The quote leaves out the best part.

people have cast doubt over the quality of Telegram’s encryption, given that the company uses its own proprietary encryption algorithm, created by Durov’s brother

That was exactly my point, yes

Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) – you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it’s real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.

Turns out the answer was government, all along…

Saying that it’s okay if one group of people that someone tried to wipe out, does whatever they want, because of course they’re the victims after all, is exactly how we got to this situation where Israel is creating on Earth a for-real biblical apocalypse and people are trying to defend their right to do so.

Two things can both be concerning

When one side is being violent and racist against innocent people and then some other people start being violent and racist against innocent people on the “other side” to counterbalance, that’s not a calm or welcoming development for anyone concerned

Yeah this is a somewhat bad guide at least as far as some of these entries

I would also add:

• ad hoc = sort of made up for this one situation; “ad hoc attendance system” means they’re not following the structure; carries an implication that it’s more or less working but maybe not the best way
• de facto = it doesn’t have the designation but regardless of that, the meaning of the designation is what’s happening; “de facto manager” means they don’t have the manager title but that’s the job they are doing
• per se = I’m being nitpicky about details so please be careful not to read anything into my statements other than what’s specifically said; “he didn’t drive off the road per se, but he skidded on the turn and he was way out of his lane”

Yeah maybe that’s fair

My point is largely based on that I think the LLM is going to do an incredibly poor job of this. Something like the Pearson readers, I think are fine, because they’re accomplishing this important thing while (a) preserving the literary merit (b) IDK, something about how this is marketed makes me think it will be aimed at people who should be developing their reading skills but want easier-than-adult-English level for whatever reason, not at places where it actually makes sense and is perfectly reasonable to have an easy-fied version.

My point was that Gatsby is perfectly readable for an adult reading level. If someone’s not at that level with English then fine. Can we compromise on the importance of preserving the important elements of the book, if we’re going to make a simplified version of it, instead of just having an LLM make a bad job of it and then pass off the result as something that’s going to do something for anybody if they read it?

Yeah. The axis of “powerful writing vs waste of time” is for some reason not really related to the axis of “hard to read vs easy to read”.

“The Great Gatsby” is actually a really good example of the powerful + easy to read corner of the chart. I suspect that they chose it having no idea what they’re talking about, and that doesn’t give me a lot of faith that they will be able to tackle the extremely difficult task of getting an LLM to not completely ruin the artistic merit of what comes out of it, regardless of how much easier to read it made it.

Agreed

Lookin at you “Ulysses”

There are books that are too hard for me. I get that and I’m comfortable with it. Anything above short story length from James Joyce or William Faulkner is simply beyond my abilities and not enjoyable to me. It is fine; I don’t read them.

(1) I would obviously never in a million years decide that the answer was for someone or some bot with no literary abilities whatsoever to pre-chew it for me and spit it back up into my mouth like a big mama bird, and for me to choke down the resulting product (2) The Great Gatsby is not on that list my man. It has some deeper themes, allegedly, but that’s not a hard fuckin book. I suspect they just chose a “classic” book at random, unaware that the specific one they chose is a pretty easy and enjoyable read, because they have never read it, because they are to a man a bunch of un literary morons and thieves.

Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there’s no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It’s basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.

What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole “debate” survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.

Yeah. I mean it’s hard to blame them–

You know what, fuck that, let’s blame them. They have a responsibility. This is like all the German businesses that played along with the Nazis because it was easier and then had to change the subject when their grandkids asked them about the war years. Like yeah grandad ran a, uh, a pots and pans factory. Yeah. Just pots and pans. Now go play outside.

In ordinary times I think it would be fair to say well you know a bunch of them didn’t focus on the bottom line and went out of business and everyone had to get new jobs, so hard to blame the ones still around. But this is kind of all hands on deck time. It’s one thing if you don’t want to write articles about the IRA and all good stuff about Biden. It’s a whole different fuckin story if you want to write stories feeding into getting the guy elected who is going to fuck up your home and city and business and economy and the safety of you and your families, too, and then (I am sure) stand around like “we’re all looking for the guy that did this” if it winds up coming true.

It gave some sound bites for people to hold up as examples of why Biden is old which I’m sure we will be seeing on certain news networks from now until forever going forward

And gave a bunch of “objective” news outlets a good excuse to write a bunch of “DEMS IN PANIC AFTER BIDEN’S UNFORGIVABLE SHIT SHOW” articles they are for some reason eager to write

Other than that significant amount of fodder, I think nothing of value occurred

Sickness, Puking, and Debt

Sounds about right

It’s bananas from start to finish

I can’t recommend it highly enough

Why would you hurt me this way

I took the phone to do a video chat with someone’s central Asian friend and he immediately said “Aw, shit, big fake American smile.” I sort of checked myself like yeah he’s right I do have a big fake bullshit meeting-someone smile on my face. Well now I feel like a dummy.

It gave me some cultural perspective.

You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:

1. Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
2. Take it out.
3. Boot it up.
4. If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.

I classify most of those people as shills. The people who want to talk about communism or anarchism or pro-China/Russia-ism, and lack of any interest or hope for US electoral politics as kind of an outgrowth of that but US electoral politics is not the main thing they are interested in focusing on, I classify as probably authentic tankies.

Like I say, of course, I have no idea. That’s just how I write it down in my head.

As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are places in the world where it works the way this guy wants it to. Redmond O’Hanlon talked about observing the results, someone falling off a boat and clearly going to drown, and O’Hanlon becoming incredibly alarmed to the people around him, like where is the rescue boat, isn’t someone going to do something for him, don’t they have some kind of safety in place? And they asked him, who’s going to pay for it? Why would someone set up a lifeguarding operation like that for no one in particular just out of the goodness of their heart? And they laughed at his naïveté about how the world operates, as he watched the kid struggling, going further and further away and out of sight as the boat continued without him.