isleepinahammock

I propose we build all new school buildings as giant Faraday cages.

It’s the parents that are the problem. The problem is, when schools try to ban them, parents flip the fuck out. They become apoplectic at the idea of not being able to instantly reach their kids at every hour of the day. A surprising number of parents install tracking apps on their kid’s phones. They have them tagged like wild animals under study.

So schools are stuck compromising with unenforceable rules. Instead of banning phones entirely, they’ll ban kids from having them out in class. Which of course never works, as the kids just take them out as soon as the teacher turns their back.

95% of human beings alive today could die tomorrow, and there would still be more of us around than when Julius Caesar walked the Earth.

I worry for the future. I see us on a path that will likely lead to a substantial decline in the total human population from the effects of climate change. It’s not a future I want to see.

At the same time, extinction is not something has to remotely worry about.

On the bright side, our descendants will live on a planet banded by a glorious set of glimmering planetary rings. With all the crap they’re planning on launching, Kessler syndrome seems inevitable at this point. But, if you’re looking for a silver lining in this dark cloud, rings are it. A spherical shell of debris orbiting the planet does not stay a spherical shell. Interactions between the particles eventually coalesce the spherical shell into a flat disk, planetary rings.

They would be pretty, but yeah…the astronomers aren’t going to be too happy about it…

How long before some truck manufacturer sees their truck returned to them as a truck bomb after pulling this shit?

Sounds like you’ll be buying a Slate.

Whelp, glad I switched recently to LibreOffice. Had been using an old license of Office from my old university. But that expired and Word ultimately refused to function without it. And I’m certainly not paying money, let alone a subscription, for an AI-infested slop factory.

My logic isn’t flawed. I’m not using a motte-and-bailey fallacy, I’m just using rhetorical defense-in-depth! 😂

The company’s total daily active users grew by 18% to 130.3 million versus estimates of 130.07 million.

I’m guessing all of that increase is bots.

Ultimately the only thing that will stop it is advertisers fleeing the site. They won’t be able to tell what portion of the ad views they are paying for are bots, but it sure will show up in the sales conversion figures. Bots don’t buy products that advertise to them.

Not who you messaged, but the “advocating violence” thing gets massively abused by conservative mods on r/politics. For example, on January 6, right as it was happening, right as a mob of thugs was storming the capital building trying to steal an election? I wondered out loud why this place was so unguarded. Why aren’t there machine gun nests opening up on the mob? Sorry, but if you try to form a mob to overthrow a democracy, that’s what you deserve. That’s how countries have dealt with such violent uprisings since time immemorial. You try to overthrow a lawfully elected government? Lethal violence is absolutely justified in such a case, and any reasonable person should acknowledge that. Violence is a tool governments unfortunately sometimes have to use. But the site policies do not acknowledge this. Violence is ultimately the core function of the state. See monopoly on violence. Discussing how the government will use one of its core defining functions is perfectly reasonable on a politics sub. Blind “do not advocate violence” policies are idiotic. And it’s not like it ever gets applied to people advocating for the US to bomb other countries. That doesn’t count as “advocating violence.” Oh, and of course the conservative subreddits never get banned even after openly encouraging an armed insurrection against a lawfully elected government.

Later we learned those troops were not stationed at the capital because Trump ordered them away. Didn’t reverse my ban though.

The same could be said for newspapers.

The vibe is still similar in some places. I get a lot out of lurking on some of the trans subreddits for instance. But yeah, anything outside of small niche communities has been enshittified into another Instagram.

There are reddit front ends you can access. Won’t let you actually participate, but if you just need to access a page for info, they work.

stats.uptimerobot.com/mpmqAs1G2Q

I hope when he gets canned they also ban him from the site itself.

AI can’t do a CEO’s job. A CEO is just a professional schmoozer. They’re there to interact with and sell the company’s services to a bunch of rich bastards. They’re basically a highly paid escort that mostly gets to keep their clothes on.

If you do not have a good time, I am going to find you, strap you to a chair, and flay you alive!

/s

Bond.

Not in the same way, no. Medium does matter. We are physical embodied beings, and the objects we interact with matter. A dynamic digital medium will always be more distracting than a static paper one. Regardless of how much you lock the devices down, a dynamic backlit digital screen is intrinsically more distracting than pen and paper. And paper requires finer motor control than writing tablets, as the paper isn’t filled with text correction technology and auto-fill. Plus the simple tactile experience is more neurally engaging than a blank screen. It takes more skill to write on paper than it does a tablet.

Most of all, pen and paper is so much better at putting a student in the right place for learning. People use tablets primarily for entertainment. Students in high school today have been using tablets since they were toddlers. We’re handing them the same devices that were used to distract them at age 2, and then expecting them to be able to maintain focus. When you engage with a tablet, your brain is subconsciously expecting diversion and entertainment. When you make a choice to write something by hand, you’re activating an entirely different set of cognitive frameworks than when writing on a pad.

Remember, all knowledge is social and situational. No knowledge exists in a vacuum. Human beings are not computers you just upload software into. Students often have trouble transferring specific skills from one class setting to a comparable but slightly different one. They may be able to read a graph in a math class, but struggle interpreting the same kind of graph in the context of a science class.

We are physical beings with physical bodies and physical minds. Medium matters.

You can’t really write laws that just require people to offer a service indefinitely though. That’s how you end up locking some poor bastard in jail who honestly tried to start a good car company up, did the best they could, and then saw it all go under. No one would ever start a car company, lest they risk imprisonment if the thing went bankrupt despite their best efforts. Starting a car company is already a hugely risky endeavor. Now you’re asking people to risk imprisonment if the company fails. I’m generally in favor of locking up more CEOs. But there are plenty of ones committing real crimes. We don’t need to be inventing new ones to trap otherwise innocent people.

The way to do this right is to mandate a long but still limited period of cloud coverage, say 20 years. And require companies to put up a bond to cover the cost of third-party hosting these ongoing cloud service in the event they go bankrupt. Then also require all essential functions to work without cloud connectivity.