Notices by Valerie Aurora (vaurora@wandering.shop)

So the thing I didn’t realize when I co-authored the Al Capone Theory with @leigh is that the next phase of VC investment would have to be in companies led by exactly the kind of person we were talking about: the person who feels entitled to take other people’s work, possessions, and bodies without consent. Most of the remaining plays to get 100x returns in tech rely on theft of some form, and OpenAI is no exception

https://hypatia.ca/2017/07/18/the-al-capone-theory-of-sexual-harassment/

Making a living as a writer in 2023 is so weird. Your choices are:

* nepo baby staff writer for legacy media fawning over billionaires and peddling fascism
* writing 3 email newsletters a week and making the most obscure one subscriber only
* organizing a community of your fans and charging for access to it
* starting your own publishing business and asking fans to pay you up front to write the next book

PSA: LLM's are not trained on a knowledge base, they are trained on a text corpus - a collection of strings. What you get out is another collection of strings, generated using a a prompt, another text string. The output only contains "knowledge" to the extent that a human edits and curates it

Amazing how many brilliant scientists will look at an LLM "passing" a standardized test and think, "wow, this computer is very smart" and not "standardized tests are very bad at measuring intelligence"

Shortly after getting COVID, she lost hearing in one ear and developed disabling vertigo. It took several months and lots of physical therapy, she mostly recovered. I was the only person who suggested that her symptoms were caused by COVID attacking her nerves; her doctors thought it was coincidence.

Then her hearing loss and vertigo came back. My suspicion was right. For whatever reason, COVID preferentially attacks the nerves that lead to one of her ears. This time, she was nauseous and hearing impaired for only a week.

She began going to conferences for work, unmasked. Her first few conferences were unremarkable. At her 4th or 5th conference, she and several of her coworkers got sick. But she didn't test positive on a RAT until more than a week after feeling sick. By then it was too late to get Paxlovid. Her whole family missed Thanksgiving, home sick with COVID.

She still has to go to conferences for work, and she's the often the only person in the room wearing a mask. She doesn't want to get COVID again; even temporary hearing loss and vertigo are a misery - and there's no guarantee the next time will be temporary. Maybe COVID will attack the nerves in her other ear and she will be unable to hear and nauseous for the rest of her life. I wouldn't be surprised if she switches career tracks to stop going to conferences.

I'm already disabled with symptoms that are very similar to Long COVID (my hEDS includes POTS, MCAS, and CFS). I wouldn't wish this on any other person, and I don't want to get worse. I'm used to being the weirdo in the room, but the next person to be disabled by COVID is blithely chatting over a conference-provided lunch indoors.

The Public Health Pledge is very flexible. It just asks you to, as organizer, announce some COVID related policies far enough in advance that people can decide whether to attend based on them, and then promise not to weaken the policies going forward. This includes actually enforcing them at the event. We can all agree that bait-and-switch is not a good look for an event people have made unrefundable travel plans for in advance.

I just signed the Public Health Pledge @phpledge and here is a story about why:

A friend of mine has to go to conferences as part of her job. She first got COVID when her kids brought it home from school. They were all vaccinated and boosted and seemed to recover normally.