naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Also how the fuck do I create cool masked hyperlinks on that website, is that supported yet?
The markup here is basically the same as on reddit, as far as I have been able to determine. To link, put words in [] brackets, then the link immediately after in (), like this:
[This text will become a link to Google](http://www.google.com)
(In this case I added a backslash before the open parenthesis so it wouldn't convert the text to the link, so you could see how to type it.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I went ahead and removed this thread since there are two others that people submitted... sorry I was slow to see these. :(
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Sorry we didn't get one of these posted, multiple people posted them but no one was around to approve them. Please feel free to re-post this comment in the one approved thread. My apologies.
Over the summer, Arizona lawmakers passed a universal educational voucher program, to my understanding the first in the nation. It attaches state education dollars to students rather than to specific schools, allowing parents to choose where to send the money the state spends on educating their children.
This was immediately challenged by, well, the whole education establishment. Kathy Hoffman, Arizona's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, was officially tasked with overseeing the program; instead, she doxxed parents who signed up for it. Arizona's teacher's union was immediately mobilized to work with the far-left non-profit "Save Our Schools" organization, which sought to gather signatures to put a repeal of the scholarship law on the next election ballot.
Arizona's Secretary of State excitedly tweeted her receipt of the supposedly over 140,000 signatures (almost 120,000 were required). Her statement that
Filing petitions today means the applicable portion of law will not be implemented tomorrow on the General Effective date🛑As long as the petitions continue to meet the min sigs through all the processing, that portion of the law stays on hold.
is a bit confusing to me, I don't know how Arizona referendum law works but the idea that a petition to add an issue to the ballot could function to suspend the operation of a signed law raises several questions in my mind. However, as the Secretary of State maybe this was her call to make? Anyway she was too glib by half. The libertarianish Goldwater Institute, which had posted watchdogs on the filing process, immediately noted that fewer than 90,000 signatures had actually been filed. "Save Our Schools" Facebook page calls this "questionable" and notes that only the Secretary of State can make the final determination, but apparently the Secretary of State's office only received 8,175 petition sheets with a maximum of 15 signatures per sheet. Off their Facebook page, SOS concedes that they have likely fallen short. Their explanation of the miscount? "Well we were just estimating." Apparently Arizona's schoolteachers aren't so great with math!
SOS receives preferred treatment in the news reporting, but poking around some parent sites it looks like they have been predictably underhanded pretty much the whole way. Despite the support of both the Secretary of State and the Superintendent of Schools, both of whose offices are supposed to be effecting the law rather than repealing it, the voucher program is likely to proceed (which may only attract even more anti-choice money to the state's lobbies, I guess). With almost 11,000 applicants pending, it's likely to generate some very happy parents--along with at least some frustrated ones. I doubt we've heard the end of this.
But the victory here may encourage other states to follow suit. I feel like this is one more symptom of the present educational paradigm unraveling. COVID showed parents both how much, and how little, public schools do for them, personally. I know many parents who were relieved to send their children back to school. But I know many others who have simply decided to not. It's a bit of a homeschooling renaissance, it seems, and now in Arizona there are public education dollars attached to that. A family with three children could get something like $21,000 per year to help educate them.
The substance of the opposition is that this deprives neighborhood schools of much-needed funding, "skims the cream," hasn't got enough oversight, and empowers uncredentialed teachers to teach. These are basically all the same criticisms teacher's unions offer against charter schools, which are booming business in Arizona--Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.
Parents, apparently, are not buying these arguments, at least in Arizona. And indeed I have never seen any evidence that these arguments have any merit; to the contrary, I am persuaded by The Case Against Education that our existing K-12 system cannot be upended fast enough. So I have been, and will be, watching Arizona's voucher experiment with great interest!
But in case I have not sounded appropriately unhinged thus far--I do have to ask. What would have been the outcome, if the Goldwater Institute had not posted watchdogs on the counting process? The Arizona news media seems to want to cast SOS as the watchdogs, here, but SOS appeared to be quite happy to smear their numbers in their own favor, and they have at least two powerful allies within the government who swallowed their claims whole, declaring the law "on hold" even when the math obviously didn't add up. This kind of narrative-crafting is really disturbing to me, and the fact that the Secretary of State seemed happy to take SOS at their word, to the point of tweeting about it, even as the Goldwater Institute knew instantly from the math that this wasn't going to fly... well, the whole thing seems awfully shady.
(This is where I deleted a paragraph borrowing a jack about "finding" a thousand more pages in a box somewhere...)
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
When topline education funding takes a hit, I predict there will be no firing of excessive administrative personnel like diversity experts or secretaries or superfluous academic committees. The budge hits will be directly to education funding proper, textbooks and materials and the like, so the entrenched education interests can point to a shortage of textbooks and say "See what your ESA is doing to our precious children!?"
This reminds me of the other thing I saw about Arizona education over the summer. I guess a couple years ago there was a bunch of organized protesting demanding a raise in teacher salaries, and the governor and legislature allocated money to give teachers a 20% raise over the next few years. But the public school districts did not pass that money on to teachers as promised, leading to another round of demands for increases in "teacher pay":
The Arizona Auditor General released a report earlier this year showing the average teacher salary increased by 16.5% or around $8,000, less than the promise of 20% by 2020. That report shows that while most districts increased pay, only 43% of districts statewide actually met the 20% goal since there was no requirement that districts spend the money on teacher salaries.
(I do wonder how widespread salary increases of 10%+ contributed to Arizona's inflation...) Meanwhile, Arizona district superintendents are pulling down $200,000 annual salaries, plus stuff like this:
She was joined by dozens of other educators who had gathered before heading into the first Buckeye Elementary School District meeting since the Arizona auditor general’s finding that the district paid its superintendent $1.7 million in retirement credits and unused leave and then failed to note it in public employment records.
The amount of money being poured into "public education" systems in the United States is absolutely gob-smacking. I don't know who first said that "think of the children" is the root password to all government systems, but it certainly seems to be true. It will be interesting to see how things change as more parent groups catch wise to the scam. Something else I saw on social media somewhere, was that the biggest mistake Democrats made during COVID was turning "parents of school-aged children" into a special interest voting bloc opposed to Democrat policies.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This seems like a pretty Johnny-come-lately response. Julius Branson was stale and sophomoric compared to, say, penpractice. And TrannyPornO was as far beyond penpractice as penpractice was beyond Julius Branson.
That said, I'm pretty sure HlynkaCG has ultimately caused more seething than all three of those posters combined.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I never got the impression that he was intentionally yanking on chains to get a reaction.
Nor I! At least, not habitually. But particularly when he was moderating, and even for a long while after, almost every comment he made, regardless of content, would draw vitriolic reports of one kind or another.
Yeah, sorry. The links were auto-generated by Paperclip Perfector, and this was our first run on the new site. I will see what I can do about this post maybe later this week, but hopefully in the future the links will be better.
EDIT: Okay, I think I have fixed them all, but if you spot any I've missed, let me know!
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This is really unnecessarily antagonistic. If you're unfamiliar with the idiom "borrowing a jack," you should read about it. There are plenty of examples of people out there actually doing stupid or horrible things; there is no need for you to invent extra examples from whole cloth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
And the constant whiny bitching and crying by artists about AI art has made me suspicious of the motivations of these so called "artists"
Write like you want to include everyone in the conversation, please. This is unnecessarily heated.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
No, your mistake was contributing nothing but heat to what was a relatively anodyne post. "Oh, that went well, but you know my outgroup could have made it much worse, and probably would have just last year" is unnecessary heat. When your outgroup fails to be as horrible as you expect them to be, let them.
Well, it's very literally co-incidence; things corresponding in both nature and time of occurrence. On one hand, cheating has been happening forever; we have cuneiform tablets from 1750 B.C. complaining that someone delivered the wrong grade of copper ingots. It has even been theorized that sapience is the evolutionary result of a runaway cheating arms race. So, like, you're definitely not noticing a new development in human behavior.
On the other hand, we could say the same thing about, like, transsexuals (an example I pick in part because of the advantage, arguably unfair, enjoyed by males participating in women's athletic competitions). Men living as women, and vice versa, are attested anciently, though it is hard to separate ancient record from ancient rumor. The fact that something has been happening forever isn't proof that it's not happening more now. And it is manifestly true that there are a lot more people claiming to be something they aren't today, than there used to be--to the point where some people get conspicuously upset when it gets phrased that way (notably, Simler and Hanson observe that the best way to persuade someone of a falsehood is to first persuade yourself!). Nevertheless, the act of sending social signals that deceive regarding one's sex appears to operate in the same mental realm as sending signals that deceive regarding one's fidelity to one's spouse, or the poker hand one is holding, or the like.
The trouble with your hypothesis is that even if you are noticing a genuine trend toward something like "increased social or personal acceptance of cheating," it's going to be difficult to measure empirically. You could try to capture it within some particular domain, but the very nature of cheating is such that your ability to measure it depends on your ability to detect it, and the whole point of this kind of behavior is to pass undetected. This is the standard difficulty with claiming that e.g. certain kinds of crimes are underreported, or that certain kinds of crimes are even occurring. You will also, per the example above, run into people who want to say cheating is not really cheating--to give another example, is extramarital sex "cheating" if it's consensual (i.e., open marriage)? Or is that just an extremely elaborate form of cheating (e.g. deceiving regarding the nature of one's love and affection, to the point of effectively gaslighting your spouse into believing it's okay)?
So I am open to the possibility that we live in an society that has become so "individualistic" in its priorities that individuals are more expected to pursue their own conscious aims than ever before, even at the expense of unlegislated cultural norms, and expected to allow others to pursue those conscious aims even when they appear, to our anciently-evolved cheat-detection software, to be cheating. In formal competitions we may still get upset about clear rule-breaking, if we catch people doing it, but I don't think I'd have to look very hard to find a Marxist willing to claim that "get yours, screw others" is very much a late-stage capitalism thing, or words to that effect.
But I think it's going to be very difficult to demonstrate, and extremely prone to being one of those arguments that strengthens your priors whatever those priors happen to be, e.g. "the real cheaters have been my outgroup all along!" That doesn't mean you're actually wrong--and the difficulty of the argument may make it one of those that turns out to be exceptionally fruitful when made well. But off the top of my head I can't think of a good way to explore broadly-defined "cheating" in a clear empirical way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Has it actually been demonstrated that most of these students are actually incapable of learning algebra? Or is it more that the school needs to slow down, separate out the high achievers and the actually retarded, and maybe adjust the teaching strategies(all things that the Obama admin strongly rejected trying in favor of doing the same thing, but more expensively).
I mean, some of the kids we're talking about in the public school system are profoundly mentally retarded, so you can't just discount them entirely.
But after that, it depends on what you mean by "demonstrated" and "incapable," I guess. Suppose, for example, there were someone who actually could learn algebra, but only if they have one-on-one tutoring for eight hours per day for five years? Of course, you have no way of knowing that's true at the outset, so: at what point between just "send them to a standard high school algebra class for a semester or two" and "expend every possible resource teaching this person algebra" do you conclude that they are "just not capable?" Or if "incapable" is just an off-putting word for you here, at what point do you conclude, "we've made every reasonable effort, at this point if they want to learn algebra they're just going to have to find the time and resources on their own?"
Slowing down and adjusting teaching strategies may not be what the Obama administration favored, but I know many schools have taken that approach anyway. I'm not aware of any impressive results that didn't experience regression to the mean in pretty short order, but naturally I'm not aware of every experiment anyone has ever done! But I've discussed educational experiences with a lot of students, and a large number of them manage to master just enough algebra to squeak out a "C" so they can graduate. The movement to abolish algebra requirements seems like some evidence that many educators have concluded, yes--some people are just never really going to get it, or at least not in a reasonable enough timeframe to justify the effort of teaching them.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Lol what.
This is low-effort and antagonistic. You're welcome to ask for clarification on a claim that confuses you, but this is not the way to do it.
I think the move off Reddit will come to be seen as a big mistake.
Why--because the forum will die? That's a possibility, however (1) the number of CW thread weekly posts hasn't noticeably dropped since the move and (2) Zorba was pretty explicit that "keep our commitment to open discourse and die" was a preferred outcome to "capitulate to limiting discourse on especially difficult topics and live." Plenty of people predicted we'd die after splitting of from the SSC sub, too. We frequently had users point out ways in which they regarded the sub as "dying." But several years later, well... maybe we're still dying? Very slowly?
the main thing that drew admin attention was a few trans activists reporting gender-critical posting
While there was certainly some of that, the co-founder of TheSchism explicitly owned up to drawing the Eye of Sauron to the sub in the first place, because he uncharitably interpreted some conflict theory posting as "calls to violence." And there were other things that AEO didn't like, for example (((parenthesis))). You may be right that radical trans advocates seeking to shut down open discourse were the main problem, but the list of problems was not short, either.
The main pipeline for new and interesting users is now cut off.
Eh. Striking the balance between Eternal September and Eternal Silence is tricky, ongoing, and probably not indefinitely maintainable regardless. I will continue to post our AAQCs in the subreddit until someone stops us, probably. The barrier to participation is a little higher, now, maybe, but in some ways that can be as much a feature as a bug.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Where are new users going to come from?
Where do new users ever come from? Why did people go to the SSC sub in the first place? Why did they follow Zorba over to the Motte sub--but perhaps more importantly, why did they follow Zorba over to the Motte sub, instead of going to the CWR sub, or later to the Schism sub? Why have so many people actually come over here onto Zorba's server?
We have a community, and we have an ethos (the "foundation"). On reddit, it was easier to keep the community churning, but hard to preserve the ethos--and getting harder every month. Here, it may very well be harder to keep the community churning! But the ethos will remain intact. Neither the current SSC sub nor the ACX comments section handle culture war discussions as well as we do (it seems to me). I don't think any of your concerns are wrong in any obvious way. I just feel like you are overlooking (ignoring?) the very public justification Zorba has been giving all along: better the community die on its own terms than live with a compromised foundation. I hope the community does not die for quite some time--if ever! But if we'd stayed on reddit, death would have been at least as inevitable--it just would have been a death of our ethos rather than a dissolution of our userbase.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
spouting this cowardly garbage
I'm not totally happy with the level of charity in this thread, but certainly your rhetoric here has crossed over into "unnecessarily antagonistic" territory. Please don't.
Well, yes, but do you see from what I wrote why that is entirely beside the point?
Without, I think, entirely meaning to, @ZorbaTHut once upon a time took the weight of the SSC sub's "Roundup" culture almost entirely on his back, and has been carving out refuges for it, to greater or lesser extent, ever since. Some things have fallen off, other things have been added on. But something Zorba has been repeatedly clear about from the beginning through today is that growth and life are not the primary objectives. Would we like to see fresh insights from new users on a regular basis? Yes. Are we willing to give up on the foundation to make that happen? No.
This is unusual for an organization, even an informal and largely ad hoc organization like the Motte. Virtually all organizations hold, as a stated or unstated assumption, that any of their principles may be abandoned in order to preserve the functioning and existence of the organization itself. This is a big idea in wartime jurisprudence, of course. But also consider Google's abandonment of "Don't Be Evil." Or watch the ACLU bail on free speech, or watch Methodists approve gay marriage, that's two consequential examples from a single month in 2021. Something I admire a lot about Zorba is his willingness to act on the idea that, no--we're not going to worry about survival, we're going to do what the foundation suggests, and if we die, we die! I'm far more conservative; I opposed the Motte's exile from SSC, I accepted an invitation to moderate without having much faith in the longevity of the sub, and I would not have initiated the move offsite without much stronger censure from the reddit admins.
But here we are, and we didn't die immediately, or even see a substantial dropoff in posting. That violates my nervous expectations, again. We may yet die! But if we die--we die. And while that's not the conclusion we're aiming for, it is a conclusion I think we are all able to accept.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I don't have anything useful to say about this... I don't think Kanye is a mentally stable human being, but I'm not sure many humans at that level of fame can be stable. Existing on that scale is so far outside the ancestral environment that I suspect brain stuff just gets weird.
What immediately struck me about this case was how clearly it feeds Kanye's argument. When saying "the Jews are shutting down everyone who disagrees with their agenda" gets you shut down by organizations substantially owned and/or operated by Jews, like, what--you think he's gonna conclude "oh, I must be mistaken?" This is on the same rhetorical playground as the well-trod "canceling conservatives just gets them bigger book deals, 'left media bias' is obviously a myth."
I can't help but be reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's suspension over what sounded to me as mostly weird commentary--not anti-Semitic. The antipathy or even just skepticism so many black Americans have expressed toward Jews is remarkable. But I can imagine being a black person whose community openly expresses frustration at whites or Asians or Hispanics "keeping me down"--in such an environment, why wouldn't a statistically wealthy, powerful group of phenotypically white people be permitted targets of the same basic criticism?
It also seems related to stuff like this. Armed black militants demanding reparations and a closed border seems like evidence that some blacks, at least, have decided that they don't want to be pawns for either "Left" or "Right" politics. Not sure that works out for them, in a two-party left-right coalition environment... but maybe?
And yeah. Twitter delenda est.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I am far from an expert on cars. However, my general impression is that hydrogen powered cars overcome many of the individual downsides of EVs--at the cost of reinstantiating many of the broader downsides of fossil fuel vehicles.
For example, you can fully "charge" a hydrogen car in 5 minutes, and its range will be close to that of many fossil fuel vehicles. Even with a "fast" charge, an EV is going to take 15+ minutes to get 200 miles of range, and more often you'll be charging it overnight (and never taking it on road trips). If you have the ill fortune to get caught in a blizzard, a hydrogen vehicle will be much safer than an EV, both in terms of staying functional and keeping you warm. But the technology is costly, charging stations are uncommon, and every new advance in battery technology brings EVs closer to parity with hydrogen performance.
The big picture, though, is that the charging infrastructure overhead for hydrogen (producing, transporting, and storing it) is basically the same as fossil fuels, minus the more complicated stuff that happens in refineries. Most current methods of hydrogen production are energy-intensive and carbon-positive. At best, you get the same problem as with EVs charging off coal; at worst, you're essentially selling EVs with an even higher carbon footprint (and increased thermodynamic waste along the way).
So, basically, in an alternate universe where we already built out a bunch of hydrogen charging stations and brought the cost of production on hydrogen fuel cells down through mass production, people might be wondering why anyone would want a slow-charging, short range EV! But I suppose it's possible the EU intends to subsidize that world into existence, and is counting on fusion or renewables to make electrolysis a more economical approach to hydrogen production. There are definitely possible futures where hydrogen cars are far better than EVs, but I'm skeptical that we'll bring any such future to pass.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I'm locked into starting a career in tech, in one of the wokest cities in the nation.
At the risk of fighting the hypothetical--why? Assuming the nation you're talking about is the United States, you're always free to just go get a different job.
I don't know what specifically you do for a living, but if it can be done remotely, remote work is pretty hot right now! Then you can live wherever you like, modulo stable internet access. And even if you can't or won't do remote stuff, there is no shortage of tech jobs in non-woke or less-woke cities. Chances are good that whoever you work for will have some amount of "diversity" stuff going on, but like, even Silicon Valley gets slammed for being insufficiently woke all the time.
Still, if you insist on going forward with this thing that you're apparently afraid to go forward with, I expect you'll find it, most of the time, a lot better than you fear. Even at exceedingly "woke" corporations, there's a lot of real, actual work to be done that just isn't impacted in any discernible way by hyper-obsession with race or gender or whatever. In most circumstances you can literally just ignore it. Some companies do go so far as to "discipline" people who, say, don't add pronouns to their signature block, but the vast majority will never notice or care. When someone passes the plate for Black Lives Matter or Habitat for Humanity or whatever, you just... don't give!
Yes, you'll probably need to bite your tongue from time to time. But that's always true everywhere you're thrown into dealing with people. If you think you have it bad in that department, try working customer service! You'd be amazed how far you can get by allowing people to draw their own conclusions, instead of spelling your beliefs out in excruciating detail at every opportunity. And if you're forced into a mandatory diversity training where an outside contractor with primary-colored hair tells you why you're the oppressor, sit through it, ask annoying questions if you dare, and fill out all the anonymous feedback follow-up paperwork with "this was a huge waste of everyone's time and money and it makes me ashamed to be employed here."
In the vast majority of employment cases you're going to be fine being honest, as long as you're not an asshole about it. "Thanks for the input, I'll take it under advisement" is wonderfully noncommittal. "Is there any specific thing you would like me to do at this time?" is also a great way to scatter vacuous calls for increased wokism, which often never make it past the "raise awareness" stage of organizational activism. I do this with my own superiors every year: "Is there anything I am doing that you would like me to stop doing, or anything I am not doing that you would like me to start doing?" They have rarely considered my performance in those terms, and so they have nothing to say, and so I am free to continue doing as I please. Of course, you might get specific feedback ("add some damn pronouns to your signature block!") and then you'll want to follow it (or start sending out resumes, depending on your value to the company), but extracting specific feedback also gives you an opportunity to demonstrate compliance, which is itself a form of currency in employment negotiations.
Basically: you'll be fine, don't worry. But if you can't help but worry, you should keep in mind that you may be better off looking for a different job.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
It already seems semi-clear that you're not going to be able to eg. trademark a logo you make with Stable Diffusion
Trademark law is quite different from copyright law, I would be very hesitant to stake a claim that nothing made with Stable Diffusion could serve as a trademark.
The companies will argue that a human who views a thousand Greg Rutkowski pictures online and then paints and sells an original painting in a similar style to Greg Rutkowski isn't different to an AI using a training set of the same and producing an original artwork, but this ignores decades of legal precedent in digital copyright cases
Yes, but most importantly, this precedent, which is a shocking timebomb for copyright law generally. It is the clearest example of someone being granted copyright protection for a style, and while I'd like to say "I can't imagine this insanity holding up to continued scrutiny from appeals courts," it's actually all too easy too imagine.
What people forget is that copyright law is a hard case of total regulatory capture. No one cares about copyright law but content industries and aging geeks. The main practical consideration in copyright law is, "does this help content industries make money?" It's extremely likely that, over the next several decades, Congress will adopt some kind of compulsory licensing scheme for original artwork, such that model trainers will owe $0.01 (or $1, or...) per picture they incorporate into their models. This will help to shut down amateur and FOSS efforts toward AI, ensuring that only big players can afford to make advances. The upside for government is, big players are much easier to regulate.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Can an (unlicensed) derivative artwork of copyrighted art be registered as a trademark? I guess that's the question.
Anything can theoretically be trademarked, as long as it meets the requirements. Rather, if you are, without permission, using as a mark something that someone else owns a copyright in, then you would presumably be liable for copyright infringement every time you used it. The USPTO would in most cases have no reason to know whether your trademark registration included unlicensed copyrighted elements; this is a fight the copyright holder would have to raise on their own. Depending on how derivative the trademark ultimately was, the copyright holder would in most cases have no idea any infringement had occurred (minus some whistleblower getting involved).
And why would any content creator sell the unlimited right to their art for the most advanced language model for $0.01 per picture? Disney certainly isn't going to take that.
Statutory licenses are already the legal standard for music recordings and broadcast-to-cable television programming (see table on page 38 of this PDF). When tech innovators clash with content industries, a historical answer has been for Congress to impose a compulsory licensing scheme. I agree that $0.01 per image might be too little, but surely $1.00 per image would be prohibitively high in most cases of model development. The thing is, deciding the right price is something that can be handed to a bureaucracy to determine. The problem right now is that, as far as I can tell, all image models are just straight-up mass infringement. It's Google's "library of Alexandria" all over again, with technological innovation and the letter of the law coming into direct conflict. And it's not at all clear who will win, or what it will cost the rest of us.
Ah! So, this definitely addresses what I'm wondering about. If the ultimate source is Hegel, then Leiter could perhaps make the case that the Marxist interpretation is just the most faithful use of the term--though given his broad dismissal of Hegel, maybe he wouldn't want to do that.
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