Cyclospora, if I'm reading this correctly, has effectively no transmission from human-human contact. So while this outbreak is bad if someone, anyone, can figure out where it's coming from it should be relatively easy to stamp it out and get food back to normal.

The games should be more expensive argument is a necessary but not sufficient kinda thing, for games from big publishers to not be predatory psuedo-casinos games will need to be more expensive to have any chance of the economics working out, but that alone won't get existing publishers to cool it.

Cyberchase really was my favorite children's television show and it's very hard to watch nowadays because public access shows have such nightmarish publication rights. I think the show might still be coming out, I think it deserves a proper finale even if they keep it going.

Here's why Cyberchase is authoritarian propaganda, Motherboard is a dictator who employs child slave labor to address her failure to create a monopoly on violence... *am hit with a brick and dies*

Pawpatrol has some icky subtleties but I think they're mostly genre conventions. The bad guy in a lot of arcs is the mayor, that's something. Chase is selected for missions much more often than the others even when they'd be better suited, but that's just him being the main character.

Artdecade is an accomplished artist but also he's clearly violated TOS a dozen times eg telling troops to kill themselves I'm not convinced his account was just "hacked."

If it were the other way around and weight loss/management drugs were discovered in the late 1800s and non-psychoactive painkillers were only just now becoming a thing I think people would hem and haw about them in the same way we are with GLP-1s now. There is no virtue in suffering.

The Star Wars EU kicking the shit out of Coruscant sucked actually.

Part of the Republican party platform that Lincoln ran on included ending the "twin relics of barbarism" slavery and polygamy. Mormonism was broken with state power and today is grateful for it. We can do this again against the megachurches and insane evangelicals.

Okay so the mechanics of being "God's chosen" in Mormonism has two parts, the extra work and the extra reward that comes with it but also the flip side that this means that anything in service of this extra work is necessarily moral and that God will clear the way for that extra work to be possible.

If a project calls for it suggesting LaTeX isn't "elitist" or whatever but LaTeX is not good for as many (most?) projects as it is suggested for and its use in science is pretty bad. Why? Accessibility! PDFs are awful for that, the accessibility tag system bolted on is not (well) supported by LaTeX.

The city of Rome in ancient times had at its peak conservatively 1 million people. I live in a city that is large but not really renowned for its size and it's double that number.

I 100% support this wherever it is viable but there's gonna have to be something else for cities where it absolutely is not, Las Vegas comes to mind.

At least once a week there was a press release about some new regulation or policy or lawsuit being pushed by the Biden admin that was something good, not all of it was groundbreaking but it was stuff that needed to be done and wasn't necessarily easy or politically free. I miss this.

If getting rid of daylight savings time bothers you because it gets dark "too early" you know you can just adjust your own personal schedule to match, yes? That freedom is not afforded when the clocks themselves change.

It seems a little odd that fitness for purpose doesn't come up a lot in AI discourse. An advanced fuzzy search or autocomplete basically has no threshold there, while something like scheduling could be load bearing and we'd need to understand LLMs better before using them for that.

I just asked Claude about a feature of ImageMagick with limited documentation, how annotate/font/EXIF expand interact, and it downloaded ImageMagick 7 (it recognized the sandbox only had 6), generated a test image, ran the test command, and used image recognition to make sure it worked. Impressive.

he should drop

I've been helping a few people through the application process for my university and my least favorite part is having to coo coo people through things like the statement of purpose and GRE because everyone thinks they're somehow above it and that it serves no purpose.

What I'm saying is that they should put lithium back in the 7-Up. (/j)

At least a portion of social media negatively impacting people's mental health has got to be the incredulous sensational castastrophizing reporting on current events and at least some of that is on the consuming individuals for being so gullible.

I have a big cotton American flag that was flown over the Capitol in my apartment and it is one of my more special possessions. You can request such flags from your local congressperson, comes with a certificate. Can make a nice gift.

Patriotism is pride as in "taking pride in your work," or love as in "loving a child even when they do bad things." The project of statecrafting simply doesn't work without these.

This is part of my skepticism that AI will ever produce quality video, I don't think there can be a function that describes a coherent/good video. While language is messy and I doubt any function could capture all of any language there likely is one for some useful large specific dialect/subset.

Being in computer science research before LLMs took off I was familiar with the proof that a sequence of matrices of sigmoid functions could be made approximate to any other function, presumably including one that could describe language or everything, so I was pretty open to what they could do. 1/2

What happened to PT I think should have caused a bit more of an uproar, that's basically what the all-digital-no-backups future looks like.

I am not surprised by the end of physical game discs but that doesn't mean I like it. On some of Sony's older consoles you could backup the downloaded "installer" for games to an external drive (IIRC, similar to the PSP transfer process). Bringing that back is the best compromise I can think of.

When I was first introduced to the concept of "bullshit jobs" it was pitched as like MLM jobs or maybe payday loan brokers, I was a little shocked when I figured out a lot of people extend it to basically any job that doesn't make something tangible.

In my domain of specialty (online algorithms) LLMs are poor and have not meaningfully improved since I first tried them, so that probably sours my overall assessment of their output. They still cannot define or understand what a "task system" is without me explaining it explicitly.

The worse models I can see having their places but also from my expense with students trying to use them for homework is that they're not fit for use without hand-holding. The LLM being asked to implement or prove merge sort and instead doing quicksort is apparently a common problem.

The contours of what code LLMs are good at writing is very fickle. If you're a typical dev who makes web apps I'm sure they're spectacular but this has not, in my relatively extensive and varied graduate experience with the nicest paid and open-source models, extended very far into other domains.

Okay so I actually read the policy and this seems completely reasonable. They're not banning anyone who's ever used an AI autocomplete they're banning substantial code written by AI. If an AI can do it why bother with the 3rd party submissions and not just do it yourself? Etc. Does it feel good?

I do not see a path for the LDS church to not double down on its right-wing tendencies when Oaks is still relatively young and Bednar is going to live forever.

Oaks is also a loose candidate for "richest person on earth" but because so much of his wealth is private and difficult to count he usually doesn't register at all.

Dallin H Oaks is at least as bad as JK Rowling and if you give him money with tithing it is also at least as bad as buying Harry Potter merch.

Wait until you apply geographic demos to this, red states vs blue states, etc.

Re: irreligiousity making people more liberal. Just looking at those two variables the correlation is weak, but when you start throwing other demographics into the mix (irreligious trend younger etc.) it becomes stronger.

I am somewhat surprised at the final outcome but it makes sense. I am a CS doctoral candidate in a non-AI field if that means anything to anyone for this result.

I have suddenly found my life's purpose, making this happen.

I think that gratuitous sex scenes in movies are the same as gratuitous fight scenes in movies, it's okay for something to just be indulgent and fun and if you treat them differently I think that's your problem.

the "handwriting makes you learn better than typing" thing is going around and I'm going to say the same thing I've said every time: they need to study proficient touch typists. it's terrible experimental design to pit 'proficient at handwriting' vs 'whatever their typing skill is'

This is what I've been saying and the smarmy reddit "it's just expensive because Reagan making it so you couldn't discharge student loans" seems almost purpose built to break higher education.

Between this post and now Wikipedia was changed to say we are in the 7th Party System instead of just speculating about a possible change.

Adobe Flash is definitely one of the weirdest hills people, especially young people, die on.

Couple’s quashed conviction for female genital mutilation declared a miscarriage of justice | BreakingNews www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/coup...

Well well well if this doesn't apply to my pet issue I don't know what would.

I think this take is an actual dud, bordering on actually just anti-intellectual. There is science on the effectiveness of therapy, it can do things psychiatry can't. You landed on all duds somehow, makes me think the problem might not be them.

I'm seeing more gay men pride flags this year than in years past and I can't completely nail down why but it feels good to see this. We've come a long way from the old "gay men having their own flag is transphobic/patriarchal" discourse I remember from old Tumblr.

These people are pedophiles.

Asperger's syndrome was removed from the DSM-V and rolled into the broader ASD diagnosis (along with a few others) NOT because Asperger wasn't PC or whatever but because a bunch of scientists did science and found that having the diagnoses separate led to worse outcomes. #ActuallyAutistic