MetaFilter

That's a very interesting article, and like others I'm grateful it didn't dwell on the headline too much.

The headline did get a good laugh out of me though. I do old NYT puzzles for recreation and not only are they American, they are a very small slice of demographic and time window of American. The pop culture questions alone set the tone: Anyone remember who played Renee on Ally McBeal?

I've got about as much chance knowing that as I do… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:31 AM on December 27, 2023

Legally change your name to Aeiouy and live off the riches of crossword fame till the end of your days.

I've already decided that if I ever form a public organization the acronym will be 3-6 letters, start with A, and be at least half vowels.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:48 AM on December 27, 2023

If nothing else, for someone who's learning English as a second language doing crossword puzzles is a great way to get accustomed to English's um, unique approach to spelling and openness to including foreign words."

Also even the simpler ones include common cultural trivia worth knowing. For example I've recently started doing Spanish crosswords and this morning I learned the "Spanish municipality famous for its Polvorones." I asked… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:54 AM on December 27, 2023

That was awesome.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 12:47 PM on December 25, 2023

Well they’ve produced plenty of ammunition for the anti-woke crowd. A bit of a Pyrrhic victory.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:52 PM on December 23, 2023

>Thinking your life is a narrative where you're the underdog hero and the world is against you

Since this is precisely the core plot device of so many YA books, maybe it’s not a surprise that At least some aspirant YA authors seem indulge it as a self-image.

Just came to say that. It's the infamous reverse self-insertion.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:08 AM on December 24, 2023

Can I just not care about the writer when I'm reading a book I like? This is a serious question.

Oh, this is a wonderful and much debated question. It is more often phrased as "Can a work of art be divorced from its creator?"

The 'no' argument is often that one should not give money to people who will use it to continue to hurt society -- I think the money argument is too limiting in that artists often thrive on the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 9:16 AM on December 24, 2023

Okay, but I guess the question then becomes "what level of 'hurt society' makes it such that it behooves me to not buy their book?"

My personal take is this: if someone holds views I think are problematic then I will argue with them and try to at least come to a mutual understanding of each other. This applies to the vast majority of people.

When someone steps over the line into advocating (or worse, legislating)… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 11:53 AM on December 24, 2023

If something is worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

Emphasis on the first part.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 9:27 AM on December 24, 2023

9 minutes into the video, in case you're impatient like me.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 3:06 PM on December 23, 2023

It's also not a coincidence that so many freedom of speech absolutists jump to defend Nazis first and foremost.

Because the very very very first response they'll get is a Reductio Ad Hitlerium anyway?
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:41 AM on December 23, 2023

>> It's also not a coincidence that so many freedom of speech absolutists jump to defend Nazis first and foremost.

>Because the very very very first response they'll get is a Reductio Ad Hitlerium anyway?

Yes, and to remain free speech absolutists, they have to respond "and I am ok with spreading Hitler's belief system, and think spreading Hitler's belief system is a net positive".… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 10:18 AM on December 23, 2023

Is there something I missed that we know he was lying?

His entire history of interactions with the web?
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:59 AM on December 21, 2023

Maybe because I engaged with quite a few of Somerton's podcasts where he spoke specifically about his own experiences rather than media plagiarism, so he feels more human to me?

I present this very gently, but is it possible that you have an interest in believing him so you don't have to consider if his other stories were stretching the truth?
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:26 PM on December 21, 2023

On the flip side, I have an interest in believing he’s lying because I don’t like to think of anyone being in that state. I’ve extended as much belief as I’m willing to with him, but I wouldn’t wish suicidiality on anyone.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:47 AM on December 22, 2023

Can anyone help me understand why it's taking so long to get the online catalogue up and running again?

The British Library holds more than 170 million items, including over 13 million printed and electronic books as well as hundreds of thousands of periodicals, microfilms, and rare manuscripts

They appear to have had an extremely spotty backup system and if they even have a backup of the full catalog it is significantly out… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:22 AM on December 20, 2023

Am I taking any risk in clicking the download link on the Rhysida website? Part of me thinks this is a really bad idea

Trust your instincts.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:26 AM on December 20, 2023

as a former BL employee I'd like to know if any of my personal data is there.

From their temporary front page, just in case you hadn’t seen it….
Q: I'm a former member of staff and worried about my personal data - what should I do?
A: Please email customer@bl.uk and we'll come back to you as soon as we can
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:42 AM on December 20, 2023

The hackers may have overplayed their hand here. If they had restricted themselves to just the HR or customer databases then BL might be willing to take the risk of paying for the data and believing that they could secure that system. Knowing the full breadth of the infection it seems like the only responsible solution is to burn their entire digital infrastructure to the ground and start over.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:10 AM on December 20, 2023

Are they taking a long time to restore their systems because they're treating it as a crime scene and doing some slow and painstaking digital forensics? Or is it because they've lost crucial data and don't have a backup?

As with most ransomware attacks there are really two things being held hostage -- a big chunk of data (passwords, billing info, book catalog, etc) and the digital infrastructure itself. It's pretty easy to detect when you can't… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:59 AM on December 20, 2023

It seems extraordinary to me that they wouldn't have a full backup

I once joined a small team at an Apple subsidiary. Because it began as just a few people doing a special project they never got around to plugging themselves into the company's full IT system. When I arrived the team had grown to ten experienced developers who had been working on a project for over a year with no backups.

The point being that even if there was… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 9:21 AM on December 20, 2023

The amount of data is actually pretty middling by modern standards. I would guess a few TB of metadata and then a few hundred TB for, e.g., scans of manuscripts and the like.

We’ll definitely if they had a fully working recovery plan I would expect a quicker response, but in terms of a lesser system I suspect a library catalog is a much different beast than an archive of business transactions. Opening ten million accounts is a matter of having ten… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:34 PM on December 20, 2023

organized Christianity is mostly associated...

WTF? Associated by who? There are huge swaths of Christians out there working hard to support their communities and support justice for all. You'd think the left was populated solely by Athiests.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:46 PM on December 19, 2023

If the quoted author wanted to say "Evangelical Protestants" they could have said "Evangelical Protestants". If they had said "Conservative Christianity" they would have even been a lot closer to what they probably intended.

Stating that social recidivism is the common face of Christianity belies a tremendous lack of connection with life in the U.S. Hell, even the recidivists themselves can't get over what a repressed minority they are.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 3:34 PM on December 19, 2023

"There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity."

— Gene Wolfe
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:18 AM on December 19, 2023

I was discussing this with my wife last night and I really do sort of regret that the Tolkein estate has not followed the path of, say, Star Wars and recruited talented people to play in that world - what an expanded universe we could have!

[short opinionated essay ahead]

I think there’s a big difference between Tolkien and Star Wars for this, which is that the Star Wars universe was introduced with a slew of creatures and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:47 AM on December 19, 2023

Now, the Urth Cycle, there's a universe that could be expanded on. And shouldn't be, because peaking behind the curtain of mystery would ruin the epistemological horror of that setting.

Too right. Honestly I think Urth of the New Sun goes too far in that direction.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 11:06 AM on December 19, 2023

All said, this does not bode well for my Death of a Salesman sequel.

Thought: I wonder if as copyrights on the original material expire the better fanfics will become become products in their own right.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 2:28 PM on December 19, 2023

Any tool that is consistently successful at detecting LLM output will become the de facto standard in improving LLM output until it defeats said tools.

This whole "AI detection can't work!" thing has a lot in common with "Computer virus detection can't work!". Any new advances in detecting computer viruses are immediately challenged and overcome by virus writers. And yet here we are 40 years laters still messing about.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:52 AM on December 12, 2023

Humans cannot consistently tell the difference between AI-generated text and human-generated text.

And this is what makes the feedback loop between engines so difficult. You could run an AI student generator and feed it directly into a detector but you would be missing the special sauce that is the final human decision that gets made. A detector might say 100% but the human may pass it anyway. A detector might say 0% and the instructor may decide… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:11 AM on December 12, 2023

Speaking as someone who has lived it, forcing people to write by hand is definitely ableist.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 12:00 PM on December 13, 2023

ChatGPT did not increase cheating in high schools, Stanford researchers find

They polled the students for that; I would love to poll the teachers. If they felt that cheating had decreased that would mean that ChatGPT represented a higher quality of cheating.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 10:23 AM on December 16, 2023

Yeah, this isn't happening. At least not from end-user devices.

Having implemented legal wiretapping a few times I can tell you that the hardest part of it is hiding the fact that you're doing it. All it would take is one interested person to monitor the data coming out of your app and you'd be blown.

There are organizations who have made a science out of analyzing network traffic -- not decoding it, but rather looking at amounts and timing.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:36 AM on December 15, 2023

What if, instead of listening in on the call yourself, you got the data from amazon or apple or whoever made the phone and offers the voice-activated features like Siri and Alexa? We already know those are sending voice data to external servers for processing, and who's to say just by looking at the data traffic that the data isn't being sold to third parties ?

It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they were selling every single word that was addressed… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 12:16 PM on December 15, 2023

Didn't the TVs in "Fahrenheit 451" spy on the watchers, or am I misremembering that?

You’re thinking of 1984. In Fahrenheit 451 the populace is almost entirely self-regulating.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 2:52 PM on December 15, 2023

What is the allure for using stone of any kind over, just, like a regular countertop? What is it normally, wood with some kind of thing on top of it, or something similar?

Personally I find natural materials more pleasant. When I redid the house I had the contractors put stone tile flooring throughout, used stone tile for the kitchen counters, and redid the entire bathroom (floor, walls, and counters) with it.

I also have… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:44 AM on December 14, 2023

More than a little ghoulish/tone deaf that this thread turned into "what countertops do I have in the home I own" when it's about people who probably can't afford houses, dying to make materials for them

Well actually it started as a thread about people *not* dying to make make materials, and a discussion of what materials to use instead seems like a natural progression.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 12:22 PM on December 14, 2023

Definitely! And next time we talk about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire I'll make sure to get good tips on alternate blouse sources.

Cool! I didn't realize the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire story was about a bunch of people being spared from working in dangerous conditions. I thought it was a bad thing.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 2:50 PM on December 14, 2023

Yech. They intermixed the Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig series. Very inconvenient. :-(
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 5:36 PM on December 11, 2023

> Yech. They intermixed the Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig series. Very inconvenient. :-(

Why would they need to be separated?

So I won't break another TV reflexively punching the avatar of everything bad about Oxbridge in the face.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:38 PM on December 11, 2023

I believe they both are Cambridge-educated and from relatively well-to-do families - which do you mean?

Fry. I enjoy him as an actor but he was more of himself when hosting QI and he is an absolutely grating personality for me.

They're also both pretty far from the worst Oxbridge has to offer.

Fair enough. Let’s say there are different realms of annoyance, and that Fry is a master in his field.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:51 PM on December 12, 2023

Very cool, but next time they need to add an accelerometer.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:43 PM on December 12, 2023

Some of them are a bit, /eyebrowraise, and you can feel the right-wing going after a lot of things...

Yup. And nationally the right-wing hates California because progressive policies that start there get exported in its massive cultural output. It is everything wrong with America and it’s taking the rest of the country down with it.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:55 PM on December 10, 2023

On the other hand throughout the 80’s and 90’s Hollywood had started portraying homosexuals as regular people just living their lives, and you know much God hates that kind of thing. Perhaps you could share the credit.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:38 PM on December 10, 2023

So I’m curious. For those of us not lucky enough to live in the socialist paradise of the Left Coast…. Will any of these laws spill over into nationwide changes in corporate policy?

Some pressures on companies and states:


The negation of non-compete contracts will give California a hiring advantage, particularly because it negates existing non-compete contracts people in other states are already living with.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:58 AM on December 11, 2023

Or download it for free when it's not available any more on any platform? That's fine with me too.

Whether it's piracy or not depends on the contract you signed when you bought it.

--------------

Frankly all of the rest of this sophistry is so pointless as to be ridiculous. If you want to steal something just steal it. No one who believes it is stealing is going to read all of your self-justifications… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:29 AM on December 11, 2023

ARGH! The term is less than a year old and already its meaning has been corrupted.

This is why you shouldn’t invent catchy terms. If he had called it the Corporate-Consumer-Customer-Death-Spiral we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:16 PM on December 10, 2023

Here’s a site where it has been used "incorrectly" since at least April 2.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 9:23 PM on December 10, 2023

This sort of piling on (“Look! Someone is wrong on the internet!”) is just the sort of thing that I left MetaFilter to avoid. And I pop back to see if anything has changed… nope.

And the other 28 posts on the front page? Or were you only drawn to comment on this thread because it was wrong on the internet?
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:20 AM on December 11, 2023

So I watched the animated series and I really enjoyed it. Basically a complete variant of the story with a lot of nods to the original.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 4:39 PM on December 10, 2023