1/ Now that the election has been called and voter fraud dismissed, it’s time to search for other frauds. Let’s look at $TSLA Full Self Drive. About 3 weeks ago, Tesla released its Beta version to a limited audience of Tesla influencers.

2/ The influencers were supposed to flood social media with praise and testimonial videos. Instead, FSD performance was so bad that every video contained errors, many requiring driver intervention.

3/ Excuses were made. “Remember, this is only Beta”. “I’m teaching it to drive down this street”. But the reality clear to everyone was that Tesla’s Beta FSD is anything but Full Self Drive.

4/ Beta release – what does that mean? It means that the software is a candidate for production release. It means 100% of the specification has been implemented. It means only clean-ups remain.

5/ So how is it possible that FSD performs so poorly after all the hype? Certainly, there’s an element of time pressure to fulfill the Robotaxi proclamation. And similar pressure from Waymo’s competition.

YouTube’s ad business is officially bigger than Netflix.

YouTube ads at ~$35B run-rate vs Netflix at ~$31B run-rate

2. '𝐢 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠'

In the spring, Katsuki gets accepted into the bioengineering program at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His friends insisted they opened the admissions letter, just in case he got waitlisted—then they all screamed, because

he’d been accepted.

Just like he knew he would be.

Personalized letter from the dean of students. Excess financial aid. Honors.

He smiled, even if it hurt a little, knowing he’d be leaving them soon. Hanta had applied there as well, and although his standardized test scores

weren’t great, he still had a shot since he scores really well in STEM courses. Other than him, everyone else planned to stick around Musutafu.

Eij wanted to join the armed services. Denki wanted to be a dental hygienist. Mina would go to the community college, and figure shit

out when she got there.

Ochako planned to leave the country, take a gap year and travel around a bit. Tsu—who is now dating Mina—was also on a full-ride to the University of Tokyo, on a pre-med track.

And then there was Deku.

The dumbass couldn’t pick a direction if you handed him a map and a compass.

Hizashi wants him to join the military; and as much as Katsuki hates the bastard of a man, he can’t deny that it may be Deku’s best option. If he doesn’t pick a school or come up with a plan,

New scam happening in your name @amazonIN.

I had a product delivered today to my home, for which I had placed an order on Sunday.

Around 1.30 P.M., I received a call from +91 98743 95024 saying Amazon has selected 10 winners out of the people who have ordered this product

And I can choose between 5 options as a gift (including an iPhone 11 and a Sony LED TV). I knew straight away that this was a scam but played along.

The scammer then told me that since the cost of the gift I have chosen (iPhone) is quite high, I would need to buy something else

as well worth INR 5000 or more to ensure that I would not refuse the gift once it was delivered to me (as if you can find people like that!)

At this point, I was beyond sure that it was a scam but was also intrigued so I played along further.

The scammer then "transferred the

call to a senior" person to guide me with the rest of the process.

The "senior" then asked me for the color of the phone I want and asked me to add both the phone and the item worth INR 5000 to cart. I told him I have done that (I hadn't).

Then the scammer asked me how I would

like to pay. Upon me saying credit card, he said that if I pay by credit card, I would have to "divulge my details". When asked what details, he dodged that question and said UPI or bank transfer was "easier".

Just to play along, I said let's go ahead with UPI

Great report by @satariano on a fake network that @Graphika_NYC (and others) found in December.

Twitter accounts with GAN faces, boosting Huawei, boosted by Huawei execs, and attacking Belgium's 5G policies.

Not enough evidence to prove who ran them.

We found this network when it was boosted by Spamouflage, a pro-China operation.

Independently, @mvanhulten of @TI_EU and @ArbiterOfTweets of @Knack found it with different methods.

It's not a friendly environment for fake campaigns,

This was the first account we found.

"Alexandre, PhD", apparently a CEO.

But no surname, no indication of what he's a CEO of, and a GAN-generated profile pic.

Alexandre's had a bit of an obsession with Belgium and #5G recently.

Especially, Belgium's security limitations on 5G providers, which are reportedly mainly about Huawei and ZTE.

Alexandre didn't like the Belgian approach much.

The account was created in 2017. It only started tweeting in early December, 2020, but its first posts were retweets of tweets from November 2017-18.

They were meant to be about VR, as in virtual reality. Oddly, one was actually about Victorian Railways in Australia. Awkward.

Questions are a disruptive technology. A thread. 1/

We see the most recent wave of disruptive technologies. E-commerce. Smart phones. Ride-sharing. Blockchain. We are often blind to the disruptive technologies and techniques that have been with us for a long, long time, but are still disruptive and disrupting. /2

Ancient but still disruptive tech: music, migration, out-marriage, ink, questions. /3

Questions change lives. They bring people together, tear them apart. They open doors. And minds. They are the seed of adventure. They acknowledge the chaos inside and around us. They are a transfer of power, trusting that the power will come back in time, improved. /4

What is a question? We use them so frequently, so thoughtlessly. It is easy to overlook their strangeness, and the nature of their power. /5

Scary but Artificial intelligence...😊😊

Ordering a Pizza in 2021
CALLER:
Is this Pizza Delight?
GOOGLE:
No sir, it's Google Pizza.
CALLER:
I must have dialed a wrong number. Sorry.
GOOGLE:
No sir, Google bought Pizza Delight last month.

CALLER:
OK. I would like to order a pizza.
GOOGLE:
Do you want your usual, sir?
CALLER:
My usual? You know me?

GOOGLE:
According to our caller ID data sheet, the last 12 times you called you ordered an extra-large pizza with three cheeses, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and meatballs on a thick crust.
CALLER:
OK! That’s what I want ...

GOOGLE:
May I suggest that this time you order a pizza with ricotta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and olives on a whole wheat gluten-free thin crust?
CALLER:
What? I detest vegetable!
GOOGLE:
Your cholesterol is not good, sir.
CALLER:
How the hell do you know!

GOOGLE:
Well, we cross-referenced your home phone number with your medical records. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years.
CALLER:
Okay, but I do not want your rotten vegetable pizza! I already take medication for my cholesterol.

🧵 Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic Systems, Mitre Corporation y Mayo Clinic, anunciaron el jueves q estan desarrollando estándares tecnológicos para permitir obtener y compartir registros de vacunación a través un “pasaporte de

When we say that "an algorithm is biased" we usually mean, "biased people made an algorithm." This explains why so much machine learning prediction turns into phrenology.

1/

Researchers with phrenological delusions ask machines to find statistical correlates of personalities or emotions, and machines dutifully provides them. It's high-stakes, machine-human collaborative apophenia, detecting patterns where none

Regrettably, this junk science gets published in respected journals. In 2017, @nature published a study by Stanford's Michal Kosinski claiming that machine learning could detect the facial correlates of homosexuality, creating an alleged AI gaydar.

3/

Unsurprisingly, Kosinski's study spectacularly failed to replicate. But as is so often the case, the blockbuster finding gets all the press, the careful replication work that calls it into doubt is roundly

Kosinski hasn't given up on AI phrenology. His lab's latest paper (published by Nature...again!) claims that he can detect political affiliation from social media

BILL GATES:

-HS Diploma
-Stole idea for Microsoft
-Mom worked for IBM (look up what they did in WW2)
-Dad worked for Planned Parenthood
-Sanger family ties
-400,000 Paralyzed in India
-Caused Polio outbreak after it had been irradiated
-Openly talks about the need to depopulate

At the #AAS237 conference yesterday I went to a panel discussion on the effect of large constellations of satellites on astronomy from the ground. The thousands of satellites @spacex and others want to launch are a serious problem. 1/n

The launch of so many satellites might change the appearance of the night sky for ever and the trails they leave in astronomers' cameras and the potential for interference with radio telescopes are serious problems 2/n

Those problems are particularly acute for those searching for near-Earth or threatening asteroids, for example, though any large survey of the sky is affected. 3/n

It was good to see @spacex, Amazon's Kuiper project and @oneweb present, and to hear that the latter have dropped their plans from more than 40,000 satellites to 'only' 6372. All the speakers were positive about working together. 4/n

@OneWeb And a lot has been done. All three companies talked about making sure their satellites were fainter than 7th magnitude soon after launch, which would make them invisible to the naked eye and avoid the worst problems for large surveys 5/n

I have some thoughts re: the responses that @GameMinimalist got yesterday when he expressed his discomfort with history-based conflict games, their Euro-centric nature, and imperialist overtones/undertones. 1/

There are many people who are uncomfortable with wargames (the term I'm going to use as shorthand for "games that attempt to engage seriously with, or to model, some aspect of history in some way"). And that's okay. 2/

If someone is expressing that discomfort, I personally think the first and in some cases only thing one can or should do is *acknowledge* that. Listen to them and their concerns. 3/

If they're misinformed - a lot of folks seem to think that wargames are about gore and violence and bloodlust, that they act as a pressure release for dark impulses, which simply isn't true. I mean, converting numbers to an odds ratio isn't exactly drenched in viscera -- 4/

go ahead and correct that misinformation, while understanding that they might still be uncomfortable with it, and it's perfectly valid for that to be the case.

This reminds me of my grandfather. 5/

Just gonna leave this here. When we released the Alternative Influence Network report (@beccalew is the author), many were criticial of the humble recommendation that social media companies should review accounts as they gained popularity.

Becca wrote, “In a media environment consisting of networked influencers, YouTube must respond with policies that account for influence and amplification, as well as social networks.” This recommendation was simple, clear, and I told every company of the implications.

I wonder if we would be in this situation today if some of the more prominent disinformation voices had supported this recommendation, instead of saying that deplatforming threatened free speech.

Too busy trying to spot a bot maybe? Too worried about declining data stockpiles?

It’d abhorrent to have been arguing for simple policy fixes for years and only have support for them when hell touches down for the white middle class. BIPOC and women have been organizing for decades to get policies enforced for community safety online.

Instead of learning their work and policy recommendations and doing everything we can as researchers to help get these shared concerns on the table, I see white men rebranding as “disinformation,” “extremism,” and “conspiracy” experts.

It’s bumming me out.