AcidiclyBasicGlitch
@AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works
Researcher in the U.S. trying to stay informed and help others stay informed. I write a blog that focuses on public information, public health, and policy: pimento-mori.ghost.io
I only recently began using ghost, and am slowly figuring things out. Apologies for any formatting issues.
- Comment on We really need to bring back the 70s conversation pits 15 hours ago:
I feel like I remember somebody saying they tend to cause flooding or water damage? Like I guess the foundation can separate and water seeps in? I could be completely misremembering that though.
- Comment on We really need to bring back the 70s conversation pits 15 hours ago:
I can definitely see why people dislike the colors but there’s something about the 70s (I prefer to think of it as avocado) green paired with wooden mid century mod decor
- Comment on We really need to bring back the 70s conversation pits 15 hours ago:
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 4 days ago:
“AI will replace a humanities degree, so don’t bother going to college,” says billionaire who went to college. “I need you to use your hands to build batteries for my shitty AI that doesn’t work.”
- Submitted 6 days ago to technology@lemmy.world | 1 comment
- Comment on Venture Capitalists Are Using Profits From Genocide to Fund AI-Powered Weapons 6 days ago:
It’s behind spent on Military AI not just AI
And it’s not just going into Palantir it’s going into every Palantir wannabe startup, and they’re making claims to advertise their product that sound like some jackass at DHS is responsible for making up bullshit tailored to the individual startup
- Submitted 6 days ago to technology@lemmy.world | 6 comments
- Comment on Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap 1 week ago:
Yes! It is so sad this seems like such a bold move, but we’ve just become so fucking conditioned to bullshit politicians gaslighting us about why everybody else is just going to have to go without in order to keep giving handouts to the most entitled and useless pieces of crap just because they’re already wealthy.
Why? Allegedly because they generate more money… But do they really? Have they ever?
- Comment on Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap 1 week ago:
It feels ridiculous I have to say this, but it feels so good to hear about a politician just immediately saying “oh yeah, we needed to figure out where to make cuts, and these shitty AI chat bots seemed like an obvious place to start.”
- Comment on How do you fight doomerism/pessimism in these trying times? 2 weeks ago:
Whatever makes you happy. It can be helpful to mix it up to with things that provide you a creative outlet, so if you like making music, then try to always set aside dedicated time to do that.
Learn to identify what the doom feels like. Take the time to write down how it feels so you recognize it when it starts to set in. How do you feel emotionally? Physically? How does it feel in the beginning vs once it’s really taken hold?
Write that down somewhere just for you. You can even just delete it once you write it down if you think you can remember it. It’s really just an exercise to help you identify it when it starts to happen. When you feel the doom setting in, consider that a signal from your body telling you to take a step back and take a little break. Give yourself a set amount of time to focus on that instead. If music isn’t helpful try video games for 10-20 mins, just be sure not to let it suck you in and become a new substitute that keeps you checked out.
If that’s not helpful, maybe try a new hobby out even if you’re not good at it. Mindfulness practices can even be something you think of like an exercise where you start with dedicating 1 minute then gradually increase to 5 minutes whenever your body is signaling it feels overwhelmed.
- Comment on How do you fight doomerism/pessimism in these trying times? 2 weeks ago:
Allow yourself escapism and breaks where you get lost in the things you enjoy even if you feel guilty. It will keep you from burning out
- Comment on Engineer at Elon Musk's xAI Departs After Spilling the Beans in Podcast Interview 2 weeks ago:
And they will not ask for forgiveness. They will tell you that you should apologize for trying to stand in the way of their progress, while they send society back to the stone age.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 43 comments
- Comment on White House tech chief slams EU AI Act, champions Trump's approach as Davos begins 2 weeks ago:
Yeah it’s pretty much a guarantee that when you hear an oligarch saying regulations cause stagnation or stifle innovation, they’re referring to protections that are meant to keep people from being exploited.
They will then claim that U.S. values are “baked in” to their bullshit and that’s why you don’t need regulations… These are also the people that are destroying the U.S. and have openly stated they are trying to destroy democracy
- Comment on White House tech chief slams EU AI Act, champions Trump's approach as Davos begins 2 weeks ago:
Don’t blame you
- Comment on White House tech chief slams EU AI Act, champions Trump's approach as Davos begins 2 weeks ago:
The shit they’ve already gotten away with is fucking insane. I cannot believe nobody has ever called them out for COVID masking bullshit
- Comment on White House tech chief slams EU AI Act, champions Trump's approach as Davos begins 2 weeks ago:
He’s Trump’s official science advisor now, but Idk why people leave his very impressive stint as Trump’s default science advisor with no science experience off of his resume these days…
Sign of the times I guess
Trump’s de facto science adviser is 31 and has no science training
More than a year into his presidency, Donald Trump still hasn’t appointed a top science adviser. So who, then, is the top-ranking science official in the White House?
“The job falls to Michael Kratsios,” ClimateWire’s Scott Waldman writes. As the top-ranking official in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kratsios is now the de facto top science adviser in the White House.
Kratsios is a 31-year-old with a political science degree and a focus on Hellenic (a.k.a. Greek) studies from Princeton who cut his professional teeth in Silicon Valley, according to Waldman. These are not exactly the qualifications you’d want for the person the president is supposed to turn to for advice on dealing with a disease outbreak, or an environmental disaster (though Archimedes’ principle does come in handy in explaining sea level rise).
- Comment on White House tech chief slams EU AI Act, champions Trump's approach as Davos begins 2 weeks ago:
As long as you’re ok with helping the U.S. destroy democracy and speed up the establishment of an authoritarian global surveillance state (privately owned of course) for your real boss and the people that pay money to listen to him rant about the antichrist, what he’s saying isn’t unreasonable.
He’s always believed that a country’s values are baked into technology. That’s why nobody needs regulations.
However, if you think that collecting data to improve facial recognition tech didn’t really justify intentionally spreading misinformation about masking during COVID, then you might not be interested in slurping the kool aid he’s so generously
threateningoffering. - Comment on White House tech chief slams EU AI Act, champions Trump's approach as Davos begins 2 weeks ago:
“I will continue to point out to my tech minister counterparts the ways they can create a regulatory environment to allow AI to thrive,”
I would like to continue to point out to his tech minister counterparts that Kratsios was responsible for preventing the spread of online disinformation in the U.S. during the earliest days of COVID.
Shout out to the broligarchs who stepped in by early March to use cutting “edge technology” to keep COVID disinformation from spreading across social media:
March 2020: White House seeks assistance from tech companies in fight against coronavirus
In a phone call, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios implored the companies to help out with an “all-hands-on-deck effort” to fight the new coronavirus. “The White House’s top priority is ensuring the safety and health of the American people amid the COVID-19 outbreak,” Kratsios said in a statement. “Cutting edge technology companies and major online platforms will play a critical role in this all-hands-on-deck effort.” According to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, top tech trade groups and companies participated in the call, including Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, the Consumer Technology Association, the Information Technology Industry Council and others. The meeting revolved around how the tech industry can better coordinate with the government to get out authoritative facts about the coronavirus while cracking down on the spread of bunk cures and conspiracy theories spreading online.
Remember how we didn’t know for the longest time if we all should be bothering with masks? Crazy how so many people died because of that little “misunderstanding.” I’m pretty sure the U.S. was like the only country where it was even really debated…
Federal officials initially discouraged the general public from wearing masks for protecting themselves from COVID-19. In early April, federal officials reversed their guidance, saying that the general public should wear masks to lessen transmission by themselves, particularly from asymptomatic carriers. Public health experts such as Larry Gostin stated that federal officials should have recommended mask-wearing sooner;others noted that US government guidance lagged significantly behind mask recommendations in East Asian countries and likely exacerbated the scale of the pandemic in the United States.
I wonder why masking ever became so debatable on social media, and only in the U.S. when these guys were trying to keep disinformation from being spread? Oh well, when a billionaire decides to bother trying to help you, I guess the least you can do is show how grateful your are and say thank you, so I guess thank you for your services broligarchs 🫡
Even if you couldn’t stop the mask debate from spiraling out of control, it’s not like y’all intentionally didn’t want people masking up right? Like what incentive could tech bros (including Peter Thiel’s protege, Michael Kratsios) have possibly had in March of 2020 to try and discourage people from masking?
•March 2020: Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich •March 2020: What is Clearview AI and why is it raising so many privacy red flags? •May 2025: The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI
When the Department of Defense scheduled a meeting in January 2020 for Clearview to pitch its services, the invite included Johnson. The following month, Ton-That sent his friend a proposal to compensate Johnson in Clearview stock for advisory services he provided to the company “with respect to developing, marketing and selling its technology.” In July 2020, Johnson helped Schwartz draft a letter for Rep. Matt Gaetz—a personal friend of Johnson’s—to send to top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, lobbying them to use Clearview to smoke out spies among the “400,000 Chinese nationals who enter the U.S. every year as foreign students.”
By the end of Trump’s first presidential term, Clearview had secured funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s earliest business partners, and signed up hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country.
July 2020: Peter Thiel’s New Man In The Defense Department
The Pentagon’s new 33-year-old head of research and engineering lacks a basic science degree but brings deep connections to Donald Trump and controversial Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Too bad their plan to fight online disinformation about masking failed, I guess…
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 23 comments
- Comment on who's gonna tell him? 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on YSK in 2006 a Putin loyalist wrote a "fictional" novel accurately predicting Russia's future assault on Ukraine. In the novel, this escalates to WWIII followed by the surrender of the U.S. and Europe 1 month ago:
Yuriev, a businessman and former deputy speaker of the state Duma who died in 2019, was a member of the political council of the Eurasia Party, which envisions an essentially feudal social order overseen by a political class that rules through fear.
As Khapaeva points out, Yuriev died in 2019 and was relatively unknown outside of Russia.
However, he did pop up in an odd place in the U.S. shortly before his death:
Who Is Konstantin Nikolaev? Putin Ally Behind Mike Johnson Campaign Donation
News of money previously given to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s congressional campaign by Russian nationals has re-emerged after the Republican rejected a $95 billion foreign aid bill passed in the Senate.
In 2018, a group of Russians were able to donate to Johnson’s bid for the Louisiana seat he eventually won as the money was funneled through the Texas-based American Ethane company.
While American Ethane was co-founded by American John Houghtaling, at the time it was 88 percent owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev. Nikolaev is known to be a top ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A spokesperson for Johnson previously assured in 2018 that the campaign returned the money that was given to them by American Ethane once it was “made aware of the situation.” There was no indication that Johnson’s campaign team willfully broke federal law, which makes it illegal for a campaign to knowingly accept donations from a foreign-owned corporation, a foreign national, or any company owned or controlled by foreign nationals.
- YSK in 2006 a Putin loyalist wrote a "fictional" novel accurately predicting Russia's future assault on Ukraine. In the novel, this escalates to WWIII followed by the surrender of the U.S. and Europewww.theatlantic.com ↗Submitted 1 month ago to youshouldknow@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on US Energy Department signs AI collaboration deals with Big Tech for Genesis Mission 1 month ago:
Idk I think the day somebody tries to kill it with nuclear fire will just mean judgment day for all of us anyway, but maybe you can’t really fight the future.
- Comment on US Energy Department signs AI collaboration deals with Big Tech for Genesis Mission 1 month ago:
But that’s the excuse for why we just have to trust them and not ask too many questions about what they’re doing or what regulations they’re ignoring. They’re claiming this is to make the U.S. self sufficient so we no longer have to rely on foreign technology.
It’s debatable if not highly unlikely they will actually do that, regardless though this will allow them to continue to build and expand the giant authoritarian surveillance state that’s basically an open secret at this point, but if you were to ask any questions about that, you would be standing in the way of progress.
And to be completely fair, as far as not relying on foreign tech, would it make you feel any better if I pointed out the AP actually broke a story earlier this year which showed the U.S. actually sold China the technology they’ve used to create their mass surveillance state?
Not sure if it was just a test run for what they plan to do in the U.S. with Palantir at the helm, but I point it out because it does prove they aren’t completely reliant on foreign tech, and I’m not sure if you stopped reading before the casual mention about Palantir being involved in this project
- US Energy Department signs AI collaboration deals with Big Tech for Genesis Missionwww.reuters.com ↗Submitted 1 month ago to technology@lemmy.world | 8 comments
- Comment on House Science Committee Questions DOE Science Chief About Agency Reorganization 1 month ago:
Gil said the work of the new offices will be “complementary” to the basic research in the Office of Science. “Sometimes people say, ‘Well, are you doing it in tension with the support of the basic science?’ We’re not. We’re saying, because we’ve succeeded in investing in that, we have the opportunity now to create an industry,” he said.
- Submitted 1 month ago to technology@lemmy.world | 1 comment
- Comment on After viral interview, Palantir launches neurodivergent fellowship 1 month ago:
Exactly, not to mention the entire idea of a “tech” bro violated societies norms (it didn’t really they just wore hoodies). But the fact that you had “nerds” succeeding and winning at life seemed to contradict the Don Draper/Frat Bro prototype of success
- Comment on After viral interview, Palantir launches neurodivergent fellowship 1 month ago:
The cognitive traits that make the neurodivergent different are precisely what make them exceptional in an AI-driven world.” Palantir, a data and analytics company co-founded by conservative “kingmaker” Peter Thiel, was quick to argue that the fellowship is not a DEI initiative. “This is not a diversity initiative. We believe neurodivergent individuals will have a competitive advantage as elite builders of the next technological era, and we’re hiring accordingly for all roles.”
Wow, that’s super deep and profound. Maybe I had these people all wrong.
So, essentially, you believe there are likely very talented people who don’t fit within the neat little box of what success is “supposed to typically look like.” They might even be looked over or excluded simply because they don’t fit into that box, but you are wise enough to see past that. You understand that the very traits that lead to their exclusion, may also provide them with a unique perspective that is often lacking in everyone who does fit neatly into that heterogenous box. And that the unique perspective of those divergent people, can actually be an advantage to everyone…
