thu2111

It was spotted by someone claiming statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies between rounds and demanding an investigation, which this time, they got.

Last year there were also lots of claims of statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies, and demands for investigations, which they mostly didn't get. Or in which they got a fake investigation at least - I remember seeing one video someone had secretly filmed inside a counting centre where some volunteers doing a recount were trying to report that a large run of ballots had identical signatures, and the overseer was telling them to ignore it, that it wasn't their job to report fraudulent ballots!

You're also making the rather generous assumption that this was an actual error. As other commenters observe, "test ballots" for which you need >100k of them, which contain real candidates names and which are posted to the production database do not sound like any defensible testing strategy. If it's genuine incompetence it's of the form that in the civil engineering world would send people to prison.

It sort of does. The new app in your case would be signed by a different key and so wouldn't have access to the existing app's data. It would boil down to a phishing attack - the new app would have to impersonate the UI of the old one and get users to log in again.

Hence my concern with this part of the article:

"While it’s unlikely Google would ever do so, it is possible that it could sign apps on behalf of a developer"

Actually given the trend the company has been on over the past 6 years I'd say it's very likely Google would do this ...

Such polls are done frequently and have been for a long time, so there's a wealth of data on who and what the US population trusts, like this one:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/trust-and-di...

I've not used Copilot but I've experimented with two other AI driven autocompletion engines in Java and Kotlin. In both cases I uninstalled the plugins due to a combination of two problems:

1. The AI suggestions were often less helpful than the type driven IDE autocompletions (using IntelliJ).

2. The AI plugins were very aggressive in pushing their completions to the top of the suggestions list, even when they were strictly less helpful than the defaults.

The result was it actually slowed me down.

Looking at the marketing materials for these services, they're often focused on dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript where there's far less information available for the IDE to help you with. If you've picked your language partly due to the excellent IDE support, it's probably harder for the AI to compete with hand-written logic and type system information.

I took a look just now to see what you mean. Not surprisingly, a lot of the videos are the sort of things YouTube would ban, but that doesn't automatically mean they are wrong, bad or "FUD", which is again a kind of meaningless insult given that a lot of what official sources claim about COVID is specifically designed to create fear, by their own admission! See e.g. the the SAGE SPI-B subcommittee and their reports.

I don't see all the same videos you do, but here are some titles that should cause us to think twice before writing off this site as "far right":

1. "Pfizer whistleblower exposes the corrupt and unethical company for what they really are" - although BitChute seems mostly to be conservative videos, this one could easily be a headline found in the Guardian.

2. "NSA whistleblower demonstrates Biden administration spying on political opponent's communications" - haven't watched it so have no idea if it's true, but this is pretty much the core theme of the Snowden revelations which, again, was spearheaded by the Guardian just a decade ago. This is hardly "far right" or "hate".

3. "Fine print in Biden's tax proposal will have middle class Americans fuming". This sounds like a bog standard centre-right reaction to tax changes. Very much not far right or hate.

4. "Remembering dogs in warfare on memorial day", sounds quite nice actually.

5. "Journalism jobs disappeared faster than coal miners, according to Dpt of Labor" - sounds again like something the left would care about.

I took a look at the "THEY WANT YOU AND YOUR KIDS DEAD" video to see what it was about. It turns out to be some guy getting agitated because (so he says) he shared a video of a doctor on Facebook who treated people with COVID talking about ways the doctor (claims he) helped save them, and was banned from Facebook as a result. From this event the speaker takes a large leap and infers that because discussion of saving people with COVID is banned, "they want to kill you". You can argue that this is a ridiculous inference, but frankly it's inevitable people will look for explanations of otherwise apparently inexplicable events, like people being banned for hosting doctors talking about doctor-ing, and some of those explanations will be extreme.

Is this so different to YouTube? I just did a quick search and found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLpW76qpHUU titled "WHY I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS", which consists of some dude exhorting violence against them. The YT front page doesn't show these sorts of videos because it's normally filled with pop content or very personalized stuff. BitChute has way less content and is a refuge for people who get banned from other platforms, so, no surprise that stuff is more visible.

Finally, BitChute is currently advertising at the top of their site a new content policy:

https://support.bitchute.com/policy-changes/2021-06-01/

Their previous policy on prohibited hate speech said: "There should be a reasonable probability that the content would succeed in inciting actual action against the target, recognizing that such causation should be rather direct." This is a reasonable policy! But the UK government forced them to remove this requirement because a reasonable probability that something will happen is, apparently, not a requirement to be hate speech in the UK. Same for "inciting violence". So they've now updated their policies to not even require direct incitement. Ironically the YouTube "I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS" video would be banned under both BitChute's new and old policy because it directly incites people to violence. This is not the document of some far right extremist hate speech site, it's a content policy that tried to follow US norms and apparently is getting whacked by Ofcom to make it follow the far vaguer and abuse-prone EU definitions (which are still in effect in the UK).

At any rate, from my browse through the BitChute site it actually seems more reasonable than I expected. There's a lot of anti-liberal US politics stuff, but also some left wing stuff, some non political stuff, and a content policy that was already reasonable but was just changed to be even more "anti hate speech" (whatever that ends up meaning).

Well yes, but FreeSpeech's comment was grey and flagged when I saw it, even though it's indeed kind of so obvious it's pointless. And it had a reply disagreeing, so it needed to be spelled out.

Yes, but you were doing that in response to news articles citing academics who - we now know - were assuming COVID was 10x deadlier than it actually was (reported IFRs fell from 1%-2% to 0.1%-0.2% in most places). Which is what the article is about: how did that happen and why did the media and research institutions do such a bad job?

Please cite some examples.

BTW the post you're replying to is factually correct. As a government the EU does not innovative in the sense normally understood by the word, e.g. it does not introduce surprising new products, or (directly) create new technologies. It does however regulate.

Whilst this may well be true, the very same problem affects COVID death numbers: a death is reported as a COVID death if it occurs within about a month of a positive test result, regardless of whether symptoms are displayed at all or whether the person is already dying of something else. Thus using the same standard to classify vaccine-correlated deaths ensures at least that the numbers are comparable in this regard. You can see where this affects their results where they calculate a CFR using the globally reported death rates.

If they had used some other way to define a vaccine-related death, it would make the vaccines look artificially good, because you'd be comparing it against something made to look more deadly than it really is.

There is an additional problem with your counter-argument: it is anticipated and is discussed in the paper, which appears to counter it:

"One might argue that it is always difficult to ascertain causality in such reports. This is certainly true; however, the Dutch data, especially the fatal cases, were certified by medical specialists"

They also discuss your second point:

"In the Israeli field study, the observation period was six weeks, and in the U.S. regulatory studies between four to six weeks, a period commonly assumed to be sufficient to see a clinical effect of a vaccine, because it would also be the time frame within which someone who was infected initially would fall ill and perhaps die. Had the observation period been longer, the clinical effect size might have increased, i.e., the NNTV could have become lower and, consequently, the ratio of benefit to harm could have increased in favor of the vaccines. However, as noted above, there is also the possibility of side effects developing with some delay and influencing the risk–benefit ratio in the opposite direction"

Some of the counter-arguments on Twitter seem to criticize the paper for being bad and then make other dubious arguments of their own (it's frustrating, nearly all COVID research is like this). For example "Health Nerd" states:

"10/n If you assume that everyone who stays alive will get infected without a vaccine eventually - which is a fact"

That is not in any way a "fact". That is a model assumption based on epidemiological theory that has not yet yielded any usefully accurate predictions. The theory is so weak you could have made exactly the same arguments on exactly the same grounds for SARS-1 or MERS-CoV or really any infectious disease at all, yet the world is full of infectious diseases and people who have never caught them. Additionally it ignores the way viruses seem to become less dangerous over time as they evolve to optimize for propagation rather than killing their host, meaning even the very nature of what people eventually may get infected with can be very different. This is already visible with the discussion of how the delta variant has milder symptoms than the original.

That's not the right way to increase people's confidence in vaccines. It's not normal for journal board members to resign in protest at a paper even if they believe it has methodological errors, and their argument in this case is especially weak, consisting as it does of:

1. Only virologists and "vaccinologists" may express opinions on the safety of vaccines. This is argument by authority and especially bad given the obvious conflicts of interest both groups have, along with the fact that many virologists were just exposed as engaging in a massive conspiracy and coverup re: lab leaks.

2. A complaint that classifying a post vaccine death as a vaccine-caused death is not OK. Where were these people when COVID deaths were defined as any death at all within 28 days of a positive test, regardless of comorbidities or age? Are they resigning in protest at that? No? If not, why not? Isn't this massive hypocrisy? And wouldn't they be concerned at the risk of inconsistent classification by doctors given the extreme emotions attached to the topic, as evidenced by their own response?

Real scientists would respond to a paper they thought was wrong with another paper explaining why it's wrong. These "scientists" are refusing to do so and demanding retraction on the basis that the paper is being referenced by "anti-vaxxers". In other words, the conclusion itself is considered sufficient grounds for retraction.

How can anyone believe the scientific world is on top of the vaccine safety topic when clearly un-scientific behavior like this is occurring?

That seems kind of backwards and circular.

The lab leak people did have evidence: the fact that the virus emerged right next to a lab doing experiments on coronaviruses. The people claiming it couldn't have escaped from the lab were the ones without any evidence. Their claims were basically "it wasn't from the lab trust us we're scientists".

The "anti China posturing" you say existed could also be described in other ways but if someone believes China allowed a deadly virus to escape from a lab and then covered it up, it's hard for that position to not be anti China in some way.

As for "a strong undercurrent of undermining scientists", as you admit, it turned out later that they had been dishonest so the people trying to undermine them were in fact doing the right thing.

It feels like you're trying to retroactively justify a dismissal of these claims by arguing that because their conclusions didn't fit with your notion of what good people think you were right to dismiss it. But that's not how argumentation is meant to work.

The WHO hasn't changed its views due to "new science", the shifts have all been for political reasons, as was sometimes admitted by their own staff. Additionally this notion that it's ok for "experts" to set policies and claim science as justification then totally change them on a dime largely voids the whole original justification. It implies their original "science" was totally wrong in ways they couldn't detect and thus they presented it with absolute confidence, then they discovered they had badly screwed up but never admitted to it or investigated what went wrong.

In the end, science is respected because it claims to reveal universal truths about nature. If those truths are constantly being announced to be obsolete such that the new truths aren't mere refinements but totally different, what use is science?

As for authoritarianism, preventing people disagreeing with a global authority is a pure example of it, no? YouTube shouldn't even bother trying to figure out the truth here, they aren't able to do so. Just let people thrash it out amongst themselves.

Ah I see, you're quoting different parts of the website.

But my point is this: your argument is that vaccines work to stop transmission with 100% reliability but not infection. You aren't stating that explicitly but it's the only belief that is consistent with what you're proposing.

1. If vaccines stop infection, then you don't need to care if other people are sick or not.

2. Therefore you argue that because they might not be 100% effective at that, everyone should act as if they aren't effective at all, and ban unvaccinated people from things.

3. But what if the vaccine isn't 100% effective at blocking transmission either? Then a vaccinated person might be both sick and infectious. In which case as they'd be dangerous to other vaccinated people, they should also be banned, which means everyone is banned.

Therefore by contradiction you must believe it's possible that they block transmission 100% but not infection. This makes no biological sense and isn't supported by robust science. In fact even asymptomatic transmission as a concept isn't supported by robust science - actual contact tracing attempts to find this keep drawing blanks. The belief it must be common comes from attempts to make models work mathematically, but those models are so filled with basic errors nothing about them is useful.

Who is saying they want to kill half the population?!

None of those things were really the result of some top down utopian master plan, though. The closest might be the enlightenment if you consider the rewards for book finding granted by wealthy benefactors, but it was fundamentally a backward looking "Revolution" that was based on worship of the ancients.

The "scientific revolution", is not really a well known or unambiguous label, the growth of science being a long term trend. And it's worth observing that a major part of the present day corruption of science with the replication crisis, the junk sociological sciences and so on, are the result of an explicit top down utopian plan by governments to make a better tomorrow by funding academics.

Flu is endemic. Many people have never had it. The idea that 100% of people will get not only COVID but the exact strain that exists today does not seem well supported, especially as governments are already making noises about variants and booster shots.

You didn't understand my question at all.

Gebru said "do this or I resign". The company accepted her resignation. She then attempted to "unresign" by claiming her statement she would resign wasn't an actual resignation. Clearly you support this kind of meritless word games from her.

As for Megan, why is a non engineer running YouTube? Why did someone at lightweight as Gebru end up being paid as a researcher at all given that her research had no real validity? Why was she allowed to behave in such toxic ways for so long? Google is neck deep in identity politics, that's why.

Exactly. You are arguing that vaccines don't work to protect people from infection but do work to prevent transmission, which is a complete inversion of what vaccines are normally understood to do. You believe the vaccines don't actually work, or rather, that everyone should act as if they don't, which amounts to the same thing

At some point I think you have to accept that your stance is an unfalsifiable form of collectivism. You are insisting that everyone injects themselves with something potentially dangerous to reduce your own risk from extremely small to extremely small, on the back of completely novel and extremely questionable claims, and damn the risk to everyone else.

What's your point? The internet mob views the rightness of such things as being beyond question, an actual direct democracy doesn't. Seems like good support for the original point.

To do that you'd need to roll back corporate feminism. The reason this guy got cancelled is the feminist culture of "always believe the victim" which is basically the same as "always believe an accusation". Anyone who points out that women can and do lie about being raped i.e. an accusation is not automatically true, is immediately trashed by feminists as a woman hater, and they make it quite clear that it's a "pick us or them" type situation, which in turn makes it difficult to treat the topic rationally. This poor guys situation is the inevitable result.

The art world is especially exposed to this because it's full of leftists, so you're really asking for a roll back of identity politics as a whole. Good luck with that. If you figure it out let us know.

Are you arguing vaccines don't work? The whole point of getting one is it makes you immune so it doesn't matter if other people have it.

This total distortion of what vaccines are about is dystopian. Vaccines are about protecting the person who takes them. If a few people who didn't take them renders the vaccine useless for everyone else, that means it's not a vaccine

Are you objecting to Google's refusal to let her "unresign" then?

Btw plenty of us ex Googlers think Jeff Dean's reputation was enhanced still further by that move. Gebru was acting in crazy ways, she really should have been fired much earlier, but taking the opportunity when she so helpfully presented it seems like a no brainer. Sad that the rest of Google lacks that approach.

If they were to recommend a drug based without a scientific trial, they risk losing the trust of the world

But that's already happened with vaccines. A bit late to worry about that now.

I can see how that might prove difficult for a non-native speaker. Here's a version written in less fancy English.

During COVID times, scientists have become political. Many scientific arguments were not written about in the American media, because journalists assumed that the truth was the opposite of whatever Donald Trump was saying. Tech firms mostly did the same thing. This means discussion of conspiracy theories and real scientific debates have both been suppressed, and now take place "underground" i.e. in non-mainstream forums.

The Apple APIs date back to NeXTStep at the end of the 80s, yet they managed to mostly keep them fresh.

Win32 is old and unviable because Microsoft hasn't bothered making comprehensive upgrades for it and never laid out a gap-free plan for how to move off it. They could have upgraded it more smoothly but never did.

That's not a distinction most will recognize, partly because believing this is true requires you to trust Google wouldn't share sensitive data with the authorities. They just proved they will happily push code to your device without notifying you at all, if they think it's for the greater good.

You are merely arguing that it was worth it because you agree with the goal, not that it wasn't despotic or paranoid.

Why do most of the things governments have been doing about COVID? Not because they work or make sense, most of their policies were undermined by data showing ineffectiveness a long time ago.

They do these things because they can.

It's smart. The result of using these apps is that lots of people have to quarantine, even though these policies have not resulted in any impact on the virus in any way, and even though there can be test false positives (which is officially denied, so there is no way to appeal any positive test result). Why would people want to sign up for that?