Notices by Dan Sugalski (wordshaper@weatherishappening.network)

@sophieschmieg https://giphy.com/explore/facepalm

@sophieschmieg "We trained our neural net on thousands of images of lava lamps and can now generate an endless series of random numbers!"

@simon @profdiggity @cwebber ...so what you're saying is we're doomed? /ducking

@simon @cwebber @zacchiro Yeah, this is very much true. There are a *very* small number of people for whom "my phone is listening to what I say" is a reasonable threat model, and those folks already know who they are. For everyone else it's just a combination of fantastically bad statistical understanding and a depressingly deep (and, unfortunately, earned) distrust of complex systems and the orgs that run them.

@cwebber @simon @profdiggity This isn't to say that our phones are listening and ad targeting, they almost certainly aren't. And it's not to say the transcription you'd get from them would be good, because it'd be crap and probably ~80% accurate (to pull a number out of nowhere). 80% for transcription is *horrible*, 80% for a signal to feed to an ad targeting algorithm is just fine.

@cwebber @simon @profdiggity As a specific data point, Dragon NaturallySpeaking was released in June of 1997 and ran on x86 systems. The amount of computer power an x86 system had in 1997, compared to even a mid/low-level phone ARM chip in 2017 is... not big.

@cwebber @simon @profdiggity FWIW, the kind of voice recognition you'd need for this kind of ad targeting has been feasible with 2017-phone-level computing power since the turn of the century. (he says, as he turns to dust and blows away) Honestly with 2017 level phones you could probably run a continuous voice recognition transcriber and not use a noticeable amount of CPU/power for it.

The transcriptions would be kinda crap in many cases, but for ad targeting that'd be just fine.

@mekkaokereke I've never really understood the level of delusion necessary for people who are clearly on the outside of American racist politics to support those same politics. I mean... have they never *looked* at US history? Any of it? Seriously? Horrible as it is, it's been pretty damn consistent over the past few centuries. The loathsome things they say are the loathsome things they want to do, it's not some kind of Jedi mind trick.

@simontatham Plus the ever popular "WE DON'T KNOW WHAT WE WERE THINKING, IT WAS 3AM WE WERE EXTREMELY DRUNK AND THERE WAS ALSO A DONKEY WHICH WE SHALL NEVER SPEAK OF AGAIN"

@cwebber Oh, yes, this level of mortality is, I expect, borderline *terrifying* for epidemiologists. As long as the spread is both only animal->human *and* very hard then it's a concern but not a worry. If we get human->human transmission or animal->human gets easier... yeah, that'll be a very bad day.

Hopefully this is a MERS situation, with low transmission and some care kept it from being bad. It is, though, influenza and the flu is an absolute bastard virus

@cwebber I thought it was important to make 'em but I couldn't think of a way to phrase it as a reply that didn't either co-opt the thread or "well, actually"''d it, neither of which is cool. That thread is useful and derailing wouldn't help!

I stats for a (partial) living, though, and I know how folks tend to misunderstand them. (Which is fine, stats are weird, and frankly if you think about them and your head *doesn't* hurt you're probably missing something. Maybe that's just me, though...:)

The main reason the real rates for these rare-infection diseases is lower is because we're only analyzing the stats on the people we actually know got the disease, and for these rare diseases that means people who either died (so the local authorities checked), or got sick enough to go see a doctor *and* got their infection analyzed. If you just felt meh, or didn't present symptoms, or your doctor waved you off, then you won't be in the stats.

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@cwebber has a thread on the current H5N1 situation, which is an interesting (and useful) read. There are mortality stats in it and I wanted to add some statistics color to that, since it's common for people to see these and panic. Don't panic! (actually never panic, it doesn't help)

Disease fatality/injury rates are, especially for very rare occurrence diseases, extremely biased because the sample the draw from is biased. The real rates are almost always lower.

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113680455871797535

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@evan Only if it stayed internal-only. If it was actually federated then absolutely not. (Though given my employer that's not a worry, there's no way they'd allow that)

@tim In Benevity's defense they're very slow on normal days too.

@cwebber @mcc Scaling is hard and if you don't aggressively use a core feature when developing a system it's really easy to find it falls over hard, so I have some technical sympathy for BlueSky here.

I'm not in any way surprised, mind. I also fully expect to find that the end result is Bridgy Fed gets shut off basically forever "while BlueSky works out some scaling issues" that never actually get fixed.

@mcc @cwebber I'm gonna guess that Bluesky doesn't have p2p really and truly built into their core node, and it's basically a monolith. Their scaling issues reek of that, honestly -- p2p with 99% of your work on one central node has a nasty tendency to fall over when the external nodes start getting bigger.

@cstross Oh, I'm sure they *could* do Laundry. Doing the CGI's not the problem, it's the whole "watching the CGI" afterward part that seems like it could be a bad idea. :)

@cstross I am trying to picture the kind of CGI these'd need and I think this may turn out to be one of the things I regret most in life. Also ow, my brain.

Two things that history shows us are:

1) You can count on authoritarian and fascist governments to be corrupt, venal, incompetent, and filled with laughably stupid people
2) You can't count on the fact that the government is corrupt, venal, incompetent, and filled with laughably stupid people to save you