Would you consider covering the fact that girls have been getting their periods younger and younger? It seems like a topic for a “more than you ever wanted to know about” deep dive. The question is from my wife but I happen to be interested also. To pick a a random one of many relevant links: https://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/news/what-drives-earlier-menstruation-girls
I worked for several months writing a nerdcore rap song about cognitive biases (it's a lot of lyrics and I have a day job and a weekend gig too). Anyway the song is about how the bees have bounced back from Colony Collapse Disorder, but Negativity Bias prevented people from caring about this good news. The funny thing is by the time I released the song it became apparent that bees were now facing new problems like the Varroa destructor mite, so many of the commenters self-righteously denounced me for downplaying the problem. Still, it kind of proved my point. Anyway here's the song, let's cheer for the bees! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs8_cQpI_IM
But seriously - you're right about how rarely we follow up here. And it has consequences - every so often someone tries to downplay global warming by saying "Remember acid rain? Or the ozone layer? Those problems went away!" But those problems went away because people took action. The absence of follow-up leads people to incorrectly conclude that those problems went away on their own.
I would love see some in-depth reporting on the bee thing. Did they truly just recover on their own? Did we Fix the Bees? Was there ever a problem in the first place, or was it a Shark Attack fear cycle?
I hear that one of the big problems is that other drugs are laced with fentanyl to cut costs while giving them a kick. And so the standard administration measures and doses no longer apply for these other drugs, and result in deaths.
The current fentanyl epidemic seems to be far more deadly than the crack epidemic. Two sources of drug overdose deaths show that the 1980s were lower than any year since for overdose deaths, and the Wikipedia list says that they were lower than any year before 1979. (They also show a weird discontinuity at 1979 - I'm not sure if that's a real one-year drop, or some data issue.)
The Wikipedia page also shows cocaine deaths broken out since 2000 - there was apparently a peak around 2005-2007, and a second higher spike now involving cocaine and opiates together.
Does anyone else not understand why people take so many holidays? Yes, I know I sound like one of those overbearing and demanding managers, but hear me out.
I frequently hear people say that they "need" a holiday as if:
a) the excessive demands of their current work are such that they will not be able to continue without a complete break for some duration, usually in a different country
b) After this complete break, the previously excessive work will no longer be a problem due to the magical rejuvenating powers of the holiday
Is this actually what happens most of the time? Or is the real reason just that people want time off work to do something else?
* People need a break to dissolve the stress from work. Yes, having a break makes it easier also for the few days after vacation until the stress accumulates again.
* If you want to visit a different country, a weekend is not enough; the ratio between "time and money spent traveling" and "actually being there" is dramatically different when you take a vacation.
* Yes, sometimes people want or need to do something in the private lives, too. For some of those things, an evening or a weekend is not enough.
>Is this actually what happens most of the time? Or is the real reason just that people want time off work to do something else?
It kinda works. Time solves everything, and a surprising number of problems go away if you ignore them long enough. So taking a vacation means that of everything that's a problem at work at a time T, a part will have become irrelevant at T+2 weeks, another part will have been solved by someone else, and yet another part you'll have worked out unconsciously. And one can assume you come back better rested than before, and better able to solve the problems that remains.
As for the leading question of "not understand why people take so many holidays", I used to not understand when i started working, but that's because I had just graduated from College, so of course, after a 5-years vacation I didn't need much for the first 2 or 3 years.
I don't think anyone actually believes (b). The value of a vacation is that you don't have to work for that period of time, not that it's any better once you come back.
Most people build up stress such that their work performance slowly declines. Taking a break can be a corrective. Not taking a break makes it worse. Evenings and weekends can be enough of a break, and usually at least help, but most people need more than that. Real breaks, where they don't monitor email or do anything else related to work for a period of time.
For me, the break needs to be longer than four days. About 3-4 days into a vacation I start feeling better and my stress drops off.
I've never had a break help with work stress, but I can imagine a situation where someone's stress is coming from a growing backlog of home tasks, which holidays allow time to address.
Otherwise, taking a trip can provide motivation for continuing a harrowing job; sure the work sucks, but it also means I get to see Hawaii, and if I stick with it I'll get to see Europe soon.
Time away from work induced stress is immensely valuable. it usually doesn't need to be an overseas trip to be valuable, but for many people home and/or family can be a stressor or a reminder or stressors so getting out of town commonly helps relaxation.
The homepage for this blog has started showing subscriber-only posts in the main list of recent posts to me, a non-subscriber. Given he specifically said he'd avoid this and there hasn't been any announcement from him about the change as far as I've seen, I assume this is due to a change from Substack not Scott. I just wanted to point this out in case he hadn't noticed given it presumably doesn't affect his view of his own blog.
Thanks for the heads up. This is not a deliberate change on my part, but my subscriber count keeps going down and I'm looking for ways to change that, so I'm going to experiment with keeping it for now.
Scott, I can't afford (or at least justify) the US$100 paid-subscription rate, particularly given that I'm paid in C$, but also feel bad about not contributing.
I know you have a student rate, but that was a long time ago for me. I'm not willing to rationalize that "I'm a student of life" or somesuch rot.
I wonder if you'd consider a retiree rate of US$50/year.
This could be a voluntary thing attracting people like me who want to contribute financially. I'd be fine with paying a reduced rate and not having access to the subscriber-only posts.
Or is there some other way people can contribute financially?
Could be partially inflation, though I wasn't a subscriber to the blog, I'm letting even my newspaper subscription lapse, gas is 50% more than a few years ago, groceries are up 20% or more on many items; and my pay is not keeping pace; entertainment is definitely one of the areas I am cutting to be able to keep affording car repairs while I wait for my new one to get built and delivered. :(
Almost all my scores for book reviews are in the 5-8 range and rather a lot of them are 6 or 7. (Because they're almost all at least _quite good_ and most aren't _astonishing_.) I suspect that my book reviewing may affect the final outcome more by rewarding/penalizing the reviews I've happened to choose (depending on whether I'm more or less generous than the average) than by rewarding the ones I like over the ones I don't.
(Perhaps the scoring process should normalize each rater's scores, or use them only to adjust _relative_ merits for pairs of reviews, or something, but that's not so easy to do for people who don't rate as many reviews as I do.)
Yeah, the problem with normalization is whether the *unrated* reviews should be treated as the *worst* or as *average*. If there are 3 reviews A, B, C, and I rate A as good and B as bad and don't say anything about C, is that "A, B, C" or "A, C, B"? Obviously A is my favorite, but is explicitly disliking something worse than not even bothering to rate it?
If we answer this, the rest is relatively simple. If there are e.g. 10 reviews, then everyone's best rated review gets 10 points, the second one 9 points, etc.; if there are reviews rated the same, they get the average number of the points for their places.
The book review review submission form doesn't seem to check the email-address field. I have definitely submitted at least one review-review with an "email address" lacking the @-sign and everything that should follow it, and I think probably at least one with nothing at all in that field. But I have no idea whether those submissions will be ignored, or treated on an equal footing with all the rest, or what. (I have not attempted to resubmit them. I have already forgotten which ones they were.)
Reading book review contest entries, I frequently find myself thinking "this is a pretty good review of a book that doesn't deserve the attention, and its actual value to me is therefore pretty small". (One _can_ in principle write a review of a bad book that's so good on its own merits as to deserve reading, but that's difficult and most reviewers in the contest have not done it.) I've tended to give these good-ish but not great scores, because to me the value of a really good book review is typically _both_ that it's interesting or enjoyable in its own right _and_ that it directs me to a book that's worth reading. I wonder whether I'm typical in this.
Yeah I also tend to rate highly books I want to read. If I order the book while reading the review then it's at least an 8. I see this as self interest, as I'm mostly here to find other good books to read.
IMO the point of you fine folk taking the time to do this is to curate what the time poor among us read in a few months time. Thus, if the subject matter is tripe it probably isn't worthy, even with a good review.
Does the book review contest really have to be about book reviews? As I’m reading I definitely feel like most reviewers have done their own thinking, and are stretching the definition of a review to talk about what they’re interested in. Which honestly I’m on board with, I just wonder if this really has to be a book review contest every year. Why not- book inspired blog post contest or something?
I've heard that MMA helped to sort out which of the martial arts were the best since, in the beginning, anyone of any fighting style could enter tournaments. There were weird matchups like sumo wrestlers fighting kung-fu guys. Through a process of natural selection, the winners converged on the best set of fighting styles.
Has this same thing been done with sword fighting? Are there tournaments where guys with medieval broadswords fight guys with katanas or Roman gladii?
>Has this same thing been done with sword fighting? Are there tournaments where guys with medieval broadswords fight guys with katanas or Roman gladii?
Actual swords where people can literally die, no. But an open ruleset including sticks/clubs as well as full MMA rules? (I.e. you can choose to tackle the guy hitting you with a stick, hit them on the ground, etc.) Yes, it's obscure but has actually been around since a little before the first UFC- it's called Dog Brothers. It's not a competition (there's no winners or losers), but just guys or gals getting together in a park or gym and fighting with sticks. Here's a good sample https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvmLQ_Jjqmk&pp=ygUWZG9nIGJyb3RoZXJzIGdhdGhlcmluZw%3D%3D
Part of the trouble is that every weapon and martial art is designed for a particular context, and sometimes these are incompatible. Is it for battlefield, or self-defense, or formal duels? Do they wear armor, and if so what sort? Do people carry around shields, daggers, or other off-hand implements? Are there assumptions about the sort of thing a gentleman simply Would Not Do?
Also, being able to practice at full force without injuring your partner(s) is very important, and different schools come up with different compromises. Which inevitably leaks back into the style itself, sometimes creating weak points. So to some extent, the dominant style of this free-form competition would be determined by the rules being set.
The fight choreography at the end of "Rob Roy" (1995) isn't a horrible depiction of different styles in conflict:
My understanding though is that all top-level MMA competitors deploy elements of more than one martial art -- it isn't the case that a pure judo expert is fighting a pure jiu-jitsu expert or whatever. That seems to muddy the sorting part quite a bit.
And would that translate to sword fighting or fighting with other types of weapons? As a practical matter could a broadsword guy and a katana guy each be benefitting from techniques from swords having different lengths/weights than the one they're each holding?
There were; but the gladiatorial games fell out of favour a few centuries ago due to the deaths, and there have been quite a few new swords developed since then.
You could use fencing-style rules, I suppose. Like, most blades don't need a tremendous amount of force behind them to inflict a fatal wound - if you can hit their chest with even moderate force you're going to ruin their day, and that's well within the ability of a judge or even an electronic circuit.
The trouble is, swordfighting under those rules would likely converge on, well, fencing swords - very long and very thin, maximizing your ability to stab your opponent without getting stabbed in return, in an environment where you don't need to worry about armor. Actual fencing foils have a maximum length, but if you went UFC-style anything goes, you'd probably see some stupidly long swords that blur the line between "sword" and "polearm."
Yea, ultimately the problem is that human anatomy is really complicated, and what, in practice, is a "disabling cut" is basically impossible to ascertain. Increasingly HEMA tournaments are trying to incentivize a greater variety of tactics though, for example "doubles", where the person who scores the initial hit gets hit within 2 seconds of that hit give both people a point, as well as getting extra hits for deep cuts, torso, head or thigh, etc.
Even within this ruleset rapiers tend to win out, although this is mitigated by the fact that slicing cuts with a rapier aren't always counted. I will note that in my personal experience doing HEMA longsword vs katana is a pretty even matchup, the katana has less inertia and can be viably used one handed, but longswords have greater reach and the increased inertia means that they can collapse an opponents block while its unlikely a katana can do the same.
The stupidly long and thin "sword" has been used in a real war before, and the people who used it conquered the entire known world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarissa
Interestingly, the recent upsurge in HEMA has made a lot of people aware of why spears were always the traditional kings of the battlefield. A spear is very hard to deal with for a person using a sword due to its reach and speed.
I have an old Samsung Galaxy Tab 4, running the Android 5 operating system. I want to upgrade it to Android 11 or higher. Here's an instructional video on how to do that, but I can't understand what the guy is saying, or his written instructions in the video "caption." [Skip to the 4:00 mark]
Having watched the video, even though I am not technical myself, I would *not* recommend you follow this guy as he has a lot of weird files and dodges and honestly I think you're as likely to wreck your system as update it.
But if you really want to chance it, here's a transcript of most of the video:
And it’s called Linux OS. We will as well install gaps okay so you’re gonna have Google Play Store as well. This tablet can handle it, but how to get started?
Well, just turn off the tablet, power off, okay and then it’s a matter of pressing the Home button, pressing volume down and press power. I keep these three together, we will get into a download mode you see?
(Get to Warning screen about “if you want to download a custom OS, press the volume up key”)
And now you hit “volume up” to continue. Now we are in actual download mode now (get to screen saying “Downloading – do not turn off target!)
Are we gonna connect the cable to the computer and you’re gonna start up your ODIN, okay, and in ODIN when ODIN is started up you’re gonna as well see that the com port is litten up (lighting up, I think he means). Com 4 or whatever it’s gonna be called will be turned on.
As well, if I want to show you that, in options, in ODIN, if you select “options” you’re gonna see “turn off auto restart”. You can deselect it because sometimes it’s a little bit difficult, after the flash is done it’s going really fast and then you must grab the tablet and then hit “volume up”, “power” and “home” together and keep them pressed until you see the Samsung logo.
So you only have a couple of seconds to do that and release the buttons when you see the Samsung logo and then you’re gonna get into the TWRP. But you must do it the first time right - well at least you must do it right after the flashing of the TWRP, because if the tablet is gonna boot up then you already missed it and then the original recovery will be restored.
So then you’re not gonna have TWRP so then you’re gonna have to do this again. Okay? All right, so connect the cable to the computer, in ODIN we select PDA and we browse for the 3.5 star file that we downloaded from the Android file host and we’re gonna go ahead and flash it to the device.
Remember what I said about “options” in ODIN, that you can turn off auto reboot. If you’re gonna turn off auto reboot and the progress will be done, then you’re gonna go ahead with “volume down” and “power”, yeah?, you’re gonna keep them pressed until the tablet so let’s go ahead and exercise that.
Okay, so the tablet is now done with flashing TWRP now, okay, so we’re gonna hit “volume down” first, so we can feel the “volume down”, play with it a bit that you feel it good and then the “power” you press it, press it and feel that you’re feeling it good and then you keep them together until the tablet goes off.
And now we’re gonna switch with “volume up”, “power” and “home” and now we’re gonna see recovery and then we’re gonna go into recovery. I already installed TWRP okay but I’m showing you the procedure. Alrighty? That’s how to go into TWRP. And then when you’re in TWRP you can do several things, you can go ahead and wipe, you must wipe first, you can as well do a “format data”, you’re gonna lose everything on the tablet, you hit “select”, “yes” and “okay” and then you must reboot, you hit the home back and then reboot back into recovery, and when you’re back into recovery, you’re ready to flash the ROM.
We’re gonna do all that in the video but I need you to understand this procedure. It’s not so easy but you can do it, okay, just put the tablet to stand in a thing like this (a stand) and just try it, or let somebody help you.
So make sure that ODIN is seeing the tablet, connect the cable to the computer, make sure the device is in the download mode, this is a download mode, and the yellow com port is lit up.
Select AP, select the TWRP file, the TAR file, hit “start”, and be quick, okay. It’s flash(ed) now and now “home”, “volume up” and “power”, let go when you see the logo, and there we go into a recovery mode.
So now we are in recovery so let’s go ahead and flash Android 11. When you see the blue light turning on, you did it right. So now it’s gonna go into recovery mode and TWRP. You see that? So now we flashed TWRP to the device. It can be a bit of a hassle but just try to keep it right. (Skipped a bit of comment).
So what happens if we do an advanced wipe? Dalvik, System, Data, Cache (select these on screen). Is this thing encrypted? No it’s not. So that means we can boot up the system, we can leave it Samsung firmware if we want, but that’s not what we want, what we now want is, of course, connect to the device, you can close “other” now, and I just downloaded a file.
We’re just going to copy the files to the computer and here you can see that I already copied some files to the computer so let’s go ahead and flash. As you can see we’re getting a red line there, that’s because I’m using old TWRP, so we need to update the TWRP. The TWRP 3.5 you can download from Mateo.
(Skipped advertising for this Mateo guy).
So then we’re gonna go ahead and put the phone (sic) into a recovery mode, we’re gonna copy Android 11 to it, but as well we’re gonna update the TWRP.
The tablet is now off and we’re gonna go into a recovery mode, we’re gonna press “home”, this is “volume up” and “power” and when we see the logo we release these three buttons.
You see we get a little red sign there saying (ignore all the rest of this bit, it’s just blathering)
In the recovery mode – so first of all we’re gonna update the recovery, because this recovery is not proper. It’s image 3.5 and we flash it as a recovery and then we’re first gonna reboot back into recovery.
So now we’re gonna do a wipe (same procedure as for advanced wipe above)
So now we’re gonna go ahead and install Lineage OS 18. The code name for this device is mattisa wi-fi. So we’re gonna go ahead and select 18 and we’re flashing Lineage OS 18 Android 11.
Thanks for your help, but it's still too confusing for me to follow. The fact that he says making a mistake will "brick" the tablet puts me off even more.
(1) Who is Noah Berlatsky, and why is he an idiot?
I've read his review of the new Disney live-action remake of "Peter Pan", now renamed "Peter Pan and Wendy", and while I don't care too much about the entire thing because I was never into the original cartoon version, this is just ridiculous. They've race-swapped, gender-swapped, and been as inclusive as they could possibly be (Wendy and her brothers are still white, or I should say White given Noah's reviews, unfortunately) and it's still not enough.
It's the colonialism, you see. Neverland is a cypher for - well, the USA? The British West Indies? The exact location isn't important, it's the idea of the British colonial possessions. Go out West and it's filled with childish natives and thus a natural place for literal (White) British children to have fun adventures.
Going by the trailers, I think the movie is not that great. But honestly, this kind of reviewing is just making me tired. "Okay, so they fixed Tiger Lily, they race-swapped Tinkerbell, and the Lost Boys are also including girls, but I have to find *something* to complain about, else how will I live up to my trendy bohemian coffee-house Beatnik headshot?"
Yeah, they're giving the female lead agency, but she's still White! Problematic!
"The intention in both is to elevate Wendy as the hero, giving her more agency and adventuresomeness than the sexist prototype in Barrie’s writing. But in centering (White) Wendy, the Peters of color are pushed toward stereotype."
Yeah, the 1924 version was full of tropes we find totally unacceptable today. But today is 2023 not 1924, and the new movie is bending over backwards to be as DEI as it can be. And honestly? I find a white guy from Chicago complaining about the treatment of Native Americans in the source material to be a bit, how shall I say, precious? Somewhat like land acknowledgements, which boil down to "yeah we took this land, and we're not giving it back, so whatever".
(2) Anyway, on a cheerier note: an American Youtube cook/chef plumbs the mysteries of the Spice Bag!
I don't know who this guy is, so I have no idea if he's Youtube famous or just another cookery channel. Ignore the Irish accents, they're terrible, but he does keep the paddywhackery to a minimum and he suffers for his art - he nearly kills himself making the dish 😀
I've never heard of parboiling the chips (fries) before, and I remain dubious, but if it works? Great!
Also the curry sauce is (traditionally) Chinese chipper curry sauce and it's an optional dip rather than an integral part of the dish, but every place has its own version of a spice bag, you can buy commercial spice bag mixes (ranging from the decent to the terrible) and in the end, whatever way you make it, it's going to be great.
The only problem is that now I'm craving a spice bag!
Why would you assume that a writer for NBC Think, Independent, Public Notice, Atlantic, and WaPo, and a member of the CIC, was an idiot? He's such an idiot that he stumbled, Mr. Bean style, into having millions of people absorb his pontifications on a regular basis? Meanwhile, people like me and you are simply too intelligent to be listened to? What is the mental block with concluding that it is entirely intentional?
He's an idiot because he wrote a stupid review of a bland, inoffensive, carefully ticking all the diversity boxes movie (black Tinkerbell! Mixed-race Peter! Girls in the Lost Boys! Non-stereotypical Native Americans!) to find some scrap of racism he could bloviate about.
I don't care if he's written for Big Name Publications. As we've seen with the NYT, being a Big Name Publication is no guarantee of quality content.
I never heard of him before, and after reading this, I wish I had remained in happy ignorance. Next week: Noah tells us "Did you know Washington owned slaves and Jefferson was a rapist? This country was built on slaves (slaves!)".
But none of this speaks to his being an idiot! It reads to me like he (any by extension this blob of mainstream western media, of which he is an apparatchik) is just straight up oppressing you! He's on your telescreen (which doesn't turn off, remember, if you'll permit me to abruptly change the metaphor) smugly telling you yet more lies and nonsense, as your anxiety increases because you don't know which bits you are permitted to dispute, which bits you are chancing your arm if you even so much as fail to publicly reaffirm -- "the film was PC, why is he still mad about it, oh god what will it take!" -- and he's doing it apace, he's competently and intelligently destroying your probity. And yeah I agree, the founding fathers might well be next, if that hasn't already begun.
(1) simpliciter, because of all the valid things to criticise this movie for, "too white" ain't one of them.
(2) because he's a white guy himself, and all the simping in the world isn't going to save his backside should the Revolution come (it never will, but suppose).
I don't know anything about Noah Berlatsky, but I'd guess his job is to serve up PC nonsense to generate clicks for the crowd that loves such stuff, and also for the crowd that hates it and would enjoy complaining about it. Hard to fault a dude for just doing his (ridiculous) job.
A white guy complaining "too much whiteness!" in a movie that is based on an Edwardian story-turned play-turned novel set in Britain is a bit rich, especially when Disney was as DEI as they dared. "No, you left Wendy white, that is wrong!"
I mean, by the same logic, I could complain that Noah's review is Too White and by centering a White writer it pushes the Reviewers of colour to stereotypes (to quote his own lines). Step back, step down, and relinquish your privileged position to a Person (preferably female) of Colour, Noah!
Anyway, your complaint is like: "Who is the Coca Cola company, and why are they idiots? Don't they realize that drinking too much water with sugar (or artificial sweeteners) ruins your health?"
The answer is, yes they know it, no they don't care, and they are laughing all the way from the bank. The don't drink the sugar-water; they *sell* it.
Similarly, the ultrawoke guy is not reading this stuff, he is *writing* it, and he is getting paid for writing it, and who knows he might be getting paid better than most of us. We might prefer keeping our dignity to getting generously paid for writing nonsense, but that's a matter of different preferences, not stupidity.
I've heard of Coke, I've never heard of Berlatsky. Hence the questions, because I could not understand how he could look at the trailers and (presumably) the movie, and come away with "Wendy is White, Problematic!"
I hadn't until now thought about the fact that 20th century Peter Pan productions casting an adult woman to play a boy is the mirror-reverse of how the Elizabethans cast female roles.
(Apparently Barrie wanted a boy in the role, but was overruled by the first producer of the stage play.)
I genuinely don't know the guy, his opinions, or his politics, and I genuinely wanted to know how he could produce a review of a movie. that made nearly all the Good Guys non-white while keeping the Bad Guys all white, which complained about "too much whiteness, the racism is showing through".
The movie looks like a safe, family-friendly, forgettable piece of work. Take the kids to it over the bank holiday without needing to worry they'll see blood or nudity.
But the reviews are still banging on about racism. Barrie's work too White! Yes, Tinkerbell is now black, but the actress gets no lines, so this is Bad even if it's the way the original character was written. Wendy and her brothers are White, this is Bad.
Yeah, they can make a version where everyone is a mixed-race trans pansexual nonbinary they/them, but at that point it's not Peter Pan anymore, it's a whole new thing, and if you want that, then why not write a whole new thing? Complaining about oh my gosh, a Scottish writer in 1911 wrote his main characters as white English children is a bit like complaining that oh my gosh, imagine that Gilgamesh is Middle-Eastern and not Latinx!
Oh, the Epic is just *riddled* with Problematic content. While it gains credit for its sex-positivity, sex-worker support, and valorisation of same-sex relationships, on the other hand it has cruelty to animals (killing the Bull of Heaven), racist and colonialist attitudes (Enkidu the 'wild man' has to be 'civilised'), class struggle issues, environmental exploitation and destruction (cutting down the Cedar forest) and of course the privilege of the rich, powerful, male king.
I submitted a book review before April 5th. I then went away on holiday for two weeks. I came back and opened my laptop and pressed one key on the google doc and deleted it straight away (the letter 'k'). This was saved on the google doc as a change/edit. I tried to 'undo the edit' that further saved that as a change too. I am unsure if you can see edits or if you have only the version I submitted on the day.
Will it show that I edited it and will I get automatically dismissed? I posted this anonymously and left no clue as to my submission date. I hope it is okay to be asking.
How controversial would the notion of "1-10 rating scales are fake, no one actually can consistently & reliably distinguish buckets beyond 4-5" be?
I'll personally be rating reviews on a scale of 1-5, then doubling the score for submittal (except particularly egregious 1s which will stay 1s I suppose)
You don't need to consistently and reliably distinguish them. You just need your error-prone and inaccurate rating mechanism to have some sort of reliable correlation with how good you actually find the thing, and as long as enough people with similar feelings are averaged together, the noise should wash you, and you get just signal+bias. (And the fineness of the scale doesn't eliminate or magnify bias in any obvious way.)
You absolutely can distinguish all ten places, though studies of people reading analog instruments (where you visually estimate the last decimal place) show that not everyone is good at it.
You really don't see a difference between "this is a 5" and "this is a 10"? If I'm confined to 1-5 scale, I might score some things 3 which would be a little higher than I want to score it, but 2 is too low.
For my purposes, 5-6 is not the same as 7-8 is not the same as 9-10. Something to score 9-10 would really have to knock my socks off. A 1 on 1-10 scale is worse than a 1 on a 1-5 scale, because the smaller scale doesn't allow me the same level of discrimination. A 2 on 1-5 scale is better than a 2 on 1-10 scale because of the shortened range, but simply doubling that 2 to make it 4 for 1-10 may not fit with how I score it: it might only be 3 on 1-10 in my judgement.
1-10 is too finegrained if you're only rating a few items, but once you have rated, e.g., twenty of them, then you can make a large enough number of comparisons for 1-10 to make sense.
But 1-5 doesn't give you a lot of room. For me, on 1-5, that ranks as "1 - bad, 2 - poor to mediocre, 3 - good, 4 - very good, 5 - excellent".
But with the book reviews, if I have six of them (say), I may well feel that A is better than B, even if both of them are not the best. So I would give A a 6 and B a 5 on 1-10 scale, where I might be forced to give them both 3 on 1-5 scale.
Depends on the number and how much you care. I have graded essays on 0-4 and 0-5 scales, and even with that I would sometimes give out a 3+ or a 5-. If you have a lot of items there really can be a need to get pretty fine grained.
I usually max out at 1 through 4 if I'm trying to grade in a vacuum. 10 is largely useful if you're trying to score things against each other and make a hierarchy; these two are both good but I like this one slightly more than that one, so this one gets an 8 and that one gets a 7.9.
Seems like a bit of a pity not to have an optional comments field for the book review contest. I think a lot of authors would appreciate the ability to see feedback for their essay.
Substack's UI (or servers) has apparently lost its mind, they show the "(banned)" flair next to Carl Pham and Freddie DeBoer. Their names in other threads show just fine.
Freddie also got a one-week ban, for a comment in which he called YIMBYs a "little cult" who will "kill you" for questioning their ideas.
Harsh? Maybe, but I appreciate the demonstration of the principle that even respected long-term commenters need to keep their comments civil and sensible.
Especially since I generally consider myself a YIMBY, but find some of his more thoughtful criticisms of the movement quite persausive.
If I were going to kill him for anything, it would not be that. (I do not intend to kill him or any other commenters on this board. Unless there are Wood Ducks posting on here in which case... I'm sorry, but it's your own fault for being delicious.)
Yes, and I prioritized backyard size over house size or location to the point of moving 3000km to buy a house with a decent sized backyard instead of an apartment condo.
I don't want anyone else telling me what I can do with my land, so, per the Golden Rule, I don't want to tell anyone else what to do with theirs.
I can not find the SSC post talking about how scarcity leads to politics and scott makes up a fictional example of if there was 10% of the available water all the interest groups would fight for it but with enough water it is a nonissue. It could be a ACT post but I think its older.
Thank you so much. I paraphrased this idea to a friend of mine to understand why making things cheaper is so good in the context of politics. Weinstein talked about how the enemy of systemic violence in the modern age is not peace but growth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L39Xr6bU9Mg
It is a sort of commentary of the stagnation and perceived increase in 'political violence'. Fundamentally, political ambitions are elevated to a higher level where simple things like plumbing and feeding a nation are seen as a given. This world could be called post-scarcity and it future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.
"Imagine if tomorrow, the price of water dectupled. Suddenly people have to choose between drinking and washing dishes. Activists argue that taking a shower is a basic human right, and grumpy talk show hosts point out that in their day, parents taught their children not to waste water. A coalition promotes laws ensuring government-subsidized free water for poor families; a Fox News investigative report shows that some people receiving water on the government dime are taking long luxurious showers. Everyone gets really angry and there’s lots of talk about basic compassion and personal responsibility and whatever but all of this is secondary to why does water costs ten times what it used to?"
It would be interesting to see someone come up with a diagram showing what various intellectuals and AI big wigs think about AI risk, displaying the relationships among them and who seems to be influenced by whom. Perhaps that would be very hard to do. But, for instance, I imagine Tyler Cowen isn't going to change his position as long as Robin Hanson doesn't. If Hanson did change his position, then TC + hundreds of thousands of his readers also might, some of whom are also public intellectuals with huge readerships.
For some use cases it will be possible to have hardware (cameras, microphones) that cryptographically sign their output to indicate 'yes this is in fact the digital artifact produced by a particular device at some particular time'.
Of course this might make ordinary postprocessing impossible, but in time even that could be solved in a similar manner by having a chain of signatures associated with certain 'acceptable' modification technologies, so that a picture could be cropped while retaining the verification that it was taken by some particular physical camera.
It's a cool idea, but I can see a lot of ways to cheat it:
1. Buy a crypto-signed camera, crack it open, and find a way to read its encryption key. Or if the chip itself is beyond your tools, find a way to feed it faked data. Physical access is nearly impossible to secure against, especially if you're worried about government action.
2. Actually, if you're a government propaganda agency, there's an even simpler option: Just go straight to the manufacturer and order them to secretly create some encryption keys for you to use.
3. The analog hole: Generate a fake image, print it out, and take a picture with your cryptographically verified camera. Add a bit of blur or JPEG compression to hide any rough spots, if necessary.
4. Just make up a reason why your data couldn't be signed. "This image comes from a confidential source and if they sign it you could track them down" is a good one - it might even be true for a lot of sources.
That being said, news reporters already have some defenses against people lying to them, such as by asking questions of actual human sources. After all, it's been possible to generate large quantities of realistic fake text ever since the invention of the typewriter.
I'm not sure what level of depth is right for someone like you, with lots of tech knowledge. I thought this youtube vid of a talk was good, regarding immediate dangers of AI:
Hinton's response to that article, from his Twitter: "In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly."
Cade Metz strikes again, huh? I've hit my limit of free NYT articles and I'll be damned and roasting on the hobs of Hell before I subscribe to them so I can't read it, but given that recently (apparently) on their recipe pages they described scrambled eggs and cheese on toast as "toad in the hole", they do seem to be living in their own little reality.
I'd just add the caveat that while this could be an expression of genuine feelings about google, it could also be the case that Hinton's NDA with google contains a non-disparage clause and he wants to make sure nobody at google thinks he's triggering it.
Would you consider covering the fact that girls have been getting their periods younger and younger? It seems like a topic for a “more than you ever wanted to know about” deep dive. The question is from my wife but I happen to be interested also. To pick a a random one of many relevant links: https://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/news/what-drives-earlier-menstruation-girls
I worked for several months writing a nerdcore rap song about cognitive biases (it's a lot of lyrics and I have a day job and a weekend gig too). Anyway the song is about how the bees have bounced back from Colony Collapse Disorder, but Negativity Bias prevented people from caring about this good news. The funny thing is by the time I released the song it became apparent that bees were now facing new problems like the Varroa destructor mite, so many of the commenters self-righteously denounced me for downplaying the problem. Still, it kind of proved my point. Anyway here's the song, let's cheer for the bees! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs8_cQpI_IM
We're not even worried about too few bees now. The new thing is Too Many Bees.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90716696/everyone-got-so-into-the-idea-of-urban-beekeeping-that-now-there-might-be-too-many-urban-bees
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/13/bees-urban-beekeeping-native-pollinators/
But seriously - you're right about how rarely we follow up here. And it has consequences - every so often someone tries to downplay global warming by saying "Remember acid rain? Or the ozone layer? Those problems went away!" But those problems went away because people took action. The absence of follow-up leads people to incorrectly conclude that those problems went away on their own.
I would love see some in-depth reporting on the bee thing. Did they truly just recover on their own? Did we Fix the Bees? Was there ever a problem in the first place, or was it a Shark Attack fear cycle?
Few bees, many bees, it doesn't bother me. What matters most is that the bees are aligned with human values.
Like in "Jupiter Ascending"!
In a win for nominative determinism, a man named Quoc Le owned a Quickly.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/S-F-boba-tea-shop-fencing-suspect-was-charged-17169538.php
It's so cute I have to wonder if it's actually his real name.
Is today's fentanyl epidemic worse than the crack epidemic of the 1980s?
Also, is it fair to say that the fentanyl epidemic is to white Americans today what the crack epidemic was to black Americans in the 1980s?
I hear that one of the big problems is that other drugs are laced with fentanyl to cut costs while giving them a kick. And so the standard administration measures and doses no longer apply for these other drugs, and result in deaths.
The current fentanyl epidemic seems to be far more deadly than the crack epidemic. Two sources of drug overdose deaths show that the 1980s were lower than any year since for overdose deaths, and the Wikipedia list says that they were lower than any year before 1979. (They also show a weird discontinuity at 1979 - I'm not sure if that's a real one-year drop, or some data issue.)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db81.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_drug_overdose_death_rates_and_totals_over_time
The Wikipedia page also shows cocaine deaths broken out since 2000 - there was apparently a peak around 2005-2007, and a second higher spike now involving cocaine and opiates together.
Does anyone else not understand why people take so many holidays? Yes, I know I sound like one of those overbearing and demanding managers, but hear me out.
I frequently hear people say that they "need" a holiday as if:
a) the excessive demands of their current work are such that they will not be able to continue without a complete break for some duration, usually in a different country
b) After this complete break, the previously excessive work will no longer be a problem due to the magical rejuvenating powers of the holiday
Is this actually what happens most of the time? Or is the real reason just that people want time off work to do something else?
It probably involves some status signaling as well. I can afford overseas travel and have earned a vacation because my job is so demanding.
I guess it is all of that together:
* People need a break to dissolve the stress from work. Yes, having a break makes it easier also for the few days after vacation until the stress accumulates again.
* If you want to visit a different country, a weekend is not enough; the ratio between "time and money spent traveling" and "actually being there" is dramatically different when you take a vacation.
* Yes, sometimes people want or need to do something in the private lives, too. For some of those things, an evening or a weekend is not enough.
>Is this actually what happens most of the time? Or is the real reason just that people want time off work to do something else?
It kinda works. Time solves everything, and a surprising number of problems go away if you ignore them long enough. So taking a vacation means that of everything that's a problem at work at a time T, a part will have become irrelevant at T+2 weeks, another part will have been solved by someone else, and yet another part you'll have worked out unconsciously. And one can assume you come back better rested than before, and better able to solve the problems that remains.
As for the leading question of "not understand why people take so many holidays", I used to not understand when i started working, but that's because I had just graduated from College, so of course, after a 5-years vacation I didn't need much for the first 2 or 3 years.
I don't think anyone actually believes (b). The value of a vacation is that you don't have to work for that period of time, not that it's any better once you come back.
Most people build up stress such that their work performance slowly declines. Taking a break can be a corrective. Not taking a break makes it worse. Evenings and weekends can be enough of a break, and usually at least help, but most people need more than that. Real breaks, where they don't monitor email or do anything else related to work for a period of time.
For me, the break needs to be longer than four days. About 3-4 days into a vacation I start feeling better and my stress drops off.
I've never had a break help with work stress, but I can imagine a situation where someone's stress is coming from a growing backlog of home tasks, which holidays allow time to address.
Otherwise, taking a trip can provide motivation for continuing a harrowing job; sure the work sucks, but it also means I get to see Hawaii, and if I stick with it I'll get to see Europe soon.
yes, breaks and holidays are nice
Time away from work induced stress is immensely valuable. it usually doesn't need to be an overseas trip to be valuable, but for many people home and/or family can be a stressor or a reminder or stressors so getting out of town commonly helps relaxation.
Re Book reviews: There is a review at the end of the third google doc that is not in the list.
Title of book: The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America
Maybe this has already been mentioned?
The homepage for this blog has started showing subscriber-only posts in the main list of recent posts to me, a non-subscriber. Given he specifically said he'd avoid this and there hasn't been any announcement from him about the change as far as I've seen, I assume this is due to a change from Substack not Scott. I just wanted to point this out in case he hadn't noticed given it presumably doesn't affect his view of his own blog.
Thanks for the heads up. This is not a deliberate change on my part, but my subscriber count keeps going down and I'm looking for ways to change that, so I'm going to experiment with keeping it for now.
> looking for ways to change that
[internal screaming] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/corrupted-hardware
Scott, I can't afford (or at least justify) the US$100 paid-subscription rate, particularly given that I'm paid in C$, but also feel bad about not contributing.
I know you have a student rate, but that was a long time ago for me. I'm not willing to rationalize that "I'm a student of life" or somesuch rot.
I wonder if you'd consider a retiree rate of US$50/year.
This could be a voluntary thing attracting people like me who want to contribute financially. I'd be fine with paying a reduced rate and not having access to the subscriber-only posts.
Or is there some other way people can contribute financially?
Could be partially inflation, though I wasn't a subscriber to the blog, I'm letting even my newspaper subscription lapse, gas is 50% more than a few years ago, groceries are up 20% or more on many items; and my pay is not keeping pace; entertainment is definitely one of the areas I am cutting to be able to keep affording car repairs while I wait for my new one to get built and delivered. :(
The tiles are also much bigger than they were, such that scrolling takes longer.
Almost all my scores for book reviews are in the 5-8 range and rather a lot of them are 6 or 7. (Because they're almost all at least _quite good_ and most aren't _astonishing_.) I suspect that my book reviewing may affect the final outcome more by rewarding/penalizing the reviews I've happened to choose (depending on whether I'm more or less generous than the average) than by rewarding the ones I like over the ones I don't.
(Perhaps the scoring process should normalize each rater's scores, or use them only to adjust _relative_ merits for pairs of reviews, or something, but that's not so easy to do for people who don't rate as many reviews as I do.)
Yeah, the problem with normalization is whether the *unrated* reviews should be treated as the *worst* or as *average*. If there are 3 reviews A, B, C, and I rate A as good and B as bad and don't say anything about C, is that "A, B, C" or "A, C, B"? Obviously A is my favorite, but is explicitly disliking something worse than not even bothering to rate it?
If we answer this, the rest is relatively simple. If there are e.g. 10 reviews, then everyone's best rated review gets 10 points, the second one 9 points, etc.; if there are reviews rated the same, they get the average number of the points for their places.
The book review review submission form doesn't seem to check the email-address field. I have definitely submitted at least one review-review with an "email address" lacking the @-sign and everything that should follow it, and I think probably at least one with nothing at all in that field. But I have no idea whether those submissions will be ignored, or treated on an equal footing with all the rest, or what. (I have not attempted to resubmit them. I have already forgotten which ones they were.)
Reading book review contest entries, I frequently find myself thinking "this is a pretty good review of a book that doesn't deserve the attention, and its actual value to me is therefore pretty small". (One _can_ in principle write a review of a bad book that's so good on its own merits as to deserve reading, but that's difficult and most reviewers in the contest have not done it.) I've tended to give these good-ish but not great scores, because to me the value of a really good book review is typically _both_ that it's interesting or enjoyable in its own right _and_ that it directs me to a book that's worth reading. I wonder whether I'm typical in this.
Yeah I also tend to rate highly books I want to read. If I order the book while reading the review then it's at least an 8. I see this as self interest, as I'm mostly here to find other good books to read.
IMO the point of you fine folk taking the time to do this is to curate what the time poor among us read in a few months time. Thus, if the subject matter is tripe it probably isn't worthy, even with a good review.
I'm judging these on the standard of the review, rather than the book, because if I like/dislike the book, that would prejudice me.
So if I think the *review* is good, regardless of the book, I give it a good score.
Does the book review contest really have to be about book reviews? As I’m reading I definitely feel like most reviewers have done their own thinking, and are stretching the definition of a review to talk about what they’re interested in. Which honestly I’m on board with, I just wonder if this really has to be a book review contest every year. Why not- book inspired blog post contest or something?
I've heard that MMA helped to sort out which of the martial arts were the best since, in the beginning, anyone of any fighting style could enter tournaments. There were weird matchups like sumo wrestlers fighting kung-fu guys. Through a process of natural selection, the winners converged on the best set of fighting styles.
Has this same thing been done with sword fighting? Are there tournaments where guys with medieval broadswords fight guys with katanas or Roman gladii?
>Has this same thing been done with sword fighting? Are there tournaments where guys with medieval broadswords fight guys with katanas or Roman gladii?
Actual swords where people can literally die, no. But an open ruleset including sticks/clubs as well as full MMA rules? (I.e. you can choose to tackle the guy hitting you with a stick, hit them on the ground, etc.) Yes, it's obscure but has actually been around since a little before the first UFC- it's called Dog Brothers. It's not a competition (there's no winners or losers), but just guys or gals getting together in a park or gym and fighting with sticks. Here's a good sample https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvmLQ_Jjqmk&pp=ygUWZG9nIGJyb3RoZXJzIGdhdGhlcmluZw%3D%3D
Part of the trouble is that every weapon and martial art is designed for a particular context, and sometimes these are incompatible. Is it for battlefield, or self-defense, or formal duels? Do they wear armor, and if so what sort? Do people carry around shields, daggers, or other off-hand implements? Are there assumptions about the sort of thing a gentleman simply Would Not Do?
Also, being able to practice at full force without injuring your partner(s) is very important, and different schools come up with different compromises. Which inevitably leaks back into the style itself, sometimes creating weak points. So to some extent, the dominant style of this free-form competition would be determined by the rules being set.
The fight choreography at the end of "Rob Roy" (1995) isn't a horrible depiction of different styles in conflict:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERmM5l2ceoY
My understanding though is that all top-level MMA competitors deploy elements of more than one martial art -- it isn't the case that a pure judo expert is fighting a pure jiu-jitsu expert or whatever. That seems to muddy the sorting part quite a bit.
And would that translate to sword fighting or fighting with other types of weapons? As a practical matter could a broadsword guy and a katana guy each be benefitting from techniques from swords having different lengths/weights than the one they're each holding?
If you're interested in swords and so on, you might enjoy Stephen Hunter's novel "The 47th Samurai".
There were; but the gladiatorial games fell out of favour a few centuries ago due to the deaths, and there have been quite a few new swords developed since then.
It would be hard to tell who wins without anybody dying.
You could use fencing-style rules, I suppose. Like, most blades don't need a tremendous amount of force behind them to inflict a fatal wound - if you can hit their chest with even moderate force you're going to ruin their day, and that's well within the ability of a judge or even an electronic circuit.
The trouble is, swordfighting under those rules would likely converge on, well, fencing swords - very long and very thin, maximizing your ability to stab your opponent without getting stabbed in return, in an environment where you don't need to worry about armor. Actual fencing foils have a maximum length, but if you went UFC-style anything goes, you'd probably see some stupidly long swords that blur the line between "sword" and "polearm."
Yea, ultimately the problem is that human anatomy is really complicated, and what, in practice, is a "disabling cut" is basically impossible to ascertain. Increasingly HEMA tournaments are trying to incentivize a greater variety of tactics though, for example "doubles", where the person who scores the initial hit gets hit within 2 seconds of that hit give both people a point, as well as getting extra hits for deep cuts, torso, head or thigh, etc.
Even within this ruleset rapiers tend to win out, although this is mitigated by the fact that slicing cuts with a rapier aren't always counted. I will note that in my personal experience doing HEMA longsword vs katana is a pretty even matchup, the katana has less inertia and can be viably used one handed, but longswords have greater reach and the increased inertia means that they can collapse an opponents block while its unlikely a katana can do the same.
The stupidly long and thin "sword" has been used in a real war before, and the people who used it conquered the entire known world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarissa
Well, yeah, I know that polearms beat swords any day of the week, but OP asked about MMA for swords so I only discussed swords.
Interestingly, the recent upsurge in HEMA has made a lot of people aware of why spears were always the traditional kings of the battlefield. A spear is very hard to deal with for a person using a sword due to its reach and speed.
I have an old Samsung Galaxy Tab 4, running the Android 5 operating system. I want to upgrade it to Android 11 or higher. Here's an instructional video on how to do that, but I can't understand what the guy is saying, or his written instructions in the video "caption." [Skip to the 4:00 mark]
https://youtu.be/Act7Rtpk2xk
Can someone explain the process to me in plain English?
Having watched the video, even though I am not technical myself, I would *not* recommend you follow this guy as he has a lot of weird files and dodges and honestly I think you're as likely to wreck your system as update it.
But if you really want to chance it, here's a transcript of most of the video:
You need ODIN 3.1.1 Google it
Samsung USB drivers Google it
Your Cable a good one
The right ROM for your device
SM T530 & T530NU https://bit.ly/3FY0b8m
SM T535 https://bit.ly/3aJ3Kk4
SM T531 & T532 https://bit.ly/3DIZiP2
Find Matteo and Android 9 also a new build and info https://bit.ly/3vhxTAz
Twrp Matisse https://bit.ly/3j3wecY
(After booting up)
And it’s called Linux OS. We will as well install gaps okay so you’re gonna have Google Play Store as well. This tablet can handle it, but how to get started?
Well, just turn off the tablet, power off, okay and then it’s a matter of pressing the Home button, pressing volume down and press power. I keep these three together, we will get into a download mode you see?
(Get to Warning screen about “if you want to download a custom OS, press the volume up key”)
And now you hit “volume up” to continue. Now we are in actual download mode now (get to screen saying “Downloading – do not turn off target!)
Are we gonna connect the cable to the computer and you’re gonna start up your ODIN, okay, and in ODIN when ODIN is started up you’re gonna as well see that the com port is litten up (lighting up, I think he means). Com 4 or whatever it’s gonna be called will be turned on.
As well, if I want to show you that, in options, in ODIN, if you select “options” you’re gonna see “turn off auto restart”. You can deselect it because sometimes it’s a little bit difficult, after the flash is done it’s going really fast and then you must grab the tablet and then hit “volume up”, “power” and “home” together and keep them pressed until you see the Samsung logo.
So you only have a couple of seconds to do that and release the buttons when you see the Samsung logo and then you’re gonna get into the TWRP. But you must do it the first time right - well at least you must do it right after the flashing of the TWRP, because if the tablet is gonna boot up then you already missed it and then the original recovery will be restored.
So then you’re not gonna have TWRP so then you’re gonna have to do this again. Okay? All right, so connect the cable to the computer, in ODIN we select PDA and we browse for the 3.5 star file that we downloaded from the Android file host and we’re gonna go ahead and flash it to the device.
Remember what I said about “options” in ODIN, that you can turn off auto reboot. If you’re gonna turn off auto reboot and the progress will be done, then you’re gonna go ahead with “volume down” and “power”, yeah?, you’re gonna keep them pressed until the tablet so let’s go ahead and exercise that.
Okay, so the tablet is now done with flashing TWRP now, okay, so we’re gonna hit “volume down” first, so we can feel the “volume down”, play with it a bit that you feel it good and then the “power” you press it, press it and feel that you’re feeling it good and then you keep them together until the tablet goes off.
And now we’re gonna switch with “volume up”, “power” and “home” and now we’re gonna see recovery and then we’re gonna go into recovery. I already installed TWRP okay but I’m showing you the procedure. Alrighty? That’s how to go into TWRP. And then when you’re in TWRP you can do several things, you can go ahead and wipe, you must wipe first, you can as well do a “format data”, you’re gonna lose everything on the tablet, you hit “select”, “yes” and “okay” and then you must reboot, you hit the home back and then reboot back into recovery, and when you’re back into recovery, you’re ready to flash the ROM.
We’re gonna do all that in the video but I need you to understand this procedure. It’s not so easy but you can do it, okay, just put the tablet to stand in a thing like this (a stand) and just try it, or let somebody help you.
So make sure that ODIN is seeing the tablet, connect the cable to the computer, make sure the device is in the download mode, this is a download mode, and the yellow com port is lit up.
Select AP, select the TWRP file, the TAR file, hit “start”, and be quick, okay. It’s flash(ed) now and now “home”, “volume up” and “power”, let go when you see the logo, and there we go into a recovery mode.
So now we are in recovery so let’s go ahead and flash Android 11. When you see the blue light turning on, you did it right. So now it’s gonna go into recovery mode and TWRP. You see that? So now we flashed TWRP to the device. It can be a bit of a hassle but just try to keep it right. (Skipped a bit of comment).
So what happens if we do an advanced wipe? Dalvik, System, Data, Cache (select these on screen). Is this thing encrypted? No it’s not. So that means we can boot up the system, we can leave it Samsung firmware if we want, but that’s not what we want, what we now want is, of course, connect to the device, you can close “other” now, and I just downloaded a file.
We’re just going to copy the files to the computer and here you can see that I already copied some files to the computer so let’s go ahead and flash. As you can see we’re getting a red line there, that’s because I’m using old TWRP, so we need to update the TWRP. The TWRP 3.5 you can download from Mateo.
(Skipped advertising for this Mateo guy).
So then we’re gonna go ahead and put the phone (sic) into a recovery mode, we’re gonna copy Android 11 to it, but as well we’re gonna update the TWRP.
The tablet is now off and we’re gonna go into a recovery mode, we’re gonna press “home”, this is “volume up” and “power” and when we see the logo we release these three buttons.
You see we get a little red sign there saying (ignore all the rest of this bit, it’s just blathering)
In the recovery mode – so first of all we’re gonna update the recovery, because this recovery is not proper. It’s image 3.5 and we flash it as a recovery and then we’re first gonna reboot back into recovery.
So now we’re gonna do a wipe (same procedure as for advanced wipe above)
So now we’re gonna go ahead and install Lineage OS 18. The code name for this device is mattisa wi-fi. So we’re gonna go ahead and select 18 and we’re flashing Lineage OS 18 Android 11.
(Problem with wrong files)
Thanks for your help, but it's still too confusing for me to follow. The fact that he says making a mistake will "brick" the tablet puts me off even more.
I made a market on Manifold on which Book Review will win the Book Review contest. Making one option for each book would be too much work so I made one option for each letter of the alphabet. https://manifold.markets/TimothyCurrie/what-will-be-the-first-letter-of-th
Is there a particular "T" review dominating the predictions there? Or are people predicting T because ~25% of reviews start with T?
This is what happens when you include the definite article in the sort.
(1) Who is Noah Berlatsky, and why is he an idiot?
I've read his review of the new Disney live-action remake of "Peter Pan", now renamed "Peter Pan and Wendy", and while I don't care too much about the entire thing because I was never into the original cartoon version, this is just ridiculous. They've race-swapped, gender-swapped, and been as inclusive as they could possibly be (Wendy and her brothers are still white, or I should say White given Noah's reviews, unfortunately) and it's still not enough.
It's the colonialism, you see. Neverland is a cypher for - well, the USA? The British West Indies? The exact location isn't important, it's the idea of the British colonial possessions. Go out West and it's filled with childish natives and thus a natural place for literal (White) British children to have fun adventures.
Going by the trailers, I think the movie is not that great. But honestly, this kind of reviewing is just making me tired. "Okay, so they fixed Tiger Lily, they race-swapped Tinkerbell, and the Lost Boys are also including girls, but I have to find *something* to complain about, else how will I live up to my trendy bohemian coffee-house Beatnik headshot?"
Yeah, they're giving the female lead agency, but she's still White! Problematic!
"The intention in both is to elevate Wendy as the hero, giving her more agency and adventuresomeness than the sexist prototype in Barrie’s writing. But in centering (White) Wendy, the Peters of color are pushed toward stereotype."
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/28/opinions/peter-pan-disney-problem-berlatsky/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2q71Z-o0flaus0Wilg9EuutpogiB4woEj7h7ukODDZbGSmjKdmMwFao1k
Yeah, the 1924 version was full of tropes we find totally unacceptable today. But today is 2023 not 1924, and the new movie is bending over backwards to be as DEI as it can be. And honestly? I find a white guy from Chicago complaining about the treatment of Native Americans in the source material to be a bit, how shall I say, precious? Somewhat like land acknowledgements, which boil down to "yeah we took this land, and we're not giving it back, so whatever".
(2) Anyway, on a cheerier note: an American Youtube cook/chef plumbs the mysteries of the Spice Bag!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBuCq4WAjes
I don't know who this guy is, so I have no idea if he's Youtube famous or just another cookery channel. Ignore the Irish accents, they're terrible, but he does keep the paddywhackery to a minimum and he suffers for his art - he nearly kills himself making the dish 😀
I've never heard of parboiling the chips (fries) before, and I remain dubious, but if it works? Great!
Also the curry sauce is (traditionally) Chinese chipper curry sauce and it's an optional dip rather than an integral part of the dish, but every place has its own version of a spice bag, you can buy commercial spice bag mixes (ranging from the decent to the terrible) and in the end, whatever way you make it, it's going to be great.
The only problem is that now I'm craving a spice bag!
Why would you assume that a writer for NBC Think, Independent, Public Notice, Atlantic, and WaPo, and a member of the CIC, was an idiot? He's such an idiot that he stumbled, Mr. Bean style, into having millions of people absorb his pontifications on a regular basis? Meanwhile, people like me and you are simply too intelligent to be listened to? What is the mental block with concluding that it is entirely intentional?
are you familiar with Thomas Friedman?
I am not, tell me more?
He's an idiot because he wrote a stupid review of a bland, inoffensive, carefully ticking all the diversity boxes movie (black Tinkerbell! Mixed-race Peter! Girls in the Lost Boys! Non-stereotypical Native Americans!) to find some scrap of racism he could bloviate about.
I don't care if he's written for Big Name Publications. As we've seen with the NYT, being a Big Name Publication is no guarantee of quality content.
I never heard of him before, and after reading this, I wish I had remained in happy ignorance. Next week: Noah tells us "Did you know Washington owned slaves and Jefferson was a rapist? This country was built on slaves (slaves!)".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0kCH-ACgM8
But none of this speaks to his being an idiot! It reads to me like he (any by extension this blob of mainstream western media, of which he is an apparatchik) is just straight up oppressing you! He's on your telescreen (which doesn't turn off, remember, if you'll permit me to abruptly change the metaphor) smugly telling you yet more lies and nonsense, as your anxiety increases because you don't know which bits you are permitted to dispute, which bits you are chancing your arm if you even so much as fail to publicly reaffirm -- "the film was PC, why is he still mad about it, oh god what will it take!" -- and he's doing it apace, he's competently and intelligently destroying your probity. And yeah I agree, the founding fathers might well be next, if that hasn't already begun.
I think he's an idiot:
(1) simpliciter, because of all the valid things to criticise this movie for, "too white" ain't one of them.
(2) because he's a white guy himself, and all the simping in the world isn't going to save his backside should the Revolution come (it never will, but suppose).
I don't know anything about Noah Berlatsky, but I'd guess his job is to serve up PC nonsense to generate clicks for the crowd that loves such stuff, and also for the crowd that hates it and would enjoy complaining about it. Hard to fault a dude for just doing his (ridiculous) job.
A white guy complaining "too much whiteness!" in a movie that is based on an Edwardian story-turned play-turned novel set in Britain is a bit rich, especially when Disney was as DEI as they dared. "No, you left Wendy white, that is wrong!"
I mean, by the same logic, I could complain that Noah's review is Too White and by centering a White writer it pushes the Reviewers of colour to stereotypes (to quote his own lines). Step back, step down, and relinquish your privileged position to a Person (preferably female) of Colour, Noah!
>gender-swapped,
Wait, so... Peter Pan is a GUY now?
Well, for the moment perhaps. But who are we to assume Peter's gender identity? They could well be non-binary!
> They could well be non-binary!
I propose balanced ternary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary
Anyway, your complaint is like: "Who is the Coca Cola company, and why are they idiots? Don't they realize that drinking too much water with sugar (or artificial sweeteners) ruins your health?"
The answer is, yes they know it, no they don't care, and they are laughing all the way from the bank. The don't drink the sugar-water; they *sell* it.
Similarly, the ultrawoke guy is not reading this stuff, he is *writing* it, and he is getting paid for writing it, and who knows he might be getting paid better than most of us. We might prefer keeping our dignity to getting generously paid for writing nonsense, but that's a matter of different preferences, not stupidity.
I've heard of Coke, I've never heard of Berlatsky. Hence the questions, because I could not understand how he could look at the trailers and (presumably) the movie, and come away with "Wendy is White, Problematic!"
I hadn't until now thought about the fact that 20th century Peter Pan productions casting an adult woman to play a boy is the mirror-reverse of how the Elizabethans cast female roles.
(Apparently Barrie wanted a boy in the role, but was overruled by the first producer of the stage play.)
https://slate.com/culture/2014/01/peter-pan-played-by-a-woman-why-a-history-of-casting-the-j-m-barrie-character.html
"Who is Noah Berlatsky, and why is he an idiot?"
Fewer comments like this, please.
I genuinely don't know the guy, his opinions, or his politics, and I genuinely wanted to know how he could produce a review of a movie. that made nearly all the Good Guys non-white while keeping the Bad Guys all white, which complained about "too much whiteness, the racism is showing through".
If you really want to dive in, the Blocked & Reported podcast has a whole episode about Noah (he often pops up in discussion of Internet bullshit) https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-80-because-god-hates-us-or-is-dead-heres-a/id1504298199?i=1000538291640&l=es
I mean Noah is consistently an idiot, so none of that is a surprise.
The movie looks like a safe, family-friendly, forgettable piece of work. Take the kids to it over the bank holiday without needing to worry they'll see blood or nudity.
But the reviews are still banging on about racism. Barrie's work too White! Yes, Tinkerbell is now black, but the actress gets no lines, so this is Bad even if it's the way the original character was written. Wendy and her brothers are White, this is Bad.
Yeah, they can make a version where everyone is a mixed-race trans pansexual nonbinary they/them, but at that point it's not Peter Pan anymore, it's a whole new thing, and if you want that, then why not write a whole new thing? Complaining about oh my gosh, a Scottish writer in 1911 wrote his main characters as white English children is a bit like complaining that oh my gosh, imagine that Gilgamesh is Middle-Eastern and not Latinx!
That is a problem with Gilgamesh. Racist Sumerians! Only oppressed people should be allowed in literature.
Oh, the Epic is just *riddled* with Problematic content. While it gains credit for its sex-positivity, sex-worker support, and valorisation of same-sex relationships, on the other hand it has cruelty to animals (killing the Bull of Heaven), racist and colonialist attitudes (Enkidu the 'wild man' has to be 'civilised'), class struggle issues, environmental exploitation and destruction (cutting down the Cedar forest) and of course the privilege of the rich, powerful, male king.
Hello,
I submitted a book review before April 5th. I then went away on holiday for two weeks. I came back and opened my laptop and pressed one key on the google doc and deleted it straight away (the letter 'k'). This was saved on the google doc as a change/edit. I tried to 'undo the edit' that further saved that as a change too. I am unsure if you can see edits or if you have only the version I submitted on the day.
Will it show that I edited it and will I get automatically dismissed? I posted this anonymously and left no clue as to my submission date. I hope it is okay to be asking.
Thanks
How controversial would the notion of "1-10 rating scales are fake, no one actually can consistently & reliably distinguish buckets beyond 4-5" be?
I'll personally be rating reviews on a scale of 1-5, then doubling the score for submittal (except particularly egregious 1s which will stay 1s I suppose)
You don't need to consistently and reliably distinguish them. You just need your error-prone and inaccurate rating mechanism to have some sort of reliable correlation with how good you actually find the thing, and as long as enough people with similar feelings are averaged together, the noise should wash you, and you get just signal+bias. (And the fineness of the scale doesn't eliminate or magnify bias in any obvious way.)
You absolutely can distinguish all ten places, though studies of people reading analog instruments (where you visually estimate the last decimal place) show that not everyone is good at it.
You really don't see a difference between "this is a 5" and "this is a 10"? If I'm confined to 1-5 scale, I might score some things 3 which would be a little higher than I want to score it, but 2 is too low.
For my purposes, 5-6 is not the same as 7-8 is not the same as 9-10. Something to score 9-10 would really have to knock my socks off. A 1 on 1-10 scale is worse than a 1 on a 1-5 scale, because the smaller scale doesn't allow me the same level of discrimination. A 2 on 1-5 scale is better than a 2 on 1-10 scale because of the shortened range, but simply doubling that 2 to make it 4 for 1-10 may not fit with how I score it: it might only be 3 on 1-10 in my judgement.
1-10 is too finegrained if you're only rating a few items, but once you have rated, e.g., twenty of them, then you can make a large enough number of comparisons for 1-10 to make sense.
yeah one to ten sucks. 4 is best, though i have a preference for 0–3 over 1–4. just feels more accurate.
But 1-5 doesn't give you a lot of room. For me, on 1-5, that ranks as "1 - bad, 2 - poor to mediocre, 3 - good, 4 - very good, 5 - excellent".
But with the book reviews, if I have six of them (say), I may well feel that A is better than B, even if both of them are not the best. So I would give A a 6 and B a 5 on 1-10 scale, where I might be forced to give them both 3 on 1-5 scale.
Depends on the number and how much you care. I have graded essays on 0-4 and 0-5 scales, and even with that I would sometimes give out a 3+ or a 5-. If you have a lot of items there really can be a need to get pretty fine grained.
I usually max out at 1 through 4 if I'm trying to grade in a vacuum. 10 is largely useful if you're trying to score things against each other and make a hierarchy; these two are both good but I like this one slightly more than that one, so this one gets an 8 and that one gets a 7.9.
I think 1-4 was the ideal rating scale.
Seems like a bit of a pity not to have an optional comments field for the book review contest. I think a lot of authors would appreciate the ability to see feedback for their essay.
Seconded! I submitted a review, and I would very much appreciate comments/feedback.
I see in the comments that it is OK to flog one Substack
Mine is "Radical Centrist" and you can subscribe at:
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com
Mainly about economics, inflation, trade, immigration, taxes
Substack's UI (or servers) has apparently lost its mind, they show the "(banned)" flair next to Carl Pham and Freddie DeBoer. Their names in other threads show just fine.
Anybody else seeing the same thing ?
I did, but I didn't see the usual message by Scott that "user is banned for this comment". So what gives?
Search for "banned for this comment" on this page. You'll find the comment one of these got banned for.
I looked for that, but not seeing it.
Your comment is the only instance of the "banned for this comment" string on this page. What's going on?
I'm not seeing any of them anymore either (there were 2). Collapsed or deleted?
Carl got into an insult exchange with someone and drew a one week ban. I don’t know about Freddie.
Freddie also got a one-week ban, for a comment in which he called YIMBYs a "little cult" who will "kill you" for questioning their ideas.
Harsh? Maybe, but I appreciate the demonstration of the principle that even respected long-term commenters need to keep their comments civil and sensible.
Especially since I generally consider myself a YIMBY, but find some of his more thoughtful criticisms of the movement quite persausive.
If I were going to kill him for anything, it would not be that. (I do not intend to kill him or any other commenters on this board. Unless there are Wood Ducks posting on here in which case... I'm sorry, but it's your own fault for being delicious.)
No love for mallards?
Out of curiosity, do you own a backyard?
Yes, and I prioritized backyard size over house size or location to the point of moving 3000km to buy a house with a decent sized backyard instead of an apartment condo.
I don't want anyone else telling me what I can do with my land, so, per the Golden Rule, I don't want to tell anyone else what to do with theirs.
I can not find the SSC post talking about how scarcity leads to politics and scott makes up a fictional example of if there was 10% of the available water all the interest groups would fight for it but with enough water it is a nonissue. It could be a ACT post but I think its older.
Perhaps this?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/
Thank you so much. I paraphrased this idea to a friend of mine to understand why making things cheaper is so good in the context of politics. Weinstein talked about how the enemy of systemic violence in the modern age is not peace but growth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L39Xr6bU9Mg
It is a sort of commentary of the stagnation and perceived increase in 'political violence'. Fundamentally, political ambitions are elevated to a higher level where simple things like plumbing and feeding a nation are seen as a given. This world could be called post-scarcity and it future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.
"Imagine if tomorrow, the price of water dectupled. Suddenly people have to choose between drinking and washing dishes. Activists argue that taking a shower is a basic human right, and grumpy talk show hosts point out that in their day, parents taught their children not to waste water. A coalition promotes laws ensuring government-subsidized free water for poor families; a Fox News investigative report shows that some people receiving water on the government dime are taking long luxurious showers. Everyone gets really angry and there’s lots of talk about basic compassion and personal responsibility and whatever but all of this is secondary to why does water costs ten times what it used to?"
Showers, is it? I mind the time when a basin and a wash hand stand was the height of technology!
http://graceelliot-author.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-victorian-stand-up-wash-keeping.html
Seriously, as a young child I grew up around houses where the wash basin and ewer had been the most recent ablution technology.
Ok boomer 😂
So Hinton has decided that the current AI race dynamics really are dangerous: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html
I wonder whether now others will follow?
It would be interesting to see someone come up with a diagram showing what various intellectuals and AI big wigs think about AI risk, displaying the relationships among them and who seems to be influenced by whom. Perhaps that would be very hard to do. But, for instance, I imagine Tyler Cowen isn't going to change his position as long as Robin Hanson doesn't. If Hanson did change his position, then TC + hundreds of thousands of his readers also might, some of whom are also public intellectuals with huge readerships.
It’s a good piece. I wish it had been a lot more in depth though. The near future problem of impossible to detect deep fakes is troubling.
For some use cases it will be possible to have hardware (cameras, microphones) that cryptographically sign their output to indicate 'yes this is in fact the digital artifact produced by a particular device at some particular time'.
Of course this might make ordinary postprocessing impossible, but in time even that could be solved in a similar manner by having a chain of signatures associated with certain 'acceptable' modification technologies, so that a picture could be cropped while retaining the verification that it was taken by some particular physical camera.
It's a cool idea, but I can see a lot of ways to cheat it:
1. Buy a crypto-signed camera, crack it open, and find a way to read its encryption key. Or if the chip itself is beyond your tools, find a way to feed it faked data. Physical access is nearly impossible to secure against, especially if you're worried about government action.
2. Actually, if you're a government propaganda agency, there's an even simpler option: Just go straight to the manufacturer and order them to secretly create some encryption keys for you to use.
3. The analog hole: Generate a fake image, print it out, and take a picture with your cryptographically verified camera. Add a bit of blur or JPEG compression to hide any rough spots, if necessary.
4. Just make up a reason why your data couldn't be signed. "This image comes from a confidential source and if they sign it you could track them down" is a good one - it might even be true for a lot of sources.
That being said, news reporters already have some defenses against people lying to them, such as by asking questions of actual human sources. After all, it's been possible to generate large quantities of realistic fake text ever since the invention of the typewriter.
I've often thought this would be a great idea, glad to see someone else thinking the same way.
I'm not sure what level of depth is right for someone like you, with lots of tech knowledge. I thought this youtube vid of a talk was good, regarding immediate dangers of AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=bhYw-VlkXTU
This article about misalignment made a lot of sense to me:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626
And here as a bonus resource is my comic illustration of the apocalypse
https://photos.app.goo.gl/PX6XhqJtd4uMiMj38
Hinton's response to that article, from his Twitter: "In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly."
Cade Metz strikes again, huh? I've hit my limit of free NYT articles and I'll be damned and roasting on the hobs of Hell before I subscribe to them so I can't read it, but given that recently (apparently) on their recipe pages they described scrambled eggs and cheese on toast as "toad in the hole", they do seem to be living in their own little reality.
What the NYT thinks toad in the hole is:
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019609-toad-in-the-hole
What sane people know it as:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbREqQm7zzw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xrwwIKlto8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRu_Gq1bDPg
I'd just add the caveat that while this could be an expression of genuine feelings about google, it could also be the case that Hinton's NDA with google contains a non-disparage clause and he wants to make sure nobody at google thinks he's triggering it.