Oh my… I had a slightly similar incident. New phone number, had a bunch of random strangers texting me (some even calling!) asking for Ethan. My name is not Ethan, I didn’t know who Ethan is

No idea what was on my mind back then, but I somehow got the contact info of this mysterious Ethan, called him (hilarity ensued since he got a call from someone on his contact list named “Me”), confirmed his up-to-date number, and promptly referred everyone looking for Ethan to the real person for over a year…

Life is strange sometimes

I genuinely don’t know… there doesn’t seem to be any ongoing discussion of who or why are these people targeting IA. There are other people who are trying to rescue data stored on IA

Hope this would be over soon…

This is the study they were referring to: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2015.07.040

C-section babies have slightly higher risks of several diseases related to immune system function, and the hypothesis is that it is because these babies have slightly less developed immune systems

So this is a bit counter to the news article’s point, and apologies for linking to Reddit… but there has been a fairly hot post on the subreddit r/USCIS. A practicing immigration attorney was sharing some thoughts on how feasible the promises are https://www.reddit.com/r/USCIS/comments/1glflxy/so_what_now_an_immigration_attorney_perspective/. Some quotes:

IMO, no-- the economy makes way too much money from DACA folks. I do believe that they will dangle it like a carrot to appease right-wing voters. Major corporations employ DACAmented folks. The SSN from work permits have allowed more tax revenue to come in. Too much is at stake. Legally, the legal arguments at the courts surrounding DACA involve constitutional rights, which themselves aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s honestly just a topic that is often talked about, but hardly understood by many.

I want to put this into perspective. There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US. Currently, DHS has about 92,000 officers, and ICE has about 21,000 officers. It is asinine to try to achieve this.

Let’s say it actually does begin and people are getting rounded up. Guess what? Not all undocumented folks are just undocumented-- many have TPS, pending asylum applications, pending T/U Visas, and work permits (see my point regarding #1). Unless a migrant has an expedited removal (not likely), DHS/ICE still needs to process each deportee, assign them A#s, and follow basic procedures. If they don’t? That’s a very easy way to reverse a deportation order. It’s the equivalent of convicting someone of murder using a confession made under a very obvious 4/5th amendment violation. Slam dunk case.

Oh, and you know who has to handle all of these deportation cases? Federal DHS attorneys. They’re already overworked, and they tend to exercise discretion. If no discretion, the overworked ones tend to gloss over cases and provide weak arguments. Only major attention is paid to serious crimes. You’d be surprised the amount of times DHS attorneys have gotten my clients’ names wrong or made procedurally embarrassing typos.

… assuming the administration still follows basic social contracts, that is. If the Trump administration actually uses the military to forcefully enforce mass deportations, then I feel the US is going to be fucked on so many different more levels… and there would be way more to worry than just the deportations

Not a perfectly relevant xkcd but

(From https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/)

A bit off topic… But from my understanding, the US currently doesn’t have a single federal agency that is responsible for AI regulation… However, there is an agency for child abuse protection: the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect within Department of HHS

If AI girlfriends generating CSAM is how we get AI regulation in the US, I’d be equally surprised and appalled

clear because apparently I am too scatterbrained to comprehend more than one full page of text in the terminal

This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered… The person is not officially “fired” since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.

This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study… close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.

And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn’t find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low… oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.

This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc… one poor girl’s nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I’ve heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits…

Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is… Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from… San Diego State University? Doesn’t seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.

If you are interested in the full detail… here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue’s student-run newspaper

• Undark’s report on Camp DASH
• Exponent, 2017-07-24, Camp DASH was shut down
• Exponent, 2017-11-28, president’s statement
• Exponent, 2019-09-20, drama between Dr. Weaver and the school on data retention
• Exponent, 2024-02-11, outcome of a lawsuit

This again??

This time once archive.org is back online again… is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn’t imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn’t looking good now)

The elites don’t want you to know but “[y]ou may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home)”

Following their guide gives a local Invidious client, don’t forget to 1) copy their production compose file instead of using the one on git and 2) change “hmac_key”… from my experience setting up cron (crontab -e) to restart the docker container once per day keeps the Invidious docker healthy

Edit: here are some alternatives for popular Google services. Not in anyway related to the above (smirk

• Google itself: SearXNG (try searx.be first), one of the easiest services to self-host
• Gmail/calendar: a lot of people seem to swear by one of Proton Mail, Tutanota or Mailbox.org. Self-hosting is possible but challenging
• Google Drive: You mean Nextcloud?
• Google maps: Organic Maps is actually getting pretty good now
• Google Chrome: at the very least there is Chromium… obviously there is Firefox and Firefox forks (such as Librewolf), as well as other smaller browsers
• Google Play: F-Droid hosts a lot of FOSS stuff, and there are alternative ways to access Play (such as Aurora Store)
• Android: a bit more difficult… but there is LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and similar stuff