Wow that’s wild. The thing that bothers me most about shit like this is that a good teacher would put aside their pride and take it as an opportunity to learn something themselves and show the class how to find out an answer to a question like this. Instead, you’ll always remember her as the dumbass who didn’t know what fossils are.

Goood question. I hadn’t thought about her in ages, but it’s funny how random memories of her class are coming back now. She was a shitty teacher, she clearly didn’t want to be there.

Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.

Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.

A middle school teacher asked for an analogy about something, I don’t remember what specifically, but I raised my hand and excitedly said “Oh! Like how math can help you understand music and music can help you understand math?”

The teacher looked at me like I was a total fool and said “music has absolutely nothing to do with math, how could you possibly think that?”

Since I was a snarky little punk, and I knew I was right, I said “have you heard about the circle of fifths? Let me tell you about it” and I proceeded to explain the mathematical beauty of music to the entire class. I even had sheet music in my bag from my piano lessons, so I pulled it out and showed it to everyone to explain the bars, tempo, and time signature, all of which are based on mathematical principles.

She was not happy to be proven wrong in front of a class of fifth graders.

It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…

Human and AGI collaboration might be interesting, if ever real AI actually develops. But I wouldn’t call augmenting or probing of existing works of fiction with rehashed LLM sludge collaboration, I’d call it glorified and advanced plagiarism at worst, and low quality cliff notes at best.

I would much rather read a work of creative fiction from a human being than to encounter autocorrect word predictions written into paragraphs. The idea that the text itself can be queried to gain additional meaning divorced from the author’s intention strikes me as unrealistic and not faithful to the person who originally crafted the words.

Though I’m obviously biased against LLMs being used for this kind of thing, from lots of experience seeing how crappy they are.

I see that engaging with you seriously was indeed pointless.

I suggest you read some books before spouting misinformation about things you clearly don’t understand.

I’ll choose to ignore your snark and engage with you seriously, because your misconception of race as biology is a very common one. It’s a misconception that has been proven wrong over and over again. Race being culturally constructed does not prove a link between skin color and cultural behavior. In fact it proves the opposite.

If you genuinely care about this topic, I suggest you arm yourself with some scientific knowledge. Here’s some more reading to add to my previous list:

There is No Biological Meaning for ‘Race’

Race Is Not Genetic

There Is No Such Thing as Race

There is no biological foundation to the concept of race. Race is culturally constructed. Saying otherwise is a conflation and misunderstanding the science. Talk to any modern biologist, anthropologist, behavioral scientist, or psychiatrist and they will tell you that peoples’ skin color has absolutely no link to their behavior. A combination of peoples’ lived experiences and upbringing, as well as a complex variety of sociocultural influences have an impact on their behavior, but skin color doesn’t come into it at all.

Here’s some suggested reading:

Misunderstanding of race as biology has deep negative biological and social consequences

A Qualitative Analysis of How Anthropologists Interpret the Race Construct

Racial Biology and Medical Misconceptions

Myth of race still embedded in scientific research, scholar says.

I’d tell you that was racist, but more importantly that you were wrong.

But I can’t tell if you’re being serious.

Ugh.

Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

In essence, DeepSeek — and I’ll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI’s reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of “unsafe thoughts” that might “manipulate the customer,” then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a “competitive advantage.” -Zitron

100%

I’ve had dreams where my long locks were dramatically blowing in the wind, only to wake up and run my hands through my…well shit, that’s just my scalp.

I started losing my hair when I was a teenager, so I’ve been bald for most of my life. I’ve been shaving my head for decades because it’s the only way my head and face don’t look absurd. I’m totally used to it, and long ago accepted that I’d never have hair on my head again.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my hair back.

If this turns out to be legit and works on most people, there could be a worldwide explosion of self-esteem in adults.

I wish this was all true, I really do. But there is a time and a place to be calm. This is not that time, and this is not that place.

These systems are supposed to have COOP plans (Continuity of Operations), but not all of them do. Systems are supposed to have some degree of backups, but I can tell you from experience that this is almost never the case in any meaningful way.

I’ve spoken to a number of feds who said their work disappeared overnight. They didn’t choose to comply, and didn’t have sufficient backups in place because of a lack of resources. Their manager or an administrative assistant somewhere most likely went on a deletion spree, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Sometimes when this stuff is gone, it’s really gone. And we have every right to be furious about it.

100% agree about the media incentives, but sometimes outrage is not only warranted, but essential.

Most if not all non-paid options will have privacy concerns similar to gmail, so you’ll have to pay. I pay for Proton, and though I’m not thrilled about some of the political bullshit their CEO has been up to recently, I think I’ll stay with them for now since they’re still good for privacy, and their other services are solid. They’re also very upfront about what they charge and why, and I think they still plan to transition to a non-profit.