veridies

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's really cool! Thanks for sharing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you expect that the Nazis were uniquely evil? What trends in German society made them 'evil' that we lack?

Ordinary people are capable of great evil when they limit their sphere of empathy.

It is the job of a public defender to defend his clients. His statement here is absolutely correct. Prosecutors, on the other hand, have to decide what their jobs are.

Yeah, it's sad – Wolfwalkers was a beautiful, innovative film. While you could argue Soul is better, no one even bothered to look into that category much because the winner was inevitable.

My reaction to this post was similar — is OP sure he actually wants to be a developer? Because honestly, it sounds like a big part of his problem is that he feels like his work lacks meaning. There are many other jobs out there where he might feel more motivated to work.

Because that catchphrase started in reaction to Black Lives Matter, and is used largely to signal opposition to the goal of constraining police actions. If people were holding All Lives Matter protests in opposition to police violence of all kinds, I doubt they'd get much flak; instead, they're protesting the idea that black lives matter.

I think the point is that white people are likely to lack this lived experience. If there's a massive difference in opinion about racism in the country between white and black Americans, that difference of opinion may be due to factors that white people can't easily see.

Then why aren't they, more often?

The post in question is full of strongly stated points, presented with minimal evidence, and in many cases irrelevant to the real argument being had. I would suspect that most people didn't respond because they recognized it as a waste of time. Not every argument is worthy of engagement.

For example:

> Floyd had high levels of drugs in his system, COVID-19, and was complaining about breathing in the car before there was a knee on him.

That makes it much more important not to use a chokehold.

> Chokeholds are also a very standard and typically non lethal form of getting a suspect under control.

This is relevant to whether Floyd's killing was an aberration; the protests were predicated on the assumption that it was not, and that police in general use unnecessary force.

> There’s no evidence of race playing a part in this incident (no evidence of motive)

As per https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic..., a higher proportion of unarmed black men are shot by police than unarmed white men. So whether or not THIS CASE was race-related, there is a racial aspect to the problem.

> or it even being an instance of police brutality (standard and typically safe procedures were used)

"Typically safe" is arguable; Floyd was not the first man killed by a chokehold in completely unnecessary circumstances, where there was no imminent need to subdue the person being arrested (see Eric Garner). But again, this is the problem. Pointing out that it's common looks like an argument against it, but it's really not.

> because of these complicating factors. The news media focus, social media virality, sustained legal protests, and sustained violent rioting have corrupted people’s ability to judge this situation rationally, to the point that people overestimate the number of unarmed black people killed by police by over 50x (https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/poll-44-of-liberals-say-...)

This number is based on a database that documented cases where we know that police have killed someone, we know that person was black, and the police have said the person was unarmed. The police's judgement on what constitutes "unarmed" may not be the same as that of the people polled.

I think you make a good point about how this can be read uncharitably. You're right that I read it literally: a list of specific things which sound good on paper but which can lead to disparate outcomes (with links to explain how each one can be problematic). I also understand that someone who was interested only in criticizing teachers for perceived racism could weaponize this list against them. As a teacher, I have not had that experience, nor am I afraid of it. (The only criticism levied against me by "woke" people has been by students, and the criticism was immediately rejected by my superiors.) But I understand that people are afraid of it, and I know colleagues who fear that happening to them.

I personally am unbothered because this is a document for curriculum designers with real explanations of their arguments, and I doubt that it will encourage a culture-wide opposition to, for example, "right answers." I'm not sure how someone, meaning to avoid racism, would problematically de-emphasize right answers. To my mind, the only likely negative result would be ineffectual scolding. But I'm open to being proven wrong.

(Please note that one or two examples of teachers being unjustly fired is not terrible persuasive, in the same way as one or two marijuana-related deaths is not evidence that marijuana is a society-wide epidemic.)

It didn't say that, though. I agree it could be clearer here, but it seems to be suggesting simply that other values should also be considered when thinking about math education. It never seems to say precision or accuracy are bad or racist.

I am a white teacher. It seems wholly innocuous to me, but I've only skimmed it.