In a similar vein, I highly recommend Annie Jacobsen's recent book, Biological War: A scenario. It dives into the Soviet/Russian biological weapons programs and discusses facilities such as the Vector Institute (State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology) located in Koltsovo, Siberia. Interestingly enough, the scenario follows a lab leak of weaponized plague at this research facility... having read the book it was rather shocking to see this headline.
The algorithm giveth, and the algorithm keepeth away.
Before I clicked that link I had never heard of Breaking Points, a political series with over 2MM subscribers. I'm a YT premium subscriber and watch a ton of political stuff, much of it damn similar to what that channel produces.
I also watched a lot of news content and never saw them until seeking them out. I suspect they are suppressed by the algorithm because they are generally willing to give voice to anti-establishment, anti-oligrachy sentiments (both from the hosts and guests). But yea they're great. The primary hosts are explicitly left and right leaning but rarely get caught up in partisan discord and instead focus on high quality, fact based journalism. (Relatedly, the one topic that does most often trigger the occasional bouts of partisan bickering between Saagar and Krystal is COVID and Dr. Fauci, make of that what you will).
Funnily enough the reason why virology therapy (something the Soviets did a lot of research in cuz they didn't have good antibiotics and biotech/pharma) hasn't seen much success at scale is precisely because the body's immune system adapts too quickly. Maybe we will see more success now with AI but it will be a cold day in hell before the powers that be let any garage biohacker have access to LLMs trained on this sort of information.
I saw a post about this on Reddit this morning. Haven't looked into it further, but people were claiming that there are versions of this plague that have been modified to release other toxins. It's effectively a bioweapon: they cure you for the plague, which kills you with the poison it contained.
There are some that had been modified to release endorphins!
>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."
> . . .
> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."
The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".
Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets, so I'd like to see a reputable source. (Having said that, bacteria upregulate selected interleukins to reduce inflammation, so maybe this is a game of telephone based on some actual Soviet effort to increase virulence, just not "euphoria.")
> Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets, so I'd like to see a reputable source.
Where was this claimed? Do we have any definitive confirmation of the Roswell incident anyway?
This sounded so ridiculous that I had to check. The book is Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. This unflattering contemporary review, retrieved from the Wayback Machine, has an excerpt:
The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue work in eugenics. . . . in secret, in the Soviet Union.
Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. . . .
> Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets
Endorphins make you happy as you are. Endorphins have sedative effect. Morphine is a similar substance and it is a sedative, all opioids are.
What makes one socialize is dopamine [1]: "Hypomania, manifesting with feelings of euphoria, omnipotence, or grandiosity are prone to appear in those moments when medication (dopaminergic medication - thesz) effects are at their maximum."
This dopamine dysregulation occurs naturally in people with toxoplasmosis.
This kind of mistake - mistaking dopamine and endorphine, - strongly suggests a fake. I know of one such fake from the former employee of my friend, you can read his account here [2]. My friend was a lead of the "secret" laboratory (next to Kitay Gorod metro station in the center of Moscow, in an institute that needed no documents to enter) that researched how "psychics" and "healers" achieve their results.
The laboratory researched what these "extrasensing people" do and found nothing - given very little training an ordinary men can do the same and even better. At the end of USSR, there was a string of visitors from USA there in the lab, and one of those visitors successfully persuaded US government to open similar research program, according to [2].
The fearmongering of "endorphin-producing bugs that make one socialize and spread" looks like, well, fearmongering to obtain funds for Big Pharma's government contracts, etc. It messes up two very different neurotransmitters, a mistake that real scientist would not make.
Sedatives are often also dis-inhibitory drugs (like alcohol, but that one has a more complicated profile also involving dopamine) and benzos, and they contribute to socialization by downregulating inhibitory behavior.
(the link is a translation to Russian, I was unable to find the original text in English)
Also consider that toxoplasma changes rat's dopamine serum level to such extent that they stop fearing cats. The same happens with humans, changes in dopamine serum level are so profound that toxoplasma-infected people become more appealing than regular people.
Those two things are not alike, and the claim about Wikipedia is a blatant lie ... certainly it is vastly more reliable than you are. Other comments from you:
> there is a gatekeeping cretin in his basement hitting refresh to make sure he controls the world's definition for egg salad.
Regarding Reddit, there is a lining of truth behind his claim (despite possibly being a troll based on account age). Someone years ago made a well written post about it on reddit (yes I know, kind of ironic)
Things have certainly changed since the introduction of AI, but I still believe the status quo is mostly the same regarding people who create content or write content and people who passively consume it.
Indeed. I wonder how much work it would be to make this antibiotic resistant. Then the Russians develop some bacteriophage that infects and kills the bacteria as their own cure.
Making it antibiotic resistant is not difficult and they already did that back when they were the USSR. Not only did they develop it, they produced large quantities of it to stockpile for a rainy day.
The phrase "gain-of-function research" has acquired almost magical properties on the Internet. You can do literally anything you want to a pathogen with it.
Purposely giving a pathogen increased infection abilities and more lethality, and expecting to be able to contain it in a lab has proven to be wishful thinking time and again.
Gosh I hadn't realised there was that much - employing up to 65,000 people and able to produce 100 tons of smallpox!
I read a bit about bioweapons re covid. Apparently Xi said he wanted China on a par with other countries in all military technology which presumably included biological - the Wuhan lab was run by the military and very secretive - China signed the Biological Weapons Convention not do do that kind of thing.
Also a bit on the Ukraine biolabs stuff - there were conspiracy theories they had those making biological weapons funded by the US which I'd assumed was just nonsense but they were actually real soviet bioweapons labs that the US had funded to switch to non weapons research.
I worked at Google datacenters for over a decade. It was a huge ordeal to request running generators because our entire ECS (environment control services) team was geared towards NOT having to run them. I know AWS and Microsoft both have a similar situation. The referenced article just seems like senseless fear mongering.
Same is true for software "engineers". We don't take a professional exam or adhere to any professional licensing. We aren't legally engineers in some states/nations.
You'll often find a lot of engineers, and in my experience, a lot of former navy nuke personnel, overseeing the power and facilities at large data centers. There also tend to be a number of others with engineering backgrounds working in data center operations even if a lot of their work may not be what would commonly fall under "engineering". Technicians who perform some of the break/fix and routine maintenance do tend to be lower skilled but, again, it's not uncommon to find advanced degrees. I knew someone with a Phd in Chemistry working as an entry level data center technician because they were simply looking for something different outside of academia and it was a career that had rapid advancement potential.
Yes, I worked for a bit on site at a datacenter in Fort Worth and was surprised by how many ex-nuclear-submarine engineers there were. I guess it's similar, you have a lot of high tech equipment in an environment where the climate is closely controlled.
In Canada, members of the Royal Canadian Engineers have just as much right to the title of engineer as professional engineers do, and the operators of locomotives are also referred to as engineers.
You're using engineer in a highly context specific way; yes, in some contexts, engineering is a licensed field, but the general meaning of the word is:
> Engineering is the practice of systematically applying natural science and mathematics to design and improve systems, devices, or processes that solve problems under constraints.
Which is a word-for-word description of the sort of work (…some…) software engineers do.
(Perhaps less and less "systematically applying science" these days with the slop fest out there … but the field should be doing engineering.)
Most software "engineers" never got a degree in engineering, and even fewer ever bothered to do what is necessary to enter the profession where it is regulated.
I can agree: my parents bought a top loader and dryer in 1975 ('Made in Newton Iowa") which was used a few times a week for 30 years and now once a week for the last 21, as far as I know without repair. Now held by a family member they still look like the day they were delivered due to the porcelain enamel used instead of the painted metal that disintegrated on my second front loader. I've managed to repair my 3 front loaders through an average of about 8yrs each, so far.
I've joked with my wife that if I see that washer by the side of the road I'll carry it home on my back.
The primary failure I've observed in washing machines that get a lot of use is the drain pumps which are probably similarly (un)reliable across designs (we only have front loaders so not sure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm?
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