One thing I've noticed is a large difference between what's served on Facebook's desktop site and what's served on their mobile version. I don't use the app, I just log into facebook.com on my phone, but the mobile version is serving 100% more of this AI slop than on desktop.
I think it's obvious why given the way users interact with sites/apps on their devices vs on desktop (they want to make FB mobile as TikTok-like as possible), but it's really striking how much of Facebook on mobile is just a bunch of AI slop at this point. I see some creep in on desktop too, mostly within the Reels/Shorts section (same creators/videos on both platforms, that is), but to see my recommended feed content be so vastly different indicates a lot to me about how the algorithm interprets user behavior and a lot of Meta's thinking about mobile audiences.
EDIT: mind you I don't follow a single topic or favorite anything on the platform, the content being served/recommended to me is purely based (as far as I can tell) on gender/demographic info they know about me and user behavior.
Did they even end up launching and maintaining the project? Did things break and were they able to fix it properly? The amount of front-loaded fondness for this technology without any of the practical execution and follow up really bugs me.
It's like we all fell under the spell of a terminal endlessly printing output as some kind of measurement of progress.
It's part of a multi-pronged approach to intentionally cede US soft power.
To what ends I'm still fuzzy on, but this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us from the WHO, and doing everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a few big changes.
I'm not saying the Trump regime is filled with people beholden to or influenced by Russia... but if they were I don't see what they'd be doing differently.
> this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us from the WHO, and doing everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a few big changes.
Seems like it's to manufacture consent for a narrow overton window of capital interests, which is nothing new to this administration in particular. It keeps up the illusion of democracy by looking like changes are happening all the time as a result of voting, but really it's a race to the bottom except for the uber wealthy.
Since most voters of both corporate parties have pretty much universally internalized and accepted they're voting for the "lesser of two evils," it's safe to conclude our political system is captured and has been for decades. Furthermore, 1/3 of people refusing to vote is not solely out of laziness. Many of them have concluded the system is FUBAR.
We're given two shit options which come about through a broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-approved narratives that are disseminated.
The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both parties and has lots of blood on its hands:
Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have, thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an archaic consumption-based economy.
The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.[1]
In the early days of Wikipedia many articles were taken directly from the CIA Factbook since it was public domain. Numerous Wikipedians have fond memories of it and remembers it as something the US did that was actually good and not evil shit. That and America's Army. Cheap ways to gain goodwill. Maybe in the grand scheme of things it didn't matter.
Millions of people around the world looked at the CIA world factbook. It was useful. It gives you a warm feeling about the USA and the CIA. Warm feelings are useful.
If you deny this argument do you claim:
1. No one used it or it wasn't useful, or
2. They used it robotically and formed no feelings, or
3. It is of absolutely no use to have people like your organization or country.
There is none other than a heavier source like Wikipedia (heavy because the information is there but inconsistently buried in writing), but it is death by a thousand papercuts in terms of losing soft power.
The argument against abandoning soft power is that it's going to cost a lot more in hard power to maintain the same status. We'll see how it plays out.
This is Nathanson's recent article (gift link) describing her work and the story that likely triggered the FBI's interest. Her reporting tells the stories of federal workers, she's not involved in any investigative work beyond interviewing current or former civil servants who feel helpless and lost now that the career that gave them purpose is no longer the same: wapo.st/49BQBrh
One day, a woman wrote to me on Signal, asking me not to respond. She lived alone, she messaged, and planned to die that weekend. Before she did, she wanted at least one person to understand: Trump had unraveled the government, and with it, her life.
I called William, feeling panic rise like hot liquid in the back of my throat.
He told me to stay calm. He told me to send the woman a list of crisis resources, starting with the 988 national suicide hotline. He told me to remember that reporters are not trained therapists or counselors, just human beings doing the best we can.
“You should try to help, but whatever this woman does or doesn’t do, it may happen regardless of anything you say,” William said. “It’s not up to you.”
I did what he said, then fell asleep refreshing the app, checking for a reply. The next morning, a message appeared below her name: “This person isn’t using Signal.”
The metadata was or probably still is being collected from the notifications on the phone. So while Signal itself didn’t leak data the notification popup was. The sender wouldn’t have a popup, but the receiver might. Thus sending to the reporter vs receiving from the reporter would matter.
Apparently. If you're scared of the government, this would be an entirely rational thing to do to safeguard the privacy of other people you know on Signal.
mentally unstable people can hold down jobs sometimes, too. Like, those under treatment, but a stressor can cause "relapse" and now you got a predicament at work.
Chemical and/or clinical depression can be debilitating, and i consider it mental instability.
It's not healthy in the least, but attempts to help fans understand why it is so are met with resistance due to ingrained biases and skepticism of the establishment.
The pushback against "institutional nutrition" has been a long time coming and is honestly welcomed as health and nutrition science have evolved from the days of telling us to avoid all fat and offering consumers "low calorie" processed foods that didn't do our bodies much good.
In the same way the bacon craze of the 2000s was a successful marketing effort from pork farmers, cattle farmers (and their lobbying groups) are now having a moment with beef and subsequent beef products. Good nutritional science has been pointing to many fats (but not all fats) actually being good for our diet, contrary to those old institutional guidelines, but there's a lot of nuance around adding fats back to a person's diet. Many aren't making the distinction between saturated vs unsaturated fat as well as UDL and LDL cholesterol that ends up in our bloodstream (one of those is not good for us!).
But in an era of memes, misinformation, and context collapse good luck trying to have that more complicated discussion with people when the nutritional aspect is brought up (the book is closed on the flavor debate of course, it's delicious)
When Michelle Obama pushed for better school lunches she was excoriated for trying to get healthier foods into the hands of children. Glenn Beck's response was "Get your damn hands off my fries, lady. If I want to be a fat, fat, fatty and shovel French fries all day long, that is my choice!". Seems partisan spite cuts both ways.
I'm glad to see this announcement and despite the leadership in Washington right now I don't think these adjustment will be seen as too controversial by the American public. The recommendations are based on a lot of good nutritional science that's been out there for years, but the buck seems to stop at the conversation around fat.
They went to great lengths to remove the debate around good fat vs bad fat from this discussion. Even reading the report, emphasis is put on the discussion of why we use so many pressed oils in the food chain, but not why we phased lard and shortening out of the American diet.
"Eat real butter" is ostensibly a recommendation presented at the bottom of the webpage, but butter is not a healthy fat. Same with some people's obsession with frying in beef tallow, but the report doesn't want to dig into this distinction for obvious self interested reasons. They even recommend:
> When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty
acids, such as olive oil. Other options can include butter or beef tallow.
Which is a good recommendation. But no, you don't want to replace olive oil with butter or beef tallow. There's a lot of good nutrition science to back this up, but the report would prefer to not go there. Maybe "eat some butter" is appropriate, but unless the FDA wants to have an honest conversation around HDL and LDL cholesterol and saturated fats, I don't see this inverted pyramid doing too much good for overall population health (besides raising awareness)
Partisan spite does cut both ways and should be seen as such and ignored on either side.
Regarding fat I think "eat real whole unprocessed food" is a simple way to cover it. These guideliness recommend using less added fat including avoiding deep frying, and if one must use fat to use a minimally processed (i.e. pressed or rendered) form like olive oil or coconut oil or butter or animal fat. Though they failed to mention the distinction between refined and unrefined olive oil - today much of it is refined i.e. highly processed.
They didn't develop a new font, they improved an existing font that's packaged inside a larger design library used for building government websites. Creating a standard that states, cities, municipalities, townships, etc can utilize for digital services improves access for all.
HN would probably hate it but I've been digging Panic World. They investigate mostly modern media or internet-driven moral panics and discuss how they've led us to our current moment. Lots of 90s/2000s internet deep dives, but I mostly appreciate how well the host connects the dots between cultural/political zeitgeist (of any recent era) with some seemingly minor niche movement or idea seeded years prior.
The business model for pharma and drug discovery is unfortunately one that requires a lot of upfront investment for research and trials that may or may not pay off as revenue one day.
The technology they invented is incredibly promising for new vaccines and they should be attracting enough investment (through contracts or other deals) to continue innovating and saving lives. Maybe they can license it as a last ditch effort to build revenue, but unfortunately the public perceptions about vaccine efficacy is on the wane and government contracts are no longer there to support this vital work both in the present and as a hedge against future pandemics.
To put some numbers to trying to develop a single therapy (where candidates etc. will fail as you try them)
- Plan to sink $180-500M+ just in R&D
- Factor in failures, regulatory, clinical, recruitment, phase 1/2 trials and you arrive very quickly around $1.3-2.1 BILLION USD per therapy approved.
...there is a 90% chance that you will spend that $1B+ - and it will fail completely.
According to your numbers, Moderna got lucky at a 10% chance of producing the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in 48 hours of computation? I don't know, but there seems to be more factors at play.
Moderna got lucky in that we know enough about that virus that the chance of a COVID-19 vaccine was a lot more than 10%. The more general case of a drug is a lot more than specific one
> Also, in 2018, just one year before the outbreak in a DARPA grant proposal, Wuhan Institute of Virology and its collaborators proposed to construct genetically modified SARS viruses having a furin cleavage site, a feature associated with increased viral growth and increased transmissibility. They proposed to insert the furin cleavage site at the spike gene S1/S2 border, and to construct the viruses by synthesizing six nucleic acid-building blocks, and assembling them using the reagent BsmB1.
> Fourth, in 2019, a novel SARS virus having a spike with extremely high binding affinity for human SARS receptors, a furin cleavage site inserted at the spike S1/S2 border, and a genome sequence with features enabling assembly from six synthetic nucleic acid building blocks using the reagent BsmB1--a virus having the exact features proposed into 2018 NIH and DARPA proposals--emerged on the doorstep of Wuhan Institute of Virology.
> Taken together, the presence of a spike having an extremely high affinity for human SARS receptors, the presence of a furin cleavage site inserted at the spike S1/S2 border, the genome sequence enabling assembly from six synthetic nucleic acid- building blocks using the reagent BsmB1, and the one-for-one match between these features and the features proposed in the 2018 NIH and DARPA proposals, make an extremely strong case--a smoking gun--for a research origin.
It raises questions that James Comer keeps raising to attack Fauci, but which never seem to get anywhere close to being proven. It's now been four years. The various libels against Fauci remain unsupported.
It's tough to get people to want a vaccine which knocks you off your feet for 3 days and needs to be repeated every 6-12 months. I'm very bullish on mRNA vaccine technology - but it's potentially a poor fit for rapidly changing viruses.
That sucks if that's your experience, but it's not the universal, or even the common, experience.
For reference, I get a sore-ish shoulder the next day, and that's it. Also for reference, when I got Actual Covid, I was knocked on my ass for almost two weeks. So for me, at least, the choice is easy.
It's my unfortunate experience, when I've had covid its a 6-12 hour affair that happens once every 12-24 months. My 3rd vaccine shot had me in bed for 3 days. Leading to continued vaccination being unsustainable. My wife has a similar experience to yours, and gets moderate to severe covid. She gets the vaccine every year to help avoid it - but still gets moderate COVID roughly once per 6 months.
It's unfortunate that the vaccine has such radically different outcomes within a single household, if it was a flu shot like experience I'd happily get it once per year.
COVID is a nasty virus. I need my brain way to much to FAFO.
COVID-19 may Enduringly Impact Cognitive Performance and Brain Haemodynamics in Undergraduate Students - ScienceDirect https://share.google/49ER4VjJUwipGotZO
Flu shot experience varies too. The last several have been very low response, but the first few were a miserable couple days and I stopped getting them because certain misery was worse than a chance of misery that I'd never know if it was flu or not, because testing was inaccessible.
Last year I skipped the flu vac (I had a zillion for tropical diseases so I though come one not another one) and lo, I got a flu about every 4 weeks, so like over 6 the whole season. I'm on a way to get it this year.
At least testably/symptomatically, I'm asthmatic as well - so it's surprising that the impact is so small. My wife gets it for 1-2 weeks whenever she comes down with it.
As a data point, my experience with the shot was a sore arm and chills for a couple days.
When I got Covid later, it was slightly worse chills for 3 days. By the 4th time I got Covid, it was just chills for a day.
If I knew that would be the experience, I'd probably have skipped it. That said, it's completely possible it was having the vaccine that made getting real Covid not so bad.
By the time it was my turn to get Covid I’d been twice vaccinated. It’s the most exhausted I can remember ever feeling. Let me tell you, the whole time I kept thinking: How much more miserable would this have been without the vaccine to blunt the impact? Felt grateful and humbled
You said: "When I got Covid later, it was slightly worse chills for 3 days. By the 4th time I got Covid, it was just chills for a day. If I knew that would be the experience, I'd probably have skipped it."
I'm saying that's not an apples to apples comparison due to the growing evidence of how much long term damage a COVID infection can cause.
Ah I see, thanks. Yep, it's definitely not apples to apples in either event. As in, not having the vaccine could have made getting it, at least the first time, way way worse to deal with.
It has affected me for at most 16 hours. I have never heard 3 days, though I'm sure there are some rare outliers. And, not being at high risk, I don't "need" it more than once a year. This kind of exaggeration is one of the things that doesn't help public opinion. Especially when there are people actively looking for ways to subvert it.
People have varying immune responses to getting vaccines, but feeling crummy after getting a flu shot has nothing to do with whether the vaccine used mRNA technology or not.
I would say people who end up bedridden for 3 days are in the minority for most vaccines immune responses, but people also need to make peace with the idea that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Quite a lot of the low-hanging fruit from pharma has already been picked. The modern business model for pharma involves coming up with a patentable new drug that does the same thing as an older drug that's now out of patent and available for manufacture as a generic.
Making pharmaceuticals subservient to the whimsy of the stock market is a bad idea. It introduces incentive distortions where none should be.
I think it's obvious why given the way users interact with sites/apps on their devices vs on desktop (they want to make FB mobile as TikTok-like as possible), but it's really striking how much of Facebook on mobile is just a bunch of AI slop at this point. I see some creep in on desktop too, mostly within the Reels/Shorts section (same creators/videos on both platforms, that is), but to see my recommended feed content be so vastly different indicates a lot to me about how the algorithm interprets user behavior and a lot of Meta's thinking about mobile audiences.
EDIT: mind you I don't follow a single topic or favorite anything on the platform, the content being served/recommended to me is purely based (as far as I can tell) on gender/demographic info they know about me and user behavior.
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