Tag: technology

Because Facebook is actively editing content and isn’t even bothering to pretend it is merely a platform rather than the publisher it obviously is:

Donald Trump Jr. has accused Facebook of election interference for limiting the spread of the New York Post story which claims Joe Biden met with a Ukrainian businessman while he was Vice President, saying it needs to be fact-checked first by its chosen third party before they will allow people to share it more online. 

The announcement came on Wednesday without any explanation from the social media giant and before Biden had even denied it. 

It thrusts into the spotlight again the exorbitant power Facebook has not only over the circulation of news but also over politics and the spread of information, and comes at a particularly tense moment given the Presidential election is in just three weeks.  It also raises the question of who Facebook’s fact-checkers are and what qualifies them to arbitrate the truth.  

Andy Stone, who is a policy communications director at Facebook announced the decision on Twitter.

‘While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform,’ he said. 

Perhaps House Trump should stop crying all the time about social media and simply a) remove the artificial and unfair legal protections from the Social Media Cartel while b) supporting the non-Cartel alternatives.

The New York Post article in question, which proves that Joe Biden lied about his corrupt son’s international business dealings.

Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.

An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

UPDATE: The God-Emperor is on it.

So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of “Smoking Gun” emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost. It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!! 

– Donald Trump

In a rather clever confluence of Bostron’s simulation theory and the Fermi Paradox, Anatoly Karlin hypothesizes the possibility that the reason there is no extraterrestial life in our simulated universe is that it lies beyond the simulation’s limits:

In a classic paper from 2003, Nick Bostrom argued that at least one of the following propositions is very likely true: That posthuman civilizations don’t tend to run “ancestor-simulations”; that we are living in a simulation; or that we will go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage[58]. Let us denote these “basement simulators” as the Architect, the constructor of the Matrix world-simulation in the eponymous film. As Bostrom points out, it seems implausible, if not impossible, that there is a near uniform tendency to avoid running ancestor-simulations in the posthuman era.

There are unlikely to be serious hardware constraints on simulating human history up to the present day. Assuming the human brain can perform ~1016 operations per seconds, this translates to ~1026 operations per second to simulate today’s population of 7.7 billion humans. It would also require ~1036 operations over the entirety of humanity’s ~100 billion lives to date [8]. As we shall soon see, even the latter can be theoretically accomplished with a nano-based computer on Earth running exclusively off its solar irradiance within about one second.

Sensory and tactical information is much less data heavy, and is trivial to simulate in comparison to neuronal processes. The same applies for the environment, which can be procedurally generated upon observation as in many video games. In Greg Egan’s Permutation City, a sci-fi exploration of simulations, they are designed to be computationally sparse and highly immersive. This makes intuitive sense. There is no need to model the complex thermodynamics of the Earth’s interior in their entirety, molecular and lower details need only be “rendered” on observation, and far away stars and galaxies shouldn’t require much more than a juiced up version of the Universe Sandbox video game sim.

Bostrom doesn’t consider the costs of simulating the history of the biosphere. I am not sure that this is justified, since our biological and neurological makeup is itself a result of billions of years of natural selection. Nor is it likely to be a trivial endeavour, even relative to simulating all of human history. Even today, there are about as many ant neurons on this planet as there are human neurons, which suggests that they place a broadly similar load on the system [9]. Consequently, rendering the biosphere may still require one or two more orders of magnitude of computing power than just all humans. Moreover, the human population – and total number of human neurons – was more than three orders of magnitude lower than today before the rise of agriculture, i.e. irrelevant next to the animal world for ~99.9998{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3} of the biosphere’s history [10]. Simulating the biosphere’s evolution may have required as many as 1043 operations [11].

I am not sure whether 1036 or 1043 operations is the more important number so far as generating a credible and consistent Earth history is concerned. However, we may consider this general range to be a hard minimal figure on the amount of “boring” computation the simulators are willing to commit to in order in search for a potentially interesting results.

Even simulating a biosphere history is eminently doable for an advanced civilization. A planet-scale computer based on already known nanotechnological designs and powered by a single-layer Matryoshka Brain that cocoons the Sun will generate 1042 flops[60]. Assuming the Architect’s universe operates within the same set of physical laws, there is enough energy and enough mass to compute such an “Earth history” within 10 seconds – and this is assuming they don’t use more “exotic” computing technologies (e.g. based on plasma or quantum effects). Even simulating ten billion such Earth histories will “only” take ~3,000 years – a blink of an eye in cosmic terms. Incidentally, that also happens to be the number of Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way[61].

So far, so good – assuming that we’re more or less in the ballpark on orders of magnitude. But what if we’re not? Simulating the human brain may require as much 1025 flops, depending on the required granularity, or even as many as 1027 flops if quantum effects are important [62,63]. This is still quite doable for a nano-based Matryoshka Brain, though the simulation will approach the speed of our universe as soon as it has to simulate ~10,000 civilizations of 100 billion humans. However, doing even a single human history now requires 1047 operations, or two days of continuous Matryoshka Brain computing, while doing a whole Earth biosphere history requires 1054 operations (more than 30,000 years).

This will still be feasible or even trivial in certain circumstances even in our universe. Seth Lloyd calculates a theoretical upper bound of 5*1050 flops for a 1 kg computer[64]. Converting the entirety of the Earth’s mass into such a computer would yield 3*1075 flops. That said, should we find that one needs significantly more orders of magnitude than 1016 flops to simulate a human brain, we may start to slowly devalue the probability that we are living in a simulation. Conversely, if we are to find clues that simulating a biosphere is much easier than simulating a human noosphere – for instance, if the difficulty of simulating brains increases non-linearly with respect to their numbers of neurons – we may instead have to conclude that it is more likely that we live in a simulation.

On corporate stupidity. The engineers, both hardware and software, also exhibit a reliable form of stupidity that has been known to prove terminal. From IN SEARCH OF STUPIDITY, which is the best business book I have ever read, and other than CORPORATE CANCER, which addresses an even more critical problem, possibly the most important.

SMS: Joel, what, in your opinion, is the single greatest development sin a software company can commit?

JS: Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug-prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuilt from ground zero.

SMS: What’s wrong with that?

JS: Because it’s almost never true. It’s not like code rusts if it’s not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.

SMS: Well, why do programmers constantly go charging into management’s offices claiming the existing code base is junk and has to be replaced?

JS: My theory is that this happens because it’s harder to read code than to write it. A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is messy. It’s supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I’ll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low-memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly, but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

SMS: Well, let’s assume some of your top programmers walked in the door and said, “We absolutely have to rewrite this thing from scratch, top to bottom.” What’s the right response?

JS: What I learned from Charles Ferguson’s great book, High St@kes, No Prisoners, is that you need to hire programmers who can understand the business goals. People who can answer questions like “What does it really cost the company if we rewrite?” “How many months will it delay shipping the product?” “Will we sell enough marginal copies to justify the lost time and market share?” If your programmers insist on a rewrite, they probably don’t understand the financials of the company, or the competitive situation. Explain this to them. Then get an honest estimate for the rewrite effort and insist on a financial spreadsheet showing a detailed cost/benefit analysis for the rewrite.

SMS: Yeah, great, but, believe it or not, programmers have been known to, uh, “shave the truth” when it comes to such matters.

JS: What you’re seeing is the famous programmer tactic: All features that I want take 1 hour, all features that I don’t want take 99 years. If you suspect you are being lied to, just drill down. Get a schedule with granularity measured in hours, not months. Insist that each task have an estimate that is 2 days or less. If it’s longer than that, you need to break it down into subtasks or the schedule can’t be realistic.

SMS: Are there any circumstances where a complete code rewrite is justified?

JS: Probably not. The most extreme circumstance I can think of would be if you are simultaneously moving to a new platform and changing the architecture of the code dramatically. Even in this case you are probably better off looking at the old code as you develop the new code.

SMS: Hmm. Let’s take a look at your theory and compare it to some real-world software meltdowns. For instance, what happened at Netscape?

JS: Way back in April 2000, I wrote on my website that Netscape made the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make by deciding to rewrite their code from scratch. Lou Montulli, one of the five programming superstars who did the original version of Navigator, e-mailed me to say, “I agree completely; it’s one of the major reasons I resigned from Netscape.” This one decision cost Netscape 4 years. That’s three years they spent with their prize aircraft carrier in 200,000 pieces in dry dock. They couldn’t add new features, couldn’t respond to the competitive threats from IE, and had to sit on their hands while Microsoft completely ate their lunch.

Gab now has their own servers:

Today is a tremendous milestone for the Gab community.

After over a year of work Gab has finally migrated to our own in-house servers. We own the hardware, which means no one can ban us from using our own technology to host Gab. If you talk to anyone in the technology industry they will tell you that this is no easy task. Most tech startups have the luxury of using third-part cloud hosting providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and others.

Gab does not have this luxury.

Over the past four years we have been banned from multiple cloud hosting providers and were told that if we didn’t like it we should “build our own.”

So, that’s exactly what we did.

Good for them. I’m not being ironic or sarcastic, this is exactly what independent platforms need to do across the West. That being said, both Infogalactic and SocialGalactic have been on their own servers from the start, and Unauthorized has been on its own much more powerful servers since February.

The enemy has Cloud supremacy, but all this does is force us to be stronger and more independent on the ground. And when they go after the payment processors, the banks, and even the entire SWIFT system, as they will, what they will discover is that they will only succeed in creating even more formidable competitors.

The thing they simply don’t seem to grasp is that we’re not their only enemies. The entire world is increasingly turning against them.

The big tech cartel is run by a series of literally psychopathic mediocrities. It’s not only worse than you think, it’s crazier than you would ever imagine:

Like many people during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Ina and David Steiner took a hobby and turned it into a business. Ina worked at a publishing company and collected books. David, a video producer, had been going to yard sales since he was a kid. He liked advertising collectibles, antique tools — anything that caught his eye. In 1999, four years after eBay was founded, when the notion of transacting with strangers online was still for the bold, they started a modest website offering advice to buyers.

They called it AuctionBytes, which later morphed into EcommerceBytes. Eventually, by tracking trends and policy updates across the industry, it became a resource for sellers on a number of platforms, from Etsy to Amazon — a kind of trade publication for anyone whose business is auctioning items out of a garage or storage unit. Today, Ina is in her late 50s and does the writing. David is in his early 60s and is the publisher. Neither has spoken to the press since eBay’s alleged plot against them came to light.

EcommerceBytes may not have been well known, but it was required reading at the highest levels of eBay. In early 2019, Ina Steiner shared the news that eBay had hired a new communications chief, Steve Wymer, who would report directly to Wenig.

The two men shared an aggressive streak. Wenig had spent most of his career in East Coast financial media, as a lawyer and executive at Thomson Reuters, and he maintained a certain New York alpha quality. Before working as a technology spokesman, Wymer had spun for three Republican senators in Washington, and he kept up an interest in politics. When Rep. John Lewis tweeted about the civic importance of getting in “good trouble, necessary trouble,” for instance, Wymer replied that he had “another view on how the USA should be governed. My view is equal to your view.”

Publicly, Wenig celebrated eBay’s five community values — among them, “People are basically good” and “We encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated.” But together, he and Wymer worked to forge a more combative eBay, one that drew less inspiration from the Golden Rule and more from “The Sopranos.” (They did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and eBay would not make any executives available for interviews.)

While neither Wenig nor Wymer have been charged — both have denied involvement in the intimidation campaign — they clearly loathed Ina Steiner. In April 2019, she wrote about the chief executive’s compensation, noting that his haul of $18 million was 152 times what the average worker got, and mildly suggested it was coming at the expense of eBay sellers. After her post was published, Wymer texted a link to Wenig, adding: “We are going to crush this lady.”

Whether Steiner was breaking news about questionable expenditures, such as a pub eBay built on its campus, or marking more innocuous developments, Wenig seemed to find her existence infuriating. On May 31, 2019, she wrote that he had “promised to give sellers greater protection” from fraudulent buyers.

“Shockingly reasonable …” Wymer wrote to Wenig.

“I couldn’t care less what she says,” the CEO responded, adding: “Take her down.”

It’s pretty obvious who are the ticket takers in this story. The two men who were most responsible for the criminal actions are not only not facing criminal charges like their subordinates, they have been parachuted into plum positions elsewhere.

In June, Wenig was reelected to the board of General Motors, a position that pays $317,000 a year. Mary Barra, GM’s chief executive, called the cyberstalking scandal “regrettable” but noted “it didn’t involve any GM business.” Wymer has a new job, as chief executive of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley. The chair of the board said the nonprofit was “aware” of what happened at eBay, but believes Wymer is “a leader with integrity” and was the unanimous choice for the job.

An explanation on how Creepy Joe is being controlled live on camera in order to reduce his level of incoherence:

Biden always REACHES INTO HIS POCKET before he answers certain questions. See how confused and frightened he looks?

And here’s how he looks AFTER he reaches into his pocket. The reason he usually wears a mask is to hide his confused, frightened face. Watch his free hand.

Into the pocket.

What’s he doing? He’s activating a fully implanted, invisible receiver that uses BONE CONDUCTION to get messages. My guess is the switch also reduces ambient noise so that he can concentrate on the spoken instruction. 

Remember when Biden totally disappeared? He was having something like THIS implanted.

The remarkable Esteem® Hearing Implant is designed to provide qualified candidates with a unique combination of real-world benefits. The Esteem is: An INVISIBLE Solution — You don’t just hear better. You look and feel better. There are no external components. And nothing is in your ear canal.

Bone conduction works extremely well. Sound is just vibrations. This invisible implant has been converted to a receiver that transmits vibrations into Biden’s addled head. He switches it on and off at will. His wristwatch vibrates when they want him to activate the system. 

Conspiracy is nothing more than simply figuring out who and what is causing what you are seeing right in front of you.

 CDAN exposes a new marketing strategy for the Prometheans pushing posthuman technology:

This very controversial makeup influencer is probably the only one you will know for this blind. There are several others throughout the world that are also in on the deal, but you would be hard pressed to guess them. The controversial one and the others have signed deals, that when executed could potentially pay them many millions of dollars. The deal is being made by a company based in Sweden that wants to expand their chip implants throughout the world. They are going to pay influencers around the world not only a flat rate, but also bonuses for every thousand people that get implants. They know that young people will be most accepting of the message which is why they have targeted influencers who have shown they can get people to buy and do what they are asked. It is the end of the world.

I can’t imagine it’s very difficult to get attention whores to take the ticket. 

Facebook threatens to pull out of Europe if it isn’t permit to continue ignoring European data protection and privacy laws:

Facebook has threatened to pack up its toys and go home if European regulators don’t back down and let the social network get its own way.

In a court filing in Dublin, Facebook said that a decision by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) would force the company to pull up stakes and leave the 410 million people who use Facebook and photo-sharing service Instagram in the lurch.

If the decision is upheld, “it is not clear to [Facebook] how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU,” Yvonne Cunnane, who is Facebook Ireland’s head of data protection and associate general counsel, wrote in a sworn affidavit.

The decision Facebook’s referring to is a preliminary order handed down last month to stop the transfer of data about European customers to servers in the U.S., over concerns about U.S. government surveillance of the data.

I’m not exactly what you would call a fan of the European Union, but I would love to see the following sequence:

1. Call their bluff.
2. Watch them back down.
3. Prosecute them for their past violations of GDPR.
4. Prosecute them for their ongoing violations of GDPR.

As we’ve seen time and time again, SJWs can’t help themselves. Twitter’s most recent attempt to play publisher and manage its trends appears likely to backfire in the near future:

It’s important to note exactly what’s happening here, Twitter is choosing a subject to trend and making a values judgment about why that subject is trending. That’s the very essence of being a publisher. They are publishing their own opinion.

Twitter is saying, “Jason Whitlock opens himself up to criticism after making sexist comments about ESPN hosts.”

I added the bold language because it’s important for all of you to see.

Look at what’s going on here, Twitter is directly deciding what to trend and then making a values judgment about what was said. They are sharing their opinions. You (hopefully) read the columns. Did Whitlock treat anyone in those columns any different than he has countless men, athletes or media figures, he has ripped for decades? In my opinion, of course not.

But maybe you disagree.

That’s fine, that’s your right.

You are entitled to publish your opinion on your website or your social media feeds and be responsible for what you say. And if you do that, you’re being held to a different standard than the platform you write on because you are the content creator. Twitter’s distributing your content to the masses and claiming they aren’t responsible for it, all while monetizing their entire business on opinions. The more people who have opinions all day long, the more money the content platforms make. (Which is why they’re all created to seduce us into caring so much about likes and retweets and attention).

But here’s the deal, Twitter isn’t behaving as a content neutral company in any way when some anonymous person we don’t know who works at Twitter is labeling Whitlock’s opinions sexist. They are directly making a determination about content that they deem objectionable and then featuring it prominently on their website. All in an effort to try and punish the person who has stepped outside the bounds of what they deem to be an acceptable opinion.

Twitter is directly impacting the marketplace of ideas in this country while claiming they aren’t involved at all. They are pretending to be content neutral when in reality they are making a calculated and direct decision to be engaged in editorial content. They are picking sides and claiming to be neutral.

Why does that matter?

Because if you are in the editorial business, you are subject to lawsuits for those opinions you share. If you’re a platform, you aren’t.

So who at Twitter decided Jason Whitlock’s comments were “sexist?” We have no idea. If I had to guess, it was probably someone working in Twitter’s trending topics division but that’s only a guess. In reality, who is that person or persons? What are their biases? Why did they try to slide in their opinion on this topic and hope no one would notice? Why did they decide to make this a trending topic? And most importantly how can Twitter claim to be an unbiased content platform when they make clear editorial decisions such as these?

Those are all fascinating questions.

Which I’m sure Jason Whitlock will be interested in discussing on Thursday of this week.

When he testifies in front of Congress about content discrimination from tech companies.

It’s LONG past time to end the platform/publisher dance these companies have been permitted to play. They must be forced to choose one or the other. If you want to edit beyond the direct requirements of the law, you have to take responsibility. If you don’t want to take responsibility, then you don’t get to edit.

Twitter has taken an official stance that all public criticism of women, no matter how valid, is intrinsically sexist. If you want to  know what a feminist society would look like, now you know.

I told you they were losing money hand-over-fist on a monthly basis. They just raised $60 million from institutional investors last July, and now it’s reported that they’ve raised another $90 million, bringing the total raised to $256 million.

Patreon—the online service that allows podcasters, musicians and others to receive financial support from fans—has raised a $90 million round of funding from fans of its own, The Information has learned. The company recently closed the round at a $1.2 billion pre-money valuation, according to two people familiar with the matter. That is about double the pre-money valuation for the company before a round of funding last year, according to PitchBook, the financial data firm. 

Let’s see. This Series E round is enough to cover the costs of about what, another 3,215 arbitrations….

The membership services company has raised around $256 million to date. New investors include New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Wellington Management and Lone Pine, and existing investors Glade Brook Capital, Thrive Capital, DFJ Growth and Index Ventures also participated in the round.