Dr. Matt Might has some productivity suggestions for those in academic, who need some mental discipline. It's great that he's taken the time to post these mind-hacks.
Deep fake scams are getting better, and now we won't be able to trust whether any video is authentic. Given any technology, someone will cause problems just for the fun of it.
Self-embetterment is tough. There is no one single solution that works for everyone. It's easy to offer patronizing advice to those who are stuggling.
Cruel optimism...boils down to the folly of suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems. It’s about advice given from a position of privilege to people who will never be able to apply it to their own lives–because the cards are stacked so unfairly against them–but who will nonetheless interpret their failure as a personal one. The real harm comes from the stuff that sounds reasonable and actionable, like most self-help books.
The world has temptations that make you lose focus on achieving your goals, but "you don’t need perfect conditions to grow and to create."
Amazon used to be great. Facebook used to be great. Now some have observed that TikTok is starting to get crappy. Some are even saying this is true of Medium and Substack.
Even The Economist has observed that all the diversity and equity efforts are backfiring.
One result of all this is growing “resistance, anger, grumpiness, and eventually backlash” to the proliferation of diversity officials, says Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University, one of the authors of the study on diversity training at American universities. Many white male professors, she found, now limit campus interaction with minorities and women, lest an unintentional slight get them in trouble. High spending on diversity officials also leads to fewer classes, as well as higher tuition fees, which make it harder for minorities, who are disproportionately poor, to attend college.
Some of my friends in academia confided to me that it's difficult to work with students now. You never know when one of them might sense microaggression and report an encounter to authorities.
Daniel of Mushroaming.com is offering online class on identifying edible mushrooms that grow in the Pacific Northwest. If you'd like to know more about mushroom hunting and identification, sign up for his online classes.
It seems that the Chinese are on a roll, sending more airbone crap into American airspace. The Biden administration doesn't seem to mind.
Yes, I know that this has been going on for a while. The point is that it still is going on in Oregon, and is another reason why I feel that taxpayer money is ill-spent on the homeless. Once again, only foreign media will reveal to Oregonians how much we're losing in the war against drug abuse. The Bend Bulletin seems to agree - it's not that government officials don't have money. It's just misspent.
To anyone that has been paying attention, AI is picking up speed in making advances. SciFi author Ted Chiang seems unimpressed, and thinks that the Large Language Model flavor of AI is just performing searches, stitching the output together, and performing a kind of rephrasing, and then outputting the result. I don't think this describes what LLM is really doing, inasmuch as it is not clear what each neuron in a neural network hidden layer really contributes toward the end result. The ability to retrieve relevant text and package the output appropriately still defies clear elucidation. Stephen Wolfram has some thoughts on the ChatGPT model.
And Google is now linking LLM-AI to robots to perform simple tasks. If Palm-SayCan enters the consumer space, I can see all sorts of mischief that will result. Coupled with deepfakes (both visual and audio) and we're about to enter a crazy world.
NPR thinks that Asians are not the model minority that the stereotype makes them up to be. Well, if your definition of "Asian" includes the whole continent, then yeah, sure, I guess. Asians are not all one monolithic culture. Yokunai!
Why EVs will not see widespread adoption:
Not to mention that charging stations are targeted for their copper cables.
Why aren't smart people happer? Perhaps we should listen to the writer's grandma?
Gen Z doesn't remember when America worked.