autumnstwilight

Yeah. I also notice that Google Translate's guess at pronunciation frequently has errors, and that IS a LLM.

Someone further downthread said it appears to have about 80% accuracy on a short sentence, which means if you're not already at a level of skill where you can verify, then it's going to teach you the wrong pronunciations constantly. When studying languages myself, I find that learning the wrong pronunciation for something is annoyingly sticky, and unlearning takes more effort than learning something correctly the first time.

The "Giving What We Can Pledge" very literally was created by effective altruists and the organization that promotes it is explicitly an effective altruist organization, founded by effective altruists William MacAskill and Toby Ord.

I agree with this. In my latest stint on dating apps as a woman looking for a man, I matched with dozens of profiles from guys average in terms of height and salary (when disclosed), and also in a niche of "attractive to me personally but not in the top 10% of conventionally-attractive dudes". So I know dozens of guys got at least one match, and most of the time they liked me first, I hadn't swiped in either direction when they were shown my profile.

Upwards of 90% of matches did not convert to dates, because many did not respond to messages at all, did not or could not carry on a brief "normal human" conversation, or if they did the first two things, never proposed meeting irl. I think you are correct in your assessment that the median user on a dating app is very non-committal.

Yeah, this seems to be a truism along the lines of "scammers intentionally use poor English to filter for stupid people". It gets repeated a lot because it resonates with people, but there's no evidence it's actually done deliberately. Sure, they're making UI and other decisions to maximize for time on the app, but in order to avoid serving you the best matches for a long-term relationship, they'd have to know what those are, and still serve you only plausible, appealing matches that are somehow bad (if they were too bad, you'd quit using the app). I don't think they have this much insight.

*I came very close to falling for a scam that was written in perfect English, formatted convincingly, and appeared to come from an organization I was expecting to receive a message from at the time. Believing that scams will always be obviously stupid increases your chances of falling for one that isn't.

I'm curious how much feedback traditional matchmakers actually get about whether their matches were long-term good or not. It seems like a "wicked problem" in which any feedback is delayed and unclear, which means even people with experience might just be developing superstitious habits/generalizations rather than truly learning from success and failure.

Yeah, I've had a couple of conversations with Japanese people who were surprised to hear that I need to have a job to maintain a visa, since they think foreigners can just come here and get money from the government for doing nothing. Japan accepts very few refugees, so realistically this isn't happening to the extent that people believe. Leaving aside whether immigration is a net positive or negative, the foreign population of Japan is almost entirely working, studying (on their own dime), owning a small business* or the spouse/child of someone doing one of those things.

*While there are some reports of rich people just creating something that meets the bare-minimum requirements of a "business" to get a visa, these people are independently wealthy and not collecting welfare payments.

I've been thinking the silver lining of the current situation is that we'll be less inclined to send troops to aid US in their latest Middle East boondoggle, in the expectation of reciprocation in the future.

In other online spaces, I've seen some conservative commenters from the US asserting that America is so powerful, the rest of the world has no choice but to go along with them, and therefore there is no need to maintain good relationships and the US should do what most immediately benefits itself at all times. Certainly, there are some areas where we simply have to play along with the US, but I think they are underestimating the amount of things where they will no longer be our first choice to deal with.

Yeah, I can't see what the questions were, but if they were about suicidal thoughts and plans, having to read, consider and respond to those questions six times a day would certainly reinforce any tendency to think about it, just through sheer exposure.

My grandmother told a story about meeting an elderly female relative in Kingston, Tasmania, soon after my grandparents had got their first car. After visiting, they said they were now going back to the city (Hobart), and the old lady said, "Oh, how lovely, I've never been!" My grandmother reported, "And I should have told her 'get in the car then!', because she died not too long after."

Kingston is 13 kilometers from Hobart.

I've renewed my visa in Japan a bunch of times, including changing work category or visa status, and never had to leave the country for it. It's not standard for working or student visas, though you would have to leave if you were switching from a tourist visa to a different category.

How overworked would a doctor need to be to hallucinate you told them about microdosing psillocybin when you never said anything of the sort? (And how easy is it to then convince the system you're not a recreational drug user when it's in your medical records you admitted to drug use? Does this change if you're from a background more likely to be stereotyped as drug users?)

The humans are probably making mistakes like writing 100mg of something when they meant 10mg, which can also have dangerous consequences, but to an extent it's known this happens and there are processes to catch it. The type of mistakes and how much trouble and distress they cause matters as much as the number.

Your last line is the right attitude to take, but do you think the guy blogging his learnings of social skills on a blog called "wired differently" is a neurotypical writing for neurotypicals?

I find it to be rather common that concrete advice on social skills or other life skills called "neurotypical" if it doesn't explicitly hedge for reasons that people might not be able to apply it, when the authors are frequently writing about things they personally struggled with.

To be honest, if a guy decides not to date me because of "TeaOnHer", it's probably saved me some time.

I've been here for 15+ years and I've never seen a sushi place without salmon. But I've never been to a "fancy" sushi place, just supermarkets, kaiten chains and neighborhood restaurants that are $20-40 a head.

Salmon is not a "traditional" sushi ingredient because, until the introduction of flash-freezing, it couldn't be eaten raw due to the risk of parasites. That changed in the 80s or so, I think.

I had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"