AnasAbdin
Misplaced Lens Cap
art blog(derogatory)
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styofa doing anything
Claire Keane
JBB: An Artblog!
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
YOU ARE THE REASON
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Sade Olutola
wallacepolsom
Not today Justin
will byers stan first human second
tannertan36
Andulka
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Kiana Khansmith
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izzy's playlists!
seen from Nigeria
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@unsupervisedrat
according to claude’s rough estimate, me (and any given human) and my cat (and any given cat) are roughly 6 millionth cousins 24 million times removed.
Is it some property of mathematics that makes it always an nth cousin 4nth times removed?
For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcElotwrZ8o
Oh my god, I'm having to take some workplace training thing and it shows you a page of text and then there's a Next button, but if you click the next button before 60 seconds have passed, it tells you:
"To better understand the material, please spend more time on this page"
I am a very fast reader with ADHD! This just means I read the page and then spend the next 48 seconds fucking around in another window.
Amusingly the page I'm currently on is about respecting neurodiversity in the workplace.
I think I figured out why it works this way, and it's because of California state law. It says that employees must be given one hour of sexual harassment/abusive conduct prevention training every 2 years.
But it's just a bunch of text & images, so in theory an employee could read it all very quickly and be done in 20 minutes, which means they didn't get their one hour of training.
I beg please allow us to simply change some property of the button in DevTools and then proceed
The archons want you to feel poor. You can't let them. It's like stoicism how you feel is the one thing you can control. Boarding group 9 gets there just as fast as boarding groups 1-8!
the psychological wage of not being in the last boarding group tho
Boarding last is a privilege! That means you don't have to spend as much time on the plane.
Look don’t let me dissuade you from waiting this is one of those scenarios where a difference in preferences sorts people in an optimal way
Alas (at least in USA/Canada) the recent shift to paid check in baggage has resulted in everyone bringing the maximum amount of carry on baggage.
Either the planes weren't designed for that, or that it is impossible to design for this, has resulted in people boarding later having no overhead space for their luggage.
The airlines anticipate this and offer checking in your carryon bag for free, but this begets further waits once one arrives.
Gamma ray food treatments my beloved
whenever i attempt to buy myself A Novel Little Beverage From A Convenience/Grocery Store As A Treat these days, there's like... "fermented" sodas? "probiotic" sodas? ENERGY sodas (is... is the caffeine and sugar in most sodas not already energy enough)? PREbiotic sodas? PROTEIN sodas (?!?!?!? cursed????)? various combinations of all the above? sodas with some substance added that i've never heard of before but, based on marketing, seems purported to be "healthy", but like who knows?
and yes, half of these are probably just marketing nonsense and the other half if probably mostly-harmless stuff i wouldn't even notice, but i don't KNOW & i get so overwhelmed & stressed out that i just give up and just buy nothing at all instead
like, i enjoyed the la-croix-and-its-knockoffs era; that was intuitive to me; "here's 50 different flavors of Lightly Flavored Soda Water" is fine & delightful & there was this delicious fizzy watermelon-ginger thing for a while that was great
but i am so confused by this new shit. is this bizarre panoply of cryptic beverages actually generating appreciable profit margins. am i just experiencing what Getting Old feels like. why is there PROTEIN in a SODA
Only recently have we been able to manufacture at scale palatable, clear, protein drinks. One is to use microfiltration to remove all the fat, can't have that.
The weirder innovation (if it can be called that) was the creation of relatively low pH drinks. Whey protein has an isoelectric point (the pH at which the protein carries no charge and is likely to clump) at ~6 pH, the acidity of a light fruit drink. Alas, it appears that for now, we'll get nice tart clear protein drinks, at ~3 pH [1].
For those that remember the hydrolyzed protein drinks of yore, the advancements in that field also aids in the proliferation of modern clear protein drinks, as enzymatic hydrolysis can create fragments of proteins that can be "too large to be bitter and too small to aggregate" [2]
Apparently on the higher end, there's also the classic, "we made this protein custom from a yeast". [3] This makes control much easier.
[1] jungbunzlauer looks like some sort of supplier for addatives that are used to make artificial sweeteners taste better
[2] US Dairy
[3] Some sort of food blog? Good aggregation of things I wanted to learn
Due to my weird childhood and my weird brain, I have this very unhelpful compulsion to conceal Everything I do from Everyone. I Cannot be observed performing any action, no matter how mundane. My nervous system is convinced I'm gonna, like, Get In Trouble for eating food at dinnertime or sleeping in my bed at bedtime.
I've taken to asking myself, "Okay does this task actually require subterfuge or am I stealing a balloon on Free Balloon Day"
I see from the notes that we're all havin a normal one 👍
#i cannot be listening to music or watching tv in my own home!!
If anyone sees me reading a book they will hunt me for sport
Maybe some of this is empathy.
Seeing other people while doing some stuff is mentally difficult and triggers, "wait do i have to interact with them?"
So out of kindness to others simply, do not be observed
I was gonna write a longer piece about this but it didn't really come together, so to at least get the thought out:
In "social media vs education" discourse, there is a tension between the macro data not really showing any large declines in student learning & minimal benefits from things like cell phone bans, and the more anecdotal/smaller survey data of people telling you the kids in the classroom have really changed. I don't actually think you should toss out the personal experiences, that is being naive, while I think "oh the test scores are all corrupted by declining standards" narrative is equally naive - so what is the story?
The squaring of this circle is that when people talk about their student learning changing, it is almost always about books. They aren't unable to understand instructions, they can do math fine (again mild declines sure), people are taking calculus and chemistry and playing piano just like they always did. What has shifted is that people's attention span for reading books is vanishing, to the point where school districts are giving up on even assigning summer reading and shifting assessments to short form reading assignments. This cycle is just extremely hard to break because books are the one thing you can't "internalize" into the classroom - you can't ask them to sit in the room and read a book during an exam - and cheating the assignment is universal and free. Kids always wanted to skim their summer reading, but skimming, Cliff Notes, "asking a friend", those were all work and sometimes just an approximation of doing the reading anyway.
Now you just google/claude the answer to any of your homework questions about a book, you don't need even crack the (pdf's) spine. And of course the entire backdrop culture has shifted to either short form text or fully audiovisual content, so you don't care much about the object-level skill anyway. The bottom has dropped out on the incentives & value for many students.
But the rub is that this hasn't impacted learning all that much. The Kids Can't Read Bleak House, yes, but they were never great at that and it wasn't that related to other skills. "The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone" concept was just too limited; there are a lot of different whetstones out there. The test scores are doing fine, people's skills in the workforce are holding up, none of the "breakpoints" of someone's personal trajectory are flashing red. And of course many people do still read books! We have no shortage of historians because they were always a particular type of person anyway. Books aren't going away; their market share of global attention is just shrinking.
Are there consequences for this beyond the personal, though? Yes, individuals can still learn to be nurse practitioners and marketing analysts just fine, but is the ~body politic of the nation~ or whatever suffering from an endemic shallowness in its comprehension of itself? Maybe! I don't think that idea is crazy, actually, though it is a much more complicated story with many moving parts. But it is one that sits primarily outside the education system; school was never a particularly effective vaccine against "disenlightenment", and if the internet has done anything it has neutered the power of formal institutions to be that force.
This doesn't mean that the education system isn't facing challenges of course (AI & cheating is a big one), or that there aren't nuances to this whole story. I only wrote the quick-and-dirty version here after all. I just do think this tension is endemic to so much discourse from teachers, parents, students, etc - they are observing a mismatch between what they want students to be, and what students need to be to pass though the system.
I mean, test scores are down. Whether that's a "large" decline is perhaps a matter of definition: I don't think breathless stories about illiterate kids are reasonable (and I'm a known Bleak House truther), but I would argue they're large by the standard of how much the test scores move historically.
(Causation is another story, of course)
Yes, I mention that they are down, but I don't think these results being "small" is very subjective? Your own results have them at borderline significance declines, a few percentage points of the scoring distribution. Results like PISA - which Freddie deBoer wrote up recently - have US reading scores actually going up since the pandemic, and the math declines being nearly equivalent to student levels in 2015. These are ~10 point range reductions on tests that have score distributions in that span like ~300 point. Many metrics (like Harvard's Education Scorecard - you can look at Page 7) put their 2024 results as something like "we are at the same performance level as 2005". 2005 was just not a learning apocalypse year, right?
It is sad that we aren't making progress, that learning isn't really improving and is actually getting worse. We both A: thought we were gonna keep better at this, and B: there definitely was some bogus pedagogy movements in this era causing damage. But these are changes that are within the normal range. If you compare what these test say, to the tone of pieces like "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books", I think the claim "there is a gap here in understanding between the two sides" holds up well. And that is the gap I am talking about - if you want to just talk about the test scores in isolation from the narrative, then it can be a different conversation.
I am also a bit of a Bleak House truther, as I believe we discussed! Not to your level I don't think, but on the level of that book just being very hard and average students pretty much never being able to read it well. My favourite part of that story is that we all randomly started talking about that study in like 2024? So it was a big part of the "covid loss" or "social media brainrot" narrative? But the study was from 2015! And on college freshman. People who, yeah okay they got phones a few years ago, but for whom the impact of the internet was still pretty nascent, those kids grew up without phones. Most people just didn't really notice the date of the study. Though this was all a while ago, I may be misremembering the details here!
I have a greater confusion here: To this day my friends and I can't agree on, or understand, what English class teaches.
Sure it's the case that we would not necessarily understand what are metonym or synechdoche without them being in the high school English curriculum, and I definitely needed some grammar work when I had the fortune of landing in ESL class. But the greater part of learning how to read was... reading, and then thinking back on it to try to build a picture of what the author intended to say, kind of like trying to solve a word puzzle in which at the end, all the pieces have to (or come close to) falling in place.
The English classes themselves mostly makes one read... maybe up to four books a year? And my internal, nagging thought is that, if you 5x that, surely there'd be no problems whatsoever.
How the fuck do you screw this up.
>Buy dev infra >Make plan to maintain >...? >You are here
Wasn't there just a huge npm supply chain attack where a PR was created and then immediately deleted, causing github to track something incorrectly, in a fork ?
people are correct that a lot of attempts to restrict participation in women's sports are motivated by transphobia and a more generalized desire to force people into gendered boxes, to define boundaries around what counts as a woman. but I also think it's underappreciated how many of these attempts come from a desperate attempt to find some kind of consistent line against steroid use, and then running face first into the absolute clusterfuck that is human biological variation
okay nevermind post cancelled, apparently they have tests that can differentiate between endogenous and exogenous T, and for men they only test for exogenous T but for women they flag it if endogenous T is too high. it's all gender enforcement bullshit afterall. this is stupid, just have competitions divided into testosterone classes like they do with weight classes.
I wonder if all of this stems from professional sports lacking a telos: without a good understanding of what the sports are for, it's difficult to optimize for tiers of competition, or perceived fairness from the crowds or atheletes.
Instead we get this blend of what appears to be traditional human aspirations, competition, and entertainment. The IOC should read maybe 100 Supreme Court rulings and then come up with guiding principles and adjudicate new rules on said principles.
(consider R v Oakes, which created a new test where constitutional violations were judged on:
pressing and substantial objective (which the government is trying to achieve under this new law)
rational connection (between the law and the objective)
minimal impairment (of the constitutional right being violated, with respect to the objective)
proportionality (between the constitutional violation, and the objective)
The IoC can maybe come up with a similar set of criteria, and judge it against... well, there's no constitutional equivalent; perhaps the default of "nobody is prevented from entering/qualifying"
It’s called ‘being able to see the corpse’
So if I put you in an L-shaped swimming pool, and you knew there was a corpse around the corner, you'd be fine?
loving the implication that I'm a little animal and you're a scientist putting me into various bodies of water to test my corpse:water ratio tolerance
this is a warning to not swim in murky pools, as sometimes there are bodies in there.
now the interesting question is, what if it was:
a piece of a corpse
maybe a corpse
some combination of the above
gotta fill out the giant grid of: the whole body, a substantial part of the body, a small part of the body, versus: definitely dead, maybe dead, possibly dead
thinking of an ambient karaoke app that displays a lyrics HUD on my laptop based on whatever music it hears without interfering with whatever work I'm doing
I cast spell of summon RIAA lawyer
noo don't implement this with Claude, that's taking away valuable jobs from an ex-Facebook employee that could be paid $250k to implement it for a venture capitalist hoping for a $200 million valuation
It's surprisingly easy to do!
I made a karaoke app (pre Claude Code but with Claude) that can look up a song on Youtube, download it via yt-dlp, and then separate it into vocals/instruments (demucs), get the pitch (forgot which model), and generate lyrics (WhisperX). You can then sing and look at your pitch vs the song's original vocals!
Alas, while I wanted to use it to practice singing on-pitch, it turns out that it wasn't a significant problem I had. Unfortunately, vocal quality was much more difficult to quantify and implement.
that's really great! so it was generating lyrics by listening to the actual song? that's gotta be lossy, but any mistakes might be more fun than getting it exactly right
WhisperX seemed to do fine with English and Japanese ballads, and that model is big and seems to have encoded in it, information about the structure of language.
(I do wonder how badly it'd do with a Jay Chou song).
Unfortunately for your application, the vocal separation takes, on my 4080, about ~70% of the time of the track, so it'd be difficult to have it run in real time.
On the _other_ hand, musical fingerprinting is fast (if you have the database handy) and you can just play it in real time with the generated lyrics kicking in only a few seconds, if the music is already available.
I wonder when, if ever, Spotify will release a karaoke function. I put off making the karaoke practice app because they announced it, but once Claude came out...
thinking of an ambient karaoke app that displays a lyrics HUD on my laptop based on whatever music it hears without interfering with whatever work I'm doing
I cast spell of summon RIAA lawyer
noo don't implement this with Claude, that's taking away valuable jobs from an ex-Facebook employee that could be paid $250k to implement it for a venture capitalist hoping for a $200 million valuation
It's surprisingly easy to do!
I made a karaoke app (pre Claude Code but with Claude) that can look up a song on Youtube, download it via yt-dlp, and then separate it into vocals/instruments (demucs), get the pitch (forgot which model), and generate lyrics (WhisperX). You can then sing and look at your pitch vs the song's original vocals!
Alas, while I wanted to use it to practice singing on-pitch, it turns out that it wasn't a significant problem I had. Unfortunately, vocal quality was much more difficult to quantify and implement.
you can be a shapeshifter but once you change your shape you need to remain in it for at least one week taking the deal?
yes
no
results
Other than having a new and exciting way to enter a shape that's incompatible with life, what's the downside?
I bought a cutting board of teak and swore I would apply the oil. (yes, regularly!) (every week?) he doubts that I'll put in the toil. regards me as rashly embroiled in a war with more patient soil – sees, in a year, teak flecked; wife foiled.
Context: this man runs a history podcast
It's great that his wife is into him in this way
