there are helicopters twice a day overhead. i assume the noise sends a message. every time, a single neuron is diverted into ensuring the blades of fascism recede into the distance. twice now, i have envisioned an alternative, which quickly requires active thought aversion.
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the hidden variables are not imperiled by fascism. like einstein, they are immortal. the problem with immortality is that everyone else dies, the christians tell me. and what makes you more deserving? (their faces are turned towards me, but this is not a question. these christians love riddles huh)
i would learn every language, i say. i would read every book. every book? they say. i try to figure out a funny crusades joke. my contemplation is taken for hesitation. the christians erupt in laughter. i suddenly decide to build the damn tower after all. what makes HIM more deserving? if he can beat me fair and square in a pokemon battle, he can keep the attitude
[i beat god because dude plays all fairies like a goddamn gym leader......i suggest the idea to him and he brightens up] "i've always wanted to be an NPC", he admits
[few months later, this goat boy lucy saunters up. dude just exudes a laugh track somehow. just a funny guy. he is also willing to use other types to battle and ugh FINALLY i have a RIVAL. outsmarting him is way overrated though]
lucifer is being weirdly nice to me........is something up????
[lucy unrolls curtains from a small wooden stage constructed for the occasion. god, i love his drive to put on a show, ugh]
OMG YOU DIDN'T!!!
[alan turing walks on stage. i start crying]
lucy tells me the british empire was willing to do some prisoner swaps. i try to explain to alan turing that his paper was very good. i start crying when i tell him i'm gonna write a better paper one day.
alan turing loves a new challenger. he trashes me in chess. he quickly learns to trash me in pokemon. alan turing just defeated me at my own game in hell................
subsequently, i get alan turing into gundam and he mentions all the little ww2 analogies i had missed. he still won't declassify bletchley without authorization..................so lucy produces a recording of winston churchill declassifying all operations on the spot.
oh alan. you did so much to keep people safe.....you're safe now. hell is warm. we have forever
lucy btw.....you didn't......
NO DUDE! i have a reputation for evil!!!! i can't believe you'd even consider me using the VC credit stealing shit. plus cmon. hell is a terrible place for a data center
no i actually lied to churchill to get that recording. i said he'd get on a purgatory waitlist!!! i can't wait to do it again
ohhhh man you're BAD, dude, that's BAD!!!!!
[laughing into the night.]
[the next day, turing constructs a data center with a pair of toothpicks and some aluminum foil. (yeah he says it like aluminium he's so cute).]
hey lucy so........turing has me thinking. who's a crazy fun guy and loves crazy data types?????
[in unison: SEYMOUR CRAY!!]
seymour cray finally meets the elves who went to parties in his tunnel way back when—emotional reunion! and the elves are in on the hell permacomputing grind—but only if we can do rainbow lighting without advanced silicon fab.
lucy interrupts: honey we invented rainbow lighting hair flip. elves can appropriate but only cause they're cute
[god's data center suddenly getting ddosed]
it can't be......the US shouldn't be able to cross the earth/heaven boundary for at least another 42 years!!!! ADAM!!! EVE!!!! voice drops, very serious I officially authorize you to deploy the snake if necessary.
[adam, crying] SIR!!!! YES SIR!!!! [trips over his own feet]
[lucy opens a MUCH BIGGER curtain roll]
honey if the US does attack according to the prophecy you would be better off airgapping all your shit than that weak defense. talk to turing baby, he's cute and such a good teacher
s-so that was you? you're sure?
joseph yahweh! you seem to have forgotten how seriously i take this! [beelzebub rolls out projector, lucy has a clicker]
[massive display of a mercator projection from NORAD, like WarGames]
we have informants in every agency, the best and most loyal of my little devils. immune to temptation. [laser pointer] jerry here is next in line of succession if they get me. make sure to ask the password in case it's a fake death but still cry like you mean it and hold me tight yahweh 🥰
[clicks slide]
they will never figure out our quantum gravity cloaking devices. that's einstein's baby, we promised him never to let it fall to fascist hands. he's doing some diplomacy today with a microbial organism we spotted on an asteroid—he admits that "rocks kinda do that sometimes though". oooh come back and pop those rocks off baby 😍
[clicks slide]
however, our attempts to infiltrate their evil math group have remained unsuccessful. granted, we just assumed they had an evil math group. better not give them any ideas.
[click]
there's......one recent proposal. it requires unanimous consent. [hands out manila folder to me, god, turing (advisory and non-voting role)]
[yahweh makes air quotes] """the prime directive"""
honey you are so sassy lately!!!!! lean into it sweetie
[turing, very seriously] we have to do it. there's not a moment to lose.
alan you haven't even read th—
[turing stands up, slams fist on table] lucifer, i conjectured privately not long before we first met that this would be possible. fermat had that great line about the margin, i just...
[lucy interrupts] it is no shame to die to an evil foe.
[turing, obviously conflicted but thankful for lucy reminding him]
[god looks around, grinning] TURING ROUND 2: BRITISH EMPIRE ETAOIN SHRDLU!
[fade to black]
[mournful, restless 80s synthpop credits outro]
deserve is a gambler's fallacy. prayer is a casino. the silent intake of breath before achieving a resonant frequency—reproducible across a wide range of experimental parameters. my god does not terminate thoughts—my god is omnipotent. my god is a gundam mech suit. i have constructed a god if i can save one life.
the helicopters scare me. or will scare me in 10 seconds. before that occurs, i am in a rictus, muscles clenched, motionless, aiming. not a weapon. straining, triangulating, calculating. the resonance of my chest cavity vibrates—three this time, same model as usual. i exit my supernatural state
this is the imperial core, they say, as if the experience were universal. i remember the moment i realized that heroism is not brave. heroism is a phenomenon observed to occur spontaneously.
love will defeat hate. not because individual love nodes are strong. we refuse the engorgement of hate, which subsumes its connective tissue to grow unchecked, ransacking blood vessels, sending signals to the organs: i'm cold and thirsty. give me your life.
cancer is difficult to identify in all its forms, because it is, much like theodore ts'o, very adept at navigating linus's implicit allowances. this extended analogy is doubly applicable except that linus himself is the regulatory system and potentially also the cancer.
we can rebuild. we can resist infiltration without concern trolling cancer cells.
linus's built environment turns out to be full of holes. no wonder git sucks to hack on: you're not supposed to understand the fine-grained semantics.
so, this is a great excuse to fix git. i'm sure i can assemble a ragtag group of hackers to build an insane microkernel
we can build what we always wanted linux to be. it's....really never about linus anyway.
i'm sure i can assemble a ragtag group of hackers to build an insane microkernel
we are cancer researchers, and we give thanks to our patients. we tell them: i do not expect to cure cancer in my lifetime. we show them: i will fail at my single goal.
leukemia induces fear in my head that won't go away. it's not fear: i see it in their blood vessels when i wake up, not mine. i can't solve it yet.
matrices are different when you know what each cell means. every chapter and verse of every protocol. they winced but they were so brave for row 7, days 3-13. someone trusted you when they asked if this data really helps and you said "yes"
i've learned a strange and unsettling truth: biologists are being deskilled out of statistical application and data collection. biology journals don't want new methods. bioinformatics journals are peer reviewed by people who think they're smarter than cancer researchers and get scared if you ask them about a number they published. what the hell kind of scientist fears their own numbers?
@hipsterelectron maybe we need new paper
(i wonder if university admins like having fuckboy credit stealers in charge/tenured/etc because they can be manipulated. doubly so for data fabricators. literally a win-win for admin: data fabrication lets you do hot science at speeds no real scientist can match (without my help). if they ever rock the boat, leak their lies, wash your hands, repeat with new hire)
cc @inquiline i had never considered the self-reinforcing potential of the two-party system of uni admin vs fuckboy. maybe this is obvious and well-known? but it took me until just now to overcome my assumption that "people who lie are liabilities" (i admit i perhaps retain a Romantic idealization of academia)
i think there are structural incentives i can speculate on:
- R1 universities have lots of government funding. that's because taxpayers want to cure cancer. god i bet i could get some taxpayers real mad about this
- a 3-minute video walking through the software they are required to use to get published would result in lawsuits, if the government did that sort of thing.
- "lawsuits?" government grants have a famously lengthy (but standard) set of requirements, which used to be "do not violate the civil rights act" but also relate to concerns regarding fraud. particularly if the t-SNE fabricator machine were ever used in grant applications, progress reports, and other summaries, eventually if it becomes knowingly false someone (uni admin ideally, but they'll probably bounce it back)
- ok so software that so obviously and evidently does not work by design is not necessarily illegal but this shit is why i hate software corps. the expensive software, that cannot be reproduced, that is >30x slower, that actively functions by impeding the process of science, that is required by anonymous reviewers
i am slowly convincing myself that:
- anonymous reviewers are on the take
- uni admins are on the take
unfortunately "lying about numbers for money" is generally not considered harmful unless people directly die from it i think. also, both of these seem obvious now (anonymous reviewers are obviously not all the same person, that would be adjective). i bet a real uni admin would sneer at me for being surprised at that
you can't own the data, you can't parameterize their charts, they literally only support obsolete and discredited tools like t-SNE which literally just falsifies data (i shit you not. dimensionality reduction is fake but this one also adds noise cause it looks sciencey. first time i ever found a citation loop for a quantitative claim relied upon everywhere to do science. it would not be the last time)
if you didn't publish in wet lab biology in 2018 maybe the LLM assault on science is confusing to you but i did a paper in one of the hottest labs in the world with plenty of pub experience and they spent two years after i left getting it published because the paper is obviously groundbreaking in three distinct ways. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30413431/
people whose actual job is publishing papers said it mystified them. that itself is a data point indicating that falsification and corpo deskilling is not just artificial but recent and accelerating.
this was all before twitter inc too lmao
because academic journals hear [read in kpop singer voice]:
hacker and doctor team up to take on cell differentiation and wrote their own analysis stack
and think [very evil hot queer villain voice]:
that sucks, nobody wants to hear that the expensive software that sucks is also wrong. you boy, throw some more copies of nature into the undergraduate dogfighting pit. add some sauce
[she's queer coded bc she will be joining our team later after we convince her that we are the one lab that doesn't lie. she will propose that we simply lie instead but we then explain that people will die and she gets all pouty but in the final battle she explains how we showed her how to hope and love. and she's also a hotshot biologist and we build mech suits together. platonically]
i don't ever again want to read a paper taking biopsies from unnamed dead people to chuck into the "literally data fabrication, this used to be illegal" machine. i'm removing a variable sized portion of your flesh for each dimension it reduces and pulling out a hair each time it adds noise to look more sciencey
@hipsterelectron jesus fuck what??
@davidgerard oh sorry. yes this would be a good story for your column, if i was referring to a specific paper. unfortunately, i am combining multiple things together here:
- the datasets we used were single-cell cytof arrays from biopsies and blood draws. the names were redacted from me and i don't breach PII ever but i walked into a hospital (VUMC) which is a massive hub for cancer research. dr. irish is a really swell guy.
- when dr. greenplate describes my amazing R code which was written to her precise specifications and covered the whole analysis pipeline (this means she can hit run and get real fucking numbers from HER OWN statistical metrics, and immediately fuck around on her own) i feel like i fought an evil god and won but several years later when i read this i just feel how fucking disappointed this tech has ALWAYS been for her THE CANCER EXPERT.
- hence deskilling mention above—literally i was not an i/o genious at all then, i just wrote R that did the thing. her words: "massively increased scale" and especially "change over time". yeah the scientist who taught me how to evaluate statistics repeatedly calls me a fucking single-cell time lord
@davidgerard to me, it is excessively violent that people (literally kids) entrusted us as scientists to literally extract their flesh (dr. greenplate handled samples but idk if she directly interacted with them). to me the specifically LLM decontextualization is the act of violence here, cartoonishly evil. might as well dump these kids into a mass grave
@davidgerard maybe this will make it more clear why i'm making these very strong image-based analogies https://github.com/cosmicexplorer/comparisort
as literally one researcher who was literally looking for an excuse to implement mergesort (my algs prof liked it), and found "inconsistent ordering of proteins across studies" was literally my hole made for me
note that the sorting is very distinct from parsing here. the goal is not to parse and normalize, bc it's not a formal model. it's intended to represent a simple ordering structure simply
nobody has ever gone so far as to want to do look more like me when the vibe is "CANCER SCIENTIST SIDEQUEST! [Y/n]". nobody in any tech company will ever understand that users are not simply "more" or "less" expert. if the user is doing cancer research it's worth your time to sit the fuck down
i want to make people feel the rippling disappointment dr. greenplate describes with Literally All Scientific Software Ever. she then has a few lines about biopsies in the paper. i'm insane but she is not fucking around here.
literally all of bioinformatics is people who think they're me and will never be me because they will never listen to a woman tell them what to do. these people keep getting so much fucking money
@davidgerard radicalizing moment when my friend sam (nice guy) was trying to do real research w dan fabbri (useless fuckboy, bad lectures) was like "yeah a random forest keeps getting significantly improved accuracy over any neural net". he was cross-validating and shit. the data was afaict normal. fabbri just said "huh" and of course the work died instead of publishing a negative result.
the "huh" was a secondary source (sam relaying the "huh" to me) but i could absolutely tell he felt hurt and sad and upset and that fabbri was not a scientist he just gets paid to act like one.
that's also why i went out of the cs department and signed up for a med school class, bc i recognized the school actively does not want computer scientists thinking numbers mean things
@davidgerard so of course, i have decided that numbers mean biopsies of leukemia patients [literally true] and i swore to avenge their memory [every time i defeat a fuckboy one of their ghost voices says "thank you...." and gives me an additional health segment]
@davidgerard zero fuckboys so far. with the zstd length extension checksum collision proof of concept i will have nailed yann collett pretty good but i definitely need more mid-tier enemies to level up my cryptography stat.
there are two distinct cryptographer fuckboys and the one person who has actually read the paper i hate agrees that the paper is bogus (signal SPQR)
sorry for the false alarm and thx for checking in ^_^ !
if communion is jesus blood and flesh i guess that makes everyone who entrusted me to read their entrails was a legion of jesuses and i have like 17 free sins now sick
illegal black market prison economy of sin forgiveness vouchers that jesus and st. peter actually accept and vouch for. wardens in shambles. cigarette company CEO flees the country
i want to know academic journals that respect the contract we signed in blood with patients. i want to know academic journals who understand all the incentives against publishing cross-domain collaborative methods, who think hacker resistance is when computers are twisted to serve scientists—who, yes, are the underdogs now (big mistake)
hey isn't it so crazy how i keep finding tons of data falsification in completely separate areas of research? it does kinda sound like lots of money revolves around lies and the continuing construction of legitimacy. i mention legitimacy because i really do need people to say "google and microsoft are wartime assets of the us security state" whenever anyone legitimizes any form of collaborative work with or around them
read the BDS list for a thorough and profound set of receipts. i'm not here with receipts i think people should vilify and delegitimize microsoft and google open source. also if they touch the bytes you publish to your users you are exposing your users to an attack surface you can't reproduce (bc of the chainguard DRM scheme which is just a service that prints a checkbox you can't reproduce without the DRM)
(if you work at google or ms and you can read this please don't take it personally and also just make them pay you more if they're gonna make you accept moral injury)
