Marcela (she/her)

Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed.

If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.

And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.

Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals.

It is the departments’ choice to cancel subscriptions anytime and start publishing on their own terms. They are equally to blame when they esteem reputation above all, and measure reputation by publishing to these journals. Let’s not pretend that big-shot universities are simply taken hostage by a handful corrupt billionaires. They’re in on it.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Racket.

I think it was all over the repo.

Well, many people are not aware of the link between their ChatGPT projects and the rise in their electricity bill, nor the foreshadowed electricity drought. Contrary to what corpos had people believe about their “individual responsibility via recycling” their individual contribution to these outcomes is now actively suppressed by the billionaire-owned media. Curious.

Wow there is a lot packed into this comment, which I mostly agree with.

• Dumb collectible “ownership” fetishism
• Delusion epidemic due to AI addiction
• Decades-long Climate adaptation setback
• Devastating labor practices
• Cult doomsday syndrome reinforcing false beliefs
• Vaccine skepticism popularity and health outcomes

I am still baffled by how you managed to stuff the entirety of endstage capitalism dystopia into two short sentences. No wonder the word “fatigue” is featured in the username!

But I came here to point out that the last part is possible occurence of cognitive dissonance. When they have fucked up so badly, by commiting to such big evils, and especially sacrificing their kids health, yeah, there is no way back… Cognitive dissonance makes it impossible to admit the harm, so they are bound to reinforce the beliefs or face tremendous levels of guilt.

to let a generic phrase be forever attached to a political movement in any setting is a bit much

ahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

BTW this is a prolonged ‘Aha moment’, not a typesetting symbolism of laughter.

“Living space”, like? Displacing other peoples to provide an ideal amount of population density to your own people is still not OK. Or it should be anyway.

Good, but the way the developer spells “nazy” makes me to follow the quoted advice on my own brain process:

if you want to change the wallpaper during runtime, you must pkill the daemon, and then start it again

The first name of the project was “The Final Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Worries”. The developer reports he was unaware of the connotation until the Ukraine war happened.

Is this the reverse Turing test? It can be used to gauge if hominid hype followers can “really” think…

If your threat model involves all these, then you can only be one person, and he has already been arrested due to stylistics. /joking

BTW your advice to use AI against writing style fingerprinting is not what I have heard, and some people don’t want to use AI, especially OpenAI. You should at least make your remedy about local models, but those are not as good as the commercial ones.

The correct response here is: style guides.

Style guides are specifically designed to make multiple staff writers to all sound the same. There are tools like back-and-forth translation and reading level analyzers that you can use offline to minimize peculiarities in your writing.

But is is all very cumbersome and error prone, and for low threat scenarios just mimicking another person at a lower reading level than yourself is the most accessible method.

Think of it a bit like being in a dark room. You can sorta see other people (or their silhouettes), but if someone turns on a torch, then you can definetly see the torch.

IIRC recent studies show that this method can identify individuals with higher specificity than you describe here. The OP didn’t specify threat models, but provided general privacy advice. Moving around town with a jammer is a physical parallel of fingerprinting an anonymous browser (It’s this mysterious user again).

But if your threat model requires you are not placed in a specific place at a specific time, then just having the jammer on in this place will not identify you on its own. Then it also depends on how many people are also using jammers. If only spies used Tor, it would be very easy to smoke them out, but the rest of Tor users serve as decoy for the spies.

So the dark room analogy is not a good fit here, and it is potentially dangerous for people under certain threat models. Just setting the record gay, with all due respect.

Well, this is something that felt off indeed. But please explain. So http(s) is the world of http requests, but you can also have other services like ftp, ssh, bittorrent and what not. Is that what you mean? So the WWW is just the global interconnection of web pages strictly, over the Internet? Would this apply to any internet? /genuine

Is this …mansplaining?

An internet in theory is a network of other computer networks (not single computers). The Internet is the world wide web.

Todays news outlets if sent back to 1945: Underrated painter shot in the head by maniacal racist in Berlin. German outrage over frantic celebrations across Europe.

See, this is the bit I don’t get… If there are two people, like ANY two people, that their crimes and corruptions are enough to subvert the status quo, then what fucking difference does it make if they cover it up so hard. The message is still the same, that there is so much crime and corruption in government that a violent response is in order. Are they so stupid, or so confident?