fear

1. Don’t use Tiktok (and other low quality social media like Twitter) and encourage people you know to do the same. Suggest alternatives like federated sites, and help people navigate it if you can.

2. Firmly correct disinformation when you see it. If you have a topic of interest you find yourself repeatedly addressing, keep a short copy/paste response with easily digestible sources to make the process quick and painless.

3. Engage as little as possible with disinformation, since any kind of engagement is exactly what they’re looking for. When you stumble upon it, state a brief sourced correction and quickly leave. If someone beat you to it, simply leave and avoid in the future.

4. Teach your friends and family about the dangers of misinformation, and the importance of vetting sources. Peer reviewed journal = great. Random youtuber/tiktoker = needs sources to confirm validity.

5. Try to be as polite as possible when addressing disinformation because aggression can cause people to dig their heels in and push them further into the false narrative.

6. Learn terms to describe the spread of disinformation that are easy for people to grasp. Learning and teaching others about things like “good/bad faith arguments” so you can spot and effectively counter trolls, recognizing “irony poisoning” that is a driving force behind the normalization of extremist views, and understanding how “woke” actually means “tolerant and respectful of the differences between human beings” can all help people to see what’s happening and protect against disinformation.

7. If you’re motivated enough, start your own publication that provides accurate, well sourced information on your topics of interest, or join an already established publication as a freelance contributor.

8. Don’t give up. Don’t let anyone convince you that the fight is already over and that we’re doomed to live out 1984. The real fight hasn’t even begun, because so many people are too caught up in their own stressful lives to realize there’s a full blown culture war going on here. Once more people open their eyes to it, sanity will prevail. These points here are exactly how you can begin opening people’s eyes.

Pretty sure you could substitute “autism” with any topic at all and the point would be accurate.

Your assessment seems spot on to me. I’m connecting some projected dots to late stage capitalism. Perhaps the AIs will trickle down and such if we hold off on regulations.

Of course it’s possible for the government to impose regulations without sticking their face in and motorboating the AI’s contents. Google, Microsoft et al. would love to prevent this from happening because they actually do have their faces in there.

This is such an important distinction. Current AI is incapable of wanting to cause any of that harm, yet it’s already happening. The danger won’t be skynet, it will be and always has been human greed and ignorance.

Hmm, this makes me think of the tradition on certain parts of the internet where people publicly announce the name and crime of this convicted rapist. They’ll explain where he’s currently living, the name he’s trying to go by, and bars he was seen at. This activity seems to stem from the outrage at the excessive leniency he was shown by the judge, although could also be protecting other potential victims.

I wonder if this kind of vigilante doxxing would fall under the scope of such a law, especially when his name is already in so many publications.

Stop closing in on me!

Was the check engine light virtue signalling again?

Yeah, I took a look at the code they used in the article that might help someone generate functional attacks. A rando experimenting without permission would likely get banned from the service.

I just tried this on ChatGPT, it doesn’t work.

I did. He assured me in more professional terms that they don’t give a shit. I do a lot of business with them and have been a client in good standing since I became an adult. They apparently have nothing set up to retain customers who leave over this, which would indicate that hasn’t been an issue for them. Or they might be banking on me not following through, but that just means they don’t know me very well. When it comes time for me to make those changes to my policy, I’m gone.

Privacy has been beaten to a bloody pulp, but the fight doesn’t need to be called yet. Don’t give up, keep telling everyone you can. I know things are looking low right now, but every person you reach matters.

In the case of Zoom, an approach that could actually work is having every step of the solution already completed if you’ve got an employer trying to push Zoom on employees. Make sure you can clearly state here’s the problem, here’s why it’s dangerous for the company, here’s a great alternative, here’s why it’s safest for the company, and here’s how you install it. Reach out to the IT dept if you’re not the IT dept to get them on board. If the advice is coming from multiple employees, that will help your case.

Imagine getting caught and having your claim denied or being sued for insurance fraud. I’m happy to use ublock origin, but what you’re describing is playing with fire. We need to make sure it never gets to this point in the first place by making it illegal for insurance companies to do this.

Something needs to happen to clue in the average person about why this is such a problem. I don’t know what that something is though. Continued breaches of privacy? The government and police continuing to make obvious use of the data they can easily buy from any of these companies? What is it going to take for people to care and for laws to be made to prevent more of this going forward?

I was talking to my insurance company the other day and they warned me that if I make any changes to my policy they’ll drastically jack up my rate because of the changes in the economy. But I can bring it down a bit if I install their tracking software on my phone that can interface with my vehicle and send all of my driving data to them. It would tell them everywhere I ever go whenever I drive, my exact speed at any moment, braking habits, etc. Does anyone ever say yes to this? Do people realize that they could sift through everything you’ve ever done effortlessly with AI to find that one time in your life you came to a rolling stop at a deserted stop sign and claim you’re a dangerous driver who doesn’t follow the rules of the road in order to deny your claim?

Is there a chance in hell that one day this won’t be a requirement just to have vehicle insurance? Why isn’t everyone up in arms about their data being harvested and sold to the highest bidder? Why are there not laws being made against this kind of undemocratic, authoritarian control over people? I am so disappointed in my fellow man, both the ones guilty of the harvesting and everyone who couldn’t be bothered to complain and put a stop to this.

Don’t give France any ideas.

this study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute under grant numbers R21 HL135300 and R01 HL150053, as well as by contracts from the NIH/NHLBI funding the four field centers.

It says right on the study how it was funded, that guy was being sarcastic and rude which is why he was downvoted. If there is a bias in this study, it’s not immediately apparent from the funding.

I mostly agree with your point, just substitute “genetics” for the actual array of reasons why we have an obesity epidemic. Environment, upbringing, emotional state, level of education, financial resources, access to healthy food, sedentary lifestyle, disordered eating habits, trauma, medications, hormonal imbalances, physical and mental health, etc.

It’s common sense that people trying to lose weight are more likely to reach for non-caloric products, and with other studies showing that most people who lose weight will gain it back within 5-10 years, it’s makes this study’s results obvious and proves nothing new unfortunately. Sweeteners very well could be an independent cause of weight gain, but until they account for all of the confounding factors that influence why people gain and lose weight, they won’t be able to determine its true role in the matter.

They’re asking a valid question everyone should have in the back of their minds when reading study results, no need to eye roll. It’s not some crazy conspiracy theory that corporations will happily fund studies in the hopes of cherry picking results in their favor. It’s bad science and it happens all the time unfortunately. Sometimes bad science makes it into good journals, and it can take years to figure out that the study was flawed due to bias.

I was just reading this morning about the immunologist Jacques Benveniste who got his study published in Nature, he claimed that water had memory and that antibodies imprinted on diluted water. It was such a bold claim that it made international news and quacks everywhere ran with it. It took some investigation to determine the scientists Benveniste was working with were paid off by a company that sold homeopathic products. There’s also the douche who got the MMR vaccine linked to autism. Despite the study being debunked, it’s an idea that pervades mom groups across the globe and has resulted in a resurgence of measles that never had to happen.

J&J should have taken action years ago, they could have prevented so much suffering and death. This is a great article on the issue from back in 2020, explaining how J&J could still profit even if they only charged 25 cents per pill. Instead they charged several tens of thousands of dollars for a course of the medication, leaving 80% of people in the world who need treatment unable to access what might save their lives. It’s unconscionable.

Thanks for speaking out and sharing. I’ll do what little I can on my end and boycott this company until they do better. At this point I trust the no name brand over J&J anyways so it’s an easy option.

They’re trying so hard to lose my patronage, but they forgot I cancelled last year.

He needs to put Catherine back in charge. St. Petersburg is going to revolt and join Estonia.