domain:kvetch.substack.com
TheRealMcCoy
46m ago
What's probably going on is that the wife doesn't find him attractive. And they don't want to admit it in your fictional conversation
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
It is worth noting that the top British public (i.e. private) schools do not run on a quis paget entrat basis, and have not done since roughly the 1980's. There is a standard examination (Common Entrance) meaning that the system is transparent enough that people would know if it ran like Harvard admissions. At the time Prince Harry got into Eton in 1997, they apparently still had slightly lower academic standards for children of hereditary peers (and significantly lower standards for royalty - he wouldn't have met the reduced standards for the aristocracy), but they had no need to let a dim kid in for cash, and didn't. The other top schools had published pass marks with no exceptions.
Part of the joke about St Cake's is that there used to be a lot of mildly shit public schools that were selling social exclusivity and nothing else (and the resulting stereotypes survive because the upper classes are one of the designated acceptable targets for outgroup-bashing humour) but most of them went out of business after WW2.
DradisPing
1hr ago
The US has long been a little weird about ID.
The right was always worried about a communist takeover of the federal government and wanted to make sure they could disappear and live under fake names without too much skill needed. I'm using communist loosely, there are a lot of possible left authoritarian governments that people on the right would feel the need to hide from.
The left really did have a bunch of radicals living under fake names. Some for longer than you'd think -- Sara Jane Olson of the Symbionese Liberation Army wasn't caught until 1999.
After 2001 there was a lot of interest in tightening things up, but by that point there were a lot of illegal immigrants, and neither party really wanted to shake things up too much.
So the US government is a lot worse at identifying individuals than you'd expect. Systems are designed not to work with each other or report obvious problems. The IRS goes as far as setting up their computer systems to allow for people filing taxes with stolen SSNs.
I don't know specifics about e-verify, but I've heard it was mostly designed around making congress look like it's doing something.
FtttG
1hr ago
It Starts with the Egg by Rebecca Fett, a book I literally found on the side of the road and which, serendipitously, is uniquely germane to a project I'm conducting research into.
Corvos
1hr ago
For identifying landmark cases: Number of times that the data has been looked up? Number of contributions on relevant Wikipedia page?
I think the problem, as usual, is race; the US has a large ethnic underclass that thinks it's fucking normal to go around without an ID, and has no idea where their birth certificate is, if it even still exists. You can't enforce "papers, please!" on illegal Hispanic without enforcing it on urban blacks, and they would fail just as often despite having every legal right to live and work here, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth; see the kerfuffle about needing an ID to vote.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1hr ago
I need help finding an old post. I think I remember the phrase "dark organic society" followed by either "theory" or "bullshit". It was about the idea that society organises itself in certain ways regardless of explict, program-driven organising, and interpreting parts of progressivism as a despair reaction to that. I thought it was on baliocs tumblr, but google disagrees that its on tumblr at all. /u/gattsuru because you might have been the one that linked me back then.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1hr ago
I don't think this is the case. People have been saying for years that MMA is destined to be dominated by "true" mixed martial artists like Rory MacDonald who've trained in blended styles from the start.
There are zero crossover champions right now in any promotion that had a serious pre MMA background. Adesanya and Pereira fight 185 and up which are shallow.
But Rory never became champion and there's still a ton of people with a specific specialty they build on when they get to MMA
He left the UFC due to low money and won the championship at one, the ufc guy at the time Tyron Woodley was someone he had beaten comprehensively and was for a point the world's best 170-pounder.
I'd like a greater breakdown into those controversial and high-impact (landmark) cases
I know what you mean. Any suggestions on how to break down the data this way? I mean, at some point, if you just define important cases as cases that go 6-3 along ideological lines, then by the way that you've defined it, 100% of important cases are going to be decided along ideological lines. I'm trying to think about what would be a good middle ground that's still data analysis-based while giving insight into these potentially controversial cases.
On the Agreement Matrix tab, I've added a checkbox that excludes unanimous cases from the analysis. Which I think is an interesting way to look at it, because you're seeing that if there's any disagreement at all in a case, then, for example, Thomas and Jackson are most likely to find themselves on opposite sides, while Thomas and Alito are most likely to be on the same side. You didn't really need data analysis to come up with this insight, but I guess it's good to confirm at least that data analysis confirms what everybody knows.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2hr ago
Powerslap is the worst because no one good will ever compete in a sport with that low IQ. Plus, having zero defence means that everyone will get knocked the fuck out before becoming a star. You cannot have a dominant champion getting dethroned storyline ever. Dana is struggling to break through, as the UFC will need to allow fighter unions and two more divisions with fewer apex cards to let the sport make money.
UFC BJJ for instance, will always lose out to CJI because the people doing it are not phoning it in the way UFC is.
zataomm
2hr ago
using AI for a prolonged period will lower your overall ability to code as a developer
This strongly depends on what your ability to code was before you started using AI. The reality is a lot of people can make websites now despite not having a professional approach to coding. If you're a classically trained developer, computer scientist, and you only use Vim, then yeah, you're probably right. That set of developers is going to be a smaller and smaller proportion of the total as time goes by.
Mini-rant of the day (am I repeating myself or do I have deja vu? must be getting old): While I appreciate the intention behind occasionally using "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun in cases where the gender is unspecified, the amount of reading fatigue it generates is underrated. First let me say that my actual preference might be a somewhat stupid-sounding but actually refreshing/mildly helpful habit of simply using the opposite pronoun as a habit. For instance, in the financial column "Money Stuff" (great reading BTW) the author when talking about an imagined or generic CEO will use "she" as the pronoun. I'm not really a believer in the whole micro-aggression literature, but I can still see that subtle and low-key (non-mandatory) attempts at gently pushing back against stereotypes can be nice. Handy little reminder not to jump to assumptions. For fairness, this should be more generalized: teachers are mostly women, so use "he" as the general form. Doctors are mostly men, so use "she". College grads are mostly women, so use "he". "They" can still work in a pinch, or perhaps in official documents, but I feel like the tradeoffs involve are favorable on the whole.
But nonbinary people in fiction? That's a whole different story. Consider the following sentence ripped from a story I am reading:
Mirian and Gaius took turns instructing Jherica on soul magic. They would be the weakest of the time travelers, so it seemed best to give them some means of self-defense against the one they couldn't simply die and recover from.
This sentence is a total mess, and a nontrivial cognitive load, for no good reason. Well, not zero good reason, but here the tradeoffs fall very strongly against a generic pronoun: the loss in clarity, the mental burden, the flow disruption, the forced "backtracking" through the sentence to clarify meaning are absolutely terrible. The first "they" isn't immediately clear on the subject - is it the two people, or the nonbinary person? Okay, contextually, we figure out it's Jherica. But then we have an implied subject (who is doing the giving?), the next "them" needs context that takes a moment to process (Jherica again), and then another "they" also referring to Jherica, but needs double-checking. The wonderful thing about this sentence if Jherica were given a normal gender is that "they" clearly refers to the pair of people and not the individual. It's a useful tool in sentence mechanics that is completely ruined. "She" or "he" might induce a small amount of confusion (did the author accidentally chop up the pair and is referring to just one of them?) but partly that would be the author's fault for substandard sentence construction, and I still don't think it is quite as bad. It's far from uncommon to be referring to a group of people alongside an individual, and super useful to be able to casually and implicitly differentiate the two via pronouns.
To be clear, the story is wonderful, and there isn't any big deal or mention made about gender here at all (at least if there was I have no memory of it), and authors can make mistakes especially when self-edited (as is likely the case here). Or, in fact, I'm not even positive the author did make said character non-binary in the first place, since the author occasionally uses "he" in the next chapter, but not always. So it's not some massive culture war thing in this particular case. I think the point remains however that some progressives have tried to gaslight people (including myself) that gender-neutral pronouns are a minor inconvenience at best, and leverage already-existing rules of English. It's true that "they" already can serve this purpose (e.g. "Who's at the door and what do they want?" when it is fully unknown) but there are still some significant burdens if it becomes popularized.
It seems that it really shouldn't be a big loss to perform some nonbinary erasure here. Many forms of fiction already do things to make it easier on the reader (and I always notice when they do) such as giving main characters names that begin with different letters, or in anime they will color the hair differently not just for aesthetics but to make characters more differentiable. Sure, these semantic and visual 'collisions' happen IRL quite a lot (e.g. two Joshes on your team at work), but it seems to me the loss in realism is more than offset by the practical benefits. Note that this isn't purely an anti-woke position, in my book: I think giving characters some identifiable traits can make them more memorable. So there might be good reasons to throw in an unrealistic number of non-straight or mixed-race people into your TV show beyond deliberate representation! I don't think I'm advocating for anything too extreme.
On the one hand, I'm sure you're right that it's not as good as a human developer. On the other hand, it's kind of like the web in general. Websites all kind of suck now because React gives developers the ability to be lazy and not worry about resource usage or anything else because everything's kind of "good enough." But the cost and speed advantage of using AI is so overwhelming that I don't think your concerns are going to hold up. Developers are just going to have to add more bad code on top of bad code until it works.
Full disclosure: I really think that a lot of concerns from sophisticated developers about how AI makes mistakes are just snobbery/posing. But that's what I, an unsophisticated developer, would think, right?
Like, I'm not saying I've never had an experience where AI is going down a path that I think is bad and needs to change course. But in those cases, I usually hit the stop button and say, "Hey, I think you need to do this in a totally different way," or I can just say, "Hey, your last change was terrible. Can you just revert it?" There are a few instances where I feel kind of dumb because I'm using three prompts to say like hey I need you to change the font size, when I probably could've done it more easily myself in that specific case. But overall, I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
It's pretty hard to beat, "I left some fruit (that I'm legally allowed to buy and have) in the cabinet for too long."
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2hr ago
I'm trying to write up an effortpost about *** conditions
You have been awarded the hapax legomenon price for extraordinary achievements in rationalist brainwrangling.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2hr ago
I learnt MMA after watching it for a while. It helped me appreciate how hard the sport really is. I still have an obsession with it that i wish I did not have but I have never really liekd any other sport as much.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2hr ago
Yeah plus it has real consequences, if you lose a fight, you may never be the same again as your chin diminishes, you can pick up a career ending injury or you can learn from it and come back better.
Violence is an essential part of the human condition, hand to hand combat is totally useless unless you wish to act like a dick in bars, the large practical impact it had was proving that there were certain styles and certain ways of making them work. All combat sports work, Karate works if you have no walls, bjj works if the other guy does not know anything about grappling at all and has no friends, wrestling works if you have no issues getting murder charges for slamming a guy into the pavement, muay thai works. People watch it for the reason as most sports, the resolution of a story, a man's dream gets destroyed to fulfill anothers. The wierd side effect of that has made combat sports around the world better as everyone can cross train now.
confidentcrescent
3hr ago
I'd like the guy to go home to his guns after the medication works. This is a lesser violation of his rights than either option you have presented and no more complicated or expensive than the current system.
I can't speak for Nybbler but I read his comments as indicating he wants the same.
Glassnoser
3hr ago
It's not a scam. A friend of mine did this as a full-time job for about a year, although he didn't do any of the skilled work that pays $40 an hour, since he doesn't have a STEM background. Another friend did it part-time. I've signed up but haven't yet gotten around to doing the programming qualifications or any of the projects yet. If I do, I can let you know how it goes.
The feedback they gave was that it was pretty mentally exhausting. The tasks are not easy and require careful thinking. The friend who did it full-time really liked it though because he could work whenever.
The biggest problem seems to be that the tasks were running out, though the first friend did a lot of qualifications which made a lot of tasks available to him.
jkf
4hr ago
For example, they could require a notarized statement about the identity, age, residence, location and travel accommodations
Minus the notary I think this is in place for identity, age & residence at least; federal penalties are severe and I think it's pretty widely observed in the pro world:
https://adultbizlaw.com/2012/10/22/porn-101-18-u-s-c-2257-the-basics/
fribble
4hr ago
We label turn off valves. For us, this has been sharpie on walls, but I would go for a nice label option in a home I built. When the house is flooding a nice label with an arrow pointing to a handle you last looked at when you moved in 5 years ago is a good thing.
When we do repairs we add turn off valves if possible. I would rather turn off the water to one room than turn it off for the whole house, if possible.
When I was a kid my parents tried to build but there was weird neighborhood approval of plans required and they eventually gave up and sold the land. Hopefully you don't run into anything like that.
jkf
4hr ago
a left-leaning poster
Since Turok can't respond, I'll give out an eyeroll on this one -- I'm ambivalent to his banning, but you sure aren't reading very closely if you think he's left-leaning.
jkf
5hr ago
Do some Kaggle (or maybe Topcoder if they still have good DS comps?) and call yourself a data scientist, start sending out resumes -- you've already got a PhD (from a Western university?) and published papers, so you are honestly probably a better hire than at least half of the candidate pool that I've seen.
Lack of direct experience might have you applying to moderately lowend DS jobs -- but that would be in the $100-130K USD range rather than $40/hr and scammy (again assuming you are in the US) and WFH is still common.
If your medium sized town is south of the Mason-Dixon line and you don't mind occasional travel I might even be interested -- I need to hire somebody in the next couple of months. Feel free to send a PM.
Tbh I've arrived at the opposite conclusion. As a teen I used to like characters that go against stereotypes - and to some degree I still do, as long as they're done carefully and thoughtfully - but combined with the ubiquitousness and increasing importance of fictional stories in people's lives, it seriously distorts their worldview. Stereotype accuracy is one of the best-replicating findings of sociological research, yet many people I tell this - most of them quite smart and educated - are completely dumbfounded. Of course this is especially due to the nature of their education, but the fictional stories they surround themselves with just reinforce their biases over and over. This can get quite comical, such as women who worry something is wrong with them because they aren't as assertive nor sporty nor as interested in engineering/math/etc. as their heroines.
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