Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I didn’t call you a bad teacher. And I’m much more forgiving of your rant now that I know. And I’m sorry I explained your chronic underfunding to you, like you didn’t know.

    I am more forgiving of ableist attitudes ≠ completely forgiving of it. You’re mad at the situation. Everybody needs to let off steam.

    I’m going to assume you have already sent your problematic experiences up the flagpole, to no avail. How are your prospects for changing jobs? Not necessarily profession but maybe at a different school? It’s no use trying to ride that tiger every day when this affects you this much.

    For your own protection, you need to take the venting offline. I think you may have already given enough details for your bosses to identify you here. The days of shouting anonymously into the digital void are over. An LLM has the computing power and patience of an army to find and ID you. So if I were you, I’d delete this post, delete the account, and look for trustworthy ears who won’t rat you out next time the pressure in your cauldron is redlining.


  • The people in the nebulously defined West didn’t get into Asian comics first and then gravitated towards the Japanese offerings. Japanese manga companies saw a market for expansion and took advantage of it. Manga is Japanese in the minds of consumers. Most people probably aren’t aware of the Chinese or Korean varieties. Interest in the language came after.

    Japanese may be easier to pronounce for us atonal alphabetters. I would say Chinese beats Japanese by having simpler grammar. None of these linguistic reasons matter though. There are plenty of people who learn mandarin today but they didn’t get into it through comics. Most Japanese learners don’t do it for business reasons. The stereotypes are different.




  • You’re raging against this in very general terms. As a snotty European I would throw in suspension as a disciplinary measure for humans in development, as all children in schools are, should only be the ultima ratio. So learning there are time limits on suspension terms for kids with disabilities sounds absolutely insane to my very snotty European ears.

    If a school system in the US implemented inclusion without individual review when it isn’t working or is too disruptive for the other pupils, then I don’t mind you putting that term in inverted commas that much. I think you’re on the edge of ableism there though. If you’re trying to win an argument at a school board meeting, you might want to keep that in mind.

    Many school districts are cash poor. They are being asked to follow guidelines for all sorts of things, not just the topic we’re discussing here, without also being given the financial means to fulfill them. The American teacher asking for go-fund-mes for classroom material is an established meme. That’s why out of principle I cut teachers and admins in the public school system some slack. So rather than running the risk of being misunderstood as an angry ableist, channel your anger at the people who make political decisions that affect your school district. Because I’m very confident at the heart of virtually every school related conflict lies chronic underfunding.


  • I think there are two trends. 1) in the early 90s people still got their porn fix from magazine stashes hidden in the woods. Or so the legend goes. So a sex scene or just some boobs were a welcomed element in a movie. In the 70s it was quite common to have absolutely gratuitous female nudity in movies that didn’t need it. Fast forward to the new millennium and you can get any porn you like on your phone in 15 seconds. People don’t go mad if there isn’t a sex scene in it any more. Sensibilities have changed; also in regards to what actors -however well paid- have to go through. Also, US movies have always been more tolerant of violence than sex.

    1. Movie financing has shifted more to China and they are even more prudish than the Americans as far as movie censorship is concerned. If you want your movie to get a license to play over there, don’t make the Chinese the bad guys, don’t kill any Chinese people in the movie, and switch to footage of a train going into a tunnel when it gets hot and steamy.



  • What have rogue models effed with so far? A government website in Australia, derelict chat forums, and another AI company? I’m willing to believe that two things are happening at the same time. That sandboxing these agents will improve with these so-called breaches. And that companies like Amazon or Cloudflare are improving their security continuously with threat models. And if they don’t have rogue agents on their radar, that stack deserves to fall.


  • I wouldn’t lay blame here mostly at Google’s feet. They AI-err on the side of caution. I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide. This sort of caution is the result of various user psychoses that we have learned exist in the world. Teenagers or other easily susceptible folks thinking they are Jesus, talking to god or aliens, etc. I would go so far as to say well done in a better safe than sorry kind of way in this case.

    What we learn here is that the model doing search and the algorithm operate seemingly independently. And that the so-called AI results aren’t great. Water is wet, more at eleven.

    Google had good search results from the late 90s to about the early 2010s. Nothing else about that company was not weird at any time. With glassholes jumping out of airplanes or them buying up almost the entire online ad market and then abusing their market position. What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone. And YouTube comes with its own Pandora’s box of challenges. They famously edited the “don’t be evil” stuff out of their mission statement. There are bigger Google fish to fry than this “AI summary.”






  • You’re formulating arguments why I’m wrong. With the greatest of respect, that’s defeatism speaking. Difficult? Yes. Checkmate? No. It may take a crisis to get this going; the New Deal didn’t come from nowhere either.

    You cannot fix all of these issues at once. You probably cannot fix a lot of these issues without first improving education levels within the population. A journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.

    Term limits for SC judges to some odd number of years for any new appointees is something both sides will be able to agree on. If nobody tries though, of course it won’t happen.


  • The US has been checkmated …

    I’m going to take issue with this statement. Nobody has checkmated the US. If we have to stay in this metaphor, the US checkmated itself.

    One of the biggest mistakes was to allot the same number of votes to Rhode Island as to California in the senate. A more proportionate voting system would do wonders for half the issues you listed. Appointing judges for life is another one. Financing election campaigns like that is also mad. Nobody forced Americans to do business like that.

    This isn’t a game of chess where checkmate is irreversible. The sooner folks stop formulating arguments why I’m wrong or why these are insurmountable hurdles, the better for all of us.

    While I do agree that with the cult clown car people in charge of the executive right now, there is an added difficulty to passing legislation. The Epstein Act part 1 has shown though there are ways. So regulation on so-called AI is still possible and not late like the article seems to suggest.


  • What’s the point of this article? To highlight that the sausage maker that is a parliamentary democracy is slow? Or to show how narrow majority margins cause long delays in passing legislation? I can’t imagine it’s only the lack of knowledge about so-called AI. I imagine many members don’t know that much about tax law, the intricacies of the military, or drugs in general. Yet we don’t question their qualifications when they pass legislation on those subjects. We elect people to these bodies not on the basis that they are experts at everything but for their ability to look into issues and form an opinion that hopefully most resembles ours. They cannot know everything, no matter how much they pretend. If that is the standard we hold them to, you’ll only get braggadocios assholes who will stand for elections.

    When has a legislature ever been on top of the latest developments, especially in tech? It’s pretty much always reactive. The seatbelt and crumple zone came after the introduction of the automobile. OSHA didn’t predate the industrial revolution. Section 230 came after the WWW. Not by much in the grand scheme of things but still. We are what now? 4-5 years into this madness? It’s not unusual not to have great regulations set in stone.



  • Don’t travel to places where it’s illegal. And if you do, don’t try to acquire anything while in places where the legislation has real teeth. Chances are if weed is illegal, any fun substitute will be as well. Depending on where you are going a positive blood test, should you get in trouble with the law for whatever reason, may still get you in trouble even if all of the weed in your bloodstream was consumed where it was legal to do so. That’s also something to consider two months ahead of your trip abroad.

    If you are so worried that you cannot break your habitual use you may want to investigate your use pattern even while you are where it is legal. Marijuana addiction is not a huge societal problem overall but it can be for the individual.