MuffinButton
14d ago
It sounds like what @birb_cromble wants is a place where kids with the same disposition to reading as he had growing up could go, possibly unattended, for hours at a time. A library which has an internet cafe section at all and/or which doesn't studiously bar people who cause the homeless-in-libraries type issues will not be that place.
Edit: and that's before considering some of the changes to the stocked books and their arrangement and presentation.
MuffinButton
16d ago
I have very few degrees of separation from Rojas's situation, and more or less gave up on finding out any relevant details (e.g., "You said she's here on a visa; did the visa expire?") from anyone who might know them pretty quickly. This article answers that question and provides a bit more than I knew, while still leaving me suspicious that anything not stated sinks her case. For example:
- Rojas would've been under the au pair age cap (which I didn't know about at all; thanks!) when she started in Jan 2023, and according to medium amounts of googling, au pairs can finish out their position if they turn 27 after being hired. However, the article uses the past perfect tense: "for whom she had worked as an au pair", not "for whom she works as an au pair". The article also refers to he people who hired her as "her former employers" without saying how recently the "former" entered into effect.
- I cannot seem to get good information on whether or not someone is allowed to stay in the US during processing of their extension. It probably varies by visa. The closest I can find is that it was USCIS policy to allow it, not whether that policy remains current. Given the current administration's general stance on immigration, I wouldn't bet much on it.
- DHS doesn't mention her extension application, and I suspect if they had reviewed it and denied it, they would have said so. Then again, I'm reading what the NYT says DHS said and not what DHS said. Maybe DHS did mention the extension, and the NYT left that part out, opting instead for the rote "in violation of our nation’s laws, she overstayed her visa", without technically lying!
- The article quotes a different immigration lawyer revising advice she had given regarding domestic travel, and at no point does the article confirm whether the advice refers to the law as-is or to how it has been enforced. I'm pretty sure this depends on the type of visa and whether it's currently active or the situation in #2 applies. It seems possible that Rojas may have been allowed domestic travel as part of her au pair duties under her J-1, but would no longer be covered either because the J-1 had expired or because she was no longer an au pair.
As a result of not being able to discern any of this, I am quite frustrated, mostly because more than a few people I know are very up in arms about it. I have been asked to donate to her legal fund, and even supposing I were inclined to spend my next $100 frustrating immigration enforcement, it's unclear whether or not this particular donation would be setting that $100 on fire.
MuffinButton
17d ago
...compared to other things they could be doing.
MuffinButton
18d ago
I always thought of it as "Juicy Sommelier", with the implied layer of one who has gotten high on his own supply.
MuffinButton
18d ago
Why not both?
I can't speak to how standard NDAs with public officials are, but they are definitely insane. The governed can't consent to what they aren't aware of!
MuffinButton
18d ago
For superscripts on TheMotte, the "^" markdown doesn't work, but you can use HTML:
<sup>$SOMETEXT</sup> => $SOMETEXT
MuffinButton
18d ago
I second the crock pot and more generally, large batch cooking (though I suppose a lot of stuff is batched when it's for 5) as much as possible. There are lots of beans/rice/meat/vegetables that are set & forget and will make your house smell amazing when you get home. An oven roasted chicken on a bed of vegetables also goes a long way.
MuffinButton
19d ago
I do that pretty much every day.
Smart man.
Since she's aware of inflation...
I was trying to get at more something like this: does the idea of inflation eat away at her like the actual inflation eats away at her savings? Is it visceral? If she's generally got a low risk tolerance, savings is primarily providing an element of security to her psyche (as opposed to, say, opportunity), and explicitly orienting her portfolio around serving that purpose, with risk viewed as comprehensively as possible, is likely both the best end state for her investment approach and the conversational approach to move her in that direction.
MuffinButton
19d ago
For somebody who has that extreme level of risk aversion, what options are there that beat a HYSA? Browbeating her into equities isn't going to fly.
First, say a prayer of thanks that she's dispositionally a saver.
I'm not sure any large single changes exist which aren't going to induce a ton of anxiety, so whatever happens is going to have to be both small and prove itself to her. If you're trying to get her there specifically to combat inflation risk (likely a good idea, given Congress's bipartisan disposition toward federal spending), maybe the approach should hinge on whether or not inflation is salient to her.
If she doesn't really pay attention to it or grok the tax drag on HYSA interest, it might be possible to get her to throw the after-tax interest one year into VOO or SPY (or some other broad-market index fund) and just leave it alone alongside her HYSA for a few years, then compare the returns. It's not that high a fraction of her net worth, and importantly to her risk tolerance, it doesn't reduce the nominal value of her HYSA balance to do so. This works better if she doesn't check in with the balance often and get tempted to hit the Sell button during a dip.
If she is attentive to inflation, maybe emphasize that she's essentially paying something like 2% (HYSA nominal return * marginal tax rate) of its value, and that's a risk, too! That risk scales with inflation, the early 2020s showed us that inflation isn't a relic of the past, and the 1970s showed us that it doesn't have to last only a couple years. Diversifying holdings out of any single asset class is usually a good bet for reducing the total risk surface, especially since there are always Rummy's Unknown Unknowns to contend with.
MuffinButton
23d ago
Seconding a Beta Strike recommendation. I think it works well thematically with the fatigue mechanics to help encourage a large bench while allowing you to develop rookies outside the GTS/Ring systems since they're not made of tissue paper.
MuffinButton
23d ago
I think @Iconochasm was correct: most people do seem to consider "empathy" as "feeling really hard about someone or something" without any shift to their information state. No theory of mind is exercised in the process, and so it usually ends up being an onanistic "see how hard I feel? I'm not callous (like those on the other side)".
I don't think your observations are wrong, it's just that they're orthogonal to the point being made.
MuffinButton
24d ago
And by Newton's third law...
MuffinButton
25d ago
In my head-canon, @The_Nybbler exhibited this level of optimism long ago, but the sands of time have since worn it away, leaving behind an obsidian capsule sized just a bit too large for oral ingestion.
MuffinButton
25d ago
The opening disclaimers could be rephrased, with—as far as I can verify—no loss of accuracy:
Hi Y'all. This is a test of shady thinking and not one-shotted into an LLM. But I endorse this essay and invite criticism. I worked on this.
I am not sure how much of any of this is accurate. I didn't one-shot it with an LLM, but did I two- or three-shot it? I'm not telling you. I'm also not telling you how much I worked on this, only that I did (pinky swear!). Does reading through it before endorsing it and inviting criticism count as "working on"? If so, then I guess all of you have now also worked on this essay!
My reason for posting this is to learn more about this state of affairs in the responses.
I'm throwing this up so all of you very fine people can do the actual hard work of checking which parts are true, which parts are hallucinations, and whether it was 50%, 100%, or 200% longer than it needed to be to make a coherent point.
I read this thing because I was assigned it on janitor duty, which is why the above rephrasing (also not one-shotted with an LLM!) is a bit testy. Had I encountered this in the wild, I would've read the first two lines and simply replied, "If you're not going to bother writing it, I'm not going to bother reading it," if I even bothered to reply at all.
MuffinButton
25d ago
Ah, I was thinking about the wider conversation when I doubted the proportions; seems we were evaluating two different groups.
MuffinButton
25d ago
Yeah, I also just always called them "doctors", which probably added to how jarring "women doctors" sounded to me. Somehow, the latter became the "socially conscious" verbiage, though it seems counterproductive to highlight it.
MuffinButton
25d ago
How many people using that talking point would you estimate know that?
MuffinButton
25d ago
For #1 (& #2), I guess I just don't quite get how baggage a word picked up when someone else used it is supposed to be the preferred interpretation for how I used it when the context for how I used the word is present, unless I uttered some sentence in isolation to a stranger (or I work at a middle school or something, in which case that's more than a bit creepy).
For #3, it's not established at all that the people with ingroup bias wouldn't alter their language to use "woman" in the noun case but keep the bias (clever girl!), so in practice it ends up being the people more likely to be weirdos who want to analyze everything (i.e. mostly men members of this forum) catching an accusation of misogyny by association. I'm sure some ingroup-biased individuals are also among those using "female" as a noun, but if both groups contain this element, why are the people who insist on using "woman" not also tainted by association with those among them with ingroup bias? What I'm trying to point out is that normal people didn't spring forth from the womb1 with this belief, and the noun use of "female" clearly used to be widespread based on published works of the past, so where did the association between the two come from? As best I can tell—and I am not about to wade through the sewage that passes for sociolinguistics literature to attempt to track it down—it got memed into existence as a tool of social ostracization. Now, that is certainly a flex, but I'm choosing to respond to that flex by giving it the finger2.
I'm not sure what to say about #4 except that I haven't seen any of the Ferengi episodes, and I kind of doubt that very many of the people who come up with this stuff have either.
1Perhaps we could figure out a word to refer to people bearing wombs?
2Thus qualifying myself as a weirdo who wants to analyze everything member of this forum :)
MuffinButton
26d ago
One of the strongest senses of resentment (contempt?) I've ever felt in a professional setting was several years ago when my boss, her administrative assistant, and I were sitting around a conference table before a meeting and they were discussing the conference they had just come from. The derision and dismissiveness with which they casually trotted out the "stale, pale, male" refrain to describe a panel that was 4/5 men—in a field that's 80% male and had a three decade hiring drought, mind you—was palpable. In that moment, a realization crystallized:
If I do everything right in my career, I will be exactly where the men on that panel are. That is my victory condition, and I can see the respect you afford them. I have no future here.
MuffinButton
26d ago
Presumably both the round table and these judges are working from the same talking point distributed somewhere, but I can't be arsed to find the origin.
I believe the talking point1 was distributed all over the forest via shooting it with an AR-15. If you see bits of deer, you'll know you're close.
1It was a hollow talking point.
MuffinButton
26d ago
Indeed; they prefer the long ball.
For example, "my cousin is a cool female, you should meet her", "I met a nice female at work the other day", "I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the females". Personally, I think those do sound creepy and imply depersonalization, like the "female" is an exotic species whose main characteristic is sex appeal.
"My cousin is cool; you should meet her." is the "normal" way to say this sentence and conveys the gender; straight substitution of "woman" sounds similarly odd in place of "female".
"I met a nice woman at work the other day" does sound more natural to me when "woman" is substituted, and I take your point that it sounds at least a bit odd with "female" used here as a noun. I'm not sure why I should assume misogyny, though; none was conveyed.
"I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the females" is creepy for reasons entirely unrelated to diction, and I suspect you'd side-eye someone who told you, "I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the women" in much the same way. In fact, the value judgment you make in the next sentence accrues here with "women" in place just as strongly!
I think we're on the same page as far as how the flow of things sound when "female" is used as a noun (vs. an adjective), and this seems like an apt place to point out that "woman" has usurped (!) the use of "female" as an adjective in quite a few places despite (to my ears) sounding far clunkier. "Woman doctor" and "woman engineer" don't exactly roll off the tongue, and my brain goes "noun -> noun" internally every time I hear them...and yet, I have never once heard misogyny attributed to their speakers! I think what I'm trying to say is that both words are used validly as nouns and adjectives when referring to humans, we have aesthetic tastes for when a sentence flows and when it doesn't, and it doesn't make much sense to me to assume anything about the speaker's intent (edit: or beliefs).
Women are no less human than men, which means they are beings capable of reason and complex emotion etc.; but humans are ultimately still sexually dimorphic animals.
I mean, I agree; I'm just not sure how this applies.
MuffinButton
26d ago
Thanks! I did briefly consider loading it up as a prompt. I have been allergic to shelling out for tokens for personal use, but maybe it's worth it in this case. I suppose under the theory that humans are LLMs on a biological substrate, I already asked an agentic swarm of LLMs. I'll try it on the lower-tier models, see where I get, and hopefully remember to respond.
MuffinButton
26d ago
Does anyone have a good resource (or set of resources) for getting started using AI in coding that emphasizes building understanding? I've pretty much eschewed AI to this point, but it seems it's only getting more integrated and capable, so I might as well develop the skill. My experience is mostly in python in a data science context, with a little bit of C and the rare instances of assembly thrown in to run isolated or low-bandwidth sensors with extremely limited onboard compute. I have generally preferred VSCode, so bonus points if the resource integrates it.
I think the best guide for me is going to read something like, "A harness performs functions X, Y, and Z. Let's walk through setting up a basic harness so you can develop intuitions around what it's doing and how you might modify an existing harness to suit your future needs." Conversely, a terrible guide for me might read, "Download (someone else's) harness from (website); it's the best one for coding (no explanation as to why). Point your IDE at it and start typing your prompt (no elaboration on what makes a useful or effective prompt)."
"Woke 1" implies the existence of a "Woke 2".
I wouldn't let my guard down until it's seen as necessary to publicly express contrition for participating in the madness.
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