Interesting article! :)

I hate what the fossil fuel and auto industries are doing just as much as the next person, but the article by itself is not strong evidence of a causal relationship, only of an association. Their own conclusion in the abstract is literally: “Exposure to TRP, NO2, PM2.5, and PM10 during pregnancy and the first year of life was associated with autism. Further epidemiological and toxicological examination of likely biological pathways will help determine whether these associations are causal.”

It could for instance be that for some reason, parents with higher autistic traits tend to be less bothered by/concerned about the noise, smell etc from roads. Which could explain differences in parents’ exposure, since autism has such a strong hereditary factor. I’m not saying this is the case, just pointing out one of many possible alternative explanations.

Overall the study can be used to say we have another reason to be cautious and reduce car pollution as fast as possible, IMO. But building weak arguments based on it only makes it easier for corps to defang this type of research.

What is with this article? I’ve read previous pravda UA articles that were good, but this one just seems like something an LLM spat out after being asked to summarize the cited Telegraph article. There is no additional context offered, everything is in this list-like/chopped up format, and the last subheading (“conclusion” I presume) seems to have been left in Ukrainian or Russian (I can’t read either). At least one quote wasn’t even properly attributed to anyone. My guess then is that it’s just a direct copy-paste of an LLM response. I hope this is just a single “journalist” not doing their job rather than a trend at the outlet.

You say you don’t care who they are but you’re the one who first claimed to know that, when you called them “an anonymous user who has never contributed to foss outside of a whiney bug report or two.”. You seemed to think it very important. Moreover, it’s not impossible for the user to have been impersonating a FOSS developer for a couple of years, but what do you think the probability of that is? What would they gain? It seems far more probable that they simply are the same person.

Noone called the developer a “petty bitch asshole” from what I saw, putting words in others’ mouths doesn’t seem to help the discussion.

I agree with your overall sentiment that we can sympathize with the dev, even if they’re obviously not perfect themselves. FOSS is hard for everyone engaging with it.

It is a games console emulator project. Noone’s livelihood or business hinges on this AFAIU, and there are alternative emulators for the PS. If anything I’d hope people - maintainers, contributors, users - would be more cool and relaxed about it. It’s the kind of project I wish would give everyone involved more energy and experience for other endeavors in their lives. What’s even the point if it’s not fun?

Yes, thank you. It seemed bizarre to me as I was reading the article that this point is not brought up at all. Of course, it’s impossible to perform controlled realistic experiments to disentangle the effects. But to not even acknowledge this crucial limitation in the research makes the reporting and research deeply flawed. The research would really need to take into account each conflict’s preconditions, which is a very daunting task, to become more reliable. I understand it’s hard to do this research, but it’s only fair to demand that researchers temper their conclusions based on to the limitations. That kind of rigorous approach doesn’t sell as many books or lead to as many media appearances though, sadly.

It is literally a case study with a single pair of subjects. At first I thought the OP pop sci article was just focusing in one pair of participants of many. Most of the discussions in threads here seem wholly unwarranted. There are loads of random factors that affect people’s development, many of which can’t realistically be measured in a study. Maybe one of them happened to become friends with with a classmate that’s really into literature and so they started reading a lot! Maybe they are both sensitive to sounds, but only one of them happens to live near an airport, disrupting their sleep at night.

It is not surprising that one particular set of monozygotic twins happens to markedly differ with respect to some traits. There are always outliers in large twin studies too, and researchers don’t usually get that hung up about them because everyone knows there are countless factors involved. To be able to have any certainty about the effects of a particular factor you need scale that lets you separate them from the random noise. It’s just basic statistics, like what is even anyone doing here. The study itself does make sense, but should be interpreted as extremely exploratory in nature, not something to draw any conclusions from. IMO the researchers themselves are irresponsible in this regard, as they speculate much more than what’s warranted in the discussion and conclusions sections. Like, one of their conclusions is “They [the twins] also show that cultural climates can modify values.”. First, that is something already widely known and accepted, but second and more importantly, that is not the kind of statement you should make based on a single pair of subjects.

But it’s still thanks to the context, just a context outside of school. It’s not like s/he suddenly out of the blue started looking for study material in Tagalog and did that. Games are the best motivator (and great due to how interactive they are) No man is an island yada yada. Auf eigener Faust kommt man nicht weit wenn die Faust völlig leer ist oder insert was klugeres here. Btw personally I was helped a lot by both school, emotionally as well as language-wise, and pop media. Yay for nice teachers and peers!

It also doesn’t help that the AI companies deliberately use language to make their models seem more human-like and cogent. Saying that the model e.g. “thinks” in “conceptual spaces” is misleading imo. It abuses our innate tendency to anthropomorphize, which I guess is very fitting for a company with that name.

On this point I can highly recommend this open access and even language-wise accessible article: link.springer.com/article/…/s10676-024-09775-5 (the authors also appear on an episode of the Better Offline podcast)

I don’t know about direct Russian funding, but it seems like the Russians have long used propaganda tools to generate false support on social media for Jill Stein nbcnews.com/…/russians-launched-pro-jill-stein-so… And she has repeatedly chosen to hire/work with people very tightly tied with the MAGA movement salon.com/…/jill-stein-paid-100000-to-a-consultin…

While the two party system is a huge problem, it doesn’t seem controversial to say that a very conscious and long-term strategy for getting away from it is necessary, especially now. Why wouldn’t anti-democratic forces try to exploit third parties to siphon off and neutralize anti-fascist opinions? I get that the Democrats have loooads of issues, but that doesn’t mean just anything else is better. Unfortunately smaller parties can oftentimes be even easier to influence. And even in the most ideal case where all third parties would be good-faith actors you still have the fundamental issue that splintering into smaller groups doesn’t work unless they would all agree on supporting the same candidate to win in the current American system. Very frustrating and by design, yes!

The point was always that whatever “deal” was worked out, unless Ukraine would become part of NATO or have security guarantees with say NATO boots on the ground for decades, Russia would have only used the temporary pause to build up its forces while doing hybrid warfare, then try again in a couple of years. Also, it is misleading to characterize the war in Ukraine as an American proxy war, it ignores the complex relationships between all involved actors and most importantly ignores Ukrainian autonomy. Lastly, Netanyahu did “what Trump said” temporarily because it was in his interest to boost Trump as he expected to soon get Trump’s blessing to continue waging war on Palestinians (and it seems even Netanyahu was surprised by how emphatic Trump’s approval is).

Now, IMO Biden should have been much bolder in sending more military support to Ukraine and approving long-distance strikes etc., which would have encouraged other NATO allies to do the same. By trying to play it safe, Biden & co. ensured that the conflict would become more drawn out and expand, making things more dangerous for everyone. The Democratic Party and European allies could have used much more war rhetoric, painting Russia as enemy number one, to drum up more popular support at home, but again hesitated. The Biden admin also should have worked with the Ukrainians and other European allies on a realistic, sustainable peace deal rather than talking loosely about how Ukraine needed to “accept” that they would lose terrain while also saying Ukraine’s very reasonable security guarantee requests were “unrealistic”. But that’s very different. To suggest that Biden could have just said “ok stop, now peace” and created something lasting seems utterly out of touch with at least all of Russian politics ever since Putin came to power.

The “about” page indicates that the author is a freelance frontend UI/UX dev, that’s recently switched to “helping developers get better with AI” (paraphrased). Nothing about credentials/education related to AI development, only some hobby projects using preexisting AI solutions from what I saw. The post itself doesn’t have any sources/links to research about junior devs either, it’s all anecdotes and personal opinion. Sure looks like an AI grifter trying to grab attention by ranting about AI, with some pretty lukewarm criticism.