Links:

• Opinion | A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies – The New York Times — People will always be interested in conspiracy theories. They need a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas.
• How Masks Went From Don’t-Wear to Must-Have During the Coronavirus Pandemic | WIRED — Public health messaging and science have to work hard to stay in sync during a crisis. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they haven’t always succeeded.
• ʻOumuamua – Wikipedia — Oumuamua is the first known interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System.
• Harvard Astrophysicist Avi Loeb on ‘Oumuamua and Aliens — In November 2017, an object passed by our planet that was unlike anything astronomers had ever seen. Spotted by a telescope in Hawaii, this strange thing was dubbed ‘Oumuamua. It moved too fast for it to have come from our solar system, its orbit was unusual, and it didn’t have any of the traditional markings of an asteroid or comet. All this led Dr. Avi Loeb to hypothesize that ‘Oumuamua was artificially made, perhaps a piece of technology or some debris from a faraway alien civilization.
• UFO videos have been officially released by Pentagon – CNNPolitics — The Pentagon has officially released three short videos showing „unidentified aerial phenomena“ that had previously been released by a private company. The videos show what appear to be unidentified flying objects rapidly moving while recorded by infrared cameras. Two of the videos contain service members reacting in awe at how quickly the objects are moving. One voice speculates that it could be a drone.
• Ministries of Nineteen Eighty-Four – Wikipedia — The Ministry of Truth (Newspeak: Minitrue) is the ministry of propaganda. As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer because in reality it serves the opposite: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events. However, like the other ministries, the name is also apt because it decides what „truth“ is in Oceania.
• WeChat – Wikipedia — WeChat (Chinese: 微信; pinyin: Wēixìn (About this soundlisten); lit. ‘micro-message’) is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent.
• WHO inspectors ‘to scrap interim report’ on probe of COVID origin | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera — In an open letter (PDF), a group of 26 scientists called on Thursday for a new international inquiry. They claim that “structural limitations” made it “all but impossible” for the WHO mission to adequately pursue its investigation. Among other issues, the scientists questioned the scientific independence of the “Chinese citizens” composing half of the team.
• The Americans – Wikipedia — The Americans is an American period spy thriller television series created by Joe Weisberg for the FX television network. Set during the Cold War, it follows the story of Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), two Soviet KGB intelligence officers posing as an American married couple living in Falls Church, a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., with their children, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati).

Links:

• Pinboard (@Pinboard) / Twitter — The light inside is broken, but I still work. The Cadillac of online bookmarking sites. https://pinboard.in maciej@ceglowski.com +1 415 610 0231
• Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People — This scenario is a caricature of Bostrom’s argument, because I am not trying to convince you of it, but vaccinate you against it.
• Andrew Huberman: Neuroscience of Optimal Performance | Lex Fridman Podcast #139 – YouTube — Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford.
• Thread Helper — A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar.
• MyHeritage on Twitter — “It makes me so happy to see him smile again!“ Try our new #DeepNostalgia #PhotoAnimation feature for yourself and prepare to be AMAZED!!!
• Flint Dibble on Twitter — Alright, I’m joining the game and animating some ancient stuff. This is from the Acropolis Museum in Athens
• Shockingly Real Tom Cruise Deepfakes Are Invading TikTok — Three days ago, a TikTok account going by @deeptomcruise began posting video clips of the Hollywood actor Tom Cruise doing everything from golfing, to tripping and telling a joke in what appears to be a men’s clothing store in Italy, to performing a magic trick with a coin. In each of the three videos, Cruise delivers his signature maniacal laugh—you know, the one he repeatedly unleashed in that batty Scientology recruitment video years back—before launching into some sort of bit, and in all of them, it looks just like Cruise. Only it’s not Cruise.
• GPT-3 – Wikipedia — Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series (and the successor to GPT-2) created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory.
• Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor English Subtitle – YouTube — “A Country Doctor” (German: “Ein Landarzt”) is a short story written in 1917 by Franz Kafka. It was first published in the collection of short stories of the same title. In the story, a country doctor makes an emergency visit to a sick patient on a winter night. The doctor faces absurd, surreal predicaments that pull him along and finally doom him.
• The EMBO Journal on Twitter: „See what’s really going on inside your nerves’ ends – real-time analysis of protein mobility at the #synapse courtesy of Rizzoli lab https://t.co/lIUP0yrsnS https://t.co/l15MXR5j9k“ / Twitter
• Priključenija 15: Simulacija — Nebojša misli da živimo u simulaciji. Miloš je skeptičan. Obojici se sviđa serija koja nema veze sa simulacijom, osim što možda ima.
• Priključenija 23: Računari — Miloš je pod utiskom nakon čitanja knjige, Nebojša nakon gledanja filma. Nepoznavanje inženjerstva i ekonomije neće ih sprečiti da podele svoja mišljenja o oba.