Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The further into the future you are trying to predict the weather, the more the reliability drops. The last time I heard a meteorologist talk about it, it was 5 days into the future for a specific location. Anything more than that was as reliable as reading tea leaves. You can say it’ll rain in Asia 10 days from now but you cannot say with any certainty it’ll rain in this village.

    The climate which we ruined will provide us with punishment. Warmer oceans will give us stronger tropical storms. But they’ve gotten pretty good at detecting and outlining their likely paths. That sort of predicting is likely to improve with more storms and more data. Another suitable punishment is torrential train causing flash flooding. In the places with good satellite cover, they can see that and warn people with an hour’s lead time or thereabouts. The time span is short but the prediction accuracy is good.

    We as consumers are not good judges of the weatherpeople. We look at our phones and form an opinion. But we don’t investigate where the data came from, which LLM may have added its hallucinations, and what other corners may have been cut to get us this information, which we don’t pay for. So we see it’s pissing down outside, the forecast was for blue skies, ergo the weatherpeople are getting worse at their job. When it is more likely the quality of the free data declined or somebody asked ChatGPT and Claude.





  • There are few feces filled salvoes flung at Melon Usk that I would object to. This is not one of them. The question I have though is this: do we need a new Twitter? It had its time in the sun but most people look back at it through rose tinted glasses. Before the takeover by the son of South African emerald mine owners, Twitter was in deep trouble. It had cultural relevance but was a financial flop. It benefited from being the first service of its kind with sufficient reach. I don’t think Twitter would have survived without the Nazi saluting shithead either. Its decline would have been more graceful by comparison. It would have done it without the bullshit tsunami emanating from the top, it wouldn’t have had the money to digitally undress people or other adventures in so-called AI, but I believe it would have faded anyway. People have split up from the one consensus platform to many different ones and making people switch is hard. So coming back now with a new Twitter is like announcing we will electrocute another Topsy next week. That turned heads more than a century ago but we have moved on.




  • It is a bugbear for some, irregardless of when the first example was documented. Loose/lose has the potential to be such an annoyance. For some people.

    The word “new” can carry a connotation of “recent” but it more literally implies “the latest version.” For all intensive purposes, I did not mean to imply the controversy about the metaphorical use of “literally” was a recent development.




  • But now they want a court to treat that click as though an 8-year-old knowingly negotiated away her right to have these issues heard. It’s insulting.

    In the court of public opinion, sharpen your pitchforks, light your torches, and move on Roblox HQ. This is objectively a silly argument.

    Made in a court of law. Where lawyers play by different established rules. Where they are often compelled by those rules to pursue every possible avenue to get the best result for their client. Where they may be held accountable when mishandling their case. Where company execs push their own moral compass out of the way not because they believe this argument but out of a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. It’s a clusterfuck of obligations.

    My gut feeling is they probably know this argument won’t hold up in court. But it may just knock whatever punishment awaits them down a peg or two.






  • There are laws and case law that make criticism of Israel harder than in other places. Post WW2 pro-Nazi and antisemetic speech was basically declared hate speech. Courts have taken a narrow view of what counts as antisemetic. There are in excess of six million reasons for that hard swing in the other direction.

    So I would say the long version is this: you can criticize Israel but you need to pay close attention to how you say it. Criticizing the existence of the Jewish state is possible as well but you need to weigh your words even more carefully.

    Moderators on an internet forum may take an even narrower approach to avoid any sort of legal trouble. And thus continues a chilling effect.

    Freedom of speech is a tricky subject. Post WW2 the US had the influence to export their constitutional values, such as a first amendment, to Japan and West Germany. In both cases they punted. It’s not without some irony when I say opinions on how to establish freedom of speech in a democratic constitution vary.