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(((Sarah)))@smpa.bsky.social |
59 followers 47 following 766 posts
I am interested in international relations, images of adorable animals I'm allergic to, excessively mainstream science fiction and fantasy, legal reform, and so many more things than will fit within the character limit I've been provided here.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Anti-black racism in Russia doesn't feel like anti-black racism in America or the UK or whatever, because black people constitute a vanishingly small minority. Like, 0.2% of the population. If you're expecting Alabama or Detroit, it can *read* as not racist.
www.rferl.org/a/For_Russia...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I feel like we covered "not all nasty things are obscene" in eighth grade? Around the same time as "black armbands aren't per se disruptive", anyway, so definitely before college.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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What the heck kind of drugs are they on at Politico?
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Due to disability I have Medicare/Medicaid and I only got stable enough (and lucky enough that several of my meds went off-patent) to reliably hit the annual catastrophic coverage point in February/March, rather than January, a couple of years ago. If we had lifetime limits I'd be toast.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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@bskyttrpg.bsky.social stats
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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This was "you're making a big deal out nothing" stuff, basically the defining stereotypical medical experience for women, and even though I knew that it still took almost dying to stop always automatically convincing myself I *must* be wrong just because someone important said so.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Politeness over safety is also one of the hardest habits to train yourself out of. I inherited a "don't ever make a fuss about yourself, if someone above you says you're wrong it must be true" attitude that didn't change until a doctor medically gaslit me so hard, I ended up on life support.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Bearing in mind that running in 1944 meant doing it after the Allies successfully invaded Normandy, liberated France, etc., but before the Battle of the Bulge. The campaign also took place after we recaptured Guam, but before they tried reclaiming the Marianas from us. Pretty much ideal timing.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I honestly think it's much, much better to actively *avoid* liking them. The important stuff is can they run the operation, do they intend on enriching themselves, do they usually make good hires - buying devotional candles with their photos or whatever makes it harder to evaluate performance.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I feel very strongly that you should avoid attempting carjacking random dudes sitting in cars in an area that probably has more protective details per capita than anywhere else in the country. Like, separate from the whole "we live in a society" thing, where you shouldn't carjack anybody.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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This line of thinking is why I stopped cycling - for crying out loud, cars are measured in tons.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Hey, at least this time the whim isn't losing a presidential election.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I wonder if this is officially worse than that YouTuber who tried running in a gazillion different constituencies simultaneously.
(He then claimed he got ten people to change their names, by deed poll I guess, so, um, yeah.)
www.bbc.com/news/article...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I went through a seriously uncomfortable round of Parkinsonism that had me absolutely terrified until someone said "well, actually" and changed my meds. That's so normal, for once I wasn't even embarrassed over freaking out.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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This exactly. There's a reason "Parkinsonism" is a word applied to a bunch of other conditions - it's all the breathtakingly obvious stuff that causes people to leap directly to that one disease when they shouldn't rule other stuff out yet.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkins...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I don't know if they have one, but I'm pretty sure they try to hand arrestees off to the sheriff as quickly as possible - campus safety has 70 officers and like 85 arrests a year, which means making a 10-mile drive once or twice a week seem pretty reasonable.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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We have him on record as being like "you realize the MAGA crowd will happily kill you for this, the man just called for you to be eliminated" on January 6th. No real need for further analysis under these conditions.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/p...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I mean, his kid is, while perhaps not quite Enemy #1, *really* high on Trump's list. That'd be more than enough to move my dad from "I have some issues with this incompetent crass fool" to "I'm going to scream in public about how evil he is" even if the person in question wasn't literally evil.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I would probably tell them to have the bot restrict itself to citations before 2020, and make use of Internet Archive cached versions for any URLs. The heart of this is learning that validation is *necessary*, and why, and then learning the kind of thinking you have to do when validating.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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But ChatGPT doesn't go looking for papers that actually back up whatever "fact" it just invented, no matter who wrote the papers. If it progresses to picking real citations at random the activity becomes more like "does this statement even appear in the paper", which, harder, but still possible.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I've tried giving "answering the phone" a shot in the last few weeks (I'm in Ohio, so there's somewhat better odds that it's a pollster) but every single one I've caught has been an attempt at Medicare fraud and nobody leaves messages. I'm pretty much done, at least until October.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I think the "did really well in Maine" factoid must have been jumbled together with the fact that Maine allows for splits. Now I don't know when or why I learned that, because it wasn't relevant in 1992.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Holy smokes, I thought he got one from them. I guess that means the last one was... George Wallace? Good job, America, setting such a great example for democracies everywhere (AFAIK everyone else has ditched their electoral colleges).
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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2016 in the US was a symptom more than a cause - Le Pen came in second in the mid-2017 election, and even in her first run for president (2011) she did better than her father had a decade prior. And that's despite a 2014 conviction for electoral fraud and open praise from Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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(If you see "ALT" on a picture, click it to find the description.)
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Any system that has more than two major parties that could conceivably gain control is a stupid model for US politics; Ross Perot is the last third party candidate to get *any* electoral votes, and the last time a major party became a major party was 1856.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Too many possibilities (I'm allergic to ranked lists), but here are two major competitors. (A disproportionate number of my favorites across all genres are time-travel adjacent.)
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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"Yes, the people at Britannica are really smart and really trying to say correct things but even so you can't take that to mean this specific thing is correct" is a lot harder than showing that ChatGPT makes stuff up. No need to stash the list of errata for your World Book set like my teacher did.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Teaching the kids that ChatGPT is trying to produce an answer that *looks* right but can't tell if it actually *is* right should help. Show them what Tay did after it was allowed to incorporate information from everything users said to it, have them ask ChatGPT about stuff they already know, etc.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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You tell them they have to go on Google Scholar or whatever and make sure the sources even exist. It's like what we were taught about facts in an encyclopedia - OK, so the encyclopedia says it, now let's find something completely unlike the encyclopedia that should also say it if it's really true.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I think you pretty much have to be the kind of person who publicly pees on inappropriate surfaces while completely sober, like Lyndon Johnson or that Rupert Murdoch-y character from Sherlock.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Quincy, MA wasn't established as a separate town until 1792 - and it was named after Abigail's grandfather John Quincy, just like JQA.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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If it worked like medical malpractice a SWAT team member in a state with high liability limits might be priced out even if they're super careful and never violate anyone's rights, kind of like how in one county I lived in, absolutely no one was willing to deliver babies anymore.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Sort of - medical malpractice costs vary by a bunch of different factors, including, e.g., "when someone successfully sues a professional in this specialty the payments are absolutely massive", which isn't necessarily correlated with how good the provider is.
www.leveragerx.com/malpractice-...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Most of whom aren't even serving on submarines, let alone piloting them or dealing with the reactor or anything else that could plausibly be covered under the word "operate". It's like a blinking neon sign.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Ars Technica gets into these issues here. Some of the "screw with the pollsters" indicators are super obvious. Like, one poll had 12% of young people claiming to be trained to be operate a nuclear submarine; the entire US submarine program only has 60,000 people.
arstechnica.com/science/2024...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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They're definitely alert to specific behaviors like approving of everything. Most people who are screwing with the pollsters aren't being super careful about making their answers consistent.
www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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They're grouped with other non-genuine responses like saying "no" to every question or always picking "C". It's much better when you include a long-form prompt of some kind, because non-genuine responses are blatantly obvious when they have to come up with something themselves.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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As is "the people in charge being basically competent" and "at least this one won't literally shoot people on the street and then brag about it" and anything else that might be considered "normal" or "average" or "tolerable" or "meets the minimum standard". Only "much worse" will do.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Some of them are going for "heightening the contradictions". The idea is that the revolution will only happen when the people are so miserable they're willing to risk everything they have to make it stop, meaning incremental change for the better is bad.
boards.straightdope.com/t/heightenin...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I'm sure a lot of people using it (certainly on social media) heard it at some point and like that it's punchy, easy to remember, but still sort of feels like the kind of thing a smart person would say. If what you care about is scoring conversational points, shorter is usually better.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I don't mean they're literally thinking about Athens - just this idea that "democracy" is strictly "everyone votes on everything", ignoring the fact that very few systems are like that for very long. Even small towns have school boards and township councils and whatnot making most decisions.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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I almost always see it being used for "I'm smart and know how stuff really works, whereas you are a stupid rube who should shut up" type conversational purposes - for me it rankles because I'm a "I can't stop explaining the thing" person, basically allergic to oversimplified statements.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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They're basically saying this isn't the perfect Athenian democracy, which is true but not the same thing as not a democracy at all and not particularly helpful. I mean, at various times even the Athenians had some representation, both through sortition and through elections.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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It's stressing the idea we have representatives making (most) laws, like there was never a national vote on Obamacare or whatever. A bunch of states actually do have direct democracy for some stuff - like all those Proposition Whatevers in California - which is completely ignored.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Some major outlets just repeated the claims, others investigated properly and published "the dude was totally making crap up" stories three years into it, plus Scotland Yard wasted a *lot* of time/effort (and harassed the falsely accused) operating under the assumption it was all true.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Weird thing is, Britain doesn't just have "you said something mean which violates this standard that would never fly in America" cases - they still have "making crap up" cases! This one (where the source committed fraud) ended up killing a publication.
en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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It's weird, I was double-checking the Wikipedia article to make sure I hadn't hallucinated the people I was pretty darned sure were from Braintree, but then the Wahlbergs were on the list too, but their own pages don't mention them living there. I was super tired, shouldn't have been posting.
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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Home of the Adams clan, John Hancock, and the Watson of "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you" fame. (Also maybe the Wahlbergs, one of whom keeps buying car dealerships in my area.)
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(((Sarah)))
@smpa.bsky.social
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LOL, Ohio has 11.8 million people and our House has a whopping 99 seats (two thirds of whom are Republicans, even though Trump only got 53% in 2020).
ballotpedia.org/Ohio_General...
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