Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic.
Gonna ignore the urge to sneer at the tinfoil hattery here. See the rest of this comment section for that.
I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience
Sam, you have a doomsday bunker and a bunch of cash. This was one of your dream scenarios. Don't pretend like you're one of us.
@swlabr He doesn't have mirrorshade-wearing bodyguard goons wearing collar bombs to keep them in line after civilization collapses. Or a long pork sushi chef. Yet.
Yeah that’s probably what he meant by not a “great experience.” Our billionaire baby boy couldn’t get a nice night’s sleep without his hommes au jus.
this thread appears to have attracted keyword-seeking bad posters. these fine posters have been escorted to the egress and may continue to enjoy their subthreads on other fediverse servers and not this one.
we should post keyword honey pots every few months for culling
I have been meaning to make a vegan pitbull thread for just such an occasion
to clear up any confusion: if you’re a drive-by poster we’ve never seen before and you’re posting bullshit covid theories instead of anything related to what we discuss on this instance (Sam Altman being a fucker, for example), we can’t tell you apart from someone keyword searching threads to spread conspiracy bullshit en masse and the very funny part is, we don’t actually care how you got here
garbage is garbage, don’t post your trash here
How do you determine if someone is coming across a post because they searched a keyword? I arrived here because I sort by new comments and someone must have just commented.
if the post tastes off I throw it out
LOL
Takes like this are one of the many things I pull out to point out how naive and misguided most x-risk obsessive people are. And especially Mr. Altman.
Despite wide fears of synthetic gain of function attacks, as it turns out, it's actually really hard to create a new virus meaningfully stronger than the standard endemic ones that already exist. Many countries and labs have legitimately tried. Lots of papers and research. It's, really really hard to beat nature at the microbiological scale; Viruses have to not only be virulent, but it has to contend with extremely unpredictable intermediate environments. The current endemic viruses got there through many mutations and adaptations inside environments that they were already at least successful (and not in vitro). And in the end, what would be the point? Once a virulent virus breaks out, you have very little control. Either it works really well and backfires or, even far more likely, it doesn't do that much at all, but it does piss other nations off.
It's not impossible. But honestly, yeah, I don't comprehend x-riskers who obsess over this.
How dare you! Eternal torture in Virokos basilisk for you!
A second minor side point which shows you are prob right on this front, and which broadens it from the risks of biological warfare (which I would argue would be the reason to do research to this) are low to the risk from biological warfare and chemical warfare are low: Soldiers have beards again.
Now I know, that sound absolutely crazy as an argument. But iirc the reason soldiers were no longer allowed beards around the world wars era was due to gasmask (the pandemic also showed that facial hair make fitting masks hard). But nowadays beards are more and more allowed (and in the case of authoritarian militaristic societies a sign of their elite special forces ;) ))
To me this shows that at least on the military level they don't really worry about the risks of artificial (wait, why do they say synthetic? Wouldn't artificial be a better word? Is this some sort of signaling thing? Anyway) viral attacks in the near future.
But I could be wrong, just found it interesting, and somewhere some military theorist is prob screaming after reading this, this close to warthunderforuming this place.
Wait, I've been out for a bit - what was the actual consensus on Covid? I genuinely thought there was a Wuhan Lab that this all originated from?
I'm not a nut job, I can be reasoned with, i just need to update my beliefs with new info
I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
The "lab leak theory", while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China's fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.
The racist connotations about the lab I knew about, but I didn't think it made it less true.
That being said, I just checked wikipedia:
Most scientists agree that, as with many other pandemics in human history,[1][2][3] the virus is likely derived from a bat-borne virus transmitted to humans via another animal in nature or during wildlife trade such as that in food markets.[11] Many other explanations, including several conspiracy theories, have been proposed.[12][13][14] Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence.[15]
SARS-CoV-2 has close genetic similarity to multiple previously identified bat coronaviruses, suggesting it crossed over into humans from bats
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19
and I think I remember seeing a study that showed the similarity of the sequence to other known sequences and it wasn't that dramatic a change.
The racist connotations about the lab I knew about, but I didn’t think it made it less true.
this is an absolute fuck of a sentence and seeing as how you keep JAQing off in a way that platforms conspiracy bullshit, you can just fuck off too
In the absence of any actual evidence, it does make it less true. Believing otherwise means ignoring all the obvious (but admittedly circumstantial) evidence that racism is super-fucking-popular. So Occam's Razor says if two theories have equal levels of zero evidence and one is inherently appealing to lizard brain, that one will gain prevalence so if you want to correct for that bias you have to bias in the opposite direction. How hard? Roll dice.
In come the posters who never posted here before to explain that the leak theory is true!
While I have no real input re the whole lab leak conspiracy theory, I do have a fun anacdote from then. I remember pretty quickly after the lab leak option was dropped somebody came with proof for it saying 'we have the telephone data, and the day virus started all the telephones from the lab stayed in one place clearly manipulated!'. This story has a few holes, note first the whole 'we have the telephone data' which is already weird (esp as china refused to cooperate), then also we don't have just one day, perhaps this behavior of phones in a lab is normal. Almost like people are forced to put their personal phones in storage when they suit up (iirc often standard practice in those kinds of rooms). Of course the person bringing up the phones theory didn't think about this. I knew we were in for a wild ride of conspiracies after that one, as it was 'throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks' contrarian theories land. (a thing you often see after a tragedy happens, extremely common in far right circles when the far right does an atrocity, where it is often sort of ingroup signal and signal of cruelty). Anyway, that is just an interesting thing I remembered which I wanted to share, on the subject at hand my opinion is I doubt it was a lab leak, but I also don't think we will ever know for sure, and also we will never find enough evidence that it wasn't a lab leak to convince the people who convinced themselves it was one.
I'm on your page at least - best evidence we had was that it leaked from a Wuhan lab.
Not sure what the conspiracy here is, other than "Rich man has thoughts that come close to an opinion on vaccines. Get the pitchforks!"
Missing the forest for the trees, it feels like - The man has a good point about synthetic viruses.
Check my comment above. More scientists believe it was due to a random mutation (the similarity of the sequence to other bat coronaviruses was extremely similar, and this one was a small change that just happened to be potent), though there are also many scientists who find the wuhan lab more than circumstantial.
What
They're lemmy.ml users, best course of action is to just ignore and move on.
Thx, I'm kinda new to the lemmyverse so I haven't really figured out who is worth listening and replying to.
I'm sad nobody posted Good News, They Let Dumb Sluts into Mensa Now (also in podcast longform) in reaction to that user mentioning Mensa.
Such a good podcast series, highly recommended.
synthetic virus bad
Im sorry, this is an anti-memetic zone. You seem to have used a thought ending memetic sentence, please report to the blue room for punishment. You are to sit in the black chair. Your social standing has decreased.
This is an automated message, further replies to this message can and will increase the severity of your punishment. They also will be ignored.
worse than your posting?
yor mums a lab leek
why are the comments on this post such a disaster. who are these people
keyword seeking fuckwits maybe
This was just on All.
fuck, I stop looking for one Thanksgiving and this happens
My thanksgiving was drama-free (blurring the distinction between pleasant and boring) and just now finding what was going down here. 😭
it has certainly brought the dickheads out
Gotta admit I’m checking back here every couple of hours or so just out of morbid curiosity
As they say in Australia, he is cooked.
Now that he needs to be cancelled such things are popping up like crazy!
Wtf are you talking about, we already talked about his sister story a while back (with your 'such things'). Just because you are not aware of things doesn't mean they suddenly pop up.
Here, a post from a month ago with data going further back. (also I do hope you get why as people become more powerful and popular in various ways they also attract more scrutiny, and how that isn't bad. You shouldn't care much that namename8numbers believes in the great replacement theory, but you should worry a lot when one of the richest people in the world starts shouting about that bs)
What do you mean?
off you fuck
Who gives a fuck. Let's not turn this guy into a new Elon Musk.
uh huh off you fuck
Everyone who is saying virus spread from bats to humans - you do realize there were people researching on bats in Wuhan, right? If it's from a bat, that doesn't automatically mean from a bat in nature.