pallas's recent activity
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Comment on AI text watermarking is free and good in ~comp
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Comment on Webcomic of the author's experience in an abusive school that was a part of the Troubled Teens Industry in ~life
pallas (edited )Link ParentI think there's the distinction that it is not easy. The suggestion of the Stanford prison experiment was that, simply placed in certain broad conditions, people would quickly and in some sense...And then there are places like elan which, while unscientific, are real as hell, that perhaps the Stanford experiment proved you can in fact very easily convince humans to be this cruel to others especially if it's coordinated with someone in power.
I think there's the distinction that it is not easy. The suggestion of the Stanford prison experiment was that, simply placed in certain broad conditions, people would quickly and in some sense naturally develop particular behaviors.
This story, by contrast, perhaps illustrates how hard it is to convince humans to be this cruel to others. The arrangements of the school were extensive: an entire, constructed way of life and organization, interwoven, abusive cultic rituals, an entire lexicon: a carefully considered system to abuse teenagers and refashion them into abusers. It was a system developed over decades, by experts in cruelty: as the author points out, at every point of resistance, he would be thwarted by the fact that they had thought of everything, and at every point of possible participation, there was looming threat of humiliation, violence, and abuse if he did not.
Even with all of that, for many of the people he describes, including himself, unlike the six days of the Stanford experiment, it took enormous amounts of abuse over comparatively long periods of time to draw them into the cycle of cruelty. It's telling that the arrangement always placed newcomers in a position of humiliation for months, with their only outlet the humiliation of others, before giving them any real agency in their cruelty. It also seems relevant that the school needed to hire so heavily from its former residents for the staff actually involved in the abuse, searching, I expect for the subset of people who had been conditioned for years to accept the abuse as right, even, perhaps, truly seeing it as beneficial, perhaps as a way of coping with what had been done to them.
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Comment on PBS station sues to regain access to seventy years of archival TV history in ~tv
pallas Link ParentThe situation seems complicated. The Ars Technica article has somewhat clearer information, but it's still confusing. Iron Mountain does offer data storage services that might make sense for...Great advertisement for Iron Mountain though. Anyone using their storage would surely be evaluating other options about now?
The situation seems complicated. The Ars Technica article has somewhat clearer information, but it's still confusing.
Iron Mountain does offer data storage services that might make sense for archival storage, but it appears that here OSS was using them for colocation. It's not clear what services OSS was actually offering, but they're being described as a 'cloud storage provider'. Hearings appear to have involved questions of encryption, finding former OSS employees who might be able to access the data, and protections for the data of other OSS clients.
With Iron Mountain and archival data being mentioned, I (and I expect others) assumed it meant tape that Iron Mountain was storing. To make matters more confusing, it appears that the person who temporarily claimed to own OSS' assets may have told the PBS affiliate that Iron Mountain was providing data storage. But reading more, especially given the relatively small amount of data, it seems like the actual situation might be that the data is actually on OSS's servers that are physically located in an Iron Mountain data center, with whatever setup OSS had, quite possibly encrypted, and potentially alongside other clients' data.
In that case, Iron Mountain's point that they need a court order in order to allow a company's client physical to access the company's servers without the company's permission, especially when other clients might be involved, seems like somewhat standard practice. But while seems like something that would need to be court-overseen, it's not clear why that couldn't have come from the lawsuit against OSS, and would need a lawsuit against Iron Mountain directly.
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Comment on What's happening in Kansas should alarm us all (gifted link) in ~lgbt
pallas (edited )Link ParentIt was not a disagreement, it was just an addition. "Actual woman" does not work in their comment, but "cis woman" doesn't necessarily work well either. I feel like what (giving the benefit of the...It was not a disagreement, it was just an addition. "Actual woman" does not work in their comment, but "cis woman" doesn't necessarily work well either. I feel like what (giving the benefit of the doubt, yes) they wanted to say was "someone the local jurisdiction legally defined as a woman", but without knowing the exact state, that also is unclear.
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Comment on What's happening in Kansas should alarm us all (gifted link) in ~lgbt
pallas (edited )Link ParentI feel like one of the difficulties here is that terms become frustrating, because it seems like one point of the laws is to create situations where legal, moral, and social expectations clash. I...I feel like one of the difficulties here is that terms become frustrating, because it seems like one point of the laws is to create situations where legal, moral, and social expectations clash. I used "Kansas-judged sex" elsewhere in this thread, but it isn't very satisfying of a term.
What people actually are, what the state defines them to be, and how different groups perceive them all matter in discussing these laws and their impacts. A trans woman whom social conservatives would perceive as a woman when seeing them faces different problems (eg, a choice between committing a legal crime with criminal consequences that is difficult to notice, and a social 'crime' that is very noticeable with potentially violent, or even legal process, consequences), than a trans woman whom they would interpret as a man (who perhaps can choose to 'just' face the same harassment as before the law), or a cis woman whom they would interpret as not feminine enough (who has one legally and socially usable bathroom, but is at risk using it), or even, for example, a cis butch woman who identifies as a woman but is often perceived as a man, who potentially ends up in a situation closer to the first trans case.
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Comment on What's happening in Kansas should alarm us all (gifted link) in ~lgbt
pallas (edited )Link ParentI apologize that this is somewhat distracting from more severely and directly affected groups. And there is the sense in which it feels a primary object of these laws is to compel trans people to...I apologize that this is somewhat distracting from more severely and directly affected groups. And there is the sense in which it feels a primary object of these laws is to compel trans people to comply with legal expectations by breaking social expectations, that is, forcing them to choose between actually breaking laws, or creating the appearance to many observers of breaking laws. But on a more personal level, your point about gendered expectations of appearance reminded me of the perhaps secondary consequence, the broad cultural normativity enforced by these laws, and I wanted to thank you for that reminder. Despite my username and lack of particular preference about how people refer to me, I am cis, and think, at least within the cultures I am part of, that I am usually perceived as being my gender. I don't like gendered bathrooms, but I don't usually think I'm at risk using them.
But I also know that I don't quite fit gender norms in many cultures, and that strangers mistake my gender, if not often, on a not infrequent basis, especially when they only partially see me. I travel quite often as an academic. Do I need to worry about how people see me when I am in a gendered bathroom? When they just catch a glimpse of me? When, with a private right of action, they have a potential monetary prize to motivate them?
Your comment prompted me to check and it turns out I was just in a state where all this could have been a problem for me. Their law apparently does not apply to private buildings, and I only ever used my hotel room bathroom anyway, but it wasn't even something I had thought about mattering for me personally. I do have to wonder, now, if that was a quiet motivation of the conference organizers in unusually holding it at a hotel rather than a university campus.
And in some sense, it is a somewhat far-fetched worry for me, but isn't that somewhat the point? How much is enough to make it a risk? How far can you stray from the most narrow, repressive cultural views of the place? Is your hair too long or too short? Are you too muscular, or not muscular enough? Do you walk the wrong way? Are your clothes not sufficiently coded for one gender, in the particular area you're in? Are your clothes gendered, but gendered in what would be seen as too queer a way, in that particular region? Are you just driving through in a nice but small car with California plates? What departure from norms is too much? Isn't it safer to fit them exactly?
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Comment on What's happening in Kansas should alarm us all (gifted link) in ~lgbt
pallas LinkIt occurred to me recently how much of a mess these sorts of laws make across borders. Someone in my field, in Europe, pointed out that she wasn't going to a conference being held in the US this...It occurred to me recently how much of a mess these sorts of laws make across borders. Someone in my field, in Europe, pointed out that she wasn't going to a conference being held in the US this year because she is trans, and wasn't sure about travel. Would the US consider her passport valid for entry, given the restrictions now on US passports? Even if it officially said it would, would the border control agent actually consider it valid, if they somehow knew she was trans? If she really needed to go, would she need her country to give her some special second passport as I think sometimes has needed to be done in the past to enter petty oppressive countries for other reasons? And then considering her appearance, how would going through the border with a passport that had obviously wrong information (except in the US government view) on it actually work, beyond immediately outing her to the official as trans?
With the Kansas law, too, it would appear that bathroom use is based on Kansas' view of sex directly, while the identification part must be limited to identification issued by the state, so presumably identification from other states is still valid. That would appear to mean that someone with any combination of actual gender, gender as perceived by others, Kansas-judged sex, and sex or gender on their valid identification could commit the terrible crime of using the wrong bathroom. Or is Kansas also arguing that they can refuse to recognize some drivers' licenses from other states, in which case, is it actually not possible for some residents of more inclusive states to drive through Kansas legally?
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Comment on Waving goodbye, carrying my bundle on a stick in ~talk
pallas (edited )Link ParentI should note that I am not trying to defend some of the comments in the jars topic and similar situations, and people not respecting the community after a discussion about it is a different...I should note that I am not trying to defend some of the comments in the jars topic and similar situations, and people not respecting the community after a discussion about it is a different problem, as are comments that would really have been a problem anywhere on Tildes.
Yet I feel like there are people here who are telling something about their experience of Tildes' design, and rather than their experience being listened to, they are being corrected. I don't see the problem as one of getting hung up on 'technical specifications'. The design here doesn't work well for users who are not experienced with Tildes already and who are not regulars here. You are talking about people finding themselves in a group's topic: that assumes they understand that the post is in that group, that they know what a group is, that they realize that, as far as I can tell, they might have been added to a new group automatically, and that they realize that different groups might be different.
The practical problem is that the design is very unlikely to change at all. But perhaps the more direct acknowledgment of the frozen nature, even if that acknowledgement itself required readers to already understand the unspoken context around it, might allow the community to come up with ways to make the situation clearer.
There's the different but somewhat connected matter that, to me, Tildes feels like it has evolved from an attempt to build a more thoughtful large-scale online community to being a new design of a traditional online forum, with conversations having the context of known regulars and relationships, and understood and evolving social conventions. It can be rather confusing for those of us who aren't here as regularly.
I might point out that this post itself is a post that has gone out to everyone who hasn't removed themselves from ~talk, and a number of the top-level comments are people who have no idea what it is about. I still think there is probably quite a bit of the context here I don't know. It comes as a response to an official announcement to everyone on the site that, as far as I can tell, was in direct response to two specific conversations that it never mentioned. Comments involved in the discussions often seem to expect that readers will specifically know who the commenters are, and know some past context that I think many of us often don't know.
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Comment on Waving goodbye, carrying my bundle on a stick in ~talk
pallas Link ParentYou need to unsubscribe from most of them them, including, as far as I can tell, both lgbt and life.women, and perhaps more surprisingly, even niche groups like games.tabletop and...I mean, you don't need to subscribe to them.
You need to unsubscribe from most of them them, including, as far as I can tell, both lgbt and life.women, and perhaps more surprisingly, even niche groups like games.tabletop and creative.timasomo, which I certainly don't recall adding myself to. It feels like existing users get added to many new groups by default, as well, though it is hard for me to tell.
You need to understand that they are there, and which one a post is in, from a tiny link on equal footing with tags, the number of comments, and so on, and then, on the topic page, somewhat confusingly in separate text, away from the topic, at the top of the screen, much smaller than "Tildes".
You need to realize that, even though all default and user interface choices seem to suggest that they are on equal footing to tags and not really separate communities, even though the documentation explains that groups are not user-created or controlled, and their creation is motivated on a subject basis by commonly-used tags, even though there is officially nothing akin to reddit's idea of different standards and communities in different groups, a crowd of regulars in the comments of some groups see those groups as being specific communities, not just glorified tags.
In some sense, to me, it feels like a core conflict at the heart of tildes is that some, especially more casual users, and the design and the documentation, seem to interpret the groups as topics, while others, including many in-crowd users, interpret them as communities. That the site itself no longer evolves, and hasn't for some time, means that this conflict cannot be resolved.
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Comment on Waving goodbye, carrying my bundle on a stick in ~talk
pallas Link ParentThe admin post appears to have been a response to two posts asking for additional negative labels for comments, one asking for a “misinformation” label, the other asking for a “one-sided” label...The admin post appears to have been a response to two posts asking for additional negative labels for comments, one asking for a “misinformation” label, the other asking for a “one-sided” label that would additionally act to make the comment less visible. Those, in turn, seem to have been motivated by the posters’ experiences over several threads, but the ‘jar-opening’ thread seems to have been a frequently-cited example. The implication from some supporters of those ideas is that they would leave if something was not implemented. I expect others may want to leave simply because of the sense of increased hostility surrounding those discussions and the ones that motivated them.
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Comment on Women should be able to open things in ~life.women
pallas Link ParentIt seems like a modern, slightly more convenient (the ring and lid remain attached) implementation of the same principle behind the standard Mason jar lid in the US that has likely been around and...I guess it’s patented and that’s why not every product uses it but I don’t really know.
It seems like a modern, slightly more convenient (the ring and lid remain attached) implementation of the same principle behind the standard Mason jar lid in the US that has likely been around and quite common for over a century (I don't know the exact date, but the inventor died in 1948)?
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Comment on Any other tenure-track faculty on Tildes? in ~talk
pallas Link ParentIf I might take issue with one word in this sentence: I feel like academia works best if you do not view yourself as an employee at all. As much as some university systems, especially in Europe,...I'm happy to be an ear, it sounds like you have a lot going on, but I'm not sure I'd have answers for you beyond taking care of yourself as a person before prioritizing you as an employee,
If I might take issue with one word in this sentence: I feel like academia works best if you do not view yourself as an employee at all. As much as some university systems, especially in Europe, try to push the idea of operating a university like a business, and treating the university-academic relationship as a company-employee one, that, in my view, is both not traditional and is a neoliberal capitalist invasion of academia worth fighting against.
From a scholarly perspective, the work an academic does is and should be their own, not their university's. The work is much more closely tied to them, and when they move, moves with them. Unlike most company-employee relationships, an academic's work might be completely unchanged by moving to a different university, or even not being in a paid position at all. Choices of research interests and perspectives, and of teaching perspective and style, are often decided mostly by the individual academic. Working styles and arrangements are often unique to individual academics, and the success and failure of individuals vs the university often seem very separate.
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Comment on Tokyo, yeast, and expectations in ~travel
pallas (edited )Link ParentI think there is enough of a difference around going to good restaurants in Japan that it can perhaps be difficult for Western visitors to have a good experience unless they are specifically...I think you'd really struggle to find people who agree with you, but people who are travelling for food only are few and far between.
I think there is enough of a difference around going to good restaurants in Japan that it can perhaps be difficult for Western visitors to have a good experience unless they are specifically researching where to go and have the ability to go there. Restaurants in Tokyo, and Kyoto, feel heavily reservation based, in part because of how small they tend to be, and making reservations without understanding Japanese can be difficult or impossible for many of them. And as there are so many small restaurants, knowing which ones are particularly good can be challenging. This is not entirely different from LA, where the food culture is often obsessed with small, obscure places, or NYC, where obtaining reservations for good places can often be infeasible through normal routes, but for English speakers navigating that culture in LA and NYC can, I think, be easier. It is certainly the case that, recently having been in Kyoto to visit a friend of ours there, it would have been extremely difficult for us to find or go to as good of places as he took us to. Almost all of them needed reservations, and most did not have anyone there who understood a language other than Japanese at all. Beyond that, we simply wouldn't have known the current food scene there enough to know where to go at that moment. But again, that's more a general difficulty in finding the best food somewhere particularly foreign:
Having been to Tokyo and LA, my experience is LA sushi is fine for American food, but not great.
This feels similar, for example: if your view of food not being great is that it is 'fine for American food', and hated the food quality there, I might suggest that you are viewing the food scene in the US from much the same perspective that the poster is viewing the food scene in Japan. I expect that may even have been the point you were trying to make. There are certainly great restaurants in many places in the US, and in my experience, restaurants in some parts of the northeast US have some of the best focus on (non-meat/fish) ingredient quality and an appreciation of simplicity of preparation in the world, certainly better than restaurants in Japan, where that isn't so much of a focus. But going to great places similarly requires an understanding of the area. Sushi is arguably particularly ill-suited to recent food trends in parts of the US, and rather out of fashion. (I'd also suggest that saying you didn't like the food in America is a bit like saying you didn't like the food in Europe; it is far too large and too loosely connected to be seen as a single country culturally.)
With that said, I've had sushi in LA, NYC, and Tokyo. I'd argue that, if you were specifically searching for great sushi, it would be very difficult to rank one city wholly above the other. They are all giant, cosmopolitan cities. All three have great sushi places, and great sushi restaurants feel a bit homogeneous throughout metropoles. Sushi also isn't heavily local, seasonal, or terroir-based in a way that can't be transported relatively easily; the fish, the water, the rice, and so on all matter, but those can all be flown anywhere. I expect the question would be very different if comparing kaiseki restaurants; I expect they exist, but don't actually know of any in LA or NYC.
I am puzzled, however, by the poster's suggestion that the sushi is both better and cheaper in LA, and would suggest that good sushi is much easier to find in Tokyo.
Edit: since responses seem to be largely discussing inexpensive American sushi, I'd like to reiterate my point that, yes, good sushi is much better in Tokyo than in the US, but I am not convinced that there is an enormous difference in high-end sushi places in Tokyo/NYC/LA.
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Comment on Choosing a printer in ~tech
pallas LinkIn my experience, while Brother black and white laser printers work very well, Brother color laser printers can have unacceptably bad print quality for color, with odd dithering, effective dpi...In my experience, while Brother black and white laser printers work very well, Brother color laser printers can have unacceptably bad print quality for color, with odd dithering, effective dpi nowhere near the specifications (or even nearby black), etc. I actually bought and returned a color laser printer from them once, as the print quality made the printer unusable (color text in scientific paper figures was simply illegible). The experience completely changed my perception of Brother; I had always preferred their printers in the past.
I would not buy an HP inkjet or a small home HP printer, but I have actually found HP color lasers reasonably reliable, and they work well with Linux.
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Comment on Women should be able to open things in ~life.women
pallas (edited )Link ParentCeiling-based handholds are limited because you ideally need them to be high enough that taller people won’t constantly hit their heads, and low enough that shorter people can use them. If they...Ceiling-based handholds are limited because you ideally need them to be high enough that taller people won’t constantly hit their heads, and low enough that shorter people can use them. If they obstruct the space too much for taller people, then their primary advantage over more generally useful and inclusive handholds, like poles, is lost.
This is likely why more modern transport often seems to make less use of them. I expect the intention is that taller people will use the handholds, while everyone else will use rails and poles. That requires that there are sufficient numbers of poles, of course, but I expect that is the better option than lowering ceiling handholds.
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Comment on America's longest small town, Route 66 in ~travel
pallas (edited )Link ParentThe jumbled, part amateur collection museum, part shop, built over years as the continued passion of one local person, built onto their house, is "not small town America"? To me, on the contrary,...The jumbled, part amateur collection museum, part shop, built over years as the continued passion of one local person, built onto their house, is "not small town America"? To me, on the contrary, those feel like a common presence in small town America, and that place seems to have fit the type quite well. It was a one local person, who was born in the town and seems to have spent all of his life there involved in the community, who went the usual route of collecting random stuff with unclear meaning as a collection, then putting it on display in his garage and barn, gradually expanding, and never really creating it as something other than himself, existing somewhat outside of modern capitalism. The story even has one of the usual endings, with the supportive partner who expresses their deep love of the place while the person is alive, and then, within a few months of the person's death, decides out of some argued necessity that the best thing to do is to break up and auction off the entire collection (the other possibilities often being the local community awkwardly trying to take on running it, or some apprentice-like situation where someone new becomes involved, or, in some rare instances, expanding to something larger and losing its soul somehow).
(It is a bit odd that the article shows, without any note in the caption, a place that hasn't existed since 2020.)
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Comment on I tried to help a goldfinch - but there wasn't enough help in ~enviro
pallas LinkI'm not sure if this is a consolation, but: I have a relative who works in animal conservation, and she would point out that, a significant part of the time, those sorts of wildlife rehabilitation...I'm not sure if this is a consolation, but: I have a relative who works in animal conservation, and she would point out that, a significant part of the time, those sorts of wildlife rehabilitation groups are going to accept a significantly injured animal and euthanize it as humanely as they can. This isn't a criticism of the groups, it is simply the best option.
Animals in nature die, frequently, and especially when one moves further away from humans, have different life cycles, ways of being injured, ability to recover from injury (in both directions), ability to benefit from human medical intervention, and different levels of human expertise in medical intervention for them. We can and should try to reduce the effects that human development has on wildlife, but trying to medically intervene in individual cases like this can sometimes be futile or even harmful.
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Comment on Vatican declares Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicates bishops in ~humanities
pallas Link ParentSo, 'face-fuck' was actually the 'potentially obscure' slang I was thinking of there. It does do a decent job of translating, yes. But I didn't actually try Google Translate: that translation is...So, 'face-fuck' was actually the 'potentially obscure' slang I was thinking of there. It does do a decent job of translating, yes.
But I didn't actually try Google Translate: that translation is impressively bad. It simply isn't a poem where one or two words can be changed to censor it, and Google Translate can't really do the more traditional thing of just deciding to translate that particular poem into, eg, Italian when the user asks for English.
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Comment on Vatican declares Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicates bishops in ~humanities
pallas Link ParentThere are the dual challenges that the verbs and adjectives in the line can mostly only be translated into approximate and potentially obscure English slang, particularly irrumare, and even then,...There are the dual challenges that the verbs and adjectives in the line can mostly only be translated into approximate and potentially obscure English slang, particularly irrumare, and even then, understanding the insult would need an understanding of differences in Roman views on sexuality.
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Comment on Sweden may oppose Tesla's supervised self-driving tech in Europe over speeding concerns in ~transport
pallas Link ParentHaving driven in a fair number of places, that is very location-dependent. In the US, it is also state-dependent. Many parts of Ireland and the UK tend to follow speed limits, in my experience, in...Having driven in a fair number of places, that is very location-dependent. In the US, it is also state-dependent.
Many parts of Ireland and the UK tend to follow speed limits, in my experience, in part because of high enforcement. Japan has low speed limits, but in my experience, people regularly go well over them and may be aggressively annoyed if you follow them. Continental Europe varies, in part because some places have quite high speed limits (eg, 130 kph). The US has a wide range of location-dependent practices and experiences, which can vary by state and location: in some areas driving the speed limit would be unsafe (flow of traffic can easily be 20 mph, or even 30 mph, over), in others the speed limit is followed rather closely, in others the speed limits are made intentionally misleading for revenue generation, in yet others, behavior is just weird and context dependent. I'm particularly reminded of a rural area where drivers seem to fall into a category of going 65-70 mph in 55 mph zones between towns, but following 25/35 mph zones in town (somewhat in line with enforcement), and people who drive 45 mph in 55 mph zones and 45 mph in 25 and 35 mph zones (these are usually all on the same road).
One of the potential difficulties for companies like Tesla, however, is that California is perhaps an outlier, but has a large cultural influence on the tech industry. Most drivers likely spend much of their driving time on major highways where traffic, unless there is congestion, will almost always be much, much faster than the speed limit, the organization of lanes is often not by speed, speed enforcement is limited, and there are essentially de facto speed limits that are not the legal ones.
I wonder if one reason why people might seem angry with Anthropic's watermarking specifically is that Claude's specific writing style is so idiosyncratic and grating, to the point of being like a human-discernible watermark, and is so difficult to reliably change, that they assume, perhaps even unconsciously, the watermarking must have something to do with it.
What does make me angry is that, the last time I checked, Google's "public detector" for their watermarking is not a public detector, it's a private detector that their public LLM is allowed to use. You are forced to use their LLM chat, hope that their LLM decides to run the detector given your prompt, and then interpret its answer, along with whatever Google-perspective moralizing it added.