Get off Facebook before it drags you down with it

Please, world, let Facebook die. I’m a bit biased here, since I cut all my ties to Facebook earlier this year, but really, it has become a major source of evil on the internet. While it’s still absurdly rich and influential, there are signs that it might go the way of MySpace. Remember MySpace? For a while, you had to have a MySpace page if you wanted to be a cool kid, but now it’s an afterthought, it’s so 2009, hardly anyone cares about it.

It could happen to Facebook, too. Look at how the value of the company has been plummeting lately.

It’s also not the cool place for the kids to be anymore. When I was last on it, it felt like going down to the local legion hall for a high school reunion: lots of old people (in part, my fault for selecting who I wanted to talk to), lots of fringe kooks, a lost cause if you wanted contemporary ideas, but fine for reminiscing. It had lots of moldy corners where horrible people would sit and reinforce each other’s lunacy.

Facebook/Meta tried to put on a brave show at a recent Netroots Nation conference. It did not go well for them. Attendees picketed and protested their appearance, and they had to pack up and leave. There’s a reason for that: Facebook represents the conservative establishment.

A 2021 analysis by The Washington Post revealed that the site gives an advantage to conservatives on the platform. Facebook says that the right-wing is just better at stoking fears and responses than progressives. The reality is that Facebook has allowed false information to stand from conservative sources. While there are supposed to be protections in place to stop fake news, it typically takes so long for the review and removal that the story has already spread across the platform. As a result, the top 25 posts on Facebook are very rarely from Democratic sources.

Now Facebook is betting big on the “Metaverse” and virtual reality, and the seams are showing. Facebook is not an innovative company; they just buy stuff, they’re not big on actually engineering and creating new stuff. So they slapped together this thing called Horizon Worlds, but no one knows quite what to do with it. Also, in a fit of major incompetence, they premiered the service in Spain and France, and all of the content was in English.

“Keep on explaining things to me in English,” an annoyed member of the local outlet Real o Virtual said in a YouTube review of Horizon Worlds on Tuesday. “I’m not going to fucking listen to you.”

When asked about the lack of Spanish and bad Spanish in Horizon Worlds, a Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo that the game was launching in Spain in an English-only capacity first.

“We want to enable more people to experience and connect with others in Horizon Worlds as soon as possible, and this means opening to more regions first in an English-only capacity,” Facebook spokeswoman Amy White told Gizmodo in an emailed statement on Friday. “We look forward to building a more localized experience soon.”

Yeah, that’s the way to market. Slap your customers in the face and shout “ENGLISH ONLY!”

The only thing Facebook really knows how to do is to market the hell out of anything — so many ads everywhere — and use it to steal your personal info to sell to the highest bidder. They’re a money vacuum. It is peak capitalism.

If Facebook wants to recover, one of the things they must do is get rid of Mark Zuckerberg. Oh my god, the man is a charisma black hole — he’s a creepy dead-eyed mannequin, with the weird lack of style I associate with frat boy business majors. This is the face of Facebook? Sheesh. Steve Jobs may have been an asshole, but he did have buckets of charisma and forged a distinctive image, and people copied him (bad people, usually). Has anyone gone down to their local barber and said, “give me the Zuckerberg”? No. No one. OK, maybe a few sociopaths.

Greetings, Comrade MAGAts!

This is a brilliant strategy: engage a red-hat-wearing Trump worshipper as a peer, talk about the class issues that they claim to be concerned about, and lead them down the path to solutions. Next thing you know, they’re agreeing that the big banks need to be broken up, the work place should be collectivized, and they’re all for seizing the means of production.

You do have to avoid some of the buzzwords — the target would probably recoil if you whispered the word “socialism”, and for many of them, you’d have to hide the black folk, at first — but it’s an approach that might get them thinking, anyway. That’s a good first goal, to just get the wheels turning despite being crusted with Republican snot and semen.

Dead mealworms stink

The feeding regimen for my spiders is fruit flies every other day, and once they get above about 2.5 millimeters long, a mealworm once a week. Flies are easy. They die, they get sucked dry, the empty husks of their bodies lie around until I clean up the containers. Mealworms…not so nice. They’re much bigger than the spiders, but they’re still doomed, and in short order they’re trussed up, filled with venom and enzymes, and their guts liquify and are mostly consumed.
That “mostly” is doing a lot of work there. The worms are much bigger than the spiders, remember, so they get turned into a bug milkshake which has about ten times the volume of the predator. They can’t eat the whole thing.
So it rots. It rots spectacularly, since it’s predigested soup. I usually let the spiders sup on the corpse for two days, but then I pull out the blackened, shriveled worm and throw it out.
The spider containers are usually odorless, or nearly so, but these dead mealworms produce an unholy reek. Gooey dead bugs produce a whole new level of unimaginable putrid. Worst part of the job.
Today I was a renfield, tasked with purging the cages of their decaying victims.
While I was at it, I also measured how well they’re growing. A couple are over 5mm long now. One shrunk, I’m not sure why — they are developing into a male, they didn’t eat their mealworm, so maybe they’re in an adolescent funk. I’ll keep an eye on him.

In related news, while I’ve been consistently using the same microscope magnification (16x), that’s not going to work anymore. Some of them barely fit in the field of view, so I’m going to have to switch it down to 10x from now on. Look at this rolypoly monster (sorry, exclusively Pharyngula readers, it’s on Patreon.) You can also see how well the triangulate pigment pattern has developed.
I’m thinking I’ll continue measuring the growth of this batch of spiders for about a week more, ending at 60 days. Then I’m moving them to the grown-ups cages. The plan would be to relocate the females first, and then after a few days to establish a nice homey web, move in the horny males and see if I can get some courtship going…and then maybe the females can start investing some of the energy they currently use to grow to humongous size in producing eggs.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should

As usual, First Dog on the Moon scores.

Oh yeah. This again. Some molecular biologists with no training in population genetics or ethics think they can go into a lab and resurrect an extinct species.

Almost 100 years after its extinction, the Tasmanian tiger may live once again. Scientists want to resurrect the striped carnivorous marsupial, officially known as a thylacine, which used to roam the Australian bush.

The ambitious project will harness advances in genetics, ancient DNA retrieval and artificial reproduction to bring back the animal.

They won’t succeed. At best, they’ll assemble a maladapted hybrid something or other to be exhibited in some freak show of a zoo. It won’t be a thylacine, it’ll be a Frankenstein’s monster of an extant marsupial with no home environment and no prospects for the future and no population of conspecifics with which to live and no history. So much bugs me about this story.

They talk about “the thylacine genome”. There’s no such thing. A living population has many genomes. How many individuals are they sampling? How many individuals will they generate? Where will they live? These are carnivores — what will they feed on? Or are they just planning on conjuring up a technology demonstration that they’ll put in a cage and then move on to some other “project”?

They make a token nod towards the problem of extinctions, but aren’t very convincing.

“We would strongly advocate that first and foremost we need to protect our biodiversity from further extinctions, but unfortunately we are not seeing a slowing down in species loss,” said Andrew Pask, a professor at the University of Melbourne and head of its Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research Lab, who is leading the initiative.
“This technology offers a chance to correct this and could be applied in exceptional circumstances where cornerstone species have been lost,” he added.

No, it won’t accomplish any of that. The species is extinct because their habitat is destroyed and people killed them. That’s where you start, by rebuilding their environment, not with PCR machines and microinjection apparatus and flasks in incubators. It’s no surprise who is behind this: a guy with impressive credentials in molecular biology who thinks every problem is a lab exercise.

The project is a collaboration with Colossal Biosciences, founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, who are working on an equally ambitious, if not bolder, $15 million project to bring back the woolly mammoth in an altered form.

Yeah, right. He was claiming that he’d be bringing back the mammoth within two years…five years ago. He was also working on a dating app to eliminate genetic diseases (I guess he never heard of eugenics?).

Church has also speculated about resurrecting Neandertals. Nope. Not going to happen. If his thoughts on these matters were more than a millimeter deep, he wouldn’t be jumping onto high profile media to promote these sci-fi fantasies. It’s bad science.

It’s a JBP Socratic Monologue!

Jordan Peterson is so absurd. @thebadstats has posted a series of excerpts from his latest interview, each only a minute or two long, which is about the longest stretch of listening to this bozo I can take. Listen to him expound on his definition of “matter”, which is just him getting confused by homonyms, which leads to him being so moved by his own profundity that he starts crying.

The man is just losing it. This is what happens when you become a cult leader and begin squirreling about in your own head and believing in the deepities you pass off as wisdom.

Here’s another one where he explains that you have to believe in “ontological transcendence” in order to be a scientist.

I don’t think the fact that scientists don’t believe they know everything is quite the same as believing in whatever weird god occupies Peterson’s thinking.

As we all know, women don’t win

The next phase of the misogynists’ process has begun. Going after trans women was just the entry point for recruiting all the conservative normies; now it’s time to go after the cis women. Ladies, you better not be too good at sports!

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

David Spatafore, the UHSAA’s legislative representative, addressing the Utah Legislature’s Education Interim Committee on Wednesday, said the association — without informing the student or family members about the inquiry — asked the student’s school to investigate.

The school examined the students’ enrollment records.

“The school went back to kindergarten and she’d always been a female,” he said.

And if she hadn’t been, what would they do? Would that make it okay to target a student for investigation?

Women aren’t allowed to run too fast or play too hard or score too many points, lest they be accused of not being women. There’s another sin they must not commit.

Spatafore said the association has received other complaints, some that said “that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”

Having your makeup on point and your hair prettily styled is now mandatory for all female competitors.

And for Jesus’ sake, don’t win! That would be so unladylike!

Crossing the Rubicon

Back into hell with you!

I did it. I threw away a coffeemaker, just before the start of classes.

We had this Black & Decker coffeemaker, which ought to have been a warning sign — don’t get your kitchen appliances from a company that makes the kind of power tools you keep in the garage. It was needlessly complicated, with timers and a built-in grinder, and it had modes. I don’t need modes — I just want to push a button and have it make coffee. That’s it.

This one had a tortuous internal path to deliver coffee to the carafe, and it kept clogging up. The last straw this morning was when three quarters of the coffee ended up on the counter top, and I still have enough pride that I refused to lap it up. Instead, I swooped in, grabbed the infernal device, and threw it into the trash.

Now I’m committed. We’re going to Alexandria today to buy a new, simpler, more reliable coffeemaker. I also have to get some new shirts for the school year, and restock the refrigerator. Now I can’t put it off any longer, because waking up without coffee tomorrow morning would be intolerable.