> CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very similar stats to each platform's respective Super Bowl weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram's traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits.
The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K.
This seems like marketing for a snake-oil bot detection product masquerading as a political hit piece to get attention.
>The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K.
While I agree that this feels like an ad for CHEQ, their scale would presumably be based on how many ads their partners placed on various platforms. They could be buying far more ads on TikTok than on Instagram for some reason.
'Ad fraud' and 'bot traffic' tools really don't have any true insight into these walled gardens.
None of them are running their own code on anyone's device to track anything, at best they're processing data given to them from a Meta/TikTok/X etc. API that might have a bit more data other people don't have access to.
Maybe that uncovers some new insight and some egregious cases of fraud occasionally, but ultimately the big platforms are basically just saying 'trust me bro' and getting rubber stamped by these vendors. I don't doubt X is full of bot traffic, but Meta might just be better at fudging their numbers to CHEQ for all we know.
> keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills
while i like this idea in theory, in practice the energy efficiency and lower electricity costs of newer hardware mean that in terms of both cost and environmental impact it would probably be better to recycle the old hardware and buy something new in most cases.
>recycle the old hardware and buy something new in most cases.
Completely agree, other than nobody is willing to recycle the hardware in any environmentally friendly way. So "recycle" pretty much just means "send it to some poor country who is perfectly fine polluting their ecosystem to pull anything valuable from the junk".
It really depends. Computers have got very efficient in the last ten years.
Throwing away a five years old chromebook because google decided they don’t want to support it is very different than throwing away a Pentium4 (more of a heating machine than a processor)
We did work with Jabber/Email and 512MB/1GB of RAM running similar chat clients, desktop environments (XFCE 4.6 was much faster than 4.16), video players and office suites.
Nowadays to do the same today you need 10X the resources just for a chat application.
And by 'chat' I don't mean 'irc'. Jabber, embedded Youtube URL's, inline LaTeX documents...
>for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards?
Well, it's your environment, you would probably have to figure that out for yourself.
I don't think you would have to go fully retro to be more environmentally responsible.
When it comes to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, this is a proven hierarchy where lots of times it's like an order of magnitude better if you can reduce compared to merely reuse. And once again better to reuse as much as you can, before you finally recycle (which can require so much reprocessing beyond that needed for simple reuse) to extract any worthwhile components to be used in a circular way, that can preferebly displace the need for brand new raw materials or ingredients in freshly manufactured new products.
It's quite possible for freshly manufactured new products to be more environmentally friendly then ever and as high-technology as you would like, you just have to make the committment and step up to the plate.
Everybody's situation is different, but I do think there is a good reason why people say "think local" so much more, the deeper they do the math.
You shouldn't fail to figure, how much money does it cost just to work, and further how much of that is just to get to work?
How much pollution do you have to create just to earn the money to be able to work in the first place?
For everything you consume, or even worse waste, how much potentially environmentally damaging work did you (plus everyone else in the chain) have to do just to earn the money needed, and that's before the actual consumption could even be paid for? Whether consumption takes place before or after it ever gets paid for.
Then you can more accurately decide the degree of balance you are going to try and maintain, between consumption and conservation.
It's all so personal so you shouldn't let it bug you, just do the math for yourself and take action accordingly.
Most people can easily find some low-hanging room for improvement, sometimes really obvious stuff but it's nothing to get embarassed about.
Don't get me started on the way different currencies have different degrees of toxicity, and not only dependent on their current relative exchange rates.
But you can only imagine that for two workers doing identical work, each earning "equivalent value" but in different denominations, when there is any difference in their environmental impact it could only be due to the difference in impact between the currencies themselves. Naturally including bitcoin and things like that along with "regular" money.
> Well, it's your environment, you would probably have to figure that out for yourself.
No. Actually. It's not my environment at all. I could just leave and go somewhere else. Like Mars, Heaven, or somewhere else.
And I'll be taking three gigajoules per second of power production with me.
> It's good to minimize consumption of Earth's resources to maximize the displacement of the need for extraterrestrial raw materials and ingredients for the manufacture of new things.
What you're trying to sell me is something that is physically impossible. Entropy will still eventually—literally kill you if you actually did what you're advocating for (which is degrowth and primitivism). So, you don't actually believe what you're trying to sell to people as an "environmental conservative." Unless you're a zealous fanatic or something.
Unfortunately, Earth was meant to be used up into a big void of nothingness with this exploitation of a planet followed by the next complete consumption of a giant world. Mars is in our sights. As is the rest of the Solar system.
And we may as well go to infinity and beyond.
After all, time and entropy aren't really on our side. Solving the problem of our scheduled annihilation is the real action to think about as a responsible person who isn't afraid of objective mathematics and analysis that doesn't miss crucial variables in global dynamics.
Well when I try to be as zealous a fanatic as possible it still isn't working, so it must be something else;) Good catch.
Sorry about having nothing to sell, it was all sold out by more well-informed and more persuasive geeks than me, way before I had a chance to get near any soapboxes.
Nothing wrong with a little reminder that some people's fruit hangs a lot lower than others.
The universe and unfriendly monsters are eating up all your accessible apples.
And that pleases me.
Because you're forced to turn into a monster yourself. If you don't want to starve and die.
So a little skilled zealotry is kinda essential. ;) So is probably persuading and selling others to your side. So that you can form a competent party of universe survival enthusiasts.
People are way ahead of me on that, with skills that may only be valuable on my home planet, I'm sure to be left behind in the dust :(
Some things stand the test of time better than others.
And some ideas are not that new but maybe the earlier the concept the better. Not that long ago back at the beginning of 1970 Neil Young had something to say about how things might work out in the decade to come, from "After the Gold Rush":
"Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies."
"Well I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships . . ."
"The loading had begun, flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun."
This is completely false. For 2022 fiscal year revenue in commercial was $25B vs $23B for defense and losses in commercial were $2.3B vs $3.5B for defense.
service oriented architecture is a disaster even in large companies. without a monolithic database and normalized schemas you always end up with a bespoke ad-hoc never-consistent data store. data and results are unverifiable and continually incorrect and the performance is abysmal.
a really large company can waste hundreds of millions of dollars papering over the inherent deficiencies of the architecture but it is an exercise in building additional stories on a house where the ground floor is made out of cardboard that happens to be on fire. soa was created purely for business organization needs. any technical justifications are post hoc rationalization. from a technical perspective it is pure trash.
a much better architecture is to keep services but have them all built on top of a single monolithic db. at scale the monolithic db can be a facade and then you disaggregate the database into horizontally scalable services so that you can scale your monolithic db facade to whatever you need.
lab leak is dead simple to disprove. all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it and you have your proof. many people have been spending a lot of money for years trying to do this and the longer they continue to fail the higher the probability of lab leak becomes.
"Scientists collected 1,522 nasal swabs from free-ranging deer in 83 of the state’s 88 counties between November 2021 and March 2022. More than 10% of the samples were positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and at least one positive case was found in 59% of the counties in which testing took place. Genomic analysis showed that at least 30 infections in deer had been introduced by humans – a figure that surprised the research team."
“And the evidence is growing that humans can get it from deer – which isn’t radically surprising. It’s probably not a one-way pipeline.”
Still, this doesn't disprove a lab leak; it proves something other than a lab leak is plausible.
of course it is plausible. a priori there is no reason why lab leak is more likely than natural origin. it just comes down to the evidence of what actually happened.
what you need to show natural origin is transmission in an animal population with an animal that can be linked to the outbreak location. that hasnt been found after 3 years of tremendous effort.
everyone associated with the wiv has millions of lives and trillions of dollars in damages on their heads if it was a lab leak so these people are definitely highly motivated to prove a natural origin. it has been 3+ years and nothing has been found. the more time that passes the less likely it becomes.
A priori the evidence is squarely in the 'zoonosis' favor, because that's how viruses spread before we ever had labs and there are thousands of examples for such spreading and very scant evidence for lab leaks.
But: this doesn't prove or disprove either and just like in the discussion about that superconductor, there is absolutely no need to commit to either hypothesis even if there is a historical pile of evidence, because that's not proof that this case is the same.
So I would advice anybody that really wants to jump to a conclusion to do so with the historical data in mind and for everybody else to just wait until there is conclusive evidence with the caution that such evidence may never be found. Ironically, the Chinese moved with such speed against the market that they may very well have destroyed the evidence that would have proven that they weren't directly involved. At the same time there is some support for the theory that the market itself wasn't the place where 'patient zero' got infected, and that still doesn't prove or disprove a lab leak.
People love to have someone or something to blame when there is a big problem, and with natural disasters we sometimes are in fact able to show how humans are a direct or proximate cause. But biology is super messy and even if there is a human cause at work here we may never know it, likewise we may never know for sure that it was a zoonosis.
If I had to bet I would bet zoonosis because the stats are in favor. But I don't have to bet so I'll just wait. I do hope that anybody that favors one theory over another will come forward to admit that they were wrong to jump to conclusions if there ever is a resolution, and that they will learn something from that. But they won't be much more or less wrong than those that backed the other side. Finally: there are some viruses that are known to have jumped from the animal kingdom to people many times in the past and in spite of hunting them for decades we still haven't found the reservoir. It could happen again tomorrow and there might be a breakthrough, but so far there is nothing. So absence of evidence doesn't prove a thing.
> nybody that favors one theory over another will come forward to admit that they were wrong to jump to conclusions
a probability statement is not wrong just because the less probable thing turns out to happen. lab leak of a non-natural virus that was created through purposeful gain-of-function using transmission is currently the most likely scenario based on all available evidence. even if natural origin is proven, my probability statement will still be correct. i dont discount the probability of natural origin. it is just very unlikely now.
But humans infected the white tailed deer, and guess what when humans passed on SARS2 to different species it did not suddenly stop circulating within humans which seems to have been the case with SARS2. For SARS2 we have a single spillover event hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir and then some how the strain that was circulating in whatever intermediate host it may have come from simply vanished! Despite being so extremely infectious SARS2's spillover seems to be a case of an immaculate infection!
But like virgin births, I find immaculate infections to be implausible.
Thus providing clear evidence this virus jumps fairly readily between mammals. (Especially when you count that it has also been found to have jumped to quite a few other animals; cats, dogs, hippos, anteaters, manatees; it's clearly not picky. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...)
> guess what when humans passed on SARS2 to different species it did not suddenly stop circulating within humans which seems to have been the case with SARS2
I assure you that SARS2 is still circulating within humans, lol.
> For SARS2 we have a single spillover event hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir
Not being the same disease, this isn't all that surprising.
> some how the strain that was circulating in whatever intermediate host it may have come from simply vanished
"Hard to find" is not the same as "vanished".
We've never conclusively found the reservoir for Ebola, either. Not for lack of trying.
Which is strange for a virus as you stated. "found to have jumped to quite a few other animals; cats, dogs, hippos, anteaters, manatees; it's clearly not picky". So why is it so hard to find the virus that spilled over into humans, this virus would have been better adapted towards their own species and would have not been replaced by the human variants. We find SARS circulating in animals all the time, but they all descend from the human variant.
It looks like you've been posting about this single flamewar topic and almost nothing else for years now. That's not ok - we don't allow single purpose accounts on HN, and ban them when they show up, because pre-existing agendas aren't compatible with the curiosity we're trying to optimize for.
I'm not going to ban you right now because if I scroll back far enough, your account used to be more in keeping with the intended spirit of the site. But please go back to that so we won't have to.
Or, more mundanely, whatever mutation allowed it to be not-very-picky might be recent. The Black Death likely came about when Yersinia pestis went aerosolized, for example, despite the bacteria probably being around at least back to Roman times.
I think you misunderstood my comment. In that scenario, it still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak, since like I said they still could have been studying that natural origin inside of a lab.
> still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak
but finding an animal that can spread covid with a plausible story for how it cross over to humans in wuhan is a threshold that has not been crossed yet. if anyone could meet that threshold test it would be treated as proof of natural origin.
but supposing that it was a natural virus that came from an animal in the lab at wuhan then it would be very easy for people with access to that information to identify the natural source, and since that has not happened, it means the virus is either from a natural source that was not in the lab, or it was created in the lab.
the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.
> the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.
This is not correct. It may well be that the evidence existed but was lost.
The idea that biology will just sit around and wait until we catch up with it is fundamentally mistaken. Some things happen just once and that's that. Some things happen all the time and you can observe them as they happen. Some things leave ample evidence. Biology is not a static system, it isn't a computer program and it isn't a piece of hardware. Your 'bug' may simply not be reproducible even if it in fact did occur just once.
if the virus crossed over from animals to humans then it must be able to cross back over. viruses evolve quickly, but animals don't, and we have plenty of samples of the original virus. all you have to do is find the right species and infect them with a sample of the virus and show that they can spread it to prove natural origin.
the only scenario where your theory could be true is if the origin species suddenly went extinct after starting the pandemic, which is very improbable.
The WIV lab was built by the French with money from many different countries and the research was being done by EcoHealth Alliance with US funding so blaming it on the Chinese is probably not the whole picture.
EcoHealth alliance made a grant application to DARPA and DARPA turned them down because it was too risky but it seems pretty obvious that they got the money somewhere else.
censorship is all about power so the focus is on controlling any mechanism of broadcast communication that could result in political organization. traditional voice communication over phones is very inefficient compared to internet based text communication so it would probably be a low priority by comparison.
Instead on censoring speech why not provide tools that lead to better speech? This is perfectly possible from a tech stand point but companies would rather have the power that comes from censorship.
1. Get rid of anonymity/pseudonymity. Free speech is a right. Anonymity is not. If people had to post everything in their real name you would get rid of all of the fake b.s. and people would be much more civilized in their speech.
2. Provide content filtering tools based on user voting with a public record of user votes and the option for people to turn off the filters so that they can see what is filtered.
With these 2 mechanisms you can create a public square with absolute free speech where hate speech is filtered and suppressed, if people choose that, but the records are clear and people who want to audit the filtering can do so as they please.
its a free market so people are always welcome to run services that allow pseudonymity (nothing is actually anonymous on the internet, everything is logged and tracked and traceable) and people are free to use them.
the most popular services (facebook/instagram, twitter) are the ones that have the most real people posting stuff under their real names.
those companies continue to allow fake users for a variety of financial reasons but the fake users are actively degrading the experience.
twitter is working on KYC now, but it is a cheap AI version that is easily exploitable, so it won't make much of a difference (as i understand it so far).
People talk about this a lot nowadays, but what's your definition of a "fake user" or a fake account? A real human using a name other than a legal name? Hasn't that been the norm online since the late '80s?
and if you have any hope for humanity at all you have to believe that the majority will continue to reject that evil. pretending evil people dont exist doesnt make them go away.
The majority of people have no opinion on most issues. Politics is a fight between minority groups that try to sway or force the majority into supporting them. If you are in favour of mandatory deanonymisation for all public speech, what you're doing is giving sufficiently powerful groups a license to harass, unperson or arrest members of less powerful ones.
Are you actually fine with this? I can't help but notice you're not posting under your real name...
Many countries have recognized free speech as a right through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is much broader than the 1st amendment.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
But just because governments have recognized the right does not mean that they are complying with this recognition.
This is par for the course though. The 1st amendment was ratified in 1791 and the Alien and Sedition Acts which violated the constitution in the most blatant way were passed 8 years later.
The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K.
This seems like marketing for a snake-oil bot detection product masquerading as a political hit piece to get attention.