Notices by Krista, Darth Moose Shark (grrrr_shark@supervolcano.angryshark.eu)

What's happening at American universities is the desired end result of hiring people who are effectively CEOs as chancellors and presidents.

Capitalism and fascism win again.

The biggest silent driver of the world towards fascism is removal of the ability to get accurate facts and information.

It's not just the propaganda and deliberate misinformation - that's already in full swing.

The removal of the ability to FIND information is critical here.

The recent and very VERY obvious moves to make search engines nearly useless for actual search basically means 2-3 big corporations control our ability to find out what's going on if we don't hear about it from friends and family.

They control our ability to research things we don't know about. They control our ability to fact-check.

They control whether we find the answers to health questions. They control whether or not we see health data.

And governments control whether there is any data for us to see AT ALL (by e.g. removing funding from wastewater monitoring, not publishing data that they do have, not collecting data they should, etc.)

My ex told me that at some point after Chernobyl, it became illegal to own a Geiger counter in Germany. While I don't have verification of this, that is basically where we are right now.

It's hard to be outraged and to organise if you can't see what's actually happening.

It scares the fuck out of me, and I am NOT naturally paranoid.

It's funny... all of these massive layoffs from tech companies that were rabid to interview me 12 months ago. And 6 months ago, even though I kept saying I wasn't looking.

Maybe that's the thing - as soon as a company becomes this intangible beast where you can't exactly say what it is they DO, I get nervous about the prospect of working there, not only for ethical reasons, but also because it's very easy to be spinning your wheels on not-critical-project-X and suddenly find your funding and job cut.

(I am not saying this because I feel superior - I don't. I'm saying in retrospect, that's part of why I made the choice and don't regret it for now. But of course, no one is safe.)

I'm still pretty upset by the colleague who, honestly, is a well-meaning dude who came up to me and said, "Why are you still wearing a mask?"

Me: "I'm high risk, and it's not over."

Him: "Yeah, but I think it's mostly over, isn't it?"

Me: *shrug* "Not really. Wastewater sampling shows... you know what? Never mind. I'm managing my own risk and can't do anything about anyone else. Don't worry about it."

That's where we are, folks. I am pathologised if I say anything, so from now on, my standard answers are going to be, "Because I'm hideously ugly," "I'm an internationally-wanted cybercriminal," and "it's a fetish".

And if I'm very angry, "Because I'm not stupid."

Though I've tried that one before. The people who hear it are honestly bewildered. I won't be changing anyone's mind.

At this point, I'm not even out to.

I'm tired.

@ShaulaEvans Yup. This is definitely the reality right now.

I'm high-risk, and people are actively confused that I mask. They just want to move on.

I'm so gaslit I don't know which way is up to be honest.

I should contextualise my feelings about ChatGPT a bit. I used to do both linguistics and computer science research. For a brief period of time these overlapped, though I did not enjoy being a computational linguist precisely because NLP was shifting very hard towards statistical bullshit generation.

I am not saying there are not improvements in NLP - I find statistical translations make my life much easier, but *only as a first pass*, for example - but the greatest (popularly consumed) advancements seem to be in generating bullshit, and I find that disheartening.

I am NOT a computational linguist - I switched tracks after a year (largely due to a famously problematic advisor, frankly) and focused on language acquisition - and I am sure there are cool things going on which rely on something better than creating convincing enough statistical parrots - but it seems to me that not a whole lot has changed.

This thread from @nonlinear brings up what makes me most nervous about the rush to Mastadon: 1) the seductive nature of turning FOSS alternatives into infrastructure without mitigating the dangers inherent with having the software's development be a single point of failure, and 2) what happens when some guy's FOSS baby gets intense attention.

https://mastodon.com.br/@nonlinear/109526471201865675

Let me explain, and no, this is neither a popular opinion nor particularly well-thought-out: