But what were they actually saying? They just used the phrase "college-educated" and several synonyms as an insult to put themself forward as just some working class Joe who has no time for rich people and their hoity toity high and mighty philosphizing.
If I was to be charitable, I guess maybe their argument was that Kant only believed in subjective universality because he was rich, but that doesn't make any sense. Both Kant and Hume grew up middle class, and ended up in academia, and had very different conclusions about what "taste" is.
It's just a knee jerk reaction to dead white men philosophers and anyone who is interested in them as a bunch of elitists. That's not an argument, that's some kind of misplaced class resentment masquerading as an argument.
Idk I've read a lot of Selridge's comments up and down the whole post now and it really seems like any idea of taste to them defaults to classism and then they misapply that framework here, which is realistically one of the fairest arenas.
If someone likes what you make it doesn't matter where you come from.
Being able to easily, and quickly read scientific literature is not a universal trait. You're in the top 1% (probably top 0.1%?) if you're able to do that and actually understand the source material.
The average person has a hard time reading and fully understanding a newspaper article or cooking instructions on a pre-prepared meal.
The first paragraph is fine -- I agree. The second paragraph is a silly hyperbole that comes up over and over again on HN and needs to die. Major newspapers are written for about 8th grade level reading comprehension. Cooking instructions on a prep'd meal are probably much lower -- maybe 5th grade. The "average person" (whatever that term means) living in highly developed nations can read at 8th grade level or above.
Even with reinforcement learning, you can still find phrases and patterns that are repeated in the smaller models. It's likely true with the larger ones, too, except the corpus is so large that you'll have fat luck to pick out which specific bits.
what do you mean? are you claiming its hard to recognize the features of speech of large models? its really not. There are famous wikipedia articles about it. Heck an em dash, a single character is often a pretty good clue
> The counterpoint of this is Linux distros trying to resolve all global dependencies into a one-size-fits-nothing solution - with every package having several dozen patches trying to make a brand-new application release work with a decade-old release of libfoobar. They are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and act surprised when it doesn't fit.
This is only the case for debian and derivatives, lol. Rolling-release distributions do not have this problem. This is why most of the new distributions coming out are arch linux based.
Agreed, but I don't think that has to do with either it's "vanillaness" or the 6 month release schedule. Fedora does a lot of compatibility work behind the scenes that distros not backed by a large company more than likely couldn't afford.
> ...every package having several dozen patches trying to make a brand-new application release work with a decade-old release of libfoobar.
Applying non-vanilla flavor (patches) to libraries in able to make new packages work with old packages. (It's not just a library thing of course--I've run into packages on Debian where some component gets shimmed out by some script that calls out to some script to dynamically build or download a component. But I digress.)
Maybe I'm just out of the loop here, but I'm not aware of this being a general practice in Fedora. Yes, Fedora does a lot of compatibility work of course, but afaik the general practice isn't to add Fedora-flavored patches.
> with every package having several dozen patches trying to make a brand-new application release work with a decade-old release of libfoobar.
Quite frankly, as someone started distro-hopping around ~2009 & only stopped around 2020, I have experienced a lot of Linux distributions, as well as poked at a lot of maintainer pipelines — it is simply categorically untrue for the majority of non-Debian derived Linux distributions.
It used to be that a decent number of Linux distributions (Slackware, Debian, RedHat, whatever) put in a lot of work to ensure "stability", yes. However "stability" was, for the most part, simply backporting urgent security fixes to stable libraries and to their last three or so versions. The only system that is very well known for shipping "a decades old version" of a system library would be Debian (or its biggest derivative, Ubuntu), because it's release cycle is absolutely glacial, and most other Linux distributions do give somewhat of a shit about keeping relatively close to upstream. If only because maintaining a separate tree for a program just so you can use an ancient library is basically just soft-forking it, which incurs a metric shitton of effort and tech-debt that accrues over time.
One of the reasons I switched to and then ran at least one single Arch Linux installation for the back half of the 2010s (and used other computers or a dual boot for distrohopping) was partly for the challenge (I used to forget to read the NEWS before upgrading and got myself into at least one kernel panic that way lol), and partly because it was the only major rolling-release distribution at the time. In the last 6 years that's changed a lot, and now there's a whole slew of rolling-release distributions to choose from. The biggest is probably Steam's Holo distribution of Arch, but KDE's new distribution (replacing Kubuntu as the de-facto "KDE Distro") is based on Arch as well, along with I think Bazzite and CachyOS; Arch has always had a reputation (since before the 2010s) for keeping incredibly close to upstream in it's package distributions, and I think that ideology has mostly won-out now that a lot of Linux software is more generally stable and interacts reasonably well (Whereas, back when Pipewire was a thing... that was not the case).
Now, sure, I'm not going to the effort of compiling my decade+ experience of Linux into a spreadsheet of references of every major distribution I tried in the last ten years, just to prove all of this on an internet forum, but hopefully that write-up will suffice. Furthermore, as far as I can see, the burden of proof is not on me, but on `crote` to prove the claim they made.
Also, I get how if you've only ever used Debian-derivatives, all of this may appear to be incorrect. I would suggest, uh, not doing that — if only because it's a severely limiting view of what Linux systems are like. Personally, I've been a big fan of using Alpine's Edge release since before they had to drop linux-hardened and it's a really nice system to use as a daily driver.
> Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.
Unfortunately incorrect! JMS had the entire plot and "bible" written out start to finish before the show was produced, and the show was approved based on that bible. It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start. There were even built-in "escape hatches" planned for if actors had to drop out (which happened to Michael O'Hare, unfortunately)
The first season is definitely the most conventional (for the time) and I think that reflects in some of JMS's statements saying the show was still getting onto its feet through the first season. Having the serialized story was very unfamiliar territory for Hollywood television back then, they were learning on their feet.
If I recall correctly JMS wrote basically every episode after season 1, where as season 1 had a few guest writers. The guest written episodes did not do well, including episode 14 which is probably the worst episode in the entire series.
Agreed! In fact it is kindof annoying. Every set of orderable elements has a worst element, therefore every show has some bad episodes. You want to tell new viewers to just skip those episodes if they want, but it’s practically impossible with B5. If you skip TKO because part of it is cliche then you also miss the essential key to understanding Ivanova.
Tangent, but a cartoon I immensely enjoyed as a young kid popped up recently on my YouTube feed - Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. That day I learned JMS wrote the story and it too featured an overarching story that backed the otherwise “episode of the week” format.
> It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start.
Almost. Come S4 they got concerned the show would be canceled before finishing the story, so they dropped all the secondary plots from S4 and S5 and compressed the main plots from S4 and S5 into just S4. Then they got renewed and quickly wrote a new S4 finale using S5 budget, postponed the series finale a year to S5, and reworked all the dropped secondary plots into S5.
Personally I think this worked really well, made S4 much more fast-paced and S5 feels more like a "the world keeps turning" extended epilogue.
Can't say I agree - to me S4 felt quite rushed and seemed to be missing a lot more than just secondary plot developments. They go from "unstoppable enemy with the Vorlons being the only real hope" to "telepaths go brrr, also Vorlons are dicks now" in basically no time and then also jam in the battle for earth in the same season which felt really jarring. Then S5 feels like it's setting up the next big plot (the remaining shadow allies and specifically their hold over the centauri) only for that to end on a cliff hanger where nothing gets resolved even in the finale set in the far future.
It's really unfortunate that so many bad things happened to this show since it being still great overall despite them suggests it could have been one of a kind if things had gone better.
I heard the original story with O'Hare was for Babylon 5 to blow up after an alien attack and for the Babylon 4 to be sent forward from the past to replace it. We saw hints for that in two different premonitions in season 1. That's a pretty big departure from the story we actually got.
Incorrect. ICE is built off the background of 30-50 years of propaganda against "immigrants", most of it completely untrue.
The same is done for "benefits scroungers", despite the evidence being that welfare fraud only accounts for approximately 1-5% of the cost of administering state welfare, and state welfare would be about 50%+ cheaper to administer if it was a UBI rather than being means-tested. In fact, much of the measures that are implemented with the excuse of "we need to stop benefits scroungers", such as testing if someone is disabled enough to work or not, etc. are simulatenously ineffective and make up most of the cost.
Nevertheless, "benefits scroungers" has entered the zeitgeist in the UK (and the US) because of this propaganda.
The same is true for propaganda against people who have migrated to the UK/US. Many have done so as asylum seekers under horrifying circumstances, and many die in the journey. However, instead of empathy, the media greets them with distaste and horror — dehumanising them in a fundamentally racist way, specifically so that a movement that grants them rights as a workforce never takes off, so that companies can employ them for zero-hour contracts to do work in conditions that are subhuman, and pay them substantially less than minimum wage (It's incredibly beneficial for the economy, unfortunately).
Rightwing propaganda in the USA is part of a concerted effort by the Heritage Foundation, the Powell Memo, Fox News, and supporting players. These things are well understood by researchers and journalists who have produced copious documentation in the form of articles, books, podcast series, etc.
One excellent example is available here[0] in a series by the Lever called Master Plan. According to their website, a book has been written broadening the discussion.
They have played us for fools and evidence of their success is all over the news and our broken society. It's outrageous because none of this was by accident or chance. Forces didn't magically come together in a soup that turned out this way.
> There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example
[citation needed].
I have celiac disease and a wheat allergy, which presented at the age of 3 comorbidly.
If I ingest gliadin, my immune cells take the gliadin, run a nice little check on it, and then raise holy hell and destroy my gut villae.
If I come into contact with wheat, I get a histamine response. Even a bag of (organic, locally produced) wheat flour opened in the same room as me used to be enough to make my airways close up.
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