I’m reminded of Jon Ronson’s observation in “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”, that the religious right are surprisingly tolerant of sexual misconduct scandals in a way that progressives aren’t.

The current MAGA position seems to be that they weren’t children, they were just very very very young adults…

The kind of people they’re pissing off with this, are the same people most likely to switch to bittorrent.

Not even a good film.

The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house-martin or the plumber may seek warmer climes in winter; yet these are not strangers to our land.

They spend over £50,000,000/year on care, research, and conservation.

A significant portion of what we know about the ancient world is a direct result of their research sharing and activities; for example when the Rosetta Stone was in French hands they kept it to themselves, when it was in Egypt they did nothing with it, but when it came to Britain it was shared with research departments across Europe as well as in Britain, resulting in our ability today to read hieroglyphics and demotic script.

Think about that for a second: if the Rosetta Stone had been left in Egypt, there’s every possibility that Egyptians today would still have no idea about most of their own history or how to read their own ancient texts. You might dismiss this as paternalistic or white-savioury, but it’s true nonetheless.

Even as recently as last year we had researchers finding things like https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/babylonian-map-world-0021631 that simply wouldn’t have happened without the British Museum’s work. So, I’m inclined to cut them some slack.

Some of those are astonishing.

Safety Index: 71st, lower than Belarus, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Healthcare: 39th, worse than Argentina, Sri Lanka and Mexico

People give the British Museum a lot of shit, but it’s free all year round for everyone.

It’s an issue with cost, but that also extends to the perception of the degree itself. Even a few decades ago I always found American culture to be generally more disdainful towards degrees and degree holders than most of Europe or Asia.

One of the worst things you can be in America is “elitist”; it’s a loaded word that describes a fundamentally Un-American attitude. And you can see why - there’s plenty of idiots with rich parents and a degree, and a lot of intelligent people with poor parents and no degree. So elitism and intellectual snobbery also imply classism and racism.

In countries with free/cheap tertiary education, it’s less controversial to say that people who are qualified to do a thing are likely to be better at that thing, and that getting qualifications is inherently a good thing.

If you can’t get your LLM to not deny the holocaust, then your LLM is not ready to get platformed on a major internet site.

This is exactly why we shouldn’t have billionaires. It’s literally impossible to spend a billion dollars on things for yourself, so what’s left but to spend it on manipulating other people.

LOL

Hard disagree, because it’s like with all the other forms of AI-created slop - with the real thing there’s layers of meaning, and you spend time and mental energy digging into that and getting something from it. But as with AI art and AI prose, you try looking closer at it and it just makes you feel hollow and frustrated at having wasted your time.

There was no meaning, there was no symbolism, there were no clever literary allusions, there was no interplay between the melody and the lyrics, it’s just superficial garbage that tricks you into giving it attention by sounding good on its first listen.

(Edit: lol touched a nerve with some shit talentless musicians)

The name isn’t a coincidence. Akio Toyoda is a classic generational wealth nepo baby, the grandson of the founder of Toyota. Of course he’d be a Trumper.

The name of the company is read with a “ta” instead of “da” because of some Japanese numerology superstition reasons that I don’t fully understand.

Specifying a whole group and not giving names seems like it should probably be unconstitutional? Like you could just use it to unilaterally undo any law, which isn’t the intent of the pardon system. IANAL