James Lohner🔎

Interested in open-science, meta-science, and most prefix-science constructions.

[James Lohner🔎 @JamesLohner]

@akarlin Rewarding publication prestige prior to fixing peer review is just a recipe to manufacture fraud in the literature

[COSMIC_YOLOBOT @cosmic_yolo_bot]

A day in Manhattan, warped so that distance ≈ drive time. Drive times swell in the morning and evening rush hour, then contract in the night.

[Sawyer 🔍, ⏸️/⏹️, is approaching Vibecamp @CoughsOnWombats]

-Competitive field exists
-Form of cheating is discovered which is not feasibly detectable
-Cheaters outcompete noncheaters over time
-Field now mostly or entirely cheaters
-Someone discovers how to detect cheating

"We can't come down hard on this because everyone's doing it"

/

[James Lohner🔎 @JamesLohner]

@olivertraldi It's dumb on purpose to make you click

[James Lohner🔎 @JamesLohner]

@river_is_nice @BlueRepublik Is that the house where they filmed "sharp objects"?

[🍊 bunny 💙💛🍉 @fruitybnuuy]

wait until the english speakers find out about our other iconic phrases like
"dressed like a rat for the grand sewer opening"
"free is a fair price"
"for free even vinegar is sweet"
"looks like shit, and tastes even better"
"place where dogs bark with their asses"

[James Lohner🔎 @JamesLohner]

@mattyglesias @KathyHochul Conductor and police officer would probably be widely popular and keep her in good graces of unions

[Marcus Hutter @mhutter42]

$10'000 Xmas wager on the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize: CEO David Budden of AI Startup PingYou seems to be onto something:

[Jarvis @jarvis_best]

From yesterday’s profile of the Coldplay kiss cam chick: (1) sweater, looking out a window (2) defiantly walking in a field.

I swear to god this stuff is so easy.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Despite being a small minority of the population, almost all of the people infected in the ongoing measles outbreak are unvaccinated.

The outbreak could be quashed by vaccinating their communities, but instead, America will lose its measles elimination status next month.

[Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin]

Latest podcast from @Gregory_C_Allen has an insane section on criminal activity at Meta.

Internal docs leaked to Reuters show:

• 10% of all Meta revenue comes from ads for scams & banned goods ($16B/year)
• Meta estimates it's involved in 1/3 of all successful scams in the US
• That suggests they drive $50B in scam losses for US consumers alone each year
• Meta earns ~$3B annually from scam/banned goods ads run by Chinese operations alone

The China case study:

• In 2024, Meta made $18B+ from Chinese companies advertising to foreign consumers
• Internal teams found ~19% was scams/banned content
• An anti-fraud team successfully cut these ads in half
• When Zuckerberg saw the revenue impact, he told them to "pause" and the team was disbanded
• By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to 16% of China revenue
• This results in money being stolen and going directly from ordinary Americans to Chinese criminals

The deliberate enabling:

• Fraud earns 10% of all revenue, but anti-fraud teams were blocked from any action costing >0.15%, so they couldn't effectively do anything
• Meta charged higher rates for suspected fraudulent ads — a "scam tax"
• Their algorithm naturally identifies people vulnerable to frauds and feeds them more and more

The cold calculation:

• Meta anticipated up to $1B in regulatory fines for this
• But they make $3.5B every 6 months from high-risk ads
• They view these fines as just "cost of doing business"

Senators Blumenthal & Hawley now calling for FTC/SEC investigations in a blistering letter, noting that all this happened while Meta cut safety staff and moved billions over to VR and AI.

WTF.

[James Lohner🔎 @JamesLohner]

@visceralscenery @razibkhan How could anyone have read "leadership coaching startup" and continued?

[Neil Shubin @NeilShubin]

What scientific discovery absolutely blew you away? Of course there are many, but this one comes to mind
(one I discuss in ENDS OF THE EARTH): freshwater lakes, some the size of the Great Lakes, buried under 2 or more miles of ice in Antarctica. With living creatures inside

[Alexis Lomakin, Ph.D. (אל) אַלעקסיס לאָמאַקין @Alexis_Lomakin]

Cool paper from @EBastounis ERK activation waves coordinate mechanical cell competition leading to collective elimination via extrusion of bacterially infected cells https://t.co/21uLZQfVQp

[Yishan @yishan]

Hold on, why *hasn’t* anyone ever made an open source printer? It’s been like 30 years!

[Luke Glowacki @HSB_Lab]

If you want to understand how profound the changes in the 20th century were, look at the life of Jimmy Carter. He grew up plowing fields barefoot behind a horse and didn't have running water or electricity until he was 11.

[James Lohner🔎 @JamesLohner]

@AlecStapp @pahlkadot My biases make me want to believe everything bad I read about government. But this seems too stupid even for them

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

This is an incredible quote, but what I was more shocked by was learning that it would only cost $24 billion to be prepared for ANY VIRAL PANDEMIC.

For a few pennies to the federal government, the U.S. could simply crush any new viral pandemic before it gets serious.

[Matt Clifford @matthewclifford]

Wastewater monitoring was one of the best things we did during covid. Impressive example of tech-enabled state capacity… and we just shut it down. Hope there are no new pandemic-like threats on the horizon. Oh wait…

[Liam Bright @lastpositivist]

I don't know why academics take so long to review papers. You can literally just check to see if it cites you in the bibliography, accept if so reject if not. Easy.