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> This is why this dataset is hard to wrap your head around: there's just sooo much here. It would take a ridiculous amount of time to try to manually read thro

by lurk2 2y ago

> This is why this dataset is hard to wrap your head around: there's just sooo much here. It would take a ridiculous amount of time to try to manually read through it all. Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. He then goes on to speculate that Scot Seddon's disavowal of the January 6th protests was disingenuous, and that his true feelings would be revealed in chat logs after Trump was re-elected. But: > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel. So the guy complaining about conspiracy theories goes on to invent his own despite having access to potentially corroborative data that he simply can't be bothered to read.

dskrvk 2y ago
The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.
- lurk2 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - akdor1154 2y ago
    That wasn't my reading. My reading was that it was a natural question for someone to try and find in the dataset, so would serve well as a motivating example. Yes it's politically sensitive, but it's going to be difficult to find motivating examples in this dataset that aren't.
  - lukan 2y ago
    No claim. Just a question that could not be answered yet, because the search tools are lacking. And this was about the search tools, not Scott.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      Actually, you're right, he didn't explicitly state anything about Scot specifically, I just inferred it from his statement that the group chat "presumably" contained evidence of a crime. > Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. [...] > Ahh, so he's the founder of American Patriot Three Percent, and here's his statement disavowing the violence from January 6, 2021. Looking at the metadata of this PDF, it was created on January 16, 2021. I wonder what Scot thinks about January 6 these days, after Trump was re-elected in 2024. > In all likelihood, I can find out exactly what he thinks, because he probably posted about it to his militia buddies in Telegram, and it's probably in this dataset. The problem is, there's no easy way to quickly filter out messages from him, or even to tell which of these exported Telegram channels he was part of. I think that will be the first problem I solve. While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote.
      - lukan 2y ago
        "While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote." I read it as implying, go check for yourself!
      - sepositus 2y ago
        The vibe I got was the whole article was a tutorial on how to consume a dataset for the purpose of breaking a story. An example story that would be great to break is Scot lying. So yeah, it does come off as biased, but maybe that's how journalism is done nowadays.
roenxi 2y ago
> Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org, OSINT of all shapes and sizes). Even if a body reads the whole thing they need some sort of solid mental schema going in or they'll end up in crank territory. Although why he thinks old mate would change his position on the Jan 6 riots is a mystery (and why he cares). Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
- hsshhshshjk 2y ago
  How about a whole book? > It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    I didn't even catch that on my first reading.
- bawolff 2y ago
  > Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen. In full fairness "riots" is what its called when the rioters lose. If they win they are usually called something more positive and celebrated by the resulting new regime.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    There is a solid tradition of new regimes killing off the rioters because they are unruly troublemakers. Not a guarantee, but certainly a tendency. Nobody likes rioters when you get down to brass tacks.
cvp 2y ago
> So, I figured I'd write a series of posts publicly exploring this dataset and sharing my findings. > ... > At the end, I'll have a single database of Telegram messages from the whole dataset. I'll be able to query it to, for example, show me all messages from Scot Seddon sorted chronologically. This will make it simple to see what he was saying in the lead-up to January 6, immediately after January 6, and then what he's saying about Trump these days, after he was re-elected. There are more parts to come in this series, which is very clearly stated in the post.
- lurk2 2y ago
  If I claim to have evidence that you committed a crime, and announce that I will post the evidence later, should my claims be taken seriously, or dismissed? Even if he's right (and I'm not saying he isn't), this kind of behavior is inexcusable (though completely expected) coming from a guy who calls himself a journalist.
bawolff 2y ago
> > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel. 77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.
- pc86 2y ago
  And let's be honest 77 pages of telegram chats would probably take 15 or 20 minutes to read. It's not exactly Proust.
  - neom 2y ago
    Not that it's a great method but just for fun I gave a large chunk of it to an LLM to process and then asked it for the 20 most disturbing or nefarious things in the chats and it was incredibly boring. Most interesting thing I learned from the files is how many gun toting americans also drive dodge chargers.
    - pc86 2y ago
      I would have expected nice pickup trucks or any TRD Pro trim Toyota. I'd be curious if the LLM's own self-censorship would prevent it from reporting truly disturbing things. Maybe add one legitimately bad thing into the middle of a chat and see if it gets reported.
      - neom 2y ago
        I'm fairly decent a prompt engineering I think, told it was for my art project of a creative writing class and I'd hidden 20 disturbing and nefarious things in the text (made sure to inject a fake murder into the text) - fake murder then a bunch of airsoft stuff, some psychological manipulation, and it oddly surfaced...some fb cookies, heh. 2mill tokens x3 runs
        Koffiepoeder 2y ago
WatchDog 2y ago
The author of the blog post, Micah Lee, appears to be one of the directors of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets)[0]. DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group. Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin. [0]: https://ddosecrets.com/about https://ddosecrets.com/about

by lurk2 2y ago

dskrvk 2y ago

The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.

lurk2 2y ago
[flagged]
- akdor1154 2y ago
  That wasn't my reading. My reading was that it was a natural question for someone to try and find in the dataset, so would serve well as a motivating example. Yes it's politically sensitive, but it's going to be difficult to find motivating examples in this dataset that aren't.
- lukan 2y ago
  No claim. Just a question that could not be answered yet, because the search tools are lacking. And this was about the search tools, not Scott.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    Actually, you're right, he didn't explicitly state anything about Scot specifically, I just inferred it from his statement that the group chat "presumably" contained evidence of a crime. > Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. [...] > Ahh, so he's the founder of American Patriot Three Percent, and here's his statement disavowing the violence from January 6, 2021. Looking at the metadata of this PDF, it was created on January 16, 2021. I wonder what Scot thinks about January 6 these days, after Trump was re-elected in 2024. > In all likelihood, I can find out exactly what he thinks, because he probably posted about it to his militia buddies in Telegram, and it's probably in this dataset. The problem is, there's no easy way to quickly filter out messages from him, or even to tell which of these exported Telegram channels he was part of. I think that will be the first problem I solve. While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote.
    - lukan 2y ago
      "While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote." I read it as implying, go check for yourself!
    - sepositus 2y ago
      The vibe I got was the whole article was a tutorial on how to consume a dataset for the purpose of breaking a story. An example story that would be great to break is Scot lying. So yeah, it does come off as biased, but maybe that's how journalism is done nowadays.

roenxi 2y ago

> Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org, OSINT of all shapes and sizes). Even if a body reads the whole thing they need some sort of solid mental schema going in or they'll end up in crank territory. Although why he thinks old mate would change his position on the Jan 6 riots is a mystery (and why he cares). Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.

hsshhshshjk 2y ago
How about a whole book? > It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.
- lurk2 2y ago
  I didn't even catch that on my first reading.
bawolff 2y ago
> Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen. In full fairness "riots" is what its called when the rioters lose. If they win they are usually called something more positive and celebrated by the resulting new regime.
- roenxi 2y ago
  There is a solid tradition of new regimes killing off the rioters because they are unruly troublemakers. Not a guarantee, but certainly a tendency. Nobody likes rioters when you get down to brass tacks.

cvp 2y ago

> So, I figured I'd write a series of posts publicly exploring this dataset and sharing my findings. > ... > At the end, I'll have a single database of Telegram messages from the whole dataset. I'll be able to query it to, for example, show me all messages from Scot Seddon sorted chronologically. This will make it simple to see what he was saying in the lead-up to January 6, immediately after January 6, and then what he's saying about Trump these days, after he was re-elected. There are more parts to come in this series, which is very clearly stated in the post.

lurk2 2y ago
If I claim to have evidence that you committed a crime, and announce that I will post the evidence later, should my claims be taken seriously, or dismissed? Even if he's right (and I'm not saying he isn't), this kind of behavior is inexcusable (though completely expected) coming from a guy who calls himself a journalist.

bawolff 2y ago

> > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel. 77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.

pc86 2y ago
And let's be honest 77 pages of telegram chats would probably take 15 or 20 minutes to read. It's not exactly Proust.
- neom 2y ago
  Not that it's a great method but just for fun I gave a large chunk of it to an LLM to process and then asked it for the 20 most disturbing or nefarious things in the chats and it was incredibly boring. Most interesting thing I learned from the files is how many gun toting americans also drive dodge chargers.
  - pc86 2y ago
    I would have expected nice pickup trucks or any TRD Pro trim Toyota. I'd be curious if the LLM's own self-censorship would prevent it from reporting truly disturbing things. Maybe add one legitimately bad thing into the middle of a chat and see if it gets reported.
    - neom 2y ago
      I'm fairly decent a prompt engineering I think, told it was for my art project of a creative writing class and I'd hidden 20 disturbing and nefarious things in the text (made sure to inject a fake murder into the text) - fake murder then a bunch of airsoft stuff, some psychological manipulation, and it oddly surfaced...some fb cookies, heh. 2mill tokens x3 runs
      - Koffiepoeder 2y ago

WatchDog 2y ago

The author of the blog post, Micah Lee, appears to be one of the directors of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets)[0]. DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group. Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin. [0]: https://ddosecrets.com/about https://ddosecrets.com/about