Did he? Seems like they just buried him under a heap of investigations based on the accusations of “DEI” from a rival.

Questions about his qualifications were raised publicly last month by Nathan Cofnas, a one-time Cambridge philosophy researcher who left the university after his criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion policies sparked widespread protests.

On July 24, the Times of London published an analysis of Arday’s 2015 Ph.D. thesis highlighting what it said were multiple examples of passages that were “identical or near-identical” to an earlier paper written by another researcher.

Cambridge initially stood by Arday, saying that the plagiarism allegations had been investigated by Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday’s doctorate.

Always curious to see the scrutiny certain individuals will face at certain moments in their careers, while others seem to skate by. I hardly blame him for leaving. Hope he lands somewhere more productive and less petty.

In another 20 years, I wonder if we’re going to be looking at Ukraine like '00s-era Americans look at Iraq.

In fairness, I’ve got friends in my Big Evil Oil Company’s Environmental Sustainability and Health department, and a lot of what they do is researching real useful methods for improving the local ecology (after we’ve wrecked it with construction and extraction).

The caveat, of course, is that they do the work with an eye towards profitability.

As a case in point, a recent project involved cutting the light pollution at remote facilities by upgrading all the lighting fixtures on site. This drastically reduced the ambient light that the site produced. And, as a consequence, it reduced the cost of lighting the facility (because ambient light is an expensive waste product) while also reducing the accident rate (drivers entering and exiting the site didn’t have their night vision wrecked as they came and went).

They also ran a project to detect methane leaks along the pipeline arteries. This reduced the ambient methane that the pipelines released, which was good for the environment as a whole and also good because we’re in the business of selling methane rather than leaking it. The cost of the surveillance and repairs was superseded several times over by the value of the methane we retained.

The flip side of this is how anything seen as cost-positive (or labor intensive and cost-neutral) tends to be ignored.

Raytheon keeps around an ethics department for the same reason Satan reads the Bible.

Worth noting how many people are terrorized by MAGA-world if they express any degree of dissent from its crusade on Latin America.

Is .piefed an instance

There’s a constellation of instances with the piefed prefix operating in the Fediverse ecosystem.

https://fedidb.com/servers

I like to whisper “China Bad” into my Alexa every night before I go to bed, so I stay at the bottom of the list for getting black-bagged by my local sheriff’s office.

I tried this with .piefed and it genuinely improved my entire experience.

Amazing how much dumb bullshit a handful of terminally online losers can create.

Marriage, as a romantic notion, is about demonstrating a lifelong commitment to another person.

Marriage, as a legal institution, is about creating an economic incentive for intergenerational land ownership among the government-favored ethnic group.

I might suggest that you, at a bare minimum, like the other person even if you’re not romantically fixated on them. The marriage process comingles assets and incomes in a way that’s very difficult to unwind over time. Idk if I’d consider you “broken” for thinking about it. But you might want to reconsider what you’re getting into, especially if there’s someone other than your prospective partner who does have a romantic interest on one (or, fuck it, both) of you.

For folks who are married, the joke has been made a thousand times “We should have done this when we were poorer”. And I even have a friend who did a court-house wedding, months in advance of the family celebration, just to get the tax rebate sooner.

But, it’s a big decision. You’re sharing credit as a single household. Depending on the state, your partner can have all sorts of medical and legal authority that constrains you. And if you don’t even live with the person you’re married to? The economic benefits slide off quite a bit.

One man’s cost is another man’s profit.

At some point, Walmart execs sitting on a pile of NVIDIA stock won’t see this as a loss for them. It will just become an excuse to trim spending - on healthcare, on wages, on wholesale costs, on maintenance of their fleets and facilities - everywhere that isn’t AI.

You might have him confused with White Josh.

In talks

Going to need to talk faster

a joint European anti-ballistic missile defence system.

Didn’t the Americans already try this and end up burning through billions of dollars of defense while still losing bases all over the continent?

CIA Jim, yes

Jellyfin doesn’t have this problem

Mega-Embassy

Very funny to think the problem people have with the embassy is it’s size and not it’s “China”

A great deal of the industry is powered by debt financing. And the CEO typically holds the job by gatekeeping access to that borrowed money.

Labor solidarity is predicated on being able to participate in the market. It isn’t as if people don’t try to Unionize. But if your office or your business or your entire industry can be casually strangled to death by the financial sector when a plurality demand a raise, there’s quickly nothing left to unionize.

Maybe. Or maybe companies like EA would implode under their own dysfunction and leave a multi-billion dollar hole in the industry for China to fill.

A lot of American companies do seem willing to commit suicide before they pay their workers equitably

Excited for Battlefield 7

When you’re working on a big enough project, you’ll inevitably find yourself acting as a condom between people who don’t understand your niche field and the thing you’re all building together.

That’s not unique to Claude. However, the fact that Claude can drop big salty loads far faster than you can catch them does present additional challenges.