finlaure13 reblogged
finlaure13 reblogged
Hozier for The Current
❝ Will Hozier be leaving twitter like many other musicians? Find out what he has to say about the state of the platform and its owner, Elon Musk. ❞
Source: vm.tiktok.com
finlaure13 reblogged
elon musk had a third child with grimes that he kept secret until the release of his biography. he named it techno mechanicus
can you imagine being an adult nepo baby at a company your rich dad invested in and having to walk into the boardroom first day like. hi everyone. my name is techno mechanicus
I can tell this is fake because "techno mechanicus" doesn't start with X
OH SON OF A BITCH
I haven't been reblogging this post because I genuinely assumed you guys were Goncharoving a nepo baby
finlaure13 reblogged
Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses
MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?
AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.
Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.
The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:
Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:
Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:
Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.
The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:
Précis: Elmu keeps lying. I believe you Cory, and hopefully other people do too.
Read this article. I mean it.
finlaure13 reblogged
what the libcucks fail to understand is that this is a small price to pay for the end goal: an embedded HUD with unskippable advertisements in the margins of your eyesight
this screenshot is a headline edit/joke, about a real USA Today article (which is far more praising) and is spreading around twitter and here. The real number of primates they've killed is lower, but I think it's important to understand why.
Neurallink is a fucking awful company whose marketing materials and CEO are outright lying as to their products' supportable potential. But they're not big enough to actually have killed 3,000 primates. Most significantly, we know that the the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit against a UC Davis lab for invasive and deadly brain experiments on 23 intelligent primates.
The Physician Committee points out in its complaint that Neuralink and UC Davis staff failed to provide dying monkeys with adequate veterinary care, used an unapproved substance known as “Bioglue” that killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains, and failed to provide for the psychological well-being of monkeys assigned to the experiment.
The reason it's important to point out that it's less than 3,000 is that this kind of work is very often done at university laboratories, which gives us more leverage to slow it down or keep it out of this dude's hands.
Holy...okay. 3000 non-human primates might not be the correct number, but even 23 primates dead in this experiment is horrifying from a science perspective.
I worked in a neuroscience lab that did work with one (1) rhesus monkey. His name was Beckett. Beckett had better healthcare than a university undergraduate. Hell, it took less hoops to get some experimental studies involving undergrad volunteers up and running than it was to do one experiment with Beckett wherein he got to sit in a chair and eat grapes.
See, the paperwork regarding experiments with animals was intense. I spent three days filling out the forms and going back and forth with the ethics board to let us do experiments on terminal mice wherein they'd peacefully be put under anesthesia and never wake up from surgery. As in we were putting a sick mouse to sleep and had to be 100% sure it would not be in any pain or distress. Screwing up and causing a mouse harm or killing it outside of these exact bounds? You'd be lucky if you ever got to work with a mouse again.
Not only that, but since an animal was expected to die in the experiment, we had to report how many we needed in the experiment and then how many actually died. And if the latter number was higher, you better believe the ethics board would be on our case demanding to know what the actual hell happened.
(There's a plaque, by the way, in the labs, in remembrance of all the animals whose lives we ask for in the pursuit of science. It's right there when you walk in.)
The paperwork and restrictions get more and more complex and strict the higher up the "evolutionary chain" you go up. If you MUST use an animal model, you use the lowest one on the chain that can meet your requirements. As in, why use frogs if you can use zebrafish? Why use fish if you can use fruitflies? Why use a living creature at all if your computer simulation is good enough? And if you can't give a good answer, your proposal should be denied.
Back to the monkeys and Beckett. Monkeys, or "non-human primates" as they're often known as, are usually at the top of this chain. Ideally, you treat them like humans who are unable to consent for themselves. Which means they need advocates for them. Beckett pretty much had a vet assigned just to him. If he so much as had a sniffle, the vet had the power to veto any and all experiments he'd be involved in until he was feeling better.
This was important because if your lab had a monkey and that monkey died for reasons other than "natural causes" that the ethics board did not okay? There was going to be an investigation and if they didn't like what they found, not only would your lab never get another monkey again, but there was a damn good chance you'd be barred from working with any and ALL animals.
So from this perspective, "23 monkeys dead" should be read a very specific kind of shock and disgust. One dead should have made any kind of ethics board hit the breaks on this shit and start asking pointed questions as to "why".
(Oh, and in case you're wondering, there is an answer to the question of "what happens to monkeys who can't be used in research anymore?"
They're sent to the farm.
No, really. There are legit primate sanctuaries specifically for retired research primates. Where they get to live out the rest of their days in peace and safety in as close to a natural environment as possible. Beckett was a cranky old guy, and when I left the lab he was still there, but the plan had been for him to retire to one of those. I hope he got there and ate as many grapes as he could sucker the researchers into giving him as he could.)
Fellow researcher here, and I can 100% concur with the above. It takes SO much work and paperwork to get approved for every animal you get your hands on. We have hundreds of documents that will state essentially the same 5 things over and over because we HAVE to have a paper trail.
Having almost two dozen non-human primates dead? That's horrifying. Someone was bribed and the ethics board should be at all of their throats, shutting down this project forever.
What’s more terrifying is despite animal abuses and an ongoing investigation into the company it’s been approved by the FDA for in-human trials.
Yes, because unfortunately the FDA has been eroded pretty horribly in recent years, pretty notably with the opioid crisis, and now is basically an institution you slip some dollar bills to in order to get your Explode And Die Pills made.
finlaure13 reblogged
Not a single monkey survived the Neuralink experiment. I’ll bet Elmo can’t wait to start torturing and murdering human beings with this.
Implant it in yourself if you’re so sure it’ll work rat
OH OK THE ABLEISM (and fatphobia) HERE! OF COURSE HE’S A cUrE aUtiSm FUCKER!
finlaure13 reblogged
So let me get this straight
1. Elon Musk buys Twitter
2. Elon Musk unbans Andrew Tate
3. Andrew Tate picks a fight with Greta Thunberg
4. Greta Thunberg ratios the shit out him
5. He gets mad and posts a video response
6. There's a Romanian pizza box in the video which twigs Romanian police of his location
7. He is raided and arrested for human trafficking
That is some fabulous fuck-around-find-out shit and a great end to the year.
finlaure13 reblogged
Source: i.redd.it
finlaure13 reblogged
radiofreederry
finlaure13 reblogged
Getting fact checked by your own website that you paid 44 billion dollars for.
finlaure13 reblogged
Too many folks don’t know that Musk is not an engineer. He is not an inventor. He is not a creator. He is a person whose fortune began with enslaved human beings pulling emeralds out of a mine. He is a person who has literally bought everything, including his titles and status in every company all these dummies believe he founded.
He is NOT a good person. He is a rich person, and way too many people think they are the same thing.
If he had ANY seriousness about making a single thing better in this world for the uncountable number of human beings who are suffering right now, and not just getting attention or cosplaying as Tony Stark, he would have done it by now.
Way too many people admire the myth, while they ignore the truth of the shitty billionaire who smeared a literal hero who saved children’s lives as a “pedo”, because Musk’s ego got bent out of shape when he couldn’t make something the world cared about all about himself. He has numerous children, who he has just abandoned. His factories are consistently reported as being toxic, racist, environments. And all these folks are like, “yeah but rockets.” Do you even hear yourselves?
He’s awful. All these things y'all claim he’s “making” are coming from actual geniuses who do actual work. He could fund all their work, and really change the world in meaningful, tangible, immediate ways with his fortune, without being the poster child for fragile male egos. But he doesn’t. And way too many people are totally cool with that.
Like, if you didn’t know, that’s one thing. But now you know, so are you gonna stop worshipping this guy, or what?
finlaure13 reblogged
Musk is not from Mars, but he and Sagan do seem to come from different worlds. Like Sagan, Musk exhibits a religious-like devotion to space, a fervent desire to go there, but their purposes are entirely divergent. Sagan inspired generations of writers, scientists, and engineers who felt compelled to chase the awe that he dug up from the depths of their heart. Everyone who references Sagan as a reason they are in their field connects to the wonder of being human, and marvels at the luck of having grown up and evolved on such a beautiful, rare planet.
The influence Musk is having on a generation of people could not be more different. Musk has used the medium of dreaming and exploration to wrap up a package of entitlement, greed, and ego. He has no longing for scientific discovery, no desire to understand what makes Earth so different from Mars, how we all fit together and relate. Musk is no explorer; he is a flag planter. He seems to have missed one of the other lines from Pale Blue Dot: “There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”
Sagan did believe in sending humans to Mars to first explore and eventually live there, to ensure humanity’s very long-term survival, but he also said this: “What shall we do with Mars? There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing the question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if [they] are only microbes.”
Musk, by contrast, is encouraging a feeling of entitlement to the cosmos—that we can and must colonize space, regardless of who or what might be there, all for a long-shot chance at security.
Legitimate reasons exist to feel concerned for long-term human survival, and, yes, having the ability to travel more efficiently throughout the solar system would be good. But I question anyone among the richest people in the world who sells a story of caring so much for human survival that he must send rockets into space. Someone in his position could do so many things on our little blue dot itself to help those in need.