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If one reads a page a minute, which is a pretty decent rule of thumb, then a 600 page novel takes you ten hours, and reading ten of those takes you 100 hours. That’s reading for roughly 20 minutes a night over a year, taking some days off. Not the most common hobby nowadays, but hardly inconceivable for a busy person.

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In Blindspotting (2018), a white protagonist is shown as being able to fluently speak an incomprehensibly dense version of AAVE, and it’s revealed later he has no idea what he’s saying (despite communicating effectively). I’ve never seen anyone criticize that joke.

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Supreme Court justice Sotomayor notes that nothing in the government’s reasoning about not returning Garcia is unique to noncitizens. President Trump says he wants to send “homegrowns” to the gulag in El Salvador, and is exploring his legal options. In court, the government has argued that they have no recourse to force the return of any prisoner from that gulag. This is neither false nor inflammatory; it is the administration’s stated goal.

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This concept is worthwhile, but the author is so focused on malice that he neglects real examples. For example, I think many people agree with vegans about animals’ capability for suffering, and don’t WANT to increase it, but just don’t consider it worthy of moral consideration. The factual beliefs are the same, but the moral choices are diametrically opposed.

Similarly, many (not all!) conservatives and liberals basically agree about the effects, positive and negative, of immigration. But one side doesn’t want those people here, and one does. You don’t need to have different beliefs about the world to be on exact opposite sides of that issue.

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For the first example: that’s not censorship? It’s just a bad algorithm. Also, I don’t even know what “left-leaning” means in this context; the top result is from the Australian national broadcaster, and seems pretty straightforward. No one thinks nurses murdering Israelis is a good thing.

For the second example: Mullis is literally insane, and you can still find his opinions on YouTube, as you yourself found. Did you try uploading those lectures you found yourself? I’ll bet money that they won’t be take down (except maybe for copyright).

To be a little less charitable: this is a persecution fantasy. The right wing is not being silenced by YouTube.

3 yıl öncediscuss

I've been eagerly awaiting the new Lord Peter Wimsey novel! To avoid burnout, I've been reading them as they enter the public domain instead of reading the whole series all at once, and I was hoping that it would be in the first batch this year. Thank you so much for your hard work!

3 yıl öncediscuss

You're describing The Man Who Was Thursday. Great novel!

3 yıl öncediscuss

Some hens begin crowing like roosters. It's really annoying for backyard chickens, but I have had it happen a few times. That suggests to me that while chicken behavior varies based on sex, that is a spectrum, not absolute categories.

4 yıl öncediscuss

For all of these, an attempt to add more features (patching, additional car controls, video sharing) leads to breaking something that works. It's not so much that new tech is bad; it's that we reached a stable, pleasant equilibrium (as with the car), and then added features without considering if they improved the UX (or with the goal of finding ways to increase monetization, eg by selling feature activation in cars or adding spyware to video games).

I think one broad takeaway for me is that if tech cannot connect to the internet, it's often more pleasant to use.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I had to write 40 individualized reports this weekend. I fed my notes into GPT, along with a few directions about style, and it spit out competent reports that mostly only required tweaking. It saved me from losing my Sunday too.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I'm typing on a Star LabTop. It Just Works, No problems with drivers, no difficult set up; I unboxed it, turned it on, and had a functional Linux laptop. It's very easy to type on, the battery life is great, and I strongly prefer it to my 2016 MacBook Pro.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I honestly don't see the point. The Deck is like the Switch: easy to use in both docked and handheld mode. All Valve has to do is to bundle a dock and some new controllers and they have a full fledged game console.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I think OP's point is that there's one more major use case — gaming — for which Windows has a newly viable competitor. It's not that Linux is going to replace Windows, but that Windows could suffer a death by a thousand cuts. I'll note that more and more offices that I encounter seem to be switching to Chromebooks.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I just want to note (this is what I studied for my MA) that Krashen is very controversial in the field. Many researchers argue that output is critical to learning, and "interactionism," the idea that learning is facilitated through conversation, is probably the dominant theoretical approach at the moment. See, for example, Second Language Learning Theories, by Mitchell, Myles, & Marsden, chapter 6.

4 yıl öncediscuss

That's really cool! Thanks for sharing.

4 yıl öncediscuss

Related to this: I had fun the other night trying to explain rhymes to ChatGPT. It could ONLY write rhyming couplets, and even when I explained exactly which sentences in a poem I wanted to rhyme, it would write a couplet. (That even happened sometimes when I asked it specifically NOT to rhyme). Eventually I got it to manage ABAB rhymes by: 1. Asking it to generate four sentences on a topic with the same meter and number of syllables. 2. Asking it to come up with two rhyming words that relate to that topic. 3. Asking it to replace the first sentence with a new sentence where the last word is the first of the two rhyming words, and similarly with the other sentence. 4/5. Same as 2/3, but for the other sentences. 6. Asking it to follow all those steps again, explaining each one as it goes along.

The funny thing was that it kept trying to skip steps or simplify what it was doing. It also got completely confused when I asked it to extrapolate the pattern to new rhyme schemes, eg ABA BCB.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I agree with most of what you said, but as someone who recently switched from a Pixel 6 to a Fairphone 3, I just wanted to speak up for it. At this point, a phone is pretty much a phone, and I have no meaningful difference in UX experience. I mostly bought this one because I was quoted $300 for a screen replacement, and figured I'd rather have something that I can cheaply fix myself next time I drop it.

4 yıl öncediscuss

One oddity for me (and I haven't played with a lot of AI art, so maybe this is normal): every time I try to describe a person, it generates like four to seven different faces.

4 yıl öncediscuss

It's such an odd coincidence to see this now; I just discovered this series a week ago. I teach elementary school science and math, and I've already used a few excerpts from this (from Universe and Calculus) to help illustrate important ideas. I'm also a huge fan of Gonick's The Cartoon Guide to Genetics, which I'm using with the younger kids. As far as I'm concerned, we'd replace pretty much every textbook with comic books.

7 yıl öncediscuss

They don't have a mobile OS anymore. Apple is hardware-limited; there's a much larger buy-in required if you wanted to switch from Windows to MacOS than to Linux. And companies could save a LOT of money on computers if all they needed for software was Office and that were available on Linux.