#DavidLynch #Covid

give me my vaporwave Wikipedia right now.

joined rednote to watch all the hubbub and learn something and all the comment sections are just

Americans: Do you hate us 🥺

Chinese: No, we feel sorry for you, please come visit, most of us speak English but here’s all the Mandarin tutorials you could ever need.

Americans: I love you 😭

Chinese: Please start a revolution though.

"among the 19 million people who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 but did not vote in 2024, nearly a third named Israel's U.S.-backed war on Gaza as a top reason for staying home."

29% of 19 million is 5.5 million

The popular vote margin was 2.3 million

Less than 300,000 votes across certain swing states could've changed the outcome

https://www.commondreams.org/news/harris-gaza

Whenever the US tries to propagandize you with a horror story about something other countries do, look around. We're doing it. It's just that "The Great Firewall Of America" isn't as catchy.

What you wrote in your health policy: “masks are encouraged but not required”

What I read: “Anti-maskers are welcome here. We wish the more vulnerable members of our community would just die and stop inconveniencing us.”

Always remember:

1. This ban happened because successive US Presidents Trump and Biden disliked the speech that was taking place on TikTok. No other reason.

2. Maybe you don't use TikTok. If the US Government can do this to TikTok, it can *and will* do it to whatever thing it is you like. This is true *even if the TikTok ban never goes into effect*. The U.S. now has a loaded, functioning weapon against free speech, and the next person who gets to use it is Donald Trump

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/us-supreme-court-upholds-law-banning-tiktok/

fosdem leadership: "people are saying that we are giving the coinscam fascist guy a keynote because he is sponsoring us, but this is a vicious lie--we are giving him the keynote because we just really like what he has to say!"

biden, during his farewell address: “an oligarchy is starting to form”

okay internet explorer personified, its already here

@woe2you @dalias @altruios @tante Disclaimer: I say that working for an AI company. I get to see firsthand how utterly useless LLMs are at their job, whether it's commercially available ones or ones that we train on our own hardware. They can't even produce buggy code correctly. The only useful AI stuff we sell is bespoke tools designed and trained specifically for and with our clients' data. None of it is LLM based.

Last August, Lynch (who had emphysema) said he might never direct again because of the "let it rip" covid unmitigation strategies adopted by governments everywhere.

Wondering how many mourners would willingly, and without prompting, wear a mask around people suffering from Long Covid, respiratory illnesses, or other immune dysfunction, out of respect for their struggle, instead of placing the entire burden on vulnerable disabled people.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/david-lynch-age-movies-emphysema-smoking-b2591296.html

#DavidLynch

Support your local libraries.

Wow! Biologists seem to have discovered an entirely new kind of life form. They're called 'obelisks', and you probably have some in you.

They were discovered in 2024 - not by somebody actually seeing one, but by analyzing huge amounts of genetic data from the human gut. This search found 29,959 new RNA sequences, completely different from any known. Thus, we don't know where these things fit into the tree of life!

Biologists found them when they were trying to solve a puzzle. Even smaller than viruses, there exist 'viroids' that are just loops of RNA that cleverly manage to reproduce using the machinery of the cell they infect. Viruses have a protein coat. Viroids are just bare RNA - it doesn't even code for any proteins!

But all known viroids only infect plants. The first one found causes a disease in potatoes; another causes a disease in avocados, and so on. This raised the puzzle: why aren't there viroids that infect bacteria, or animals?

Now perhaps we've found them! But not quite: while obelisks may work in a similar way, they seem genetically unrelated. Also, their RNA seems to code for two proteins.

Given how little we know about this stuff, I think some caution is in order. Still, this is really cool. Do any of you biologists out there know any research going on now to learn more?

The original paper is free to read on the bioRxiv:

• Viroid-like colonists of human microbiomes, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.20.576352v1.full

I see just one other paper, about an automated system for detecting obelisks:

• Tormentor: An obelisk prediction and annotation pipeline, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.30.596730v1.full

There's also a budding Wikipedia article on obelisks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk_(biology)

Stay tuned!