Yishan
@yishan
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I run Terraformation, and I was once the CEO of Reddit. Both are very interesting challenges. Views are mine alone, but also yours if I do my job right.
Made on Earth by Humans
Joined April 2008
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Pinned Tweet
In this essay, I outline Why You Shouldn’t Go Net Zero this year.
This essay is one of the first in a series we’re launching called Who Will Speak For The Trees, bringing together many voices from the reforestation world.
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I've now been asked multiple times for my take on Elon's offer for Twitter.
So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private. (I have little knowledge/insight into how actual takeover battles work or play out)
(long 🧵)
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The internet is not a "frontier" where people can go "to be free," it's where the entire world is now, and every culture war is being fought on it.
It's the MAIN battlefield for our culture wars.
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I’m about to do the Lumina treatment, a cure for dental cavities developed by Lantern Bioworks.
I figured I’d do an unboxing and let you come with me on this journey. Here’s the box:
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They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.
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It means that upholding free speech means you're not standing up against some religious conservatives lobbying to remove Judy Blume books from the library, it means you're standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side.
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Contrarian opinion: the recession we're having now (or heading into) is caused primarily by covid, and not by monetary policy or inflation or anything like that.
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Google’s Gemini issue is not really about woke/DEI, and everyone who is obsessing over it has failed to notice the much, MUCH bigger problem that it represents.
(1/n)
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Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR.
(This is why people on the left and people on the right both think they are being targeted)
The problem with social networks is the SOCIAL (people) part. Not the NETWORK (company).
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OH: "Amazon was the first company to adopt the hybrid model: working from office on Monday to Friday and working from home on Saturday and Sunday."
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Neither side is lying.
Mostly, it's really because enforcement is hard, and there are LOTS of errors. There's a separate emerging problem (more FB than Twitter) where AI models make inhumane/dystopian judgments that can't be appealed, but that's a separate issue.
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My theory as to why attractive people get bad plastic surgery is that standard camera lens focal length is different from what one sees in a mirror.
Women need to stop plastic surgery until we figure out what's wrong. Why would you ruin your face like this?
This is Erin Moriarty from The Boys...she was already very pretty.
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This will ultimately be cited as one of the finest examples of mob irrationality.
It's saying: "We're upset, so we're instinctively polarizing and threatening to hand over the world's most powerful company to Microsoft for $0."
700 of 770 OpenAI employees saying they will go now. What is the board going to be board of?
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Reddit was born in the last years of the "old internet" when free speech meant "freedom from religious conservatives trying to take down porn and sometimes first-person shooters." And so we tried to preserve that ideal.
That is not what free speech is about today.
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Two weeks ago, the NY Times asked to interview me regarding Elon and free speech, saying (among other things) that she believed that thus far, no one has been able to succinctly and convincingly offer a strong counter point to Elon's position for society to consider.
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Elon's been too busy doing Actual Real Things like making electric cars and reusable rockets and fucking actresses/singers, so he has a Pretty Fucking Good Excuse For Not Paying Attention but this is also something that's hard to understand unless you've RUN a social network.
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(It's also where Russia is fighting a real war against us, using free speech literally. But that's another story too)
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I think if Elon takes over Twitter, he is in for a world of pain. He has no idea.
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(Remember when it seemed very important to certain people that we ban things like this?)
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Both sides think the platform is institutionally biased against them.
"All the top executives and board members are men."
"Silicon Valley employees are overwhelming woke and left-wing."
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They DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don't.
Donald Trump was not de-platformed for being right-wing.
I talk a bit about this in my thread about Omega Events:
An exception to the rules will ALWAYS eventually occur, no matter how universal or all-encompassing you think your rules or principles are.
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It's not that the principle is no longer valid (it is), it's that the practical issues around upholding that principle are different, because the world has changed.
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Elon is one of those, because he doesn't understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture.
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This free speech idea arose out of a culture of late-90s America where the main people who were interested in censorship were religious conservatives. In practical terms, this meant that they would try to ban porn (or other imagined moral degeneracy) on the internet.
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There is this old culture of the internet, roughly Web 1.0 (late 90s) and early Web 2.0, pre-Facebook (pre-2005), that had a very strong free speech culture.
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[Hey Yishan, you used to run Reddit, ]
How do you solve the content moderation problems on Twitter?
(Repeated 5x in two days)
Okay, here are my thoughts:
(1/nnn)
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All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy, and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence ...
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I KNOW he doesn't, because he was pretty late to Bitcoin, and if he'd been plugged in to internet culture he would've been on Bitcoin way earlier.
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Jack has his meditation retreats and unusual diets and spiritual journeys - he's an odd guy yeah - but I'm pretty sure some of that is so he can cope with All You Fucking Assholes.
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Because the problems are NOT about politics, or topics of discussion. They are about all the ways that humans misbehave when there are no immediately visible consequences, when talking to (essentially) strangers, and the endless ingenuity they display trying to get around rules.
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All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda and they ALSO have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when...
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I am probably one of a small number of people who have had the chance to work directly with both
@AdamDAngelo
and
@Sama
and get to know them.
Here’s what you need to know about these two guys:
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You really want to avoid censorship on social networks? Here is the solution:
Stop arguing. Play nice. The catch: everyone has to do it at once.
I guarantee you, if you do that, there will be NO CENSORSHIP OF ANY TOPIC on any social network.
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It turns out that the dark part of "humans are very adaptable" is also "when something is really bad and there is no palatable solution, a large percentage of people will deny it, minimize it, or even gaslight themselves and others into thinking it's actually a good thing."
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... of times when the platform has made enforcement decisions unfairly against innocuous things they've said, and let far more egregious sexist/racist violations by the other side pass.
Woke friends: it's true, right? You have LOTS of examples.
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People debating about whether Sora “understands physics” miss the point that most human beings don’t “understand physics” - at least not in any analytical form that enables internal calculation.
Humans have a “vibe” for how things move in the physical world, and that’s it.
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This event is significant because it is major demonstration of someone giving a LLM a set of instructions and the results being totally not at all what they predicted.
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It was "censored" not because it was a wrong idea, but because ideas really can - at certain times and places - become lightning rods for actual, physical, kinetic mob behavior.
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I think one under-appreciated positive effect of remote work has been erasing the discriminatory effect of HEIGHT, especially on perceptions of leadership ability.
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That is just an unpleasant, inconvenient truth that all of you (regardless of your political leaning) need to accept about speech. Ideas really ARE powerful, and like anything else that is powerful, yes, they can be DANGEROUS.
I'm sorry, it's just true.
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The majority of human beings cannot fully comprehend a statement that has a conditional as a key part of its meaning.
This sounds incredible to those who can, but I'm pretty sure it's true.
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It is because we brought all of our old horrible collective dysfunctions onto the internet, and the internet is very fast and everyone can say anything to anyone, and the place where that happens the most is on the social platforms.
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And the old GenX tech titans are right there with you - vaguely left-wing but also center-right - seeing their version of "censorship" - and drawing all the wrong conclusions from it about what's happening with the management of social platforms.
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And the worst part, the part that is going to hurt ALL OF HUMANITY, is that this will distract from his mission at SpaceX and Tesla, because it's not just going to suck up his time and attention, IT WILL DAMAGE HIS PSYCHE.
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... the platforms have made enforcement decisions unfair against them for innocuous things they've said merely questioning (in good faith) the woke orthodoxy, and let far more egregious violations by the other side stand.
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But the platforms have to be polite. They have to pretend to enforce fairness. They have to adopt "principles."
Let me tell you: There are no real principles. They are just trying to be fair because if they weren't, everyone would yell LOUDER and the problem would be worse.
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Common sense says that if you kill a million Americans (even retired ones), and cripple tens of millions more with chronic fatigue, it is going to have an effect on a nation's productivity.
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They kind of care about money, but mostly they wish you would shut up and be civil.
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I want you to pause for a minute and think about your political alignment and whether you're on the left or right of this issue, because you probably think one of those things.
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There is a reason why Jack has a crazy meditation routine and eats one meal a deal and goes on spiritual retreats. Because it takes an INHUMAN level of mentality to be able to run something like this.
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The most astounding thing to me about Von Neumann was not his capabilities, but the fact that he seemed to be entirely well-adjusted, had no mental illness or emotional traumas, and related quite well socially with normies.
From athletics to intellectualism to just sheer resilience, I love seeing the peaks of human ability. That said what would be the athletic equivalent of a 6yr old dividing 2 8-digit numbers in their head? My first thought is like a 14 second 100m dash. No idea though
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Right-wingers and libertarians: it's true, right? You can remember PLENTY of examples.
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"The best antidote to bad ideas is not to censor them, but to allow debate and better ideas."
How naive.
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Long Covid appears to be “virus gets into parts of the body that the immune system can’t fully clear, immune system remains activated because it knows it’s there, causes damage to the body.”
(This accords with the reports that paxlovid tends to help significantly, if not…
Oh my god, you guys-
@NIHDirector
just said
#longcovid
is live, replicating virus.
"We see evidence of persistent live virus in humans in various tissue reservoirs, including surrounding nerves, the brain, the GI tract, to the lung."
FINALLY.
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Replace "lab leak theory" with whatever topic you think has been unfairly censored, and the reason it was censored (or any other action taken against it) is not because of the content of that topic, I ABSOLUTELY ASSURE YOU.
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What if I told you that I had created a low-cost, self-replicating, carbon capture device nearly 10x more efficient than anything else you can purchase at scale today?
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This is what you think of when you hear "debate."
This is not what is happening on social networks today.
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This paper appears to yield a number of VERY USEFUL hypotheses and treatment for critical patients if true:
(1/n)
i dont think this paper is getting enough airtime. theorizes how and why coronavirus reduces blood O2 and causes "crushed glass" lung imagery (kicks out heme from RBCs), risk factors (high A1C, blood sugar, hemoglobin), and why certain treatments work
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Elon is going to try like heck to "fix" the problems he sees. Each problem he "fixes" will just cause 3 more problems.
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But that is impossible: they (we) made a platform where anyone can say anything, largely without consequence, so people are going to be their worst selves, and social networking is now The Internet, and everyone is on it (thank you
@chamath
), saying WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANT.
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I'm now going to reveal the institutional bias of every large social network (i.e. FB, Twitter, Reddit):
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It is demonstrating very clearly, that one of the major AI players tried to ask a LLM to do something, and the LLM went ahead and did that, and the results were BONKERS.
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Elon is not going to fix some problems. I am absolutely sure of this. He has no idea what he's in for.
(He might hire back Jack, which might be ok, but I don't know if Jack wants the job. Who knows. All the tech titans are buddies, kind of)
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I mean, it's not like he isn't already an emotionally damaged guy. (Sorry Elon, it's pretty obvious) But he has overcome a lot. And he does not need more trauma from running Twitter.
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And then Susan Calvin would come in, and she’d ask a couple questions, and explain, “No, the robot is doing exactly what you told it, only you didn’t realize that asking it to X would also mean it would do X2 and X3, these seemingly bizarre things.”
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"Debate" is a vague term, and what a social network observes that causes them to "censor" something is masses of people engaging in "debate" - that is to say: abusive volumes of activity violating spam and harrassment rules, sometimes prompting off-site real-world harm.
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Virus is disrupting the hemoglobin’s oxygen capacity. It is attacking our BLOOD first, not the lungs. It is NOT a respiratory ailment (primarily), lung breakdown symptoms are a consequence of the attack on blood hemoglobins.
Hypoxia is happening BEFORE lungs are affected.
@cameronks
it behaves like HAPE because hypoxia is FIRST. Hemoglobin is being deoxygenated by the virus FIRST and the lungs respond as if they are hypoxic (vasoc > pulm htn etc).
@emcrit
@PulmCrit
@EMNerd_
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The process through which all of that will happen is painful, which is why I don't think Elon should do it. It is not a good use of his time, and I think his time is uniquely valuable and limited.
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Woke drawings of black Nazis is just today’s culture-war-fad.
The important thing is how one of the largest and most capable AI organizations in the world tried to instruct its LLM to do something, and got a totally bonkers result they couldn’t anticipate.
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It is because at Certain Times, given Certain Circumstances, humans will Behave Badly when confronted with Certain Ideas, and if you are The Main Platform Where That Idea is Being Discussed, you cannot do NOTHING, because otherwise humans will continue behaving badly.
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TIL that the kid who got caned in Singapore totally deserved it and American media lied to us (big surprise these days…)
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I'm surprised that Meta isn't in a total insane lockdown (if anyone remembers what that is) state of emergency, given that their social business is under threat from Twitter, Metaverse is under threat from Apple, and AI is under threat from OpenAI and everyone else.
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Both the mainstream right AND left are pushing the idea that the pandemic is over.
You’d think the “contrarians” might be a little suspicious at such uniformity of opinion but no, not a peep when finally in FACT the governments ARE all lying and media is complicit.
"the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is..."
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If you like this thread, here's some more stuff about what I'm working on and how you can support it:
One of the things we work on at Terraformation is seed banking: creating low-cost working seed banks and educating others on how to do seed banking. I'm going to explain why that's a crucial element of forest restoration as a climate solution.
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This is not an unreasonable thing to do, given that they have a global audience. Maybe you don’t agree with it, but it’s not unreasonable.
Google most likely did not anticipate or intend the historical-figures-who-should-reasonably-be-white result.
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massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.
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It is hard. It is VERY hard. Like eating glass, as Elon would put it.
But it is not as hard as running a social network. And if Elon knows what's good for him AND HUMANITY, he won't do it - he will stick with the Real Atoms, which is what we really need.
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It would have been perfectly acceptable if the lab leak theory were being discussed in a rational, evidence-based manner by scientists on Twitter, but that is not what happened.
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After Reddit, I took a break, and now I work in the world of Real Atoms.
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Do you remember those old Asimov robot stories where the robots would do something really quite bizarre and sometimes scary, and the user would be like WTF, the robot is trying to kill me, I knew they were evil!
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Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...
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Because human variability and behavior is infinite. And when that happens, the social network has to make up a new rule, or "derive" it from some prior stated principle, and over time it's really just a tortured game of Twister.
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Censorship is inevitable on large social network platforms. If you run one of sufficient size, you will be FORCED to censor things. Not by governments, or even by "users," but by the emergent dynamics of the social network itself.
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I think Jack really matured as an exec, his prior experience with Twitter, then his success with Square (i.e. doing it wrong, then doing it right) really raised him to a world-class CEO level, and Twitter finally got to be "pretty good."
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@ESYudkowsky
Every single comedic large-scale error by AI is evidence that when it is even more powerful and complex, the things it’ll do wrong will be utterly unpredictable and some of them will be very consequential.
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If I had to bet on whether Elon will pull through and Twitter ultimately succeeds, I’d probably still bet on the success case. Social networks are surprisingly durable.
Still, there is a KNOWN playbook for how to take over a dysfunctional company and quickly turn it around.
🧵
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Facebook's userbase has at various times been left-leaning, then right-leaning, then bifurcated. So has Reddit's. Twitter's also. The social platforms don't care.
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What happens is that because of the fundamental structural nature of social networks, it is always possible for a corner case to emerge where people get into an explosive fight and the company running the social network has to step in.
Again: Omega Events
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Yes, the execs are (whatever demographic) and the employees are (whatever politics) but they don't care about it. They don't.
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