I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

🍁⚕️ 💽

Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

  • 263 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • A PhD is not a standard university degree. It’s a research apprenticeship that takes place over multiple years around a specific question/research group. Even if a particular school is better (by some magazine’s questionable ranking system), someone might choose to go to the “worse” school if the research of a particular supervisor is aligned with their background.

    As per this article, our schools have identified that these particular students have backgrounds that are in line with the placements that they applied to, enough so that some of the students are fully funded so that they can come here and help push the work forward.

    But I’m pretty sure you understand this already, and are choosing to sealion anyway. This explanation is for anyone else that comes across this thread. I’m applying a temporary ban so you can think about how you should speak about other human beings.


  • That’s not what the denial is about.

    Despite two years of sustained pressure, Prime Minister Carney and Lena Metlege Diab, the minister responsible for student visas, remain unconcerned by the distress of these students. For many months, Diab’s spokespeople have claimed that applications for study visas can’t be processed without biometric testing. This is a ludicrous requirement given Israel’s total elimination of all relevant facilities in Gaza and past practices for Ukrainians, Afghanis and Syrians coming to Canada.

    As for why your premise wouldn’t be grounds for a denial, by definition every immigrant petitions to be let into a country. You are picking and choosing when you see that as a request vs a protest.

    Someone that is allowed in on their first request would have no reason to ask again. You can’t then point to their subsequent requests and say that they’re being “entitled” and “uncooperative”. Not to mention that these aren’t charity cases:

    During his acclaimed Davos speech in January, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada would exercise what he called “principled and pragmatic” leadership on the world stage. Among his government’s pragmatic goals is attracting top international talent to Canadian universities. In keeping with this, Canada implemented an expedited 14-day processing period for PhD students seeking study visas and pledged $130 million (CAD) to assist “top international doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers [to] relocate to Canada.”

    It is hard to square Canada’s enthusiasm for recruiting the world’s best and brightest with its stonewalling of some of Palestine’s most distinguished graduate students. Currently, 130 students from Gaza who have been accepted to study (and in many cases awarded full funding) in masters and PhD programs in Canada are in limbo. Some have been waiting nearly three years for a study visa.

    Be better.


  • What is the justification for rolling disclosure? That seems like a very obvious problem for this kind of a report

    The above methodological concerns, however, are amplified by a rhetorical concern, obscured by what one might call the CASE report’s “rolling disclosure” — an opaque process by which the report’s findings are slowly and partially revealed over time, rather than all at once. This complicates the ability for readers to scrutinize the report’s raw data, as well as its author’s interpretation of that data.

    When the CASE report was first released on Aug. 5, it exclusively highlighted the experience of Zionist Jewish respondents, while making zero reference to the experience of those anti-Zionist students who participated in the survey.

    In stark contrast, amongst anti-Zionist Jewish respondents, a whopping 92 per cent said their campuses were safe and inclusive for Jewish students. In the National Post column, the authors try to write off the anti-Zionist data as a “psychological or social” phenomenon rooted in “a desire for social acceptance.”

    The reality seems much simpler: Zionist Jewish students conflate hostility towards Israel with hostility towards Jews, whereas anti-Zionist Jewish students do not.









  • It sounds like they are OK with people using the tool, but he wants them to be mindful of how its being used.

    But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude output, then I’m afraid I received a different message than you intended.

    The same is true for people’s newsletters and social content. It’s your name on it; are you proud of the prose and weird AI-isms sprinkled throughout it? If so, great. But I can ask Claude directly if I wanted to.

    TLDR: Take responsibility for what you send to people, and don’t just ask a chatbot and blindly share the output








  • Thanks, I didn’t know about them before today and this is probably why

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_cannon

    There is no evidence in favor of the effectiveness of these devices. A 2006 review by Jon Wieringa and Iwan Holleman in the journal Meteorologische Zeitschrift summarized a variety of negative and inconclusive scientific measurements, concluding “the use of cannons or explosive rockets is a waste of money and effort”.[7]

    There is also reason to doubt the efficacy of hail cannons from a theoretical perspective.[8] For example, thunder is a much more powerful sonic wave, and is usually found in the same storms that generate hail, yet it does not seem to disturb the growth of hailstones. Similarly, hail cannons are placed at ground level, while hail formation occurs at altitudes above 10,000 meters; a device with an effective range of 500 meters, above, would be unlikely to have an impact at an elevation 20 times higher.[9][10][11] Charles Knight, a cloud physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said in a July 10, 2008, newspaper article that “I don’t find anyone in the scientific community who would validate hail cannons, but there are believers in all sorts of things. It would be very hard to prove they don’t work, weather being as unpredictable as it is.”




  • Personally, when I’m reading an article, I skim past the parts that explain climate change, unless it has some new bit of information (ex. updates to historical trends). It’s not because I doubt climate change, but because I’m pretty familiar with the core points already.

    I think it is helpful to talk about it in longer articles where you have room to dive into the topic, and put the current topic into a relevant wider context. However, I don’t think we should require it for the sake of mentioning it. It’s not effective at changing minds when its done like that.

    I agree that the last article should have included the wider context. I would also be concerned if there is a growing pattern of not mentioning it when it needs to be. On this last point, while it’s more difficult, I would prefer if they analyzed sentiment and phrasing rather than counting mentions.





  • Hanneke Faber became CEO of Logitech on December 1, 2023, after leaving her role as group president at Unilever. Since joining the Swiss peripheral manufacturer, Faber has attracted attention for her unconventional ideas about how personal technology should evolve – often with a focus on benefiting shareholders and companies first.

    Faber is now best known for proposing the so-called “Forever Mouse” concept – a device with constantly evolving firmware features built on base hardware that customers would purchase only once. According to Faber, users would happily pay monthly or annual subscriptions to access these software-based upgrades. However, no concrete business plans have yet been announced to bring the idea to market.

    Regarding pricing, the CEO compared the mouse to a Rolex watch and the software to Logitech’s video conferencing business. A paid subscription is possible, but Faber offered no further details.

    What 😄