wrp

I feel odd reading a good description of my parents' social evolution in the 1970s-90s, realizing that what I thought was a very personal change was actually part of a popular trend. The proposed explanations don't seem to apply, though. My observation of the change was that my parents seemed to give up on it all due to lack of personal reward. Maybe they lacked the external influences that would have prompted them to keep up old social habits.

When Costco came to Korea, it was a great source of American products at reasonable prices. They have gradually shifted to more Korean brands over the years. Even if you are only buying local products, my Korean friends tell me they prefer Costco for the produce, with greater variety and turnover than domestic supermarket chains.

This comment or something like it should be at the top, because it's the main point about polygraphing. It's the process, not the answers that matter.

I knew a guy who did security clearance checking for the Three Letter Agencies for many years. He told be that if I ever had to do these interviews, I just need to pick good sounding lies and stick to them. He said it's the ones who try to be honest and introspective who get failed out.

There was an MS-DOS tool by James Korenthal called Babble[0], which did something similar. It apparently worked according to a set of grammatical transformers rather than by generating n-grams, so it was more akin to the "cut-up" technique[1]. He reported that he got better output from smaller, more focused corpora. Its output was surprisingly interesting.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Babble_1020, https://vetusware.com/download/Babble%21%202.0/?id=11924

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique

Thank you

> Sam Neil writes hilariously about the filming.

That piqued my interest, so I searched for it but Google AI told me to give up. :-/

Sam Neill has not written about the filming of The Hunt for Red October; he was not in the cast of that film, which starred actors like Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, and Scott Glenn. He is, however, known for his role in Jurassic Park, and there are interviews where he discusses that experience and his work with Steven Spielberg.

I recently watched the whole season of UFO, wanting so badly to like it because of its music and set design, but episodes were soooooo dull. The plot premises seemed promising, but the development was poor.

I recently attended someone in the hospital. The constant beeping and alarms round the clock prevented any deep sleep for days, and seemed to hinder recovery.

Support for part of this from another source. I've read through the collected letters of many famous intellectuals (just for hobby), and I've noticed a common dramatic shift in personality starting around age 28-30. People become more attentive to the needs of others and their own role in a network of social responsibilities. It's no longer "me, me, me".

I was in Hokkaido many years ago for work and loved it. Compared to the rest of Japan, indoor/outdoor spaces are wider, food is better, and people are friendlier. I never could swing another work visit, so I dream about spending time there in retirement.

I could imagine, though, that companies might have trouble attracting quality talent to Hokkaido, because people see more opportunities in the big cities down south. I suppose it's like if you were trying to build a tech hub in Montana.

What would be the plot of a movie equivalent to Blade Runner for this scenario?

As a teacher, I have closely watched the effect of LLM use on student writing and attempts by colleagues to use automated detection. I plead with you, DO NOT USE AUTOMATED DETECTION.

I hate AI slop and I fight against it in my work, but as that style of writing becomes increasingly prevalent, students are unconsciously adopting it for their base writing style. Automated detection of LLM writing never worked well, and now LLM and human writing have converged so much in style that machine detectors are worthless.

Our response should be to refuse to accept slop, whether produced by human or machine. I strive to point out the stylistic details of slop and how to avoid or edit them away.

Problem solving is a well-explored field in experimental psychology. TFA is a bit unfocused, making both some generally supported speculations and some traditional ideas that haven't been supported. A very good survey is the edited volume, The Psychology of Problem Solving (Davidson 2003).

Although TFA doesn't refer to it by name, "insight" problem solving is when you are stuck on something and then suddenly realize the solution. The common explanation for being stuck is "fixation" on the wrong things. In agreement with TFA, there is indication that verbalization supports fixation more than visualization.

There is an even longer history of denigration of the Anglo-Saxon-Jutes and mythologizing the Normans, but 11th century animosities were a different phenomenon that the modern British use of those groups as political symbols.

The traditional grand monuments in the West are arches and obelisks/columns. We already have an obelisk. How about a pyramid/ziggurat? After all, we have one on our money.

Speaking from knowing many people who once had jobs requiring security clearance, I think it's likely that a thorough search of their papers would uncover some stuff that officially shouldn't have left the office. People work on stuff from home and the evaluation of how sensitive something is can be fuzzy. The real concern should be whether the possessor was deliberately acting against national security. This "possession of classified materials" charge has become a political tool. Maybe once both political sides have suffered from it, there will be some effort to reign it in.

Japan used that strategy very successfully for at least a century. The high cost of imported goods encouraged consumers to buy domestic at prices that were also high, which subsidized exports at competitive prices. The Japanese public is less docile now, but this is one example where import restrictions worked well. I believe you can find other examples from the 20th century, but I'm not sure whether they would work well in the current global environment.

I hang out with a mostly older crowd and often eat in downmarket neighborhoods, and I've seen that dish mixing after meals.

Nice to learn that bit about long kimchi slices. I just assumed it was because people like it long, like with spaghetti.

A substantial restaurant meal in Korea is usually served with several standard side dishes. Due to the expense and effort of providing these to each table, restaurants often require a minimum party size of two. Also, I'm not sure if it's illegal or just gross, but if a dish looks untouched, sketchier places will sometimes just pass it along to the next customer.

In medicine and law, it is unethical and sometimes illegal to choose your course of action based on profitability against the needs of the client. Teaching has been traditionally been held to the same ethical standard.

They won't close. They will just rely more heavily on foreign students. The primary focus of academia is to remain employed, not to serve the needs of the domestic student population.

I am professionally interested in the narrative structure of texts, as a teacher and researcher, so I ask this out of genuine interest. I often see posts like this in discussions of LLM use and I wonder where they are coming from. They read like ad copy from a marketing department rather than a non-professional expressing personal feelings. Are you in marketing, or perhaps was this post generated by LLM?

I have a hobby interest in pre-1066 England to the extent of studying the language so I can read literature in the original, and I do find it a very irritating feature of scholarship written in Britain that the narrative is so often guided by modern political concerns.

Need to add, the idea of cultural homogeneity is entirely relative. Japan is or isn't homogeneous depending on who and when you ask, and I'm not even counting the Ainu or other not-of-Japanese-race.

Funnily, when I read up on the state of the art, I felt let down that we are apparently still far away from being able to dissolve cataracts with eye drops. I'm hoping for that when my time comes.

Speaking just about the Renaissance fair phenomenon in the USA, I think the main inspiration was the 1960s hippy obsession with Tolkien. Renaissance fairs were just a big outdoor costume party, were you could prance, toke, skinny dip, and buy/sell crafts. The more realistically named Oregon Country Fair was originally the Oregon Renaissance Faire.

As to why fans of the fantasy genre prefer medieval settings. I know it's a topic of discussion, but I don't know if there is a widely accepted explanation.

Coming from the experience in the PNW, 1960s onward, Renaissance fairs were never about serious historical reenacting. The sex/drugs/music were always focus, sort of like a Grateful Dead concert without the band.

> my male colleagues are, generally speaking, outpaced by my female colleagues.

I've worked in academia, mostly the humanities, since the 1980s, and have observed a clear difference in how much effort women put into social networking and how this affects career progress. On the negative side, this can lead to cliquishness. I even once had a gay colleague who complained bitterly that his sub-field was dominated by lesbians who resisted male inclusion.

It seems to be a frequent observation, such that it may now be uncontroversial, that women generally approach things with a broader contextual awareness while men are in general more narrowly task-oriented. The implication is that we should expect women to generally lead in social advancement while men will tend to have a lead in technical prowess.

An illustration that has given me much cause for introspection, as a teacher and researcher, is my working library. I have about 200 books on a shelf near my desk, that I thought were of such quality that I wanted my own copy always at hand. On that shelf, there is just one book by a woman. I have often considered how it could be that there are so many women in my working life but so few on my shelf.

Reactionless drives[1] have been investigated in other ways. James Woodward[2] proposed something that at least hasn't yet been debunked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_effect

TFA is based on the dissertation work of Kenneth M. Pollack. If you are into military history, his Arabs at War (2002) contains the historical part of the dissertation and is very informative. His second book, Armies of Sand (2019), contains the theoretical part and I didn't feel that it added much understanding.