JoeJonathan

Just because “information wants to be free” is a thing people say doesn’t mean it’s true.

He also calls everyone a grifter, when he seems like one himself. Im deeply skeptical of our AI overlords, but its disingenuous to keep pretwnding theres nothing there.

A lot of people in this thread are talking about how they did in-person exams, handwritten problem sets in class, etc. This kind of thing is more challenging in the humanities, where the research paper is kind of our bread and butter. A lot of us have since turned to different kinds of assignments, but I am not ready to forego research papers in favor of blue book exams. I think there's some value in having to develop and sustain an argument in conversation with some body of literature (scholarly or otherwise), and that is not easily to replicate with in-person writing, at least at the undergrad level. (Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months.)

As an academic, I am happy to see my work on Anna's Archive. Unless your book goes gangbusters, few humanities scholars make any real money from publications, and maybe the 5-10 biggest names in my field make something might get something like ~$40k at signing, and maybe a few thousand more from book sales. So far, I've netted $326 from my first book. But that doesn't matter! We publish because we want our work out there in the world, not because we think it might make us money.

On the other hand, I have no idea who runs Anna's Archive. I wouldn't be surprised if it were backdoor funded by AI companies who want the data available for scraping. Maybe that explains the Spotify debacle?

Was this written by a person or an AI agent?

Not a conventional theater, but I recently went to Vidiots in Los Angeles and enjoyed myself so much I went back a week later. The location I went to has two theaters—37 seat and 270 seat, both with comfortable seating and an excellent picture/sound. Most people who go are kind of movie nerds, so everyone was super respectful. And they don't really play blockbusters, so you don't get that kind of crowd. They seem to be doing well, and I really hope the model works and is reproducible.

Oh, and it was $11 for one of the tickets, $13 for another. I don't remember how much a beer cost, but it was on par with (and maybe less than) local bars.

I use emdashes and endashes all the time—but maybe that's because I'm an academic?

Powell is a grifter? The guy who held the US economy together through a pandemic and subsequent inflation?

Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.

I don't think there's any legal exposure here. Article 16 of 14.063 gives an exception to code protected by Law 12.527/2011. Articles 22 and 23 seem to clearly allow for not releasing source code if that release risks the "financial, economic, or monetary" stability of the country.

Beyond that, Pix is so popular that I doubt a challenge would hold up in court. If it went to the STF, there's no way they wouldn't give Pix a carve out.

I'm as big a fan of open source as anyone else, but can we audit any other payment systems anywhere? Is that a reasonable expectation to have for payment systems?

Funnily enough, você itself was once more formal, having been a contraction of "vossa mercê."

I'm surprised to hear that your family did not use formal language even in prayer. May I ask what religion(s) you grew up practicing? Catholic prayers often use antiquated, formal language (like "vós"). I don't know enough about Candomblé, but at least Nagô Candomblé is pretty highly formalized in the sense that Yorùbá is the liturgical language.

The "Doutor/Doutora" thing bothers me. I see it all the time with my in-laws empregadas, who use it to refer to my father-in-law (who's an MD) and my mother-in-law (who isn't). It feels weirdly obsequious in that context, even though there's a very clear power and class hierarchy.

I'm running 8GB on an M2 and it's no problem at all. I'm not a developer, but will run more CPU/memory intensive processes than most users.

What are the applications in ed?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic

I'm curious to see how this all plays out across different disciplines. The process of learning calculus is different from learning a language, which is different from learning the history of science, which is different from learning ethnographic methods.

There are all kinds of self-interested reasons educators might resist some of these technologies. But this also seems to be one of the areas where people from the tech world impose some idea that could potentially work for their limited domains of expertise but don't work at all for others.

While we can't blame colonialism for everything, "tribalism" throughout much of Africa is as much a product of colonial strategy (divide and conquer) as it is precolonial tension. British colonial administrators mastered this strategy.

Was everything hunky dory after the reformation? Protestant missionaries cleared the ground for British and Dutch colonialism.

There’s no one Islam, so it depends on which Muslims you’re talking to.

The book very explicitly gives credit to the essay, so much so that Mattern frames the argument in relation to the earlier essay.

Counters used to be a standard feature on personal websites. Also, the fact that there were far fewer, and that they one typically discovered other sites through shared weird interests or sheer luck changed the whole dynamic.

Are people defending WhatsApp, or just saying its widely used? In the places I go, you use it for everything from contacting friends to messaging businesses to schedule appointments. It's unavoidable.

Because its stupid and annoying

I spend a lot of time in São Paulo, and no matter how you slice it, housing is cheaper there. Adjunct professors and freelancers can afford houses there. Maids can afford houses, albeit far from the center.

Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.

Do people need privacy (of the sort you mean) and something to work on (meaning a house and not a body, a language, a family, friendships)? Is that why everyone in New York and São Paulo and Tokyo is so sad?

But why? I resisted for years and started taking them a few months ago, and they really seem to be helping. I'm not so much ignoring the structural issues as I'm not so sore from them that I can't deal with them frankly.

Do you really think professors flag plagiarism only when it's cut and dry? Absolutely not. Plenty, if not most, flagged cases of plagiarism are ambiguous. The process at most colleges and universities typically accounts for this via something like review by an academic integrity committee.

On the other hand, I'm a professional academic, and I haven't ever met a highly productive scholar who uses ZK.

I do write for a living, and I found Zettelkasten too high friction to be worth using. Plus, as Cal Newport has argued, it solves the wrong problem. The whole pitch of ZK is that you can jump into your notes and quickly generate new ideas. But experienced writers and researchers rarely struggle to come up with ideas—rather, the real challenge is execution.

Everyone is just kind of assuming that sociological research is "federally funded," but what do we mean by that? Surely, not all research is federally funded. I work in an adjacent field with a similar grant structure, and "funding" is a combination of faculty salary and grants, which typically come from both federal organizations and foundations like Mellon, ACLS, etc.

While I'm all for open access (so long as authors don't need to pay to publish, which is often the case with open access journals), it would be a mistake to think research is publicly funded in the US to the same extent that it is in Europe or Latin America.

Decriminalizing drugs doesn’t fix the supply problem, which makes drug use such a budensome expense that there are all kinds of knock on effects (theft, poverty, etc). Someone commented on how rich people don’t see drug use, but sure they do. Aside from the fact that most everyone here is pretty rich and complaining about addicts, I come from an upper middle class suburb with a ton of addicts. Lots of people I went to school with died of overdosed. But it’s not immediately visible because people’s families reluctantly take them in, they generally have enough money for drugs, etc.

Not arguing for outright legalization—while I once did, I now think it’s naive. And I’m not sure we could pull off a Portugal style system in the US. But descriminalizariam doesn’t seem to be working that well.

“Pão” is pronounced pretty similarly to “pan,” and nothing at all like “pow