I would’ve been very disappointed if the first comment wasn’t about his couch-fucking tendencies. Thank you for your service.

lol so fucking true.

Not only is no help available, but the Dept of Ed has been pestering borrowers to re-certify their Income-Driven Repayment plan, since Biden’s SAVE plan is blocked by the courts leaving the shitty IDR as the only option for those who can’t afford their full payments (most people, I’d assume). But if you go to the page where you do the recertification, you’ll find that the forms have all been taken down.

It’s purposeful, to cause the maximum amount of pain to the most number of people who are the least likely to be able to handle it. I think a lot of them actually do want to burn it all down, and screw all the people who are harmed in the process. That’s what they want their legacy to be. They don’t want people who aren’t already wealthy to benefit from education.

Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.

That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.

Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.

The article explains the problems in great detail.

Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:

All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

(I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)

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Charred fatty goose breast.

Blew my mind.

That’s one good-looking plate!

This one is a little challenging, and there’s not a ton of research out there, but food sensitivities/allergies aren’t caused by people’s ethnicity or background, but their allergies can be adaptations to environmental and sociocultural stimuli, which can be passed down through families, which could subsequently impact what food they decide to eat.

This article might help explain it better, but there’s a bit of a gap in the research into allergies and genetics, though I’m by no means an expert. Here’s a relevant quote:

Research in general, however, suggests that a complex interplay of socioeconomic, environmental, cultural, and systemic health inequities may influence higher prevalence rates of food allergies in certain marginalized populations.

Your description of those desks totally knocked some of my old memories loose. I remember going to a friend’s house in the late 90s when the first smallish “all-in-one” PCs started coming on the market (before the iMac claimed that space in ‘98). They had their new all-in-one PC set up on a tiny desk in the hallway outside their office. It was there so everyone in the family could use it, but I remember being shocked at how small it was, and so impressed that it didn’t need the whole corner of a room.

Ohh I see, thanks for the clarification. That part of your comment threw me off because I hadn’t heard that side of it yet, but that’s a pretty cool concept.

Another big difference is that Pavi is a twin, and her twin sister is also the avatar, so this time around there are apparently two avatars living at the same time. Looking forward to this whenever it comes out, but it seems like it won’t be finished for a while.

Source

The soft crinkling sound of a down comforter.

Do something real

If I had been planning to make a big purchase on Friday, but decided to join the boycott and not make the purchase, that is absolutely doing something. That is money that the retailer will not get from me.

If I usually buy groceries on Fridays, or Friday is the day I drive by the local Target and sometimes stop in, but because of the boycott I actively decide not to, that is absolutely doing something. That is money that those retailers might have come to expect, that they will not get from me.

If enough people make those decisions, the impact will most definitely be felt and reach the top.

Collective action is incredibly powerful. Sometimes collective action means deciding not to do something, together. And that is also incredibly powerful.

I’d love to hear your suggestions on what “real” looks like to you.

Bernie has a very strong Brooklyn accent which is why the R turns to aw, but either pronunciation is totally fine.

Seconding this. He has a great style that keeps it light and simple while still explaining the science behind why certain methods work better than others. I also love that he shows his work by talking about all the testing that goes into his recipes and methods.

He also used to regularly respond to random comments and questions on the other site, which was super cool, though I don’t know if he still does since I went cold turkey so long ago.

For fuck’s sake, I hadn’t heard about this yet. These educational bookshops in occupied East Jerusalem are super famous and one of the only places you can get good quality international books and academic journals in Palestine. Their customers are mostly foreign scholars and students. This is yet another proof point that Israel is proudly genocidal.

Wow that’s wild. The thing that bothers me most about shit like this is that a good teacher would put aside their pride and take it as an opportunity to learn something themselves and show the class how to find out an answer to a question like this. Instead, you’ll always remember her as the dumbass who didn’t know what fossils are.

Goood question. I hadn’t thought about her in ages, but it’s funny how random memories of her class are coming back now. She was a shitty teacher, she clearly didn’t want to be there.