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·vor 12 Tagen·discuss
Ivy League classes usually aren't as large as their state school counterparts. At most you might get around a hundred students in a large lecture course; this is rare by design.

You can crunch the numbers on this to verify for yourself – most of these have a population of 6000 undergrads or so. 1/6 of all of the undergraduates need to take a single course for your "up to a thousand" to be true.

I agree that a citation would be nice, but the number of students is indeed large for Ivy League courses (as per the article, in this econ course, he had 86 students for a class that usually only has 30).
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·vor 16 Tagen·discuss
Check out the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of BK. P&L try to really bridge the contextual gap with a lot of footnotes/endnotes.
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·vor 5 Monaten·discuss
Ha! That's amazing! Well I take it back for shower curtains (congrats to your aunt!). I do think the point still stands for Amazon sellers and Zara, but maybe I'm not giving Walmart enough credit.
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·vor 5 Monaten·discuss
What's interesting is that you don't realize how much of that stuff from Walmart had artistic processes embedded into it along the production line.

Did those shower curtains have a design? Did your sweater have a color and style? Probably so, but you never pay attention to how the world of "fine art" refracts into your daily life.

If the products were cheap, it's likely someone unpaid is responsible for the design. See, for example, the lawsuit against Zara over theft of ideas from small-time designers [1].

In any case, cheap Chinese brands do the same thing as Zara en masse (copying designs – note the "external suppliers" bit in its defense PR), and those products then end up in Walmart/on Amazon. The artists starve but you have your shower curtains and are happy with the price.

[1] https://www.grossmanllp.com/independent-artists-on-the-offen...
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·vor 9 Monaten·discuss
The same experience happened to me, but it was even better – I was told I had a "little paronychia" and lanced without anesthetic. Her scalpel rubbing against two nerves in the nailbed of my thumb, the ER doctor lanced and scraped without so much as lidocaine (or even tylenol!)

The next day I almost lost my thumb, because this sadist that enjoyed cutting me open without any painkillers didn't bother to check whether the infection spread to my bone. I was also misdiagnosed by her, and would have lost it had my PC not found a hand surgeon in the nick of time.

Meanwhile, to curtains on either side of me at this hospital were people who were clearly homeless and had come in with some fentanyl withdrawal symptomps, but mostly so that they could sleep on a bed. When my partner tried to intervene and say that he's never seen me in this much pain, the doctor looked at me like I was a junkie, telling me that "it wouldn't hurt if I wasn't acting up."

I understand the "next, next" that happens from burnout, but this was next level sadism. No empathy; she actually seemed to enjoy my pain. No legal action was possible since this was an "emergency room environment" and she was only there "part time."

This was UCSF Saint Francis/ Dignity Health in Nob Hill. Please avoid this hospital if you're in San Francisco.
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·vor 9 Monaten·discuss
>artist

technically, it was the supervising technical director.

The only reason this happened (I don't think "working from home" was very common in 1999) was because she just had a baby! I love this story because it feels like good karma – management providing special accommodations for a new mom saves the show.
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·vor 10 Monaten·discuss
Articles like this [1] (re: Rochdale gang) are contributing to the impression of a link in the UK. There's also the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal [2] which affected an estimated 1,400 girls specifically in Rotherham. Population of Rotherham is 265,800, for reference. In both these cases, girls were charged and the offenders are Pakistani.

There is also a recent video of a girl wielding an ax and knife to protect her and her sister in Scotland [3]. She has been charged with brandishing weapons. Interestingly, the BBC has issued an article [4] claiming that it was a "Bulgarian couple" that the girls approached, and to not "spread misinformation." I am a researcher of Slavic languages, so I can tell you from watching the video in [3] that the accents featured in this video are not Bulgarian. I am not willing to stake a claim in what they actually are (someone else is welcome to comment).

Actually, I'm quite alarmed that the BBC is claiming this, as I generally consider the BBC reputable.

1 – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdd2rld9mj2o

2 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

3 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVfpSbLgiBc

4 – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r40gylxpwo
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·vor 10 Monaten·discuss
In my experience, ChatGPT, at least, seems to have had multiple languages used to train its corpus. I am guessing this based on its interaction with me in a different language, where it changed English idioms like "short and sweet" to analogous versions in that language that were not direct translations.

But my guess is that the data sets used from the other languages are smaller (and actually, even if it had perfect access to every single piece of data on the internet, that would still be true, due to the astonishing quantity of English-language data out there compared to the rest. Your comment validates that). With less data, one would expect a poorer performance in all metrics for any non-Anglophone place, including the "cultural world view" metric.
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·vor 10 Monaten·discuss
ChatGPT is worse in Russian. Example: after accurately noting that a name appeared in a particular Russian book, it asked if I wanted the direct quote in Russian. I said yes. At this point it switched to Russian output but could no longer find the name in that book, and then apologized for having used what seemed to have been "approximations" about the book before.

(I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in English was right, the name is there)
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·vor 10 Monaten·discuss
Seconding Meowwolf! The one I went to in Santa Fe was very hands on and physical, requiring lots of object manipulation as well as crawling through very tight spaces. Absolute delight.

Less so for the one in Colorado, which had more of an interactive back story done through an app; but I understand the Colorado one was also meant to be more ADA-friendly, and it was still pretty good.
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·vor 10 Monaten·discuss
I know of one that "doesn't explain" the exhibits (except through an app/website where you match things hanging on walls with diagrams) – the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston; this is specifically due to the wishes of Isabella Gardner herself, who was opposed to plaques.

There is one room that breaks this rule – I'm guessing it got damaged and then at that point they didn't have to follow her will.

Still worth a visit for the garden, the Titian, lots besides.