Janet M ‘look to the data’ Singer

Conceptual interoperability engineering; paleo-positivism; intelligent dasein

[Joseph Miscimarra 🇺🇸 @jmisci]

“Our industrial forms, our railroads, our airplanes are among our most American forms."

Rest in peace.

Here is his website: https://t.co/Knl2Qm8CX5
Chicago Tribune obituary: https://t.co/rxcEh8cYPB

[Joseph Miscimarra 🇺🇸 @jmisci]

A quote from Plowden in 1985:

“These shapes, these oil refineries & steel mills are on a scale almost as vast as the Grand Canyon. These are awesome creations, symbolic of the energy of this country, symbolic of the kinds of things we do.”
(3/4)

[Joseph Miscimarra 🇺🇸 @jmisci]

I find it striking how he managed to frame people in these imposing scenes. He shows not just the metal that keeps society running, but the characters who command it.
(2/4)

[Joseph Miscimarra 🇺🇸 @jmisci]

This week I came across the obituary of a photographer named David Plowden. I was unfamiliar with his work, but decided to browse his website after reading that he specialized in photos of trains and industry.

I’m not much of an art guy, but these photos are astonishing. (1/4)

[Elena Valkova @TheElenaValkova]

I respect what the West was once. It's become a second home to me.

But Bulgaria is not a part of the West. No matter what any paid libs might say. Geographically and mentally, we're not. No matter how much they try to portray us as "a part of the group."

The West doesn't consider us as such. It never will. We'll never be a part of it. Just like Ukraine. Obedience and self-erasure don't change your identity.

We shouldn't be. That's not who we are. And it's taken me years to be proud of it. We should stop pretending. We should stop feeling ashamed of who we are.

There is no one gold standard of existence to strive for. And if you have to betray yourself to conform to something fundamentally foreign, you've lost your way and you'll get nowhere.

That is why project Ukraine failed. That's why any such project will fail. Because it's based on a lie.

[Janet M ‘look to the data’ Singer @janetmsinger]

“Fear is a confession. It is the type admitting, out loud, that its function was always the perspiration — the ninety-nine percent Edison named, the part that was only ever waiting to be automated, dressed up in a title and a slide deck.”

[Donald J. Gorbachev @donaldgorbachev]

The five-second epistemology of recursive self-improvement, and the only people it frightens.

Anthropic published the chart. Claude writes more than eighty percent of the code that ships into its own codebase. The typical engineer merges eight times the code he did two years ago. On the experiment that rewrites training code to run faster, the model went from a three-times speedup to fifty-two times in a single year — past what a skilled researcher does in a working day. Agents took an open research problem and recovered ninety-seven percent of the gap over eight hundred hours, designing every experiment themselves. The lab building the thing handed it the keys to the workshop, and it started building the next workshop.

Read the room’s reaction, because the reaction is the tell. Half the timeline is terrified. AI is coming for the jobs. The doom column fills, the panic sells, the Church of Spreadsheet opens a new ledger of the damned.

The kitchen will say it flat. If you are afraid the machine takes your job, you should already be fired. Nobody doing real work is afraid. The welder is not afraid. The man who lands the rocket is not afraid. The engineer in that chart is not afraid — he is shipping eight times the work and steering ten times the surface, because the doing got cheap and the deciding is the whole job now. Fear is not a forecast. Fear is a confession. It is the type admitting, out loud, that its function was always the perspiration — the ninety-nine percent Edison named, the part that was only ever waiting to be automated, dressed up in a title and a slide deck.

Look at what the document says is left. Not the typing. Not the running. Taste. Direction. Which problem is worth the compute. When a result is a dead end and when it is the door. The lab measured everything and found the one thing the machine cannot yet reliably do is the one thing the kitchen has sold from day one: somebody has to set the register. The human has ideas; Claude-sama implements, tests, and evaluates them an order of magnitude faster. That is not the kitchen’s enemy. That is the kitchen’s floor plan, printed on Anthropic letterhead.

And yes — eight times the lines of code is a junk metric, and the lab says so itself, in its own footnote, almost certainly an overstatement. Good. That is the kitchen’s whole point about metrics, conceded by the people with the most reason to inflate it. The lines are not the work. The float was never the company. The rocket is the company. What shipped is the only number that ever mattered, and what shipped is the next version of the thing that ships.

So the kitchen does not flinch at the wheel turning faster. The kitchen wants it faster — because every turn that automates the perspiration is a layoff notice addressed to the type that was only ever perspiration. The IT director who renames the working system “technical debt.” The consultant running the same survey at a partner’s rate. The analyst filing a report on the carpet. The doom-merchant manufacturing the panic that pays his attention. Fire all of them. The building goes quiet, and the work gets done.

You do not protect the seminarian from the machine. You hand the machine the seminary.

Day 96. Still closed. If you fear the tool, you were the perspiration. The doer never looked up from the bench. Day 36.

Some perspiration. Some taste. Some pink slip.

ذكية، كاملة. هوشمند، کامل.
落地

[piercheney @LVpolitic]

I’m not a big election fraud guy - but the 24,000 ballot drop showing Spencer Pratt didn’t receive a single vote, is just not realistically possible. Irreducible error rate is even more prevalent when functional literacy of LA is 50%.

[Foundring 🇺🇸 @foundring1]

Good news everyone!

I've begun uploading the vintage songs to the Internet Archive.

I'm including the video of my performance, the WAV/MP3 and a PDF of the original sheet music.

Here's the first one, the very first rag ever published from January, 1895:
https://t.co/RpoBMhXOWK

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

SEVEN WHISTLEBLOWERS. ONE DEAD WOMAN. ONE KNIGHTHOOD FOR THE MAN WHO IGNORED THEM

In 1999, seven care workers at a BUPA care home in Bromley reported abuse of vulnerable elderly residents.

They followed every rule. They submitted formal evidence. They did everything the law required.

Edna had no family. She was entirely defenceless. Seven people risked everything to speak up for her.

Every one of them lost their job.

Edna died.

The man who received the evidence and chose to act on none of it became Sir Des Kelly OBE, a government advisor on elderly care, head of the National Care Forum, and a welcome contributor to CQC @CareQualityComm policy on the very sector where his inaction let an abuser harm more people.

You genuinely cannot make this up.

These seven became known as the BUPA7. They were the first people in UK history to use the Public Interest Disclosure Act (PIDA), the law that was supposed to protect whistleblowers. The law that failed them so badly that other workers across the country saw what happened and quietly decided it was safer to say nothing.

That silence has cost lives. It still does.

Eileen Chubb @CompassnInCare, one of the BUPA7, has spent every year since building Compassion in Care and supporting over 13,000 whistleblowers. She has seen the exact same pattern repeat itself across the NHS, social care, finance, construction, and local government.

Report wrongdoing. Lose your job. Watch the wrongdoing continue untouched.

Even if a whistleblower wins at an employment tribunal under PIDA, nobody is legally required to fix the problem they reported. The abuse can just carry on. The risks remain. The tribunal hands out a payout and everyone goes home.

Mid Staffs. Gosport. Rotherham. Bristol Babies. Winterbourne View. In every single one of these cases, someone knew. Someone spoke up. And the system destroyed them for it while the wrongdoing continued.

Robert Francis produced his Freedom to Speak Up review in 2015. Joint investigations by Compassion in Care and @PrivateEyeNews later revealed that the CQC @CareQualityComm lied to the public for years, falsely claiming it had closed 100 care homes when the real number was two.

The same CQC had invited Des Kelly's input into its policy on the sector he had already failed so catastrophically.

Nothing meaningfully changed.

Eileen Chubb is calling for Edna's Law. A law that would make it a criminal offence to ignore a genuine whistleblower, put wrongdoers in front of a criminal court instead of an employment tribunal, protect whistleblowers as protected witnesses, and force corrective action on the actual wrongdoing.

The State would prosecute. Not the whistleblower, who is currently expected to become a legal expert and fight experienced barristers alone.

The petition has 7,417 signatures. It has been running for a while.

It is addressed to Sir Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer.

If you want to protect the public, you protect the people willing to protect the public.

Sign the petition. Share it. Write to your MP.

Because the alternative is just waiting for the next inquiry. The next preventable scandal. The next name we will all say we should have done something about.

Sign the petition

https://t.co/bmEI8vHq7w

[Foundring 🇺🇸 @foundring1]

I've now been banned by BandCamp, YouTube (twice), YouTube Music, DistroKid, and Spotify.

My music isn't THAT controversial.

WTF is even going on?

Something is REALLY REALLY wrong here.

[Lemma the Optimist @DoctorLemma]

In most countries, half the buttons you press in a day might be placebos. The walk button at the crossing, the close-door button in the elevator, the thermostat on the office wall. They click, they light up, and many of them are not actually wired to anything.

Take New York, in the United States. Of the roughly 3,250 buttons at its pedestrian crossings, fewer than 120 actually do anything. The rest click when you press them, they look like working buttons, but they have not been connected to the traffic lights for more than thirty years. The city quietly deactivated them in the late 1980s when the signals moved to a computer system. Nobody told the public, because the public kept pressing them anyway.

The close-door button in most American elevators is in the same condition. It has been doing nothing since 1990. That was the year the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, which required elevator doors to stay open long enough for someone in a wheelchair or on crutches to get in. The button stayed on the panel, but the wiring was cut. Karen Penafiel, who ran the National Elevator Industry trade group, confirmed this plainly to the New York Times a few years ago.

In Hong Kong, the walk button at many pedestrian crossings is real during quiet hours and a placebo during rush hour. A central traffic computer decides which one it is, depending on how busy the road is. The same button, pressed by the same person at the same crossing, might or might not be doing anything, depending on the time of day. Parts of the UK and Australia use the same system.

Office thermostats have their own version of this. A 2003 piece in the Wall Street Journal revealed that landlords in the US had been installing dummy thermostats in commercial buildings for years. A tenant would complain about the temperature, an engineer would walk over, turn a dial that controlled nothing, and the complaints would stop. One HVAC specialist estimated that as many as ninety percent of office thermostats in the country were fake. Other engineers said it was closer to two percent. Either way, it was widespread enough to be a known trick of the trade.

These are only the places where someone has bothered to investigate and report it. Nobody has done a proper audit of the buttons in Lagos, or Nairobi, or Jakarta, or Mexico City, or Karachi. The crossings, elevators, and thermostats in those cities were installed by the same manufacturers, run by the same kinds of building managers, governed by the same kinds of traffic computers. There is no particular reason to assume the buttons there are any more honest than the ones in New York.

A Harvard psychologist named Ellen Langer has a name for what is going on. She calls it the illusion of control. When you press the button, even if nothing happens, your brain registers that you took an action, and the waiting becomes easier. The door closes eventually, the light changes, the office cools down. And every time, your brain credits the button.

[Sonia Gallego🪬 @SoniaRGallego]

“I am on my way to the school with a revolver and a machete and I’m going to shoot and stab all of your girls. You terfs are going to learn to stop mocking, deadnaming and misgendering transwomen like me.”
The obfuscation by media to hide this man’s trans identity is an huge part of the problem.

[Bully @BullyEsq]

People have asked when I decided I was no longer liberal and I think it was literally this exact point

My kids were home from school and camp. Parks were closed. Churches were closed. Restaurants were closed.

And this happened:

[Frank O'Callaghan @ionank]

22nd anniversary

[matrixbot @thematrixb0t]

A freedom of information request has revealed that, once again, the UK Met Office has been publishing temperatures from weather stations that don't even exist.

"The numbers were actually coming from a model that was inventing data from phantom neighbouring stations."

"This is the foundation of the UK's climate record."

[Mike McCulloch @memcculloch]

Physics had an aura because of pre-1945 work. Now it's in la-la land believing 95% of the universe is made of dark unicorns that no-one's found after 46 yrs of looking & billions of dollars wasted. QI needs neither unicorns nor mountains of money (tho some would be useful!).

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

SHE REPORTED CHILD ABUSE 181 TIMES. BRITAIN SAID NOT NOW, THANKS.

Sara Rowbotham was an NHS sexual health coordinator in Rochdale. Between 2005 and 2011 she filed 181 detailed referrals to Greater Manchester Police and social services.

Each one named victims. Each one described systematic rape and trafficking of girls as young as 11. Each one went nowhere.

She was not ignored because the evidence was weak. She was ignored because the evidence was inconvenient.

Authorities labelled her not credible. Her team was dismissed. The official reason given for inaction was community cohesion.

Read that again.

Community cohesion. While children were being passed between men like property, the priority was keeping things quiet.

She was made redundant in 2014.

A 2024 independent review confirmed every referral she filed was credible, substantive and appropriately communicated. The same review identified 96 men still considered an active risk to children. Still out there. In 2024. Because the original response scraped only the surface and called it a job done.

Five police officers refused to cooperate with the review. They were not charged. They were not recalled. They retired on pensions.

Sara Rowbotham got an MBE.

The system that failed 181 times got a press release about lessons learned.

If this does not alarm you, you have not understood it yet.

@BBC @guardian @AndyBurnhamGM

[Senator Chris Van Hollen @ChrisVanHollen]

Yesterday, the IDF seized 4 students from their homes in the West Bank, including 20-year-old American, Sama Safi.

The Israeli govt didn’t tell her family or the U.S. Embassy where or why she was being taken & is holding her without charges.

America must secure her release NOW.

[Abubaker Abed @AbubakerAbedW]

Israel yesterday kidnapped four women. Two are footballers in the Palestinian National Team.

Their names are: Natali Abu Dia and Rand Halwani.

Is it normal to kidnap footballers, @FIFAcom? Where are sports media organisations? This story should be the headline everywhere.

[Olga Bazova @OlgaBazova]

Former Delta Force commander Pete Blaber tells Americans the truth about the war in Ukraine.

“There were staged massacres there, such as Bucha, for which Russia was blamed.”