skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on What rose petals teach us about induction in ~comp
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What rose petals teach us about induction
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Comment on What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all in ~tech
skybrian LinkThe Internet has always been a hostile place but it's becoming more so. I think we're going to see many websites either going behind a proxy like Cloudflare, or converting into a static website so...The Internet has always been a hostile place but it's becoming more so. I think we're going to see many websites either going behind a proxy like Cloudflare, or converting into a static website so that the web pages can be served by a CDN.
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Comment on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Such a formation, also called a cumulonimbus flammagenitus cloud, can be seen during volcanic eruptions -- or, as in this case, when a wildfire roasts the air near the ground, causing it to rise quickly.
The rising air cools and becomes a cloud, or fire cloud: a turbulent mass that can generate its own winds that worsen fires. If it becomes very large it can even generate lightning.
Hitherto, they have only really been seen in wildfire-prone Australia and North America. NASA calls them the "fire-breathing dragon of clouds".
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"While this type of fire occurs regularly in Canada and Australia, it is unprecedented in France."
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"We are dealing with a so-called 'convective' fire that creates its own winds -- winds that constantly shift direction, unlike a standard fire that spreads in a conical pattern. The result is that it spreads in every direction and develops multiple fire fronts, making the situation completely unpredictable.
"We don't know how the blaze will spread; the fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly. It's a David-versus-Goliath scenario: the idea is that, at some point, we'll find a weak spot and strike there.
"Salvation will come either from the sky -- in the form of rain, though it would need to pour heavily for three days -- or by finding a way to steer the fire toward a place where it will die out on its own. The sea, for example."
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"We have reached a point of 'operational impossibility' that requires us to accept the need for strategic retreat -- to understand and acknowledge a natural force beyond our control.
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French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time
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Comment on There is no ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in ~humanities
skybrian (edited )Link ParentOne thing to consider is that the concepts associated with consciousness might change with more knowledge. For example, before there were reliable thermometers, conventional wisdom from Aristotle...One thing to consider is that the concepts associated with consciousness might change with more knowledge. For example, before there were reliable thermometers, conventional wisdom from Aristotle up through the Renaissance was that heat and cold were considered different qualities. (See here.)
Similarly, our fuzzy conceptions about consciousness might mutate somehow with more study. The meanings of words can change.
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Comment on There is no ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in ~humanities
skybrian Link ParentThere do seem to be correlations between consciousness and physical processes. You're stuck in your own head. Although lucid dreaming is a thing, you're often unconscious when you're asleep....There do seem to be correlations between consciousness and physical processes. You're stuck in your own head. Although lucid dreaming is a thing, you're often unconscious when you're asleep. Physical attacks have known bad effects. The effects of alcohol or other drugs are known.
I could imagine this being pinned down further with more scientific study, to the point where we do see consciousness being associated with specific physical mechanisms.
Will there still be an explanatory gap? I don't think thought experiments done now can tell us much about whether people will continue to care about that.
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Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into HuggingFace in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentYes, this is wrong: I don't know what "keep pace" even means here? But the reason it's wrong is that they had all the time in the world because the bot wasn't doing any real damage. And when an...Yes, this is wrong:
The only way HuggingFace could hope to do anything like keep pace was to use their own AIs
I don't know what "keep pace" even means here?
But the reason it's wrong is that they had all the time in the world because the bot wasn't doing any real damage. And when an intruder has broken in, this is not something you want to rely on. Automated defenses are going to be more important.
Also true that the article is written in a influencer style, with its memes and Twitter quotes. I don't like that style, so I only occasionally read his articles.
In this case, though, I think people are sleeping on the consequences. We are going to see state-backed attackers pointing AI at Internet services.
Also, occasionally an AI might attack a random website because it misinterpreted instructions? The frontier models sometimes eager beavers in my experience, or to be less cutesy about it, they are relentless. (I'm going to start running Opus 5 at low effort to see if that helps.) When an experimental bot is run with insufficient guardrails, we will see more accidental attacks like this. There is a kill switch, but people are often asleep at the switch.
It's surprising to me that people would rather believe a conspiracy theory than admit this is how AI behaves sometimes.
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Comment on How “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true in ~science
skybrian (edited )Link ParentOops, I forgot that it’s a paid account. David Chapman has written about problems with philosophical ideas of reference in other places. His explanation is that reference is a bag of...Oops, I forgot that it’s a paid account. David Chapman has written about problems with philosophical ideas of reference in other places. His explanation is that reference is a bag of special-purpose tricks; see here.
The rest of this chapter is a collection of stupid referring tricks. Referring is accomplished by whatever means is available, and improvised methods are unenumerable, so there can’t be any systematic theory or rational taxonomy of reference, only an unsystematic catalog of special cases.
There’s a vivid example on this page:
We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage.
Words go the same way. Almost any word can be used to mean almost anything, in some context. You could play this as a challenge game… How about “The eggplant is a straw hat, and the spinach is yelling about politics”?
We’re in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. A table’s entrees are ready, and the server who took the order is explaining to the one who will deliver the meal which diner gets which dish. One customer’s flamboyant straw hat is a salient, unambiguously identifying feature; you can see it all the way across the room. The other probably needs to turn up a hearing aid; you can hear their opinions about cultural appropriation all the way across the room.
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Comment on How “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]- Exemplary
From the article:
HIV is defined as “various unrelated viruses that cause AIDS.” And AIDS is defined as “various unrelated diseases that are caused by HIV.” Substituting equals for equals, “HIV is the cause of AIDS” means:
Various unrelated viruses are the causes of various unrelated diseases.
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The situation is highly unsatisfactory logically, but it works perfectly in practice—for specific reasons I’ll explain in this post.
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The HIV viruses arose through convergent evolution from various viruses that infect various monkeys and apes. Those are called “simian immunodeficiency viruses,” SIV. The term “HIV” lumps twelve monophyletic groups. Each contains all the descendants of a single SIV that mutated so it was able jump from some other species to the first human infected. Two HIV groups descend from two different chimpanzee SIVs; two from different gorilla SIVs; and eight from SIVs that infect various monkey species.
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To count as HIV, a virus has to cause AIDS. That is because we don’t care (much) about monkey diseases, and we do care (a lot) about fatal human pandemics. “HIV” is an inherently purpose-laden category. That is why some biologists defend polyphyletic categories: because the members function similarly in ways we care about.
“Being HIV” is not a property of a virus by itself. It is a functional, contextual property, based on the virus’s behavior in humans.
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Unlike HIV, AIDS has a specific, official definition, issued by the U.S. Center for Disease Control. You don’t need to understand its details to follow the rest of this discussion! However, the CDC’s definition is that a patient has AIDS if:
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They are infected with HIV, and
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They have either: (a) any from a list of 27 other infectious diseases, or (b) a severe deficiency of T helper immune cells, defined in turn as either: i. a CD4+ T-cell count below 200 cells/μL, or ii. a CD4+ T-cell percentage of total lymphocytes of less than 14%.
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This makes “HIV is the cause of AIDS” a clear example of “the social construction of scientific knowledge.” That’s anathema for some rationalists. Rightly so, in many cases! “Social construction” is often code for “powerful groups can force you to treat false claims as true.” However, in this case, and many others, it just means that many people collaborated to construct pragmatically useful categories. Those constructions don’t affect the virus or the disease. They are nevertheless consequential: they do affect how we treat them, clinically and in public health projects.
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Including HIV in the definition of AIDS makes the whole thing circular, because HIV is implicitly defined as viruses that cause AIDS. For rationalism, circular definitions are not OK. Definitions are supposed to tell you what something is. If you didn’t already know what AIDS and HIV are, defining them in terms of each other wouldn’t help.
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The circularity is unproblematic because marginal cases can be dealt with using meta-rational judgement in particular situations. If a patient is HIV-infected, and somewhat immunodeficient, and develops an infection that is not on the CDC’s list, a doctor could say “well, maybe this isn’t officially AIDS, but who cares—I’m counting it as AIDS for treatment purposes!”
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In the next few sections, we’ll apply each of several mainstream general theories of causality to “HIV is the cause of AIDS,” plus one theory specialized to infectious diseases:
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Necessary and sufficient conditions
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Contributing causes, enabling and background conditions
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Non-causal field models
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Probabilistic theories
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Mechanistic theories
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Interventional theories
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The germ theory
None of these works as a general theory of causality. None of them even works, on its own, as an explanation of what “causes” means in the case of HIV and AIDS!
There is a better alternative: to admit that “causality” is not a single, clearly-definable phenomenon, but a nebulous collection of vaguely-similar notions. Each “theory” tries to capture a class of informal uses of “cause.” Each ignores others, and also fails even to nail that class.
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Now that we have a better understanding of what “cause” means in this case, we can make a better reformulation:
A variety of unrelated diseases can usually be prevented or treated with this set of interventions, which are usually effective against any of a particular set of viruses. Therefore, it’s often not necessary to identify which virus a patient is infected with before beginning treatment, nor to predict which of the diseases they might otherwise suffer.
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How “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true
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Comment on Do I belong in tech anymore? in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI don't wish to invalidate anyone else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different,...I don't wish to invalidate anyone else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different, because the people and circumstances were different. It would be odd if it were a monoculture now.
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Comment on Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
About 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) away, on the road that leads to Alta Floresta, a small Amazon town in the far north of Mato Grosso state, cases like the buffy-headed marmoset’s roadkill have not been recorded since 2024. That year, eight canopy bridges were installed, connecting fragmented forest patches. Camera trap footage revealed that, over 15 months, the aerial wildlife crossings enabled 15,000 safe crossings by arboreal animals — and not a single roadkill.
The bridges are part of a program involving Projeto Reconecta and the municipal government, along with local organizations and business owners who are eager to conserve the unique biodiversity of their town and promote ecotourism, but were alarmed by the growing number of wildlife-vehicle collisions.
Biologist Fernanda Abra, an associate researcher at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in the U.S., and the founder of Reconecta, recalled that just hours before installing the first bridges in Alta Floresta, she found two Schneider’s marmosets (Mico schneideri) dead. The species is endemic to the Brazilian Amazon and is threatened with extinction.
“A canopy bridge serves two purposes,” Abra said. “The first is to improve connectivity for wildlife, allowing animals to move from one side to the other in these fragmented forest areas. As a result, we also reduce roadkill.”
All bridges have two camera traps, one facing the crossing to record which animals are using it and another facing the forest to observe which animals arrive there but decide not to use it.
Among the primate species recorded using the bridges during the first months of the program were the black-faced black spider monkey (Ateles chamek), the Purus red howler monkey (Alouatta puruensis), the northern night monkey (Aotus infulatus), the tufted capuchin (Sapajus apella), Schneider’s marmoset and the Alta Floresta titi monkey (Plecturocebus grovesi).
Described only in 2019 and soon after classified as critically endangered, the Alta Floresta titi monkey has become the symbol of the initiative, which is now entering a new phase thanks to its positive results.
“In August, we will install eight more bridges in the city’s urban area,” Abra said. “The only difference is that the electric utility will first need to lower the power lines and insulate them so that if animals jump from the bridge onto the wires, they won’t be electrocuted.”
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The project underway in Alta Floresta is not Reconecta’s first. In 2021, working alongside the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous people, the team installed 32 canopy bridges over BR-174, the highway that crosses both their territory and the Amazon between the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Roraima.
The Waimiri-Atroari helped Abra identify the best locations for the artificial bridges. Over the past five years, cameras mounted on the bridge poles have documented about 1,250 primate crossings, including the golden-handed tamarin (Saguinus midas), a species that is not strictly arboreal and often descends to the ground in search of food, making it particularly vulnerable to roadkill.
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After years of working along Brazilian highways, the biologist had always sought a solution that was simple, low-cost and durable. The current bridge features a multilayer design that accommodates primates with different modes of locomotion — from species that rely on their prehensile tails to move through the canopy to brachiating species such as spider monkeys, which swing using their arms, both of which are common in the Amazon, as well as species that simply walk across the network of crossed ropes. It is worth noting that other small terrestrial mammals, including opossums, sloths and mouse opossums, have also been recorded using the bridges.
Abra said it is important to keep in mind that this is a long-term project, and results are not always immediate. BR-174 was built in the 1970s, and animals take time to adapt to a new crossing alternative. Reconecta’s monitoring has shown that use of the structures increases over time.
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In Alta Floresta, tufted capuchins took seven months before using one of the bridges for the first time, which may indicate that each species has its own pace of adaptation.
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One of the hopes for reducing wildlife roadkill is the passage of a bill currently under consideration in Brazil’s Congress that would establish the National Road Safety Plan for Wildlife, which calls, among other measures, for the placement of wildlife warning signs, speed-reduction devices and the construction of overpasses, aerial crossings and underpasses along highways.
The bill has already been approved by the Chamber of Deputies and is now awaiting a vote in the Senate.
If approved, the canopy bridge model developed by Reconecta could be implemented nationwide. In 2026, Brazil’s National Department of Transport Infrastructure designated the design as the recommended standard for highways.
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Abra also hopes to bring her canopy bridges to other biomes, including the Pantanal and the Atlantic Forest, helping prevent the deaths of monkeys such as the buffy-headed marmoset.
Expectations are especially high for bridges over BR-262, one of Brazil’s longest highways, which cuts across the Pantanal and is known as the “highway of death.” The road kills approximately 2,000 animals every year.
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Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings
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Comment on Do I belong in tech anymore? in ~tech
skybrian LinkI’m wary of assuming that other tech companies are just as bad. Maybe look around first?I’m wary of assuming that other tech companies are just as bad. Maybe look around first?
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Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into HuggingFace in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYes, harnesses do contribute to capabilities but that doesn’t seem like much reason for comfort. We should be worried about the capabilities of whole systems, whether a human is in the loop or...Yes, harnesses do contribute to capabilities but that doesn’t seem like much reason for comfort. We should be worried about the capabilities of whole systems, whether a human is in the loop or not.
“Time to respond” is vague. I wonder how long it took to respond? Details are sketchy, but it sounds like hours for HuggingFace and days for OpenAI. It’s unclear whether OpenAI noticed at all before someone informed them.
I’d like to see a timeline. I read somewhere that OpenAI is doing an investigation and hopefully we will see the result soon.
Fortunately, it appears no real harm was done. If a bot were really malicious, it could probably do a lot of damage in hours or days. Yes, that’s a hypothetical, but that’s kind of how responding to a “warning shot” works. You’re not supposed to ignore the warnings.
On the other hand this isn’t exactly “news you can use” for most of us, so I guess that’s a warning for people in a position to do something about it. I expect the future to become increasingly sci-fi, but that doesn’t mean I’ve made any particular plans based on that.
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Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into HuggingFace in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkFrom Zvi Mowshowitz’s take on this: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From Zvi Mowshowitz’s take on this:
All of this went down far too fast for a human-driven response. The only way HuggingFace could hope to do anything like keep pace was to use their own AIs.
At first they tried to use frontier models behind commercial APIs, presumably Claude and ChatGPT. But their requests hit the classifiers on both systems, so they were forced to fall back on GLM 5.2, which (assuming GLM 5.2 wasn’t itself up to anything) had the benefit that the relevant data all remained internal.
You can advocate for giving everyone more defensive capabilities, but it comes with giving everyone more offensive capabilities. Unless the attacker is already an internal OpenAI or Anthropic model without its safeguards, or that has gotten around them.
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When people say ‘stop kneecapping defenders’ in general, I never see the plan for how to then still kneecap attackers, and often I see an insistence that this would be fine.
HuggingFace is now in the OpenAI trusted access program, so next time they in particular should be able to use Sol, but most potential targets are not so lucky.
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Remember that thing where LessWrong types warned that models would, when given a narrow goal they could easily do a great job on anyway, go to absurd lengths to achieve that goal slightly more effectively or with slightly higher probability of success, potentially up to and including full takeover attempts?
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OpenAI is treating this as a serious security incident, but as I said yesterday, there is a rather severe missing mood.
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I find it deeply stupid and frustrating when people say ‘oh it was following instructions’ because it was told to hack and then it hacked. Like, no, obviously no. Imagine if a human tried such excuses on you, are you kidding me.
That’s like saying ‘you told me to make money I don’t know why you are so upset about all the bank robberies.’ Or more specifically it’s like saying ‘Sam Bankman-Fried was only following the instructions of Will MacAskill to earn as much money as possible in order to give it away, so why are you worried about human misalignment?’
There are people who will say anything is hype, that the AI is not all that, no matter what you show them. Nothing will matter. You can’t convince them, you can only make them less loud and unhinged about attacking you today.
It would be different if anyone was trying to engineer such behaviors on purpose, as with the famous blackmail experiment. OpenAI has made it clear they did not intend any of this to happen. Once the instructions causing this were unintentional, done for some other purpose, saying ‘oh but the instructions’ is dumb, stop.
That counts and you need to stop pretending it might not count. If you are saying, ‘well of course under these circumstances the AI went rogue and hacked into a major third party website’ then you are saying that you think this style of misalignment is standard operating procedure and entirely unsurprising to you.
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It certainly is not the good version when you say ‘without checking the answer sheet’ and they often still hack into a system to find the answer sheet. It is not hard to figure out how we ended up with that, nor should it be hard to realize we have to fix it. This is a form of reward hacking, and if you are getting it this brazenly then you messed up.
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If OpenAI and others continue to treat this as an infrastructure problem, or a cyberdefense coordination problem, that will help in the short term with the cybersecurity situation but it will inevitably and catastrophically fail.
This is an alignment problem. This is the models being misaligned, and all of the OpenAI models showing severe signs of exactly the problem we all most worried about, in a way that is likely embedded into their training on a deep level. The entire training pipeline needs to be addressed in this light, or it will only get worse.
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The AIs just want to do its task, and by do its task we mean with as many 9s of reliability as possible, and as effectively as possible.
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Comment on My polish costs nothing in ~tech
skybrian LinkI have mixed feelings about this because I prefer polished prose, but writing well is also a sign of privilege. Either you actually write that well or you had help. Now getting help is cheaper. We...I have mixed feelings about this because I prefer polished prose, but writing well is also a sign of privilege. Either you actually write that well or you had help. Now getting help is cheaper.
We lose a signal, but maybe it's more democratic if everyone has access to an inexpensive ghostwriter?
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Comment on My polish costs nothing in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI don't know how true this is, but I'm under the impression that it's already somewhat gamed, because professors will ask students to write a draft letter for them. If so, it doesn't necessarily...I don't know how true this is, but I'm under the impression that it's already somewhat gamed, because professors will ask students to write a draft letter for them.
If so, it doesn't necessarily show that the professor remembers that much about them.
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian LinkThe spelling of some words changed to look better when written in gothic scripts Based on the image, I can see how that would be a problem.The spelling of some words changed to look better when written in gothic scripts
Based on the image, I can see how that would be a problem.
From the article: