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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Yes, but nothing real came of them. The US government has a long and well recorded history of spending money on pseudoscience, even well after it’s been debunked, as long as there are True Believers in the chain of command.

    And the conspiracy theory community has a long and even more dramatic history of taking those mole hills and turning them into mountains (especially if grifters can sell books and / or T-shirts and / or weird copper sculptures that are supposed to “protect” you from it).

    Look, I grew up with parents (and a wide community) who believed in psychic shit, crystal healing, telepathy, getting messages from the Akoshic record, what evs. It’s NOT real and also believing it is NOT harmless. You’re gonna find PLENTY of misinformation about what people “believe” but if you look into any of it, you’re going to discover that somewhere along the line someone channeled something or someone like David Icke or Garahm Hancock or Rudolph Steiner or Drunvalo Melchizedek or Raël is involved, or someone is selling tickets to their lecture or psychic seminar.



  • That sounds like pseudoscience to me.

    On the other hand, there have been rather dramatic advances in brain / computer interfaces and using machine learning to interpret electrical signals from the human brain. The good news there is that every brain is different, the machines need to learn each brain individually (a model trained to pull dream images out of my brain will pull just gibberish out of yours).

    So far, the researchers would need your close cooperation in order to train a machine to understand even a little bit of what’s going on in your mind. This tech is nowhere near being used for interrogation.






  • I actually didn’t know that either, but I’m not surprised. I dislike them because they’re a mouth piece for management class propaganda. They’ve been massively pushing things like “Back to The Office” (boosting studies that say it’s better and “debunking” studies that say it’s a step backwards). They also regularly spew out garbage like “Capitalism has solutions for Global Warming” and “Universal Basic Income will harm growing economies.”

    I also know some asshole boss and asshole VC guy types who read all that crap and eat it up with a spoon, so it’s really not harmless. Fuck Business Insider.





  • Yep, they’re just seeing which parts of the network light up, then they’re reinforcing those parts to see what happens.

    I love how, for all the speculation we did about the powers of AI, when we finally made a machine that KINDA works A LITTLE bit like the human brain, it’s all fallible and stupid. Like telling people to eat rocks and glue cheese on pizza. Like… in all the futurist speculation and evil AIs in fiction, no one foresaw that an actual artificial brain would be incredibly error prone and confidently spew bullshit… just like the human brain.




  • You don’t say anything about the operating system you’re using.

    I like Qubes for this use case. You have one Qube that handles your USB devices and then you can move data in and out of that Qube whatever way feels safest. If we’re talking documents, spreadsheets and / or text files, cutting and pasting the text is a pretty safe option. If were talking image or video files, you could re encode them with imagemagick or ffmpeg before copying them between Qubes. PDFs are a bit of a tougher nut to crack. And software is… well… software.

    But Qubes is a very troubleshoot it yourself OS.