∨∅ℝ⊤∈× ∃ĝĝ [ 🌀🥚 ] @vortex_egg@hackers.town

Here is a good resource about the SIFT method (sometimes called The Four Moves):

- Stop
- Investigate the source
- Find better coverage
- Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context

https://infodemic.blog/

Brooke Binkowski of fact checking site truthorfiction.com has a great thread on birdsite about how big tech platforms are never going to deal with the festering nazi and fascist communication on their sites, and that we have to deal with it ourselves through direct action.

She provides links to several write-ups about how to do just that.

Thread: https://twitter.com/brooklynmarie/status/1385257979188895745

Links:
- https://www.truthorfiction.com/how-to-fight-disinformation-introduction-and-overview/
- https://www.truthorfiction.com/how-to-fight-disinformation-part-i-firehosing/
- https://www.truthorfiction.com/how-to-fight-disinformation-part-ii-gaslighting/
- https://www.engadget.com/anti-vaccine-misinformation-report-12-accounts-212245856.html
- https://www.stratcomcoe.org/decoding-crimea-pinpointing-influence-strategies-modern-information-warfare
- https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/antifa-proud-boys-militia-trump-insurrection-1121933/

Consensus epistemologies are subject to cults of personality or authoritarian power for their maintenance and should be replaced with decentralized epistemic swarms based on stigmergy.

Victims of instrumentarianism look like believers of alternate reality cults like QAnon: individuals deprived of the right to the human future and the capability to self-determine their own beliefs free of undue mental influence and instrumentarian interference in the form of disinformation.

The social order of the United States is based on propaganda and advertising and has been for about 100 years. The rise of surveillance capitalism hypertuned that existing social order into a programmable fabric, whose control knobs are for sale to any and all bidders.

The present state of social affairs is resultant of the many competing instruction sets colliding within that fabric.

On Friday I find out more about my attempts to get diagnosed and treated for possible ADHD.

I really can't go a day without accumulating more potential research interests.

I need to morph my research practice from "hoarding topics and reading materials" to "doing focused reading and writing".

I guess I have to attend virtual defcon now huh?

If algorithmic bias hacking were something you could learn how to do in a hacker space, that would really pique my interests. I don't know the first thing about it (though it would probably mean learning a lot about machine learning, which is ... eehhnnn).

Twitter's new AI ethics team is running an AI algorithmic bias bounty competition at defcon for people to hack on a twitter algorithm to discover its biases.

Twitter, and the corporate benefits of unpaid labor, aside, we def need more algorithmic bias hacking as a general activity that people get up to.

Twitter thread of videos of the protests from around the world:

https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1419034849881456641

https://www.logically.ai/articles/anti-lockdown-protests-organized-by-german-cell

The worldwide wave of inauthentically coordinated violent anti-covid-lockdown protests is the start of something much much worse. I'm honestly terrified.

Aww, the start date of the digital humanities analytics course I signed up for with SFI's Complexity Explorer MOOC got pushed out by a month. I was really looking forward to starting that next week.

And while I’m asking for ponies, it could have a code of conduct with a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual harassment.

Antifascist/anarchist hacker conference when?

Preferably online, because it’s also organized by people with risk assessment skills in the middle of a pandemic.

We saw this tonight. Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark.

Huh, the keynote speaker at defcon is the secretary of the department of homeland security.

This involves downloading these python notebooks from IBM Watson so I can look at them later (the class if offered through IBM and they give you free resources on their cloud AI platform for doing stuff).

TBH, valid big tech criticisms and AI-and-data-all-the-things concerns aside, IBM Watson is kind of cool now and they really turned it around as a product offering. Instead of trying to be a big centralized AI prediction machine, it's now just a bunch of low-level tools that you can put together to automate AI and ML type tasks in a business.

Whether the world needs that is another question, but within that frame it's not bad.

Making myself take notes and a cheat sheet on the course I just finished in my data science class (data analysis with python) because it is helpful.

Video game time.

I want to see more cyber-fiction that draws from second order cybernetics.

My favorite cyberpunk fiction is stuff like Ghost In The Shell, which is steeped in actual cybernetics theory. Style AND substance as it were.