...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Photographers are already using their software of choice to work with raw formats. Often, that software takes advantage of specific hardware and software features of the $$,$$$ to $$$,$$$ cameras and associated equipment that created the raw files. Staying within the family for software to work with digital negatives and images is not a big jump when someone has already invested in a single platform of camera bodies and lenses, and most photography software that is worth using in the long run provides timely enough support for new camera models. When professional photographers' time is worth $$$ to $,$$$ per hour, the fact that the software or standard is open source might not matter to their teams' workflows or bottom lines.

I've installed and supported GIMP for dozens of groups in the past, but I've stopped doing that because kids who learn that software gain significantly less advantage for employment and further education compared to learning more popular desktop and cloud based image editors.

The "current crisis" is manufactured and amplified externally. Nobody is doxxing Tesla owners with maps using Molotov cocktails as map cursors or burning lots full of vehicles in for service in some way that is a function of whether Musk is personally present on the factory floor vs doing something else he thinks is vital to our economic survival. All of it is ginned up hate based on the politics surrounding the pruning of vast left slush funds and debt-funded waste that has to go away. That's an entire industry with vested interests, and acting against it certainly brings out the coordinated hate, attacks on stock value, media smearing, and of course thousands of people who now say he's a nazi though they can't actually articulate why they think that.

No, him being "on the factory floor" or off it doesn't precipitate some "current crisis," except in the sense that entrenched interests currently having their oxen gored by drying up things like the NGO money laundering industry are doing their best to try to wreck the company to make a point.

So the people who made it should have been earning minimum wage, is that your point? Spread that dollar amount across five and half yeads and even modest team of people and their overhead, and they're making middle five figures after taxes. Is that a lot, to you?

It took five and a half years to make it. So, in perhaps over-simplified terms, that's ~$670k year working on it. Let's say you had six people working on the project, and had NO overhead at all beyond their personal income while making it. That's roughly $100k per person before they paid taxes, which is either pretty good or not very good at all, depending on where you live and how. But one supposes they also had some overhead. This wasn't done on their kids' laptops at night. There was music to compose, audio to record and design, and a lot more.

So, yeah. "Just" 3.7M is a fair characterization.

Programming and the required design skills feels like an art to me, so I would advocate for theory and practice being taught together in the same way that learning music theory doesn't make a person capable of playing a piano. But I may be an exception.

Around the time of the last *dinosaurs mating*, the debate was whether churning out compsci grads who knew how to use C / C++ was sufficient, or if they needed to learn how to program in C / C++ and other languages. Some folks thought that the compiler-writing course should no longer be mandatory because *no one needs to know assembly anymore in the real world.*

I wonder if the next debate will be about whether it's necessary for students to learn how to read documentation, or whether knowing how to ask gen AI a question or use code completion is sufficient.

No, we just voted the tyrannical little statists out of office. And the people you're now laughably calling Fascists are busy exposing and tearing down the very tools that an actual Fascist government would (and did) use. Fascists don't cut off the cash supply to money-laundering NGOs that are making their pet politicians richer and more personally powerful. Fascists don't work to shut down the mechanisms by which the government can censor your social media use. Your case of projection is pretty impressive.

You know what Fascists do? They try to hide the money movement that keeps their circle of power functioning. Our little lefty statists are busy shrieking that the lead of the executive branch shouldn't be allowed to see the records showing where the executive branch has been writing checks. Gee, what would they be hiding? Their little circle of industrial-scale grift and waste and abuse is getting exposed, and they're furious about it. And here you are having their backs. Pretty ugly. Do you live off of dubious international grant kickbacks or something?

> It won't. People run Windows 7 do it for one of those reasons:

- the machine and its particular version of software are part of a bigger validated system or configuration which has an expensive / difficult certification for the industry, utility, health, marine, aerospace, etc. environment.

WINE will not replace Windows in such environments any more than SD cards will replace floppy disk drives on aircraft which are already flying.

GPTs are a logical step combining spell check, grammar check, autocompletion, search engines, writing notebooks, word processors, and encyclopedias, among other scholarly tools. They can help to autocomplete *some* ideas that one already has, but the user still needs to already know information to create a useful prompt, and how to adapt the resulting text into the real world.

Remember amd.slashdot.org?

And my decompression sickness.

There can be value in investing in domestic infrastructure. Tariffs with other trade and non-trade barriers can encourage that investment.

Recall that folks are discussing tariffs on Chinese imports *because* China started to figure out supply chain resiliency a couple decades ago in ways that made the rest of the world uncompetitive in green energy and related manufacturing.

It may serve you to look outside your discipline and culture from time to time, as not everyone uses significantly automated data and publication pipelines. JACM publishes roughly 45 papers a year. Nature Cancer publishes 13 items per month, including corrections and editorials. MISQ publishes 15 items per quarter. European Security publishes around 10 items per quarter. Journal of Consumer Culture publishes around 12 items per quarter.

Practically, the vast majority of graduate students in the world are not top-tier physics students, and will need to publish in the vast majority of journals in the long tail. And practically, a significant portion of the world's graduate students are in Masters and PhD programs that aren't based on the German Academy model and require publication to graduate.

And the fact that you did not acknowledge at all that the estimates have been discounted suggests that you're less interested in engaging in a discussion than in simply attacking.

Have the day you deserve.

We're a convenience culture now. Some of the target audience members find *opening a web browser to type a URI and load a website* to be inconvenient and annoying. Folks will also be able to use the TikTok app by *changing their app store region*, or *jailbreaking their phone*, and other methods which have instructions online.

Asking users who have trained for years on TikTok to develop a 10 second attention span to do a modicum of work for their dopamine micro-doses means that they'll find other easier ways to get their fixes.

Remember that Linux distributions did not significantly gain traction until they could be downloaded as CD images instead of being attached to 600-page books, even though folks could download floppy disk images from CIS or FTPs.

Lawn darts and assault rifles can be tools for expressing speech and artistry.