That’s a great point and that I can’t believe I forgot to mention! To add to that, universities themselves use research as a cash cow (they take a large share of nearly every research grant of a faculty member) and as a marketing tool to get more students (tuition), prestige, grants, and so on. The fact that universities market themselves at all is ridiculous.
In the US they are also usually heavily financialized and local real estate behemoths.
The headline says researchers but it makes more sense if you name the progressions.
Most researchers start their careers as graduate students. Graduate students are poorly compensated and, despite the name, very little support or good advice for their advisors, on average. They receive plenty of negative feedback and insecurity, though.
Then graduate students graduate (or drop out), either with a Master’s or PhD. At this next tier of employment they either do a postdoc (basically just doing the last 2 years of a PhD again but with even higher expectations) or join the private sector. Neither the public sector nor private sector have enough positions, let alone well-paid ones with acceptable work environments, to take on the number of graduated graduate students each year. This forces many out right off the bat.
If someone continues to try to become a professor after doing one or more postdocs, this difference becomes stark. There are between 10-20 postdocs that want to be professors for every open professor position.
If someone goes the private track, (1) most of your explicit training goes to waste, as your environment was academic and all of your advice came from the 1 in 10 postdocs that got a professor position, and (2) you now get to try and navigate corporate petty bureaucracy in addition to doing work for whatever the company’s lords deem profitable. Many burn out rapidly in this environment, as while you actually tend to get paid and treated better than a graduate student, this usually comes at the cost of losing all motivation for the research itself. And when you want to advance your career, you get to learn the basic corporate lessons that everyone else does: you can’t advance much within the company because an incompetent boomer that is friends with the CEO is sitting on the position you want and even if they weren’t, the company sees no advantage in paying more for an employee they already have. That’s money they can’t use to “snipe talent” and “reinvest”. So again, the positions available dwindle through that path. So instead you end up making a series of external moves, sometimes purely lateral. You might even find a company where you live the research, but it will almost certainly then be one that offers you worse pay and advancement opportunities. This is usually because the most appealing research has a socially positive impact (or at least rationale) and the companies doing that research know this and adopt a non-profit “sacrifice yourself for the cause” paradigm that, naturally, does not apply to the C suite.
If you are a researcher that didn’t go to grad school, the system is the same but they put career advancement caps on you more quickly and often, regardless of how skilled you actually are.
Oh, and I almost forgot: God help you if you are minoritized in any way. Academia has no real workplace standards, they let people at all levels get away with sexual harassment and discrimination all the time. The usual status quo is that nobody wants to know what a given professor did to a student. They don’t ask and they don’t do any real follow-up to reports. So your experience as a graduate student or postdoc is dictated entirely by whether your advisor is, of their own accord, a good person with good advice and no unseen vices or bad habits. The corporate world is obviously little better outside of the threat of a lawsuit or state investigation.
So, reviewing this, we can make some conclusions:
At every step on the career path, you are expected to accept questionable pay and working conditions so that you can get slightly better ones at the next step. But there are not enough positions for most people to actually reach the steps they want to. This necessarily leads to dropout.
The environments themselves are not great due to a glut of workers, there is a large reserve army of labor to do these positions.
The system functions to maximize the size of this reserve army labor pool through media and communication monopolies. There are very few ways for good career information to get passed to students, postdocs, etc. The only people they ever hear from at the “next level” are the small minority that got into the higher positions. If you had 15 postdocs that didn’t become professors telling you it’s a scam vs 1 professor telling you that you just need to work hard, there would be fewer applications to grad school.
Traditionally, people like myself get killed due to bad opsec.
That’s true! I’m glad I didn’t say anything like, “the system is corrupt because I’m in the minority”.
PS, the ruling class is a minority.
This is a whole lot of conspiracy bs with no sources provided.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s out in the open. I don’t know what claims you would want sources for. Feel free to ask.
But it includes the usual keywords “the system”, “design”, and “ruling class” so you can get your upvotes from like-minded fellows in your bubble.
You might notice that this is a public community on a non-socialist instance. So, the opposite of what you are saying. Personally, I expected a mix of responses.
Have you considered that politics and economics is a little bit more complicated and a lot of gears make the machine?
Complexity vs. simplicity means nothing in this topic. What matters is identifying dominant powers and the mechanisms by which they function. Many of those mechanisms are somewhat complex, though not that complex that anyone can’t read about them and understand them if they actually want to.
Have you read any socialist theory?
But “the elite pulling the strings” is much easier to understand and you conveniently get an enemy.
Class conflict is actually something that emerges from base social interactions that constitute the primary economic system: how and why we work. The dominant class does have more realized power, by definition, but it is still subordinate to the mechanisms of the economic system itself.
For example, you cannot simply choose to be a nice business owner that pays everyone as much as they deserve. You will, eventually, get outcompeted by the business owners that will keep pay lower and profits higher. While small businesses are still commonly owned by petty tyrants, their loss to big box stores is an example of how a larger mass of profits can be leveraged to destroy the competition (initial low prices), then using monopoly status to earn even more profit by cutting wages and increasing prices.
The political class is just the functionaries of the state that serves the dominant class’s interests. You can call them elite because they personally get a bigger piece of the pie and have power on paper, but they are several rings lower on the hierarchy.
Learning media criticism, history, political economy, and how past groups have organized takes a decent amount of time. Namely, socialist theory. So does unlearning the ideological falsehoods that cloud our ability to think and investigate. And so does recognizing what builds power, what actions are effective, what cooption looks like and how to counter it, etc. So I don’t recommend just doing one thing, but instead working from where you are to be closer to a stronger consciousness. I suppose the closest thing to a single recommendation I can give is humility and curiosity around all of the aforementioned topics and to give people grace IRL when you begin working with an organization.
If you are interested in reading recommendations and info about your thoughts on politics I’d be happy to think of something you might appreciate. Or if you feel like you’re ready for action and are in the US I can recommend some orgs that are reasonably good to “start” with (many stay in them and that is also fine!).
Congress is an organ of the ruling class and always has been. When they (rarely) do something seemingly against ruling class interests, it is still a strategem to best keep the capitalism boat afloat (it tries to sink every 5-10 years).
Sure, Congress is corrupt, but it always has been. The system is working more or less as designed. And if you want to oppose this design, the system is also designed to fight you to the death. And funneling all of your capacity into sheepdog voting is how your masters tell you you should oppose them. So if you want to oppose this system, you must become informed as to how it functions and join up with like-minded individuals to develop actually effective means of resistance.
Privacy is a shield. It is useful to protect against a threat. It doesn’t have to perfectly protect against the threat. But the important thing is to have a threat model and construct your privacy concerns around it.
Ask yourself what you believe will be a threat to you and then criticize those beliefs. Use this self-critical process to decide on your first idea of a threat model.
Piped should build out better error messages so that users know this is a problem with Piped getting the video from YouTube.
The only surefire form of privacy is to not store information digitally in the first place, ideally not at all.
But sometimes we do have information that needs storing. And in that case privacy requires that you control the data at rest and encrypt the data at transit. All free cloud services can snoop your data if they really want to. If you value privacy, minimize your use of them.
You should assume that every social network is ride with spying, both for corporate and governmental purposes. For example, the main reason TikTok is currently getting threatened with a banning is because they have a less fed-friendly algorithm, so large masses of people are actually seeing the horrors in Gaza. If you watch the nightly news, you won’t see that content. If you go to YouTube, you won’t see that content. You also will barely see it on Reddit (which literally hired someone that worked at the CIA to be their community manager person lol). Do your best to dissociate your online activity from your personal identity. Use a good VPN that you pay for with cash or a proxy system like a voucher that can’t be traced back to you. Use burner email accounts. Etc etc.
If you do run local, properly use a firewall to prevent it from phoning home. Or airgap.
I think you are confused. The dismissive behavior was not to just give advice and I pointed out what it actually was. And it is not dismissive to meet people where they are at. I think you’re now reaching for some fairly basic defensive behaviors (straw men and even the “I’m rubber your glue” kind of retorts) so I’m going to disengage.
Please do try to interact with others with more empathy.
I was going to let them reply first. You are being rude and dismissive of them, however. Please show your fellow humans a bit more empathy.
They have already stated that they think they should be speaking to someone but are clearly having a hard time. If a chatbot is helping them right now I’m not going to lecture them about “pretending”. I recommend the approach of a polite and empathetic nudging when someone is or may be in crisis.
It is very difficult to run an email provider and not get banned by the others. Google, Microsoft, and Apple control the US market, for example. If they decide your domain is spam, you suddenly can’t email anyone with a Gmail or Hotmail or Apple account. Avoiding getting banned means you have to regulate your own outgoing emails very carefully, rate-limit them just right, and yet also build up a reputation of trustworthiness by sending a lot of emails that don’t get marked as spam.
The only privacy-secure way to do your email would be DIY but this risks getting banned like… all the time.
Personally, I recommend having your own domain and setting up MX records to a reliable email provider that is not one of the big ones and ideally offers some kind of theoretical inbox protection (please note that they could always still read everything if they just copied all incoming messages to another database as well).
Email is itself not very secure. You can use GPG to make it better but most people won’t know how to receive your messages or send secure ones. For security, I recommend using a dedicated e2e chat service or in-person communication.
Oh that’s totally valid. Sometimes we just need to talk and receive the validation we deserve. I’m sorry we don’t have a society where you have people you can talk to like this instead.
I haven’t personally used any of the offline open source models but if I were you that’s where I’d start looking. If they can be run inside a virtual machine, you can even use a firewall to ensure it never leaks info.
I’m unaware of any substantial research on Alzheimer’s or diabetes that has been done using LLMs. As generative models they’re basically just souped up Markov chains. I think the best you could hope for is something like a meta study that is probably a bit worse than the usual kind.
Is it really that useful for you? LLMs are basically parlor tricks.
That is a good idea just so that you don’t have to think about any potential privacy issues. Your email could be {firstword}{secondword}{4 numbers} and so long as the words and numbers are randomly generated, you can avoid accidentally including personal references or biases.
Your username does not need to be high-entropy, though. It will be semi-public. So it’s not about strength against dictionary attack or similar, it is just about leaving the selection process up to a random process that isn’t witnessed by a third party. You can write scripts that will generate these kinds of things using Python and the faker library.