Less than a week until classes start again…and an upcoming podcast

Yesterday, I got my Genetics class all set up — Canvas page assembled, syllabus written, first lecture prepped. Today I’ve got to do some lab work, setting up another generation of the fly stocks we’ll be using in the lab in two weeks (next week’s lab is all statistics and probability tools that we’ll be using throughout the term, and it’s all ready to go). I’ve also got to get my writing class organized today.

Also on my agenda: on Saturday, 11 January, Dr Sarah and I will be discussing a pair of wonderful parenting books: Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman and Progressive Parenting: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids by Kavin Senapathy. I’m only a grandfather now, but I have memories, or concepts of memories, that might be relevant, and also all of my kids turned out perfect, so maybe I’ll have something to say.

If you’ve got suggestions for books in a similar vein, let us know about them!

Overthrow the technocrats!

Way back in the 1990s, I was writing lab software in my spare time, and I was working with a company in California for a while. I was coding exclusively on a Mac, but they mainly did PC stuff, so they bought me a cheap PC just so I could see the software they were developing. I think it was a Dell or something like that, and I set it up at my house. First thing that horrified me was that the computer was covered with stickers. Why? What are you advertising?

Then I tried running the thing, and had to wade through all the crudware that came pre-installed on the computer. Ads popped up. There were all these off-brand applications installed, and they didn’t want me to remove them — just cleaning up all the garbage took me several days before it was functional to run the tech software I had obtained the machine for.

That was 30 years ago. I guess the situation has gotten even worse, if you’re buying the inexpensive mass-market computers. Ed Zitron got one just to see what the average users experience was like. Now we’ve got the internet layered on top of everything.

The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad.

As their clunky, shuddering laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com, and the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. “God damnit, why is everything so fucking slow? I’ll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn’t crash half the time or trick me.”

Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta — and now that every single website is so desperate for our email and to show us as many ads as possible, it’s either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online.

This is our world now — the wealthy have control, and they’ve engineered everything to grow and make more money for themselves, and they’ve wrecked everything they’ve touched. I remember the early 2000s when Google was just a barebones text box that you typed things into and it bounced back with a list. It was clean and easy. But not any more!

The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn’t any one algorithm, but the convenience of a “clean” digital experience — or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they’re engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isn’t as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least it’s not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply don’t work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.

The algorithm was never for you, the user. It didn’t make your interactions with the internet easier or better, it made it easier for companies, both legitimate and criminal, to sell you stuff. That has become the primary purpose of computers and the internet. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to even imagine using a computer for anything beyond convenient shopping…although it is becoming increasingly inconvenient as all the garbage piles up. One of the best examples of a growing obstacle to using the internet is all the “AI” trash being inserted.

The onslaught of AI-generated content — facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft — has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content — with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff — websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images — is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, they’re with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.

These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment – both digital and otherwise – along with it.

Do you need AI? Do we really want some weird capitalist-created interface in front of everything that babbles and confabulates and tells us even more lies? Again, this isn’t something added for our benefit — we have to ask who profits from these layers of new crap tossed unto our computers. I don’t think it’s the users. We really don’t need ChatGPT for anything, and it literally makes everything worse.

Ed Zitron names names.

  • Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.
  • Tim Cook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, slowly allowing the rot to seep into Apple’s products, slowly adding bothersome subscription products and useless AI features to chip away at the user experience. Apple’s app store and its repeated support of exploitative microtransaction-laden mobile games built to create gambling-like addiction in adults and children alike, making it billions of dollars a year. Because Apple’s products are less shitty, it gets a much easier time.
  • Sundar Pichai is the Henry Kissinger of technology — a glossy executive that escapes blame despite having caused harm on a global scale. The destruction of Google Search at the hands of Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan should be written about like a war crime, and those responsible treated as such.
  • Satya Nadella has aggressively expanded Microsoft’s various monopolies, the most egregious of which is the Microsoft 365 suite — a monopoly over business software that everybody kind of hates that Microsoft prices to undercut the competition, effectively setting the conditions of most business software as either “cheaper than Microsoft” or “slightly better than Microsoft.” Nadella has overseen layoffs of tens of thousands of people in the last three years alone, and despite his bullshit “growth mindset” culture treats his employees and customers as equally disposable.
  • Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul that has overseen the growth and proliferation of some of the single-most abusive and manipulative software in the world. Meta has grown to a market cap of $1.5 trillion dollars by intentionally making the experience on Instagram and Facebook worse, intentionally frustrating and harming billions of people.

I’m willing to call these people crooks and corrupters, profiteers and parasites. They are getting rich off of our growing inconveniences. We really need to fight back somehow, and tell these people we don’t want ChatGPT or whatever pointless energy-sucking leech they want to attach to us. Unfortunately they’ve got all the money and power and have monopolized everything.

I didn’t devolve, I just got angry

Did you know that Darwinists are devolving, according to the Discovery Institute? They even have a picture of this devolution, so it must be true.

I guess they haven’t noticed that if you talk to any evolutionary biologists today, they all consistently rebuke the old cartoonish illustration of the ‘descent of man,’ so it’s silly to use that against us. But then that’s all they’ve got, the enshrinement of antique notions that they can attack without ever having to deal with the reality of modern biology. They’re claiming that the proponents of Darwinism seemed to be shrinking in stature unaware of the irony of demanding that we defend Darwin — Darwinism, the narrow set of ideas that formed the core of evolutionary theory in the 1800s, is obsolete and outmoded. We aren’t defending those any more. We’ve got better, more complete models of how evolution works nowadays, and they don’t include illustrations of linear trajectories of changing individuals.

But this article from John West isn’t about the science, it’s about crowing over the defeat of their adversaries, even when no defeat occurred. So he marches through a small set of individuals, bashing them and claiming victory.

Consider Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, author of the anti-ID polemic Finding Darwin’s God in 1999. Miller was a gifted debater, but his arguments all too often relied on citation bluffing and critiquing straw-man versions of the ideas of Michael Behe and others.

Miller is still fighting, why is West using the past tense? Miller was part of the team that achieved possibly the greatest, most decisive defeat of the Discovery Institute’s agenda in the Kitzmiller trial. “Citation bluffing” seems to be the term they use to dismiss the fact that Behe’s claim of no scientific publications on the evolution of the immune system could be addressed by presenting book after book after book on the subject he claimed didn’t exist.

As for the claim of straw-manning creationists, I think it’s pretty silly to do that in an article where West constantly harps on Darwinism.

Francis Collins, in his book The Language of God, was even shallower in his critique. Indeed, if you read Collins’s book today, you’ll find that many of his arguments, including junk DNA, have been increasingly thrown overboard by mainstream science.

So who was left to champion the old time religion of Darwinism?

They have this delusion that junk DNA doesn’t exist, and that citing a few articles that have rightly shown some function for some tiny fraction of junk DNA means that the whole of it must be functional, and that their perspective is supported by “mainstream science.” It’s not. And why should they care? Mainstream science says that evolution is true!

Once again, they bring up this claim that Darwinism is a religion. We can criticize Darwinism all we want without being thrown down into the pit of Hell.

Then, oh boy, they remember little ol’ me:

You also had biologist P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota Morris. He too could debate, although the quality of what you got was decidedly second rate. His preferred mode of discourse was invective. As he once instructed his fellow evolutionists, they should “screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots” — by which he meant, of course, anyone who dared to criticize Darwin’s theory.

John West has been crying about that quote since 2005. The Discovery Institute used it in their promotional materials. The suggestion that we stop being polite to known liars, frauds, and incompetents was so terrifying to them that they’ve spent the last 20 years whining about it. I’m kind of impressed with myself.

He still gets it wrong. Please do continue to criticize a theory that was assembled in 1859. I don’t mind that at all. But stop thinking that your primitive, poorly understood comprehension of an old idea is at all relevant or sufficient to rebut modern evolutionary theory.

Also, don’t expect me to be courteous when you dump a bucket of that bullshit on the podium in lieu of debating the science.

We’re home at last!

We’re back from our excursion to Madison — a day driving there, two days with Iliana, and a day driving back, but totally worth it. You may recall that I mention the distinct change at the border with Wisconsin (“adult novelty stores, billboards for cheese, and roadkill as far as the eye can see”), but we also saw something in common: so many “Pro Life Across America” billboard spread across both Minnesota and Wisconsin. They’ve gotten more condensed over the years, at least. Nowadays they’re just a photo of a cute, plump 6-month old babies with the words Heartbeat 18 Days. That’s all. Not even grammatical. We’re just supposed to leap to the conclusion they want.

I have a much more interesting statement: Poop 19 Seconds.

That’s from Bethany Brookshire’s Insomniac Academy of brief YouTube shorts with fascinating facts about anatomy. Check it out!

This is not ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’, it’s just stupid

This is not an omen. This is just the brain of a 53 year old man-child raised on 4chan, who has somehow acquired more money and power than he knows what to do with.

Elon Musk has changed his X profile.
His avatar is now Pepe the Frog, a mascot adopted by white supremacists.
His name is a Latinisation of “Kek”, a phrase used by neo-Nazis.
Musk has also backed AfD in Germany, the political home for racists.
The man is telling us explicitly what he’s about.

Could someone please let him know his immaturity is exposed?

Also, haven’t all the cool kids moved on well past the “kekistan” nonsense? This is so 2015.

Woe! I failed to perform the ritual!

The Aztecs would rip out still-beating human hearts to honor the sun god Huitzilopochtli, so that the sun would continue to rise. I too have performed a ritual every year, in a tradition taught me by my father. On New Year’s Eve, we consume a root beer float to honor the passing year and propitiate the new one. Every year since I was a wee little tyke I have performed the sacrifice.

Until last night. I no longer have children at home, and my wife was at work. I was alone with the cat when I suddenly realized at 11pm that I had none of the sacred ingredients, neither root beer nor ice cream, it was -10°C outside, and even if I felt like taking a walk, no store would be open at this hour. I must confess I also didn’t feel much like saving the world this year.

I apologize if 2025 turns out to be a disastrously bad year — it will all be my fault.

The omens have already begun. The US Capitol building was struck by lightning last night, something that I’m sure almost never happens.