veridies

If one reads a page a minute, which is a pretty decent rule of thumb, then a 600 page novel takes you ten hours, and reading ten of those takes you 100 hours. That’s reading for roughly 20 minutes a night over a year, taking some days off. Not the most common hobby nowadays, but hardly inconceivable for a busy person.

In Blindspotting (2018), a white protagonist is shown as being able to fluently speak an incomprehensibly dense version of AAVE, and it’s revealed later he has no idea what he’s saying (despite communicating effectively). I’ve never seen anyone criticize that joke.

Supreme Court justice Sotomayor notes that nothing in the government’s reasoning about not returning Garcia is unique to noncitizens. President Trump says he wants to send “homegrowns” to the gulag in El Salvador, and is exploring his legal options. In court, the government has argued that they have no recourse to force the return of any prisoner from that gulag. This is neither false nor inflammatory; it is the administration’s stated goal.

This concept is worthwhile, but the author is so focused on malice that he neglects real examples. For example, I think many people agree with vegans about animals’ capability for suffering, and don’t WANT to increase it, but just don’t consider it worthy of moral consideration. The factual beliefs are the same, but the moral choices are diametrically opposed.

Similarly, many (not all!) conservatives and liberals basically agree about the effects, positive and negative, of immigration. But one side doesn’t want those people here, and one does. You don’t need to have different beliefs about the world to be on exact opposite sides of that issue.

For the first example: that’s not censorship? It’s just a bad algorithm. Also, I don’t even know what “left-leaning” means in this context; the top result is from the Australian national broadcaster, and seems pretty straightforward. No one thinks nurses murdering Israelis is a good thing.

For the second example: Mullis is literally insane, and you can still find his opinions on YouTube, as you yourself found. Did you try uploading those lectures you found yourself? I’ll bet money that they won’t be take down (except maybe for copyright).

To be a little less charitable: this is a persecution fantasy. The right wing is not being silenced by YouTube.

I've been eagerly awaiting the new Lord Peter Wimsey novel! To avoid burnout, I've been reading them as they enter the public domain instead of reading the whole series all at once, and I was hoping that it would be in the first batch this year. Thank you so much for your hard work!

You're describing The Man Who Was Thursday. Great novel!

Some hens begin crowing like roosters. It's really annoying for backyard chickens, but I have had it happen a few times. That suggests to me that while chicken behavior varies based on sex, that is a spectrum, not absolute categories.

For all of these, an attempt to add more features (patching, additional car controls, video sharing) leads to breaking something that works. It's not so much that new tech is bad; it's that we reached a stable, pleasant equilibrium (as with the car), and then added features without considering if they improved the UX (or with the goal of finding ways to increase monetization, eg by selling feature activation in cars or adding spyware to video games).

I think one broad takeaway for me is that if tech cannot connect to the internet, it's often more pleasant to use.

I had to write 40 individualized reports this weekend. I fed my notes into GPT, along with a few directions about style, and it spit out competent reports that mostly only required tweaking. It saved me from losing my Sunday too.

I'm typing on a Star LabTop. It Just Works, No problems with drivers, no difficult set up; I unboxed it, turned it on, and had a functional Linux laptop. It's very easy to type on, the battery life is great, and I strongly prefer it to my 2016 MacBook Pro.

I honestly don't see the point. The Deck is like the Switch: easy to use in both docked and handheld mode. All Valve has to do is to bundle a dock and some new controllers and they have a full fledged game console.

I think OP's point is that there's one more major use case — gaming — for which Windows has a newly viable competitor. It's not that Linux is going to replace Windows, but that Windows could suffer a death by a thousand cuts. I'll note that more and more offices that I encounter seem to be switching to Chromebooks.

I just want to note (this is what I studied for my MA) that Krashen is very controversial in the field. Many researchers argue that output is critical to learning, and "interactionism," the idea that learning is facilitated through conversation, is probably the dominant theoretical approach at the moment. See, for example, Second Language Learning Theories, by Mitchell, Myles, & Marsden, chapter 6.

That's really cool! Thanks for sharing.