Liberals ≠ Socialists

Solidarity fist bump.

My car’s infotainment system (a newish Honda Jazz) is running Android (which I understand is based on Linux — this is me saying “yes, and…” to the OP). I’m unsurprised by this, but also for some reason, I find it quite funny how it doesn’t look like Android — until you go delving in the settings and hidden menus to discover that the developer’s settings (and how you enable them) is exactly the same as my phone.

“future regrets” is such a trippy phrase

I give out live usbs like they’re candy (to friends who are Linux curious)

“Keep in mind, we have our own in-house models that are bloody fantastic, used for different sciences and research.”

I’m a scientist who has become super interested in this stuff in recent years, and I have adopted the habit of calling the legit stuff “machine learning”, reserving “AI” for the hype machine bullshit

I really loved how she was recognised pretty unanimously as the badass that she is. Society has a lot of deeply rooted problematic beliefs around sexual assault, but Gisèle Pélicot’s bravery was a definite step towards unravelling those icky attitudes.

This is going to be a pretty fast and loose definition of blog, but I like sharing cool stuff. Some of these links will link to a particular post on that blog — this is if there’s a particular post I really like there, or what first led me to that blog.

“A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” by Historian Brett Devereux. https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ He’s especially good at military history, which is why I linked to his series on the Siege of Gondor from Lord of the Rings. I also enjoy his series on pop-culture misconceptions around Sparta

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/ It’s a blog by the Statistician Andrew Gelman (and others who guest write). This is one of the more academic ones, so only likely to be fun if you’re a particular kind of nerd

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/12/part1statblocks/ Tabletop roleplaying games and law crossover blog

https://scatter.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/sex-as-a-social-construct/ Sociology blog. Quite academic, but still fun. Found it through Andrew Gelman’s blog above

https://www.bookandsword.com/2022/04/16/science-as-verified-trust/

https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/etc/web_paleontology/ Unsure if this site is a blog, but certainly this post has many links to old-school web pages that are cool

https://gretzuni.com/ Dense philosophy stuff about technology. This person is an academic. N.b. I am a scientist, not a philosopher, so I am less good at vetting philosophy takes. I enjoy it though

https://explorationsofstyle.com/2011/02/09/reverse-outlines/ Blog by an academic who specialises in teaching writing to university students. I like her stuff.

https://www.bookandsword.com/2022/04/16/science-as-verified-trust/ I think this person is a historian too

https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/the-phony-comforts-of-useful-idiots Blog by economist Edward Ongweso Jr.

https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/ Blog about “the intersection of music and data”. Also has a podcast.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/ This post went viral last year. Some people don’t like this tone of writing, but I found it quite cathartic, and have enjoyed other posts from the blog

https://datacolada.org/ “Thinking about evidence, and vice versa”. These guys do a lot of cool stuff on science methodology, like meta-analyses. They were so good at their job that they got sued. I really like them

https://karl-voit.at/ Blog about personal computing information systems. This guy was the one who first piqued my interest about Emacs a bunch of years ago (Emacs is a very old text editor with an insane amount of customisability and an even more insane learning curve)

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/essays/ “Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland”

https://meaningness.com/ It’s kind of blog that some would call pretentious as hell, but I like its vibe

https://wordsmith.social/elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler There’s not too many other posts on this blog, but I really enjoyed this one

https://theluddite.org/ “An anti-capitalist tech blog”

https://blog.thea.codes/winterblooms-tech-stack/ Cool resources on DIY music synthesisers

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/what-is-category-theory-anyway Maths! Especially category theory. The difficulty ranges from “pretty darn accessible” to stuff that’s way above my level. I like the pretty diagrams though.

Okay, that’s all that are coming to mind right now

I don’t know too much about this area, but I do know that this kind of task involves a bunch of complex processing in the brain. The more “Mechanical” aspects of vision could be described as visual acuity (sharpness of vision). However, gauging whether something is wonky would be a visual discrimination task, which involves more work by the brain. It’s an area in which one’s skill can be improved through learning, and some occupations have a lower discrimination threshold (I e. They can detect smaller differences).

This sounds like a good interview approach. In the sense that the interview is also an opportunity for the interviewee to evaluate their prospective employer, this would be a green flag for me.

“I’m looking for a role where I can make good use of the skills I bring to the table” (because implicitly, the 299 places that didn’t email back don’t have a role where you can fit in and be useful (even if that’s only true in the sense that they didn’t hire you so therefore you can’t contribute there))

Although I recall that some of them don’t include links to explanations or info about the falsehoods; I like that this aviation one did do that.

Thank you for the learning! Before this thread, I didn’t know enough about altitude to care about this question, but now I’m like “neat! Cool learning!”.

I still can’t believe Amazon named it’s gig work platform “Mechanical Turk”. It’s beyond parody

“Guard labour” is a fairly new-to-me phrase that makes a lot of weird things about modern society making more sense.

One of my favourite things is the one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”:

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

" …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."

Source: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf

Yay, learning!

What section would you put it under? It isn’t clear to me where it would fit

My God, that’s hilarious, thank you for sharing it. I enjoyed “I am like the Statue of Liberty: I accept everyone, even the wretched and the huddled and people who enjoy Haskell.”