On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose...
Just got back from EDC, which is the biggest EDM festival in the states. They had so much more DnB this year! I normally am fairly proud of the amount of exercise I get in, but I’m pretty sure I went even harder this year than any previous one. On one of the three days my watch said I spent 4.5 hours of the day with my heart rate in the fat burning zone and 7.5 hours in the cardio zone, netting me 7700 calories burned 😂 I averaged around 4 hours of sleep a night and about 1 meal a day so my body is definitely in recovery mode right now, hoping to get a solid night of sleep now that I’m home and hopefully the change of weather and scenery will help clear up the asthma. But I’m definitely feeling very grateful and fulfilled right now 🥰
Meganucleases can work in quite a few ways. Typically speaking cleaving describes a process in which a section of genome is removed (cutting in two places), but not always. The article doesn’t go into too much detail of the specifics of the meganucleases used in this study, but the literature they cite might.
Companies get sued all the time for insider trading or other violations. Stock owners will often get offers for class action suits that are on offer for whatever time frame a company is being sued for. It sounds like Vanguard is now offering a service to just ‘auto-enroll’ or whatever, and reduce the admin burden of filling out the class action claim for a fee.
I think it’s completely fair to have an honest conversation about what could cause someone to be enticed by a large number of followers, but I don’t think that OP was making space for that conversation. It came off as victim blaming because there was no attempt at nuance or unpacking the fact that these women were targeted by a conman and that we really shouldn’t be blaming them at all.
Again, can we please not victim blame? Calling this a failure, saying that they must be “so shallow” to fall for a fame scam is analogous to saying “she was asking for it because of the way she was dressed” to a rape victim. Being a human is complicated and there are many reasons a victim can fall prey to a scam. It’s not as one dimensional as you’re painting it and regardless of how shallow a person is, no one deserves to be taken advantage of. The focus of discussion here should not be the victim, but rather the perpetrator and the fact that they are out to take advantage of others. That’s abhorrent behavior and we should keep the focus squarely on them.
I don’t think that someone’s behavior choice is comparable to their clothing choice
I completely agree, but victim blaming across choices and especially towards women and POC individuals is part of the reason we have really shitty reporting of fraudsters. Creating an environment which discourages them from speaking up is harmful to society as a whole.
everyone in this case is trying to take advantage of someone
We don’t know this, and we shouldn’t assume this of the victim. I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis, but focusing on talking about the victim here when there are actors which are clearly out to harm or take advantage of others is harmful framing. If this is a discussion you wish to have, I personally believe the appropriate framing is necessary - we must acknowledge the existing structure of power and how it silences certain people and also blames them before talking about potentially problematic behavior. But even then, it’s kind of jumping to conclusions about the victim here and I’m not so certain it’s a discussion that should even be entertained.
I wonder if eventually we could sidestep the use of bactiophages and instead manufacture the microscopic structures themselves as sunscreen.
There’s a good number of biological processes that are much simpler, cheaper, and require much less materials when the biological process is preserved. A good example of this is water cleaning/breaking down sewage with bacteria which give off methane which is also collected as fuel. Given that the main outcome here is sunscreen that doesn’t damage biology and it’s generally not that expensive to keep sustain life like this, it might make the most sense to simply leave it at production/farming of bacteriophages.
There is no need to be tolerant towards the intolerant. If someone says they want to do some ethnic cleansing, that’s not exactly a nice gesture and pushing back against that message is both cool and good.
Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...
I can’t help but wonder how in the long term deep fakes are going to change society. I’ve seen this article making the rounds on other social media, and there’s inevitably some dude who shows up who makes the claim that this will make nudes more acceptable because there will be no way to know if a nude is deep faked or not. It’s sadly a rather privileged take from someone who suffers from no possible consequences of nude photos of themselves on the internet, but I do think in the long run (20+ years) they might be right. Unfortunately between now and some ephemeral then, many women, POC, and other folks will get fired, harassed, blackmailed and otherwise hurt by people using tools like these to make fake nude images of them.
But it does also make me think a lot about fake news and AI and how we’ve increasingly been interacting in a world in which “real” things are just harder to find. Want to search for someone’s actual opinion on something? Too bad, for profit companies don’t want that, and instead you’re gonna get an AI generated website spun up by a fake alias which offers a "best of " list where their product is the first option. Want to understand an issue better? Too bad, politics is throwing money left and right on news platforms and using AI to write biased articles to poison the well with information meant to emotionally charge you to their side. Pretty soon you’re going to have no idea whether pictures or videos of things that happened really happened and inevitably some of those will be viral marketing or other forms of coercion.
It’s kind of hard to see all these misuses of information and technology, especially ones like this which are clearly malicious in nature, and the complete inaction of government and corporations to regulate or stop this and not wonder how much worse it needs to get before people bother to take action.
Better depression relief with electromagnetic treatment (stanmed.stanford.edu)
Biden is dramatically out of touch with voters on Gaza. He may lose because of it (www.theguardian.com)
On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose...
how's your week going, Beehaw
currently working on book 28 of 40 for the year
How Much Research Is Being Written by Large Language Models? (hai.stanford.edu)
Herpes cure with gene editing makes progress in laboratory studies (www.fredhutch.org)
Abortion bans drive away up to half of young talent, new CNBC/Generation Lab youth survey finds (www.cnbc.com)
“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam” (bigthink.com)
The Disinformation Machine: How Susceptible Are We to AI Propaganda? (hai.stanford.edu)
It's Time To Stop Giving Xbox Boss Phil Spencer A Pass (Opinion) (kotaku.com)
Enzymes open new path to universal donor blood (www.dtu.dk)
Vanguard’s updated account agreement—anyone know more about class action suits in this context?
Men Use Fake Livestream Apps With AI Audiences to Hit on Women (www.404media.co)
The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women (1998) - Mary Louise Fellows & Sherene Razack (scholarship.law.umn.edu)
Safer Sunscreen: Stanford researchers explore novel approach to sustainable sun protection (woods.stanford.edu)
The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco (newrepublic.com)
Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers (www.cnn.com)
Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps (www.404media.co)
Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...