agarsev

I'm in Europe so maybe my view is different, though there's a lot of that thinking over here too: the only possible value of higher education is the advantage it gives me in relation to others (competitiveness, perception...).

But there are other more important (imho) values.

First, it is an excellent opportunity for personal worth. Socially: change of social group, freedom to explore, independence without much responsibility. Intellectually: mastering an advanced topic, in a program less directed than previous education, geared toward people with some demonstrated skill/affinity, meaning more depth. Also, no teacher or parent asking for grades, meaning more responsibility over own learning and organization.

It's a time for exploration. As it's said in classical AI, too much exploitation and not enough exploration means suboptimal solutions.

But also, higher education provides a resource for society. People with niche knowledge, expertise in a variety of topics, means a society is more resilient to disruption, and also more likely to innovate.

University is also a place for intellectuality and individuality, values very important to sustain a democracy, since democracy's main enemy is the inside enemy, in the form of ignorance and gullibilty.

Of course, to me all this means higher education is mostly a public service and therefore should be mostly taxpayer funded, but again, I'm from Europe :)

I fail to see how the two accidents, which seem to have very "down to earth" explanations (maintenance failure by workers, protocol override by operators) are being assumed to be a political responsibility so quickly by some and asking for the minister resignation. Now, two in a row seem to point to systemic issues. Is this responsibility of Adif or Renfe? maybe those state companies have to be thoroughly revised. is it due to lack of funding? maybe taxes should be raised, or money diverted from somewhere else (though seeing the spanish budget, it's hard to tell where from, both teachers and doctors are currently protesting for lack of funding). Maybe it is, in the end, a political directive that should have responsibilities declared in the executive. But seeing so many interested parties jumping to that conclusion literally hours after the crash means it's not done out of any reasoning but political animosity

southern europeans have had to deal with the northern cultural view that we're lazy, and modern work culture imported from those countries has virtually ended siesta. well, now it's hot over there too. we can be nice and tell them "see?" or we can be mean and have them live with the consequences of their moral positions. Right now I'm leaning a bit to the later, but it might just be the heat getting to me :P

Original title: President vs Parliament: Metsola overrides MEPs in bid to force through child abuse law

Content from TFA:

> Ambassadors on Friday will consider an “invitation of the President of the European Parliament [to] proceed with the Council’s first reading position” on the proposal to allow tech companies to choose to scan for CSAM

> The European Commission proposed the temporary CSAM bill as a stopgap measure to allow companies to scan while legislators agreed on a more permanent solution.

> Tech firms continued to scan, despite the legal limbo.

> If capitals choose to adopt their position, the law does not automatically pass: The Parliament would need to either accept it or re-enter negotiations. “There is no certainty that [the Parliament] would adopt the legislative act in second reading in line with the Council’s first reading position,” Cyprus wrote in the note.

> Gregorová rejected the suggestion that lawmakers would budge. “The Parliament mandate is clear: A majority voted it down, meaning that we reject the extension.”

as a researcher in NLP slash computational linguistics, this is what I tend to think :) (maybe a less strong version, though, there are other kinds of thinking and learning).

so I'm always surprised when some linguists decry LLMs, and cling to old linguistics paradigms instead of reclaiming the important role of language as (a) vehicle of intelligence.

Interestingly, one advantage SignWriting may have over IPA is that while you cannot easily represent sounds in a visual medium (thus letters are mostly arbitrary) movement and hand depictions in SW are highly iconic.

Also, just as you can drop many IPA symbols and just get the basic set needed to represent a particular language, I guess you could use "simplified" SW ignoring the fine differences.

It's a way to write sign languages. Think of like the alphabet, but for hands, movements etc instead of sounds.

Now, it may not be obvious that there is a necessity for a writing system for a minority language embedded in a larger community (spoken language), but there are many uses: preservation, digital use, teaching, linguistic study...

Since an organism characteristics depend a lot on its evolutionary history, classifying organisms like that helps us make predictions and assumptions based on our knowledge of related organisms, so it's quite beneficial to humans. Also, the other classifications like tree, shrub, fruit, whatever, are also valid and used in biology, just not the main classification system. The other feature of phylogenetically classifying organisms is that it's valid for all life, which is a nice property.

I use both (neovim instead of vim, i3 as wm) and you got me thinking. I think the point of both is actually not having to use the mouse. But the mouse is not the problem per se, probably is the spatial/visual interaction paradigm. I don't care where the window exactly goes, I just want it right/on top/minimized. I don't want to search visually for a button that does what I want, I know what I want, I can just "tell" the computer. It's not about keybindings as shortcuts to do something, it's talking to the computer via keyboard using my language center without the intermediary of the gesture/spatial metaphor. Maybe? I just thought of this sorry.

I don't think democracy is about having the "best" government, that'd be technocracy, I guess. Democracy is about sharing the power, and having the most legitimate government based on the principle that everyone's voice is equal.

Also, it's not a zero sum game at all. First, even if the long stretches of good and bad governments equalized over the long term, it's much worse to live all your life under a bad government than have one half the time. Also,thinking as an engineer, think about the stability implications of a wildly swinging signal vs a smoothly swinging one, even if both are centered.

In any case, coming from a country which had a long dictatorship until not so long ago, it's fairly clear it's not a zero sum game.

Nintendo at least has a good history with this, at least in my experience. Both 3ds and WiiU e-stores were closed, but I can still play all my digital games on both. I can even make backup copies of the game on external media and everything works as you would expect (save online multiplayer, which is a shame but that's a different story)

Sign language researcher here! I would recommend you look a bit at the scientific literature on the topic. I know it can be a bit overwhelming and hard to know to separate the actual info from the garbage, so I can try and select for you a few hand picked papers. IMO, trying to understand sign language oneself, or at least getting basic notions, is fundamental to understand where the real problems lie.

Unfortunately there's no getting away from that. While the scarcity of data indeed is an issue, and your idea is nice (congratulations!) the actual problem is the scarcity of useful data. Since sign language doesn't correspond to the oral language, there are many problems with alignment and just what to translate to. Glosses (oral language words used as representation for signs) are not enough at all, since they don't capture the morphology and grammar of the language, which among other things heavily relies on space and movement. Video + audio/audio captions is nearly useless.

Good luck with your efforts, this is a fascinating area where we get to combine the best of CS, AI, linguistics... but it's hard! As I said, let me know if you want some literature, by PM/email if you want, and I'll get back to you later.