This blog – update

Life, uh, finds a way to inconveniently intervene with important tasks like blogging. Although I have quite a few articles lined up, they only have to be written! Some of these are so hardcore that I probably neither going to publish nor write them. In fact I consider deleting the blog before the point arrives where all text on the internet is de-anonymized by machine learning models that infer identical authorship for stuff written in forums, blogs, books, articles, papers, on twitter or even said in videos, podcasts and the like under different names and identities.

I have little doubt that this is in principle possible and at some point it might be done for those anonymous authors that trample too many holy cows. And it would mean that every text by me under my real name would risk triggering a comparison with the database of naughty authors. It might even become a service for HR – check whether the guy who just send you a resume might share a suspicious amount of favorite vocabulary, phrases, grammatical mistakes, topics, etc. with a political deviant.

Of course deletion comes too late, too – the internet archive has already archived the internet. So I count on my insignificance in both blogging and real life to keep going a little longer.

Covid still a thing, but I count on vaccinations being effective enough even for strains that evade immune response to a certain degree. So, even with such strains it seems likely that the fatality rate will drop to flu levels. Normality beckons.

Bragging rights: Covid deaths in Germany are now squarely in the range I gave as a realistic more than 14 months ago. 13 month ago I wrote that the lab escape theory (that I thought and still think is reasonably likely) is becoming mainstream, but for the US liberal mainstream media this moment has only now arrived. Earlier endorsing it would have meant aligning with Trump, so everybody mentioning it was vilified. Now, a Nicolas Wade article seems to have flipped the mainstream attitude.