Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

A journal reviewer accused Lizzie Wolkovich of using #ChatGPT to write a manuscript. She hadn’t — but her paper was rejected anyway. Today, she shares her story with @Nature . https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00349-5

@luckytran Yup, Biobot released their Monday data dump and we're back at a national average of 893 viral copies / ml, which is higher than the peaks of any of the pre-Omicron waves. Just months and months of sustained high transmission and everyone you know constantly getting sick. Just awful.

Unfortunately, there are signs that there is an uptick in COVID-19 wastewater levels again after a couple of weeks of decline.

This underscores the importance of not relaxing too quickly after we reach any COVID peak, as it takes time for levels to drop. Keep taking precautions.

Is this the Age of Pretending?
So many people pretend play as scientists, researchers, health experts, and detectives. They cosplay and perform their fake expertise on social media. Unfortunately, many in the audience buy it. Our society does not know how to judge or value legitimate expertise.

Another example:

The Delusional #CyberSleuths Trying to Solve Idaho Murders

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-delusional-cybersleuths-trying-to-solve-idaho-murders

@duetosymmetry - fun!

@duetosymmetry Yup, I like galaxies. A lot. 😅

If you missed the talk Sean and I gave at @fosdem on Saturday about bringing @rust to @thunderbird, the video recording is available on the #fosdem website!

https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2469-thunderbird-how-to-exchange-rot-for-rust/

Take a few minutes to read this important blog post from @pluralistic. He got scammed, and he describes what happened. https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

We're heading into a time when the scammers are gaining the upper hand, no matter how good we are at trying to avoid being taken by experts.

That's the thing: They are experts.

Get ready to do business less conveniently in the near future.

Ever wondered what it sounds like when you close the door of a 11 metre wide, 9 metre deep, & 16.4 metre high concrete chamber?

Wonder no more – my Test Centre colleague, Jan Demming, demonstrates the ~20 second reverb time of the Large European Acoustic Facility at ESA's ESTEC today 🙉

Normally used to test satellites under the enormously loud conditions of launch, we were in the LEAF today for quite a different purpose 😉

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#SpaceFlight #SpaceExploration #SpaceScience #Astrodon #SoundOn

@dangillmor @pluralistic I have had conversations with my credit union (most recently December) about the ways their outsourced fraud partner makes this sort of scenario more likely. Specifically the real alerts come from an unknown phone number and start out asking for me information than they should.

Maybe I should send them this story as example of the issues.

I wuz robbed.

More specifically, I was tricked by a phone-phisher pretending to be from my bank, and he convinced me to hand over my credit-card number, then did $8,000+ worth of fraud with it before I figured out what happened. And *then* he tried to do it again, a week later!

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

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@tychotithonus

more and more as i try to help my mom deal with all the "new features" in her computer and phone that don't work for anyone with any sight, eye/hand, or skin chemistry issues, i'm back to this:

'no developer of any device software/OS that human beings use is allowed to touch a single line of code until they have spent 6 months doing user support at an assisted care facility'

Laugh all you want, but I think we're at an internet content singularity. Not because ML output rivals good human writing, but because "good" is irrelevant. The content we click on the most if the stuff that ML can spew out without breaking a sweat.

I semi-regularly joke about this, but I see a very real disparity on my blog. The somewhat silly articles I'm not proud of get 20k, 40k views. The ones I put real effort into stay under 1k.

We all crave clickbait that reinforces our views. And ML will oblige and drown us in it.

#Fairphone at #fosdem
- we extended the warranty to 5 years
*no reaction*
- and we publish schematics
*cheers, applauses*

"Write code for the web" by Manav Rathi https://mrmr.io/apple

This is from an iOS developer, but as an Android developer, I came to basically the same conclusion 10 years ago. The web isn't perfect, but it's a near-universal platform not owned by anybody.

Word cloud generated from your Google Scholar profile! What's yours look like? https://shiny.rcg.sfu.ca/u/rdmorin/scholar_googler3/

@ianbetteridge Petulant is a good word.

My instinctive reaction, as someone who has pencilled in an M3 MacBook Air this year, was “yeah but maybe I don’t want to now?”

Happy to share that the written version of "Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of 'AI'"(originally my keynote at #COGSCI22) is now available through Current Directions in Psychological Science:

https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214231217286

OK, poll time, and this one is a simple one (please share so I can get a decent sample). What is your main OS?

Tonight I’m making a stew in honor of Carl Weathers.