I wanted to like GATTACA; but it really ended up being almost the opposite of what it professed to be about(admittedly, in a way that seems very much like something we would do): the premise is supposedly that genetic engineering has allowed all men to not be created equal, and there are some lightweight examples of that being true(none of the engineered characters require corrective lenses; some of the naturals are identifiable by being contact lens users); but in important areas it just never actually seems to matter; the main character is supposed to have a serious cardiac condition that, um, never actually stops him from out-swimming his modified brother through the power of the human spirit or conducting astronaut training as long as he plays back the cardiac data from the suicidal athlete whose identity he assumed(apparently genetic optimization doesn't extend to psych coverage?)

And the society itself seems to realize that at some level: theoretically the premise is deeply troubling because what of a society where people are profoundly unequal by birth; but in implementation there's precious little sign of 'meritocratic' squeeze-out (there's the one woman in the astronaut training program who isn't going to make the cut because she uses glasses; but is still in the training program for some reason?): just people getting hired based on a genetic test and the ongoing battle by the protagonist to carefully cover all traces of his DNA with replacements from the guy he is impersonating because his job performance won't actually matter if the geneticops enforcing the haves/have-nots distinctions aren't doing performance based evaluations.

As noted; using relatively weak scientific evidence to justify treating people with wealthy parents as though they are better than the rest is absolutely something we would do; we'd love a blood test for legacy admits; but as a movie about genetic engineering making people unequal, rather than a movie about people running a caste system loosely justified by genetic engineering, it really doesn't go much of anywhere.

I suspect that the "I made a lot of money selling enterprise resource data munging cloud solutions or something; therefore I am very smart" crowd is more susceptible than average to the specific "Now, I'm not going to say 'eugenics'; but clearly you want your children to be just plain better, like you..." sales pitch; but the genre of hope-and-hype 'this will make life better for your child' seems to have more or less universal appeal. The upmarket techie flavor leans a bit GATTACA, and probably has a lot more literature that is the layman's idea of what good scientific papers look like; but it's basically the same impulse that has people taking prenatal wellness supplements of deeply dubious efficacy and experimenting with prenatal classical music and stuff.

I'm not particularly inclined to be trusting of someone squeezing PCR until it bleeds and then shoving what comes out into their proprietary risk model until they've shown some pretty solid results; but it's not like 'prospective parents who want healthy babies' are a weird niche audience. Especially if it's an IVF-related intervention; which presumably means that most of your customers are coming in the door with some combination of fertility issues, an atypically high number of miscarriages or stillbirths, or one of the relatively well characterized and dire heritable conditions that are closer to "25%, maybe 50-50 in males if it's X-linked" than to "well, meta-analysis suggests that these 853 genes can nudge the risk of the autism by an amount that was technically statistically significant".

"Right now, at $2,500 per embryo-screening on top of the average $20,000 for a single cycle of IVF, Siddiqui's social network in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs is an ideal target market..."

Selling upmarket sounds like it's more about the lack of validation than about the actual cost. If you actually knew that it worked a one time $2,500 to mitigate, or even moderately depress the incidence on average, of "bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and schizophrenia" would be stupid cheap. If you spread appointments out and are mostly on older drugs with generics $2,500 might cover a year of outpatient psychiatry, ignoring the costs and unpleasantness of having a psych condition to deal with; and if there's a cancer you can deal with for at or under that amount it'd probably be a nice clean presentation of an early stage skin cancer that the dermatologist can deal with; definitely not one that gets punted to the oncologists.

It's just that if you are currently at the Theranos "we can totally do stuff with PCR that stuffy 'scientists' say is statistically troublesome"; then we grind it up with our proprietary models, you are basically left selling to the anxiety of the cost-insensitive. If the method were actually validated not paying ~10%more to have your IVF round QAed would look like reckless negligence; but that 'if' is very load bearing.

How did the stock market get into this discussion?

And the list concept concerns me. Are these lists appealable? If not, then they're abusable.

Also, the line between "AI generated" and "non-AI generated" is ever more fuzzy. AI is used for upscaling. AI is used in cameras to enhance images taken. AI is used to make the sort of minor edits that are done the world over in Photoshop. Etc. There's also the fact that this is done with image fingerprinting, which is fuzzy, so then any images that have minor modifications done with AI which get added to the list will get the raw images flagged as well. The thing people want to stop is "fake images", and in particular, "fake images that mislead about the topic at hand". But then that's not "AI" that's the problem in specific, that's image fakery in general (AI just makes it faster / easier).

And re: fingerprinting, take for example, the famous case of the content-spam creator who took a photo of a woodcarving of a German Shepard, flipped it horizontally, ran it through an AI engine to make trivial tweaks to the image, and then listed it as his own. I'd think any decent fingerprinting software would catch both versions. And if it's not flexible enough to catch that, then I have to wonder how useful it is at all, since images constantly change as they move around the internet, even accidentally, let alone deliberately.

Allegedly this was a permitted practice; but the speed with which they said that they will be abandoning it once it became public knowledge; and the number of federal IT people ProPublica was able to find who had never heard of it, suggests that either the proposal that was approved was not entirely candid about what the plan was; or the approver was too low or obscure to actually approve.

This certainly wouldn't be the first time that something perfectly on the up and up was abandoned for PR reasons; but MS would probably be loathe to give up the ability to whitewash whoever into sensitive projects by having an $18/hr copy-paste pal in the loop; so they must see the exposure as potentially serious.

WHAT is right there on video? That is NOT one of Zelensky's bodyguards. That's a random soldier from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade, which recaptured Izyum, during Zelensky's visit to celebrate the victory. Do you think bodyguards spend all their time taking selfies with the person they're protecting? Grow some common sense circuits in your brain. And it's not like Zelensky was handing the man an award with the patch prominently featured in front of the camera while he received it or anything. The Russian volunteer ranks are absolutely littered with Nazis.

What, you mean like the Russian governor of occupied Donetsk outright giving an award to a guy with a Totenkopf patch? Or all of the numerous Russian officials who have praised or given awards to the puppy-eating, unabashed Nazi, Milchakov?

Also, contrary to the misinfo sites you read, that was not a photo of "one of Zelensky's bodyguards". That was from his visit to Izyum where he was posing with random soldiers from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade to celebrate the retaking of the city from the Russians. That's why everyone has their phone out to take selfies.

Stalin was perfectly happy to ally with Hitler for the conquest of eastern Europe. The USSR only turned "anti-Nazi", not for ideological reasons, but because the Nazis betrayed them. Today in Russia, "Nazi" is used as a general insult for any external perceived enemy of the state, with any actual connection to Nazism not being at all required. Yet actual support for the actual principles of fascism within Russia is well tolerated. For example, Putin's good friend Dmitri Rogozin, now governor of occupied Zaporozhye Oblast, is absolutely a fascist, including speaking at a far-rally surrounded by people doing Nazi salutes under a only slightly modified Nazi flag, among so, SO many other things.

In most countries, the saying with respect to WWII is "Never Again". In Russia, it's "We Can Repeat It!" (Mozhem povtorit!).

I guess it depends on who you were. If you were Jewish, the Nazi occupation was definitely worse. Stalin was more of an equal-opportunity atrocity-committer.

It is kind of darkly funny how similarly Hitler and Stalin thought, though. For example, Hitler cited positively the Holodomor and the collectivization of Ukraine, and planned to use the Holodomor as a role model for resource extraction during scarcity, and to maintain the collectivization of Ukrainians set in place by the Soviets. He likewise viewed Ukrainians as a "colonial peoples", in the sort of Africanizing terms common among imperial powers of the time, and just planned to switch which foreign colonial master ruled them, arguing that ultimately Ukrainians would prefer the German yoke to the "Jewish"** (Soviet) one.

** How the whole Nazi view of the USSR as a "Jewish Empire" played out was I guess predictable. Because if the Wehrmacht rolls into your town, and you're some low-level communist functionary, and there's a bunch of soldiers knocking on your door who want to kill communists, but who also believe communists = jews = communists, what's your response? For most, it was along the lines of, "Yes, yes, you're right, communists ARE Jews, absolutely! And look, I'm not a Jew, I can prove it! But THAT GUY over there, HE is Jewish, that's the guy you're looking for!".

The USSR fought the Nazis to the last Ukrainian.

The highest price in that war was paid by Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Really, computer chips are the *hardest* thing we could compromise. It's way easier to e.g. compromise mechanical or electrical parts so that they fail under stress.

They use so many western chips, if we knew what the programming was, and actually cared to, we could contaminate the smuggling routes with compromised chips to do exactly that.

Heck, we could probably do it with rough guess work if we actually cared. For GPS receivers it's obvious how to manipulate them, but even in CPUs, if you see e.g.: two floating point registers with values that look reasonable for latitude/longitude coordinates in a non-occupied part of Ukraine, and another two registers that look reasonable for latitude/longitude coordinates in an occupied part of Ukraine or in Russia... swap them. And of course, delay your functionality by some number of weeks or when a pair of registers is within range of a known production facility, so that the batch passes QA.

The fact that there's been no apparent signs of any effort at all to contaminate Russia's smuggling routes with compromised parts just screams about how lax the west has been taking this all. Heck, forget about compromising smuggled part streams, just cracking down on the smugglers at all. Like, EU trade with Tajikistan increased by an order of magnitude after the war started - gee, I wonder what's going on there!. Yet zero effort was made for years to crack down at all.

Ukraine's far-right unified in the last election under the Svoboda party. They won 2,16% of the vote, putting Ukraine the weakest electoral performance by the far right in all of Europe.

From the Wikipedia article on Utkin:

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According to several news outlets, Utkin was an admirer of Nazi Germany and had multiple Nazi tattoos, including Schutzstaffel (SS) insignia.[13][14][15][16][17] Utkin also reportedly used call sign Wagner after German composer Richard Wagner, because his work was greatly admired by Adolf Hitler and was appropriated by the Nazis.[3][18][19] Allegedly he greeted subordinates by saying "Heil!", wore a Wehrmacht field cap around Wagner training grounds, and sometimes signed his name with the lightning bolt insignia of the SS.[20]

Members of the Wagner Group have said that Utkin was a Rodnover, a believer in the Slavic native faith.[21]

And why stop at Wagner? Let's take another example: Rusych. They have been heavily used since 2014, and their leader - the infamous puppy-eater Alexey Milchakov - is a proud and unabashed Nazi, who openly marches with a Nazi flag and openly declares himself to be a Nazi in interviews, and nonetheless, has received awards from multiple high-ranking Russian government officials for his brigade's successes in Ukraine.