BC TECH
Saved by @jay_millerjay

Been reading up a lot about these jabs, esp as I know they are going to be a condition of a return to normality

Was on a zoom call last evening with a testing company that had some fascinating evidence on protection etc.

I have more reading to do.

 I do not want to be coerced into something I don't want, BUT i want normal back as soon as possible.

Basically i'm at the point in my isolation and thinking that I'll take whatever just so this bullshit can end.
That is a desperate mindset, but so is 12 months of being cut off from the world.

All i have is what goes round and round in my head.

There's no one else to help balance it.
So i'm in group 6, and my surgery are doing group 6 right now. And i am at the point i want to do it to get it DONE.

And also to study what happens. Because i have that kind of mind.
I remember Pandemrix.

But we live with risk every day.

I risk my life climbing walls with only a harness around my waist to catch me as i lean back and fall off

And rational risk assessment is at the heart of everything going wrong these last 12 months
I want to be rational in all my decision making. Not a refusenik for the sake of it.

I have a lot of thinking to do.
I'm also aware that it may come down to interfering with my job if i refuse.

This is on my mind a lot.
Visiting my family in the US is also on my mind. It's been 11 years. I *need* to be able to go. And as vaccines are mandated in the US for accessing education, I *know* they will be a precondition of entry to the country.
So @ClareGerada i appreciate your offer the other day and I may hit you up for some info

It's about rational risk assessment. Weighing up the pros and cons, not just of the jab, and not just "what happens if i do" but "what happens if i dont"

It's so much more to consider.
And absolutely nothing to do with "needle phobia" as so many people think is the reason people say no to jabs
Also fascinating to me is that 2 panodyne cartridges have been faintly positive for antibodies

But 2 Roche anti-N assays have been "negative" - 0.05, and 0.08 quantitative

So What is the actual answer? Do i just have t cells that mop it up and antibodies aren't necessary?
I'm the person who lost rubella titre when pregnant and had to have the MMR after her birth

I also have an autoimmune thyroid disease that has only once tested positive for antibodies - otherwise they're almost always under the threshold. Present, but low
So what really is the answer? Am i protected already? I think i am but am i really?

According to the testing company last evening and the expert they had on, if you've already encountered the virus and you're primed, the jab acts as a booster.
If i want to visit family in a care home, want to see my family in the US, want continued employment, is the risk of ADE / pathogenic priming worth the payoff?

It would be a more compelling argument not to be masked if i have had the jab and can prove it.

So yeah.
I can recall objecting for absolute years to the LITUK test. Why did i object? It was insulting. Absolutely pathetic. Created to pander to those who thought immigrants got an easy ride. All it did was punish me, and I had bigger things to do, autistic kids to sort, etc.
So i objected. for 13 years.

And who did it harm? Me. It did not change the situtation, which was that i *had* to pass that exam before i could obtain the citizenship i was entitled to for nearly 15 years.
This is also on my mind. Refusing for refusing's sake when the world is going to change and we are powerless to stop some of the bigger changes, like what the US demands for entry, it will only harm me.
I'm not acquiescing to vaccine passports, they are still wrong and I will still stand up for that because it's absolutely heinous discrimination.
And i'm not encouraging anyone else to do, or not do, whatever suits their personal life.

We all have our circumstances and none of them are the same. No one else walks in my shoes.

There should be no coercion and no punishment to any of this.
But reality is, there has been, and there probably will continue to be. And it would be stupid to not evaluate all of it and the potential of this stuff continuing whether we want it to or not.
The government seem hellbent to do whatever they want - look at the tests being rolled out to kids for schooling. Professionals are screaming about why it's a bad idea but the government are DOING IT ANYWAY

That's been the biggest lesson i've learned through all of this --
if the govt want to do something, they bloody well will. No matter how much evidence tells them not to.

THEY WILL DO IT ANYWAY

look at masks. no evidence of their effectiveness, mandated anyway and repeatedly the thumbscrews are tightened, shops harass us, etc etc.
it's all illegal, unethical, immoral, and discriminatory

AND THEY DO IT ANYWAY

Isnt it realism to consider that they will make being a jabbed a precondition of so much of life, that it's better for my QoL to go on and acquiesce?
So that's where I'm at.
Sorry for the huge self indulgent thread.

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Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details): https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.
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Wilbert Liu \U0001f468\U0001f3fb\u200d\U0001f3a8
Wilbert Liu 👨🏻‍🎨...
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These past few days I've been experimenting with something new that I want to use by myself.

Interestingly, this thread below has been written by that.

Let me show you how it looks like. 👇🏻


When you see localhost up there, you should know that it's truly an experiment! 😀


It's a dead-simple thread writer that will post a series of tweets a.k.a tweetstorm. ⚡️

I've been personally wanting it myself since few months ago, but neglected it intentionally to make sure it's something that I genuinely need.

So why is that important for me? 🙂

I've been a believer of a story. I tell stories all the time, whether it's in the real world or online like this. Our society has moved by that.

If you're interested by stories that move us, read Sapiens!

One of the stories that I've told was from the launch of Poster.

It's been launched multiple times this year, and Twitter has been my go-to place to tell the world about that.

Here comes my frustration.. 😤
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So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.
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Qiao Wang
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People sometimes ask me what my vision of DeFi is. This is a very tough question. DeFi is very messy with thousands of experiments happening. But high level, I think DeFi will go through 2 phases:

During the 1st phase (next 2-5 years), we'll continue to build games, casinos, and speculative products.

This sounds uninspiring. But it has two main important consequences.

1) This will ultimately lead to hundreds of millions of users to install wallets and get uncomfortable with the UX.

2) This will force the tech (especially scaling) to mature.

Once we've achieved these two goals, phase 2 begins. In phase 2, products that serve real economic activities / integrated with the real economy will be built and flourish.

Right now, such products barely exist. @terra_money comes to mind. But this is the kind of products that I really look forward to. They are more economically sustainable, and create more value.
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(((E. Glen Weyl)))
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I am grateful to @slatestarcodex for taking the time to respond to my critique of technocracy. There is a lot there to respond to and in general I think the exchange speaks for itself. However, I think there are few points where clarification is important for the exchange to be

productive, which I'll briefly address here. I suspect many fellow travelers (e.g. @audreyt @dsallentess @JohnnieM @MichelleRempel @VitalikButerin @mds49) will find the exchange fairly ironic/revealing. I'll post this as a response on this blog as well.

1. Let me start with concessions. There are many points where @slatestarcodex correctly highlights various areas where my grasp of beliefs and facts are limited or wrong, especially in the depth of my grasp of the views of the rationalist community.

I freely admit that there are serious limits to how much I've been able to research the views of people in this community and I certainly hope they are not as I characterized them, though as I will point out below many elements of @slatestarcodex's response confirm my concerns.

2. Given the last point, I fully acknowledge the danger of throwing stones lest I shatter my own glass house. However, leaving aside any blame, I think to make sense of my piece and @slatestarcodex's response requires a bit of context that clearly he lacked. First, outside
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राम-रावण युद्ध समाप्त हो चुका था। जगत को त्रास देने वाला रावण अपने कुटुम्ब सहित नष्ट हो चुका था।श्रीराम का राज्याभिषेक हुआ और अयोध्या नरेश श्री राम के नेतृत्व में चारों दिशाओं में शन्ति थी।
अंगद को विदा करते समय राम रो पड़े थे ।हनुमान को विदा करने की शक्ति तो राम में थी ही नहीं ।


माता सीता भी हनुमान को पुत्रवत मानती थी। अत: हनुमान अयोध्या में ही रह गए ।राम दिनभर दरबार में, शासन व्यवस्था में व्यस्त रहते थे। संध्या को जब शासकीय कार्यों में छूट मिलती तो गुरु और माताओं का कुशल-मंगल पूछ अपने कक्ष में जाते थे। परंतु हनुमान जी हमेशा उनके पीछे-पीछे ही रहते थे ।


उनकी उपस्थिति में ही सारा परिवार बहुत देर तक जी भर बातें करता ।फिर भरत को ध्यान आया कि भैया-भाभी को भी एकांत मिलना चाहिए ।उर्मिला को देख भी उनके मन में हूक उठती थी कि इस पतिव्रता को भी अपने पति का सानिध्य चाहिए ।

एक दिन भरत ने हनुमान जी से कहा,"हे पवनपुत्र! सीता भाभी को राम भैया के साथ एकांत में रहने का भी अधिकार प्राप्त है ।क्या आपको उनके माथे पर सिन्दूर नहीं दिखता?इसलिए संध्या पश्चात आप राम भैया को कृप्या अकेला छोड़ दिया करें "।
ये सुनकर हनुमान आश्चर्यचकित रह गए और सीता माता के पास गए ।


माता से हनुमान ने पूछा,"माता आप अपने माथे पर सिन्दूर क्यों लगाती हैं।" यह सुनकर सीता माता बोलीं,"स्त्री अपने माथे पर सिन्दूर लगाती है तो उसके पति की आयु में वृद्धि होती है और वह स्वस्थ रहते हैं "। फिर हनुमान जी प्रभु राम के पास गए ।
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