jwie

I'd believe the thing about the carrots was about marketing for carrots before tricking the Germans.

It's not like such things haven't been done. In the states there are plenty of scams (marketing) to convince us to eat more grains, or drink milk, or consume more {product}. Don't see why it wouldn't be the same anywhere else.

We had a whole cartoon character dedicated to convincing people to eat spinach, which we were wrong about being particularly beneficial as well. These kinds of things, even when well intentioned, have secondary, harmful effects, that far outweigh their purported benefits.

The problem is not that elites exist.

The problem is that the current elites hate the people they rule over, and conspire with capital to rob everyone.

The dreamworld is not a classless society. But rather one where the leaders love those they lead and work for their betterment.

That being said, I’ve met enough Harvard and ivy types to have a low opinion. They’re no smarter than anyone else. These networks are powerful though. They will eventually collapse due to the crushing weight of their own incompetence and greed, but such corrections to the natural order take generational time.

SEO won a long time ago. Google fights a hopeless war against legions of soulless locusts.

For all its resources it’s incapable of improving the situation. Since it only understands proxies of quality and truth, and these things can be manufactured and industrialized, they are incapable of winning.

Blogspam and fraud consistently outrank the original, and changes to the rules frustrate legitimate sites more than SEO spam. If anything these frequent changes increase the demand for SEO, not make it harder. You just wind up with more.

Until they figure out some kinda digital pesticide for SEO spam, the situation will continue to get worse.

There are two aspects to that saying.

The word adequately, and the fact it was made when presuming good faith was more reasonable.

These days it's better to assume everything is theft, fraud, or marketing.

There’s a gulf between the lack of expectation of privacy and that information pushed into a social media platform.

Sure, I don’t have an expectation of privacy. But I do have an expectation of not being made into content for anyone to consume.

Thank you! LLMs have raised the floor; not the ceiling. It's much easier to do stuff that was already kinda easy, but not easier to do things that were hard.

Maybe LLMs free up intellectual bandwidth for some, but what will we do with that increased productivity? Mostly scams for now, but I'm sure it'll be able to find many other net-negative or wealth-extraction applications.

If they can buy it then I can opt out.

It is an unconstitutional practice. If they didn’t think it was they wouldn’t go through the extra steps to get the data. Outsourcing one part of the illegal enterprise doesn’t make the whole thing legal.

But if they want to play this game, an interesting way to bait a Supreme Court case might be to request a CCPA delete for the NSAs “commercial” data.

It’s a segmentation issue. The ad buy was for “people going to restaurants” but it might have been “people going to {type} restaurants.”

Thought it’s probably not that simple. A naive ad buy might not care to target, or targeting is too expensive and you’re ok wasting some impressions because it might be all-in cheaper, or {brand} has the media budget to pay to be in front of your eyeballs all the time.

Easy thing to do would be very low maximum word counts. ChatGPT is incapable of brevity.

Dolphin on the Steam Deck in an officially supported capacity is likely the concern. That’s a strictly better Switch running exclusive Nintendo games.

It's far too early to say Sam Altman has succeeded at anything. We must imagine "replacement Sam Altman" who does the same things with the same resources and obtains lesser outcomes, or totally fails.

There's a Sam Altman replacement middle manager out there who only got the job because of nepotism, one of them barely pays his rent because his parents cut him off, the other one died of a bad trip of psychedelics in college, etc.

If success of this scale were repeatable we'd have bottled lightning for sale like it was Coca Cola. If people had such a formula they'd keep it just as secret.

Switzerland seems to be doing great with its drug policies. Why is that strategy so effective and other nations seem incapable of noticing or trying something similar?

“AI” eating itself is the best outcome for everyone.

It’s a mass energy balance. The inputs equal the outputs; garbage in, garbage out.

SEO is kinda dead.

In an honest form it’s “don’t confuse the crawler.”

In its actual form it makes the web worse. Even if you create a strategy that works Google will eventually shut it down.

It’s an adversarial relationship. The search engines want you to buy ads, not win shelf space.

The organizations that can pull off SEO still do it more to suppress competition. It’s not a low cost way to find customers anymore. It’s keeping people from figuring out you can file your taxes for free.

No to all questions since there’s probably a way in which doing any of those things still obeys the rule. The rule is about achieving the intent of the rule, not rote obedience.

The park might contain a parking lot, or an area where skateboarding is permitted, etc. Absent context, or a specific park, who could say if any of the things listed violate the rules.

As for what constitutes a vehicle, this is why you give examples.

That's unfair fair to the oil companies. They at least produce power and a wide variety of very useful materials for industrial applications.

The AI tools generate spam.

Oil has a trade off that's at least intellectually defensible. Spam does not.

The time for Reddit to have gone public was with all that other spac mania during the pandemic.

These days pesky investors are going to demand things like, a business model and a profit opportunity.

There will always be tension with an interface for a freemium product since it’s bad on purpose. The Apollo interface is better for the consumer, but worse for Reddit. Their interests are not aligned. Even if Reddit were to purchase Apollo they’d never reskin Reddit since the UX does what it needs to do.

I did more or less. I said I’m the instructor of record I can decide how I take assignments. Next thing was “paperless” complaints. I was “using too much paper.” After a little back and forth they got tired of me, handed me a degree and told me to leave.

I think what really irked them was other students found out and started demanding it from all the real professors and adjuncts and in other contexts. Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker.

It’s so much worse than you think.

Many textbooks come with license keys specifically so you can’t buy used books anymore.

Students who do buy a used book are typically coerced into buying the license key to do digital homework, or whatever other reason.

When I was teaching during a graduate fellowship I accepted paper assignments for students who bought used books, or who shared books with other students. The Pearson representative complained and I was given a talking to by the graduate student dean about consistency or some such nonsense. Eventually I would be reassigned to teach classes that didn’t involve digital components.

We called it the textbook industrial complex.

In a world where the people trust their government to serve them and look after their interests such a system could work.

Until then, no.

This sort of stuff is the natural consequence of the verifiability over truth approach Wikipedia has foolishly embraced.

ChatGPT detectors don’t work at all. Why would I believe a study about detection needing to be more equitable when the whole thing is bs from the start?

Come up with different ways to assess students. Writing samples don’t work anymore get over it.

It really depends on the country, and the particular school district. In the US our problem is cash being syphoned off into "not really education."

Around 10-12k worth of education dollars are spent per year per student at a public school in the US. This money does not educate the children, or even go mostly the teachers' salaries.

The nations that figured out how to get the cash to the people who matter in education are the ones doing it right. Most western countries spend a lot of cash on education; they just spend it in horrifically bad ways.

This quirk of the west should really be addressed. The feds “own” far too much of the western US.

Turkey’s mistake was not using an extra layer of indirection to accomplish what they wanted.

They were too straightforward. Suppression is just around the corner you only need outsource it to “non” governmental orgs.

I’d had a site in a similar state, and I did figure out what it was doing.

Client had launched a product that was a bit more successful than typical. Nobody could access the site though. I dig around a little, come to find a neat little snippet of template looking for a featured user for some markup.

The genius who set this up iterated through each record trying to find the featured item. One query at a time, testing each record in the application for the flag.

Php is fine, some very inexperienced “developers” use it though so you find a lot of gems like that in the space.

Not all radiation is created equal, and the delivery mechanism is very important.

Breathing in material emitting an otherwise harmless amount of alpha particles (essentially a helium isotope particle stripped of electrons) is very harmful. Those ionizing particles get into lung tissues and since they’re charged and have a lot of mass they can do a lot of damage in a local area. Internal doses are orders of magnitude more harmful.

Radiation is generally safe, but there are types of radiation doses that are very harmful. It’s less about the radiation level and more about what kind, how it’s delivered, and over how long a time span.

Landlords should be required to publish what capital they’re putting into a property, including interest. This data point alone would make it clear how good of a landlord you have.

There are two tough spots for landlords. There are some truly awful tenants out there. You can’t effectively screen them out.

The other hard place is lenders. Lenders soak up the margin. Unless the landlord rents out free and clear property he’s always behind, and it’s hard to maintain “his” property to provide a real service to tenants when he's collecting for the bank.

That’s hard a lot of this is knowledge from my Classics days.

There are other theories about Homeric verse. Scholars are pretty sure about formulaic composition explaining some features of Homer. It passes the sniff test and is a simple explanation to a lot of artifacts in the Homeric texts. Some analysis of Homer is misguided since it wasn’t made as a written work. This isn’t a universal belief among scholars today afaik, but it’s a defensible position.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition