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Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

In 2003's Pattern Recognition, @greatdismal discusses the role of "apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking. We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and hearing speech in static.

https://t.co/lKHfKbvzLN

1/

 Apophenia is omnipresent and weird. It's why 5G conspiracy theorists started circulating a guitar-pedal circuit diagram as a leaked 5G cancer-microchip design (the diagram has a segment labeled "5G frequency").

https://t.co/ss6XwqrysZ

2/
But this kind of hilarious idiocy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It's got a business model. Companies like Devon's @Energydots1 prey on people who've been sucked in by their own apophenic misfirings to sell them "Smartdots" - stickers to protect them from "radiation."

3/
It will not surprise you to learn that Smartdots don't work. Indeed, they don't do anything, except, perhaps, produce a hard-to-remove gummy residue.

https://t.co/Pr8Y6UtEZD

4/
Energydots claims that their stickers are programmed with "scalar energy" - a study by the University of Surrey's 6th Generation Innovation Centre, commissioned by the @BBC, was unable to detect "scalar energy".

5/
Energydots is a good case-study in how predators exploit apophenia. Its victims' brains have misfired, and it seizes on the opportunity to part them with their money, first, by making outlandish claims, and then by lying about outside validation for those claims.

6/
In Nov 2020, Energydots announced a partnership with the NHS to install "brand new engagement units" in two London hospitals. They quickly walked the claim back, saying it was just one hospital. Then they deleted the press release. They say it was a "misunderstanding."

7/
We are literally beset by unhinged people who believe fantastical things that cause them to engage in irrational, dangerous and sometimes murderous behavior. They bear some responsibility for that conduct.

8/
But as we rush to blame the spread of that conduct on the "user engagement" business-model of Big Tech, which is said to blindly encourage these beliefs as click-generating activity, we pay short shrift to the fraudsters who set out to exploit these beliefs.

9/
If we're concerned that the tech platforms' business model incidentally encourages conspiracies as an emergent property of algorithmic amplification, let us also spare a thought for people who manufacture and sell fraudulent goods at fantastic markups.

10/
People whose sales rely on repeating and amplifying conspiratorial nonsense and falsifying confirmation of their lies from respected public health authorities.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

1/


* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

2/

* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

3/

Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the
INTERNET
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

1/


These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

2/

These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

3/

The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

4/

PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

5/
SOCIETY
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.

1/


From the start, Uber's "blitzscaling" strategy involved breaking local taxi laws (incurring potentially unlimited civil liability) while losing (lots of) money on every ride. They flushed billions and billions and billions of dollars down the drain.

2/

But they had billions to burn. Mohammed bin Salman, the murdering Crown Prince of the Saudi royal family, funded Softbank - a Japanese pump-and-dump investment scheme behind Wework and other grifts - with $80B as part of his "Vision 2030"

Vision 2030 is a scheme to diversify Saudi wealth away from hydrocarbons by attempting to establish monopolies that will allow the family to control entire sectors of the global economy.

4/

These schemes are longshots, and the fallback position is to unload failed monopolies - with staggering debt-overhangs - on investors who've been suckered with the promise that really big piles of shit surely have a pony buried underneath them somewhere.

5/
UBER
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

1/


Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

2/

Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

4/

For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

5/
CULTURE
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
2018 was almost the year we won the #RightToRepair.

Instead, 2018 turned out to be the year we lost #R2R: 20 bills defeated in 20 state houses, and it was mostly @apple's fault.

1/


Apple has a problem. As CEO Tim Cook warned his investors at the conclusion of his company's repair-killing lobbying spree, Apple's profits depend on people throwing away their devices, not fixing them.

By monopolizing repairs, Apple doesn't just get to gouge you on parts and service - the real action is in pronouncing your device DOA, beyond repair. Then you have to buy another one.

3/

Other companies lobbied hard against R2R: John Deere, GM, and other monopolists backed Apple's play. But Apple wrote the playbook, coming up with risible bullshit like claims that blocking independent repair is essential to protecting

Apple's anti-repair FUD got picked up and amplified by Big Car in 2020, when they spent millions fighting an automotive R2R ballot initiative in Massachusetts, claiming that letting independent mechanics at your car would lead to your actual MURDER.
BUSINESS

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foone
foone
@Foone
Keybort

This one is a MicroWeb Touch-1 XT/AT. Kinda.


See if you look up that keyboard you find the Deskthority page on it, showing this.
It's clearly pretty similar, but there are some differences.


Also that one uses a PC/XT/AT DIN5 connector, and this one uses some kind of RJ connector.


This one isn't in the greatest of shape, but considering I got it from the Chuck Colby estate sale, it's surprising it isn't completely water-damaged.


It's got some minor rust damage inside, where the metal clips rubbed off on the PCB.
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?
TECH
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Luca Hammer
Luca Hammer
@luca
Two years ago on a weekend, I built a tool to make it easier to evaluate Twitter accounts. Since then 36590 people used it to analyze 55390 different Twitter accounts.

Over the last months @mmkaradeniz and I made a new version. We launched it last night:

@accountanalysis doesn't use machine learning or AI „magic“. Instead of telling users if an account is authentic or not, it helps them to evaluate the accounts themselves.

It visualizes the different features (date, time, type, app, etc.) of Tweets to make them interpretable. /1

@accountanalysis The core concept is still the same, but it looks much better and is easier to operate. Not only for the users, but us developers as well. Enabling us to continuously roll out new features in the future.

Side-by-side screenshots of the old and new version. /2


@accountanalysis Some people had questions what different charts displayed and how they could be interpreted. There are now explanations for all charts, that can be toggled on and off at any time. /3


@accountanalysis The selected/retrieved Tweet count moved to the top to make it clear that not all Tweets of an account are analyzed. 3200 is the API limit by Twitter. It's possible to get more through the Premium API, but I don't think people would pay $100+ for the analysis of one account. /4
TECH
Trond Bjor\xf8y
Trond Bjorøy
@trondbjoroy
1/12 @HathorNetwork offers a unique set of features for both builders and users. Some well known ones, others not so much. Let’s look at why you might want to consider Hathor as the layer 1 solution for your project. $HTR @HTRFDT #BuildOnHathor

2/12 Easy tokenization is the obvious one. You create your own token in less than a minute, no coding required.

3/12 As opposed to ERC tokens, your custom Hathor token is a layer 1 token. It inherits the same features and security as the native token, $HTR, effectively giving your token the same level of security as the #Bitcoin $BTC blockchain.

4/12 Hathor Network also passed their security audit by @SlowMist_Team so you can feel safe knowing that your L1 token fulfills the same security requirements as $HTR.

5/12 By configuring built-in nano contracts you will be able to add logic to your token. No coding required. Native nano contracts also mitigate the risk of bugs and security issues that comes with custom smart contracts development on other platforms. $HTR
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?


but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...

it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.


and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"


there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(
TECH

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Sam is my middle child & he’s a terror. A “boy’s boy” as so many (not me) would say. He’s rough and tumble, he’s loud, he’s always dirty, loves trucks, plays sports and knee drops me from the couch. But he also loves a lot of “girl” things.

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Lessor known facts of Sudarshan Chakra or Neela Chakra of Puri Jagannath Temple.

The metal wheel at the top of Bhagwan Jagannath temple is also known as Neela Chakra (Blue Wheel). The wheel is made of eight metals comprising of.. 1/n


iron, copper, zinc, mercury, lead, brass, silver & gold. It's circumferance is about 36 feet & it is so designed that there is a wheel within the wheel. The circumferance of the inner wheel is about 26 feet. Eight hubs join together the inner and the outer wheels. 2/n


There are decorative designs on the outer wheel. The thickness of the Neela Chakra is 2 inches.The wheel is said to be Bhagwan Vishnu's most powerful weapon, Sudarshana Chakra. Inside Jagannath temple, Lord Vishnu's wheel is also worshipped in the name of 'Sudarshana'. 3/n


But inside the temple Sudarshana is not in the shape of a wheel, but in the shape of a small wood pillar placed to the left of image of bhagwan Jagannath. It is believed that the same Sudarshana is also at the top of the temple and is known by the name of Neela Chakra. 4/n


There is a specific category of people among the temple sevaks to serve the Neela Chakra and they are known as Garuda Sevaka or Chunara Nejoga. The pilgrims hold these sevaks in high esteem because everyday at Sunset. 5/n
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Kelly Ellis
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So, I want to talk about how sexual harassment and fair pay are linked at Google (and beyond), because I think that's an angle that isn't being highlighted enough in the coverage of these walk-outs. I'm going to frame it largely around my personal experience there. Thread.

When I was sexually harassed by the director of the area I was working in, I was afraid to report it because I was worried that "getting him in trouble" would result in the subtle retaliation of missed leadership opportunities.

I wanted to continue working on the team I was on, because I'd gained a lot of very deep knowledge and expertise in that area, as well as reputation and camaraderie with the other folks working in that area. I didn't want to make the situation more "difficult."

To get promoted at Google, several need to happen: 1. you need opportunities for ownership and leadership above your current level (basically, opportunities to show you're working at the next level you're trying to get promoted to). The work you're "assigned" has a big impact.

2. You need glowing reviews from peers, *at or particularly above the level you're hoping to get promoted to.* Basically, you need people a lot more senior than you to say you're doing awesome work.
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The '60s at 60
The '60s at 60
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"The MAD Primer of Bigots, Extremists and Other Loose Ends," from September 1969.

Seen a couple of these panels make the rounds from time to time, so here's the complete set of 10 (something to amuse and/or offend almost everyone).


Chapter 1: The Super Patriot


Chapter 2: The Ku Klux Klansman


Chapter 3: The American Student


Chapter 4: The Right-Wing Extremist
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Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 ...
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@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 1. From Day 1, SARS-COV-2 was very well adapted to humans .....and transgenic hACE2 Mice


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 2. High Probability of serial passaging in Transgenic Mice expressing hACE2 in genesis of SARS-COV-2


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad B.1.1.7 has an unusually large number of genetic changes, ... found to date in mouse-adapted SARS-CoV2 and is also seen in ferret infections.
https://t.co/9Z4oJmkcKj


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad We adapted a clinical isolate of SARS-CoV-2 by serial passaging in the ... Thus, this mouse-adapted strain and associated challenge model should be ... (B) SARS-CoV-2 genomic RNA loads in mouse lung homogenates at P0 to P6.
https://t.co/I90OOCJg7o
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