merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 4 days ago:
Nice.
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 4 days ago:
Ok, now tell us what your magic 8 ball said.
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 4 days ago:
Once again proving that while AI can’t do a programmer’s job, a tech writer’s job, an artist’s job, a composer’s job, a doctor’s job, or any other job involving thinking and understanding – it can easily do a CEO’s job and probably better than the CEO.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s AI Grok Goes Rogue with Posts Suggesting Trump Is a Pedophile and Erika Kirk Is JD Vance in Drag 6 days ago:
Yes, any journalist who uses that term should be relentlessly mocked. Along with terms like “Grok admitted” or “ChatGPT confessed” or especially any case where they’re “interviewing” the LLM.
These journalists are basically “interviewing” a magic 8-ball and pretending that it has thoughts.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s AI Grok Goes Rogue with Posts Suggesting Trump Is a Pedophile and Erika Kirk Is JD Vance in Drag 6 days ago:
No, they haven’t. They’re effectively prop masters. Someone wants a prop that looks a lot like a legal document, the LLM can generate something that is so convincing as a prop that it might even fool a real judge. Someone else wants a prop that looks like a computer program, it can generate something that might actually run, and one that will certainly look good on screen.
If the prop master requests a chat where it looks like the chatbot is gaining agency, it can fake that too. It has been trained on fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Wargames. It can also generate a chat where it looks like a chatbot feels sorry for what it did. But, no matter what it’s doing, it’s basically saying “what would an answer to this look like in a way that might fool a human being”.
- Comment on Ska ftw 1 week ago:
Pop: I have a crush on a boy. World broken? Sorry, um… I don’t follow the news.
Gangsta Rap: I’m the king of this 'hood, and don’t give a shit about anything happening outside of it.
Country: My truck is my whole world, and the world is broken.
Classical: I will describe the great forces at play that are breaking the world using music.
- Comment on Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents 1 week ago:
It sounds like they lost you in 3 months, not immediately.
- Comment on Transcribed text of Samantha Fulnecky's assignment, paper, and professor's comments 2 weeks ago:
You can claim that there are requirements that are not mentioned anywhere in any of the instructions given to the students, but there’s no evidence for that in what they were actually given.
- Comment on Transcribed text of Samantha Fulnecky's assignment, paper, and professor's comments 2 weeks ago:
I fully agree that her paper is shitty. But, the ways in which it’s shitty aren’t criteria for the assignment, other than the bit about “is the paper clearly written”. I’d hate to give a hateful girl who did such sloppy work a passing grade, but I can’t see how you can claim her shitty writing didn’t mostly meet the criteria as listed.
IMO a reasonable grading rubric would be something like:
- In your own words, cite specific arguments made in the article and any evidence given to support them (5 points)
- Analyze one or more of the article’s arguments, by either showing why the supplied evidence is strong or weak, or by finding and citing another credible source that either supports or disputes those arguments (10 points)
- Write clearly and persuasively, aiming at a late high school / early college audience (10 points)
Both teachers make comments saying something like “you are being asked to support your ideas with empirical evidence”. If that’s true, it certainly wasn’t in the instructions the students were given. They were only asked for a “thoughtful reaction or response”. You could twist the idea that “thoughtful” is supposed to mean “supported by empirical, scientific evidence”, but it really doesn’t sound like that was the assignment at all. Maybe if every other assignment had been graded that way, and it was well known that a “reaction paper” had to use scientific evidence, and that “thoughtful” meant “carefully citing scientific evidence”, but as it is, it just looks like a really shitty paper that nevertheless meets the requirements of a really sloppy assignment.
- Comment on Transcribed text of Samantha Fulnecky's assignment, paper, and professor's comments 2 weeks ago:
Well, the TA does a pretty good job explaning where it is lacking.
Again though: Which aspects of the grading rubric do you think she failed at? The TA talks about things that aren’t on the grading rubric, or if they are they fall under “bad writing” which is only worth 5 points.
- Comment on xkcd #3184: Funny Numbers 2 weeks ago:
It’s been around since the 1980s. If you didn’t know it it’s not because you’re a millennial, it’s because you weren’t part of the right subcultures when you were young / teen / 20s.
- Comment on Transcribed text of Samantha Fulnecky's assignment, paper, and professor's comments 2 weeks ago:
In what sense did she not do the assignment? Which aspects of the grading rubric do you think she failed at? Her rhetoric may be flawed, but that wasn’t part of the assignment. You could argue that flawed rhetoric is bad writing, but that’s only 5 points of the assignment out of a total of 25.
- Comment on Transcribed text of Samantha Fulnecky's assignment, paper, and professor's comments 2 weeks ago:
Let’s take a step back and look at the assignment itself.
- “write a … reaction paper”. What is a reaction paper? They didn’t have those when I was in school.
- “includes a thoughtful reaction to the material presented in the article”: That’s incredibly vague. What counts as thoughtful? How are they grading that?
- “The best reaction papers illustrate that students have read the assigned materials and engaged in critical thinking about some aspect of the article”: That’s it? The best papers illustrate that the student has read the assigned materials and thought about something in them. But, that’s only the best papers, acceptable papers what… don’t indicate that the student actually read the required materials? Or maybe they read them but didn’t actually think about them?
- “Does the paper show a clear tie-in to the assigned article?” Again, that’s it? It has to be related to the thing the student was supposed to have read?
- “Does the paper present a thoughtful reaction or response to the article, rather than a summary?” Ok, so you don’t get good points if you summarize without saying anything of your own. But, there’s no indication here on what “thoughtful” means. It could mean anything from deeply introspecting your own feelings about something, to doing some research to see if the observations / findings / results from something you’ve read match scientific studies.
- “Is the paper clearly written”: Only 5 points? Given how wishy-washy the other requirements are, this should be the majority of the points.
Given how terrible the assignment was, just about anything should pass as long as it’s clear the student read the article and thought about it. Even if their writing is shitty, that’s only 5 points.
Did she demonstrate that she read the article? I guess so. She didn’t quote from it, and only talked about a couple of aspects, like teasing as a way to enforce gender norms, and that encouraging diverse gender expressions could improve students’ responses. But, if that’s what’s in the article, she clearly demonstrated that she did read the article. I don’t know what a 10/10 would be in “show a clear tie-in”, given that it’s only a 650 word essay and you’re told not to summarize. But, it seems pretty clear she read it and that she wrote about what’s in the thing she read, so 8/10.
Did she write a thoughtful reaction to what she read, rather than a summary? Well, yeah. She didn’t summarize the article at all. You can argue how thoughtful her response was, but she engaged with the ideas in the article and reacted to them, just as she was asked to do. If thoughtful means “did you question your own beliefs”, then it wasn’t thoughtful. But, if thoughtful means “did you read the article and have thoughts, which you expressed”, then yes. 7/10.
Is the paper clearly written? It’s pretty shitty writing, 2/5. Luckily for her, how well it’s written is only 5/25 points.
So, 17/25 points for a shitty essay which, nevertheless, fully meets the requirements for a shitty assignment.
- Comment on Bell Labs 'Unix' Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball 2 weeks ago:
Don’t accidentally get the bdsmgames package instead, that’s for a different kind of game.
- Comment on YSK: The pulled *60 Minutes* CECOT segment aired in Canada and is available online 2 weeks ago:
It didn’t air in Canada. What happened was that the Canadian outlet that has the Canadian rights to redistribute 60 Minutes in Canada accidentally made the segment available in their app thinking that it was going to be broadcast. So, the same version of 60 Minutes that aired on CBS in the USA aired in Canada, but the app contained the CECOT segment.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 weeks ago:
Just a little.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 weeks ago:
English has a rote greeting in “How are you doing?” But, you can respond with anything from “great!” to “oh, okay”. It would be a big faux pas to take that as an opportunity to launch into all your medical issues. Maybe in Chinese it’s ok to respond honestly, but just not to assume someone is actually asking you if you want to eat something.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 weeks ago:
IMO, English Canadians don’t really have a food that they can call their own. Quebec has poutine, tourtieres, pea soup, and other things. English Canada eats many of those things, but also a lot of generic North American or European things: hamburgers, steaks, North-American style pizza, pasta, stew, etc.
Where I think Canada might be a bit different is that after decades of high levels of immigration, Canada has a lot of foods from other parts of the world. It’s common to find South Indian, Pakistani, Punjabi, Turkish, Persian, Carribean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Mexican, etc. restaurants in a city. Many of them cater to immigrants from those countries, so they’re authentic tasting.
A lot of that is made at home too. While a home-made stir fry probably wouldn’t taste authentically Chinese to someone from China, there are many meals from around the world that have been adapted for Canadian tastes. Very white people in Canada often cook adapted versions of Indian curries, Chinese stir fries, Mexican tacos, Thai curries, etc.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 weeks ago:
How do you know people don’t like spicy food? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 weeks ago:
And what’s the correct formulaic response to that?
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 weeks ago:
That’s a great video.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 weeks ago:
German bread and beer is good. The only problem is that they have extremely narrow definitions of what makes good beer and bread. For example, the Reinheitsgebot law means that most German beer tastes the same. It’s not that it tastes bad, but the number of varieties is lower as a result. Similarly, with bread, Germans like a very specific style of bread. Sometimes they put seeds on it. But you have to search to find naan, corn bread, challah, roti, milk bread, injera, etc.
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 3 weeks ago:
I also think it’s hard to imagine that something that bad would happen to someone if they didn’t really do something wrong. It seems like an online death penalty punishment, and you’d think that for that they’d really have to have proof that you were doing something horrible. It’s hard to believe that they just make mistakes, and that having a human being review these cases costs them a few dollars, so they just let people’s lives get ruined to increase their profits by 0.000001%
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 3 weeks ago:
Apple, like Microsoft, Google, and others has a real web of dependencies for all its software. Even if he did back up all his important data, unless it was in an open format with open metadata it probably still requires an Apple program to open, which will require his Apple ID to be working. And every one of these big monopolists makes it really hard to fully export your data and metadata in a useful, unencumbered format because keeping people locked into their ecosystem is part of their business plan.
We’re all doing the best we can to live in unregulatedcapitalismland while staying sane, keeping our data backed up, eating healthily, getting enough sleep, getting exercise, spending enough time with friends and family, and so on. Things eventually slip.
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 3 weeks ago:
It’s their fault for being born into a world where antitrust laws stopped being enforced a quarter of a century ago. They should do better.
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 3 weeks ago:
How many cases like this aren’t making the news? There are probably thousands of people who depend on Apple or Google or Dropbox and are suddenly locked out with no options.
- Comment on Actual theft 4 weeks ago:
Did people care enough about the Best Buy commercial for this to be on Gamestop’s radar? Did she have a fan club or something? She’s fairly attractive, but not in a memorable way. It seems like good casting in the sense that she looks like she might be someone who works a retail job.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 4 weeks ago:
I never signed up, mainly because there was never any need to sign up. You could just go there, paste an image, and get a link to it.
Why would you sign up? It would be like signing up to use a URL shortener.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 4 weeks ago:
It still surprises me that people use Imgur as a social media site. Imgur to me is a place that hosts image to be used on other social media sites. Using imgur as a social media site is like using a url shortener as a social media site. What’s next, Captcha becomes a social media hangout?
