It’s hammered into a lot of people’s heads that the word is very mean, and not just “insult” but “remember, people like you used to be considered animals and treated like property, subject to difficult to fathom attrocities”.
It doesn’t need to be directed to be a reminder. While reference is likewise a reminder, it’s at least couched in terms that convey the speaker understands it has weight beyond “insult”.
Couple that with saying it as a white person can carry significant reputation damage.

Since these lessons are usually imparted in childhood implicitly, and it doesn’t come up often enough to drive introspection for most people, it just lingers as “don’t say words that hurt people and make everyone dislike you”.

Eh, “did you ask to download something” is about the line where I would draw acceptability. You cannot use a website without them knowing if you made a download request for the content so I’m not bothered by them paying attention to the data to see what I downloaded.
It’s when you start sharing the data with others, or using that data from others, or adding things to collect information and send it back that I mind.

If someone did everything on the up and up, they would see my browser request, information that says what it can do that the browser opts to send, and a cookie that identifies the browsing session.
I’m fine with that because I can clear it or change it at will, and without sharing anything the capability information is less useful than the session cookie.

Entirely depends on the group. I’ve been in meetings with developers where we agreed it was creepy and pushed back. I’ve also been in meetings with marketing where they said it was normal, and meetings with others who said it was the cost the user paid to use our website. Ignoring of course that we sold stuff on the website, and that part of it was a management system that the users actually paid us money to use.

They stopped giving me those projects, which was a win for me but arguably a loss for the users.

I did though for a bit convince people that it was worthwhile to fix the accept/reject not working right, but that it wasn’t a top priority to fix the reject button disabling tracking for all users of the site for the duration of the cookie. (Cookie stored “be creepy” flag. When the user clicked the button it stored a flag in the session so we could statistics, and then read the flag to set the cookie. Someone used the wrong session value and stuck it in the global store used to cache sitewide data, so when it went to see if they opted out it would see if anyone had in the last month. They fixed it after the data was all fucky for a few months and they realized my argument of “who would opt out? It’s just the way the Internet works” was extremely wrong and no one will ever complain about being opted out of tracking)

Yes, yes, and that last one’s on them. Getting better with time though.

It’s not all for them though. The thought of the sadness they would feel without me makes me sad, but the thought of not being there is a feeling of missing out that hurts.

Also chasing them while making seagull noises is good excercise for everyone.

The people who figured out the math of the hexagon also figured out you could do it with a bucket of water and a turntable.
Made for good demonstrations when reporting the results.
(They used more regulated and measured pieces for more rigorous tests. They just also had a bucket)

What the absolute fuck. I’m in the same age bracket and I’ve never heard that before.

Your statement ignores the meaning of AI or the decades of work that have gone into the field.

They’re not sentient. They’re not sapient. They’re not conscious, nor do they have feelings, volition, desire, or anything that can be described as an internal life. They can’t even think in they sense that anyone means by it.

None of those things are intelligence though.

An LLM posesses the ability to respond to external stimuli in a way that is meaningful. They also have the ability to learn, which is the act of a system transforming information or stimuli in a way that is applied to later stimuli.

My air conditioner learns and is intelligent. It measures the environment, takes actions based on that stimulus, and when I make adjustments it records when I like different settings and applies that to the temperatures it’s recorded in the past to adjust early. An LLM may be more sophisticated than my air conditioner but it’s in the same category.

The mistake is thinking that AI in the real world is what AI is on TV.

(I was responding with tongue firmly in my cheek, and I laughed out loud because I actually can’t think of why weight is a bad pricing model, beyond it obviously being not what you use. Hence “bushel of babies”)

:)

Look, I never claimed to be a genius. You can’t just go asking people questions like that and expect them to know.
I just know that childcare for a bushel of babies shouldn’t be the same as for an individual seven year old.

It’s funny to put major in quotes. If you look at shipping volumes then USPS is really the only major carrier. Since they have to deliver everywhere they deliver something like 120 billion things a year, where the second is like…7 billion.

I honestly think it’s kinda sweet how it worked to be honest.
People showed up, gave their kid postage, and told the clerk they were mailing them. Clerk was confused for a minute, and then conceded that there was nothing technically forbidden about that. Kid hops on the scale, postage is correct, and the kid waits behind the counter until the trip to train, where they ride with the operator.

Basically people gently gaming the system and the people involved saying “you’re technically correct” and then looking after a random child.
They only stopped it because they decided you can’t operate a train and keep a kid safe at the same time, and weight is not a great way to price childcare.

It entirely depends on the type of corpo speak. Some of it is a euphemism for things that humans want to avoid addressing, like firing people and potentially throwing their lives into chaos because it makes a business have a line that looks slightly better for a few months.

Sometimes it’s a polite thought terminating cliche the end a conversation or say “I hear what you’re saying and we’re doing it my way”.

Sometimes it’s just a shorthand for some of the things that corporations have adopted that can coincidentally be helpful in relationships.
Setting aside a few minutes to check-in and hear how everyone feels things have been going is a ‘retro’.

I can 100% assure you that there are positive relationship impacts to looking your partner in the eye and asking if they want to touch base. That you’ve got a high priority action item that you’re looking to circle back on, and some clearly defined success metrics.

I feel like that’s very similar to what I said, including the bit about being routine in most other regards.

People who spend a lot of time thinking are prone to having thoughts, and sometimes those thoughts are less common.
The more abstract the topic you’re working with, the more accustomed you’ll be to hearing things that don’t make sense at first.

Might just be me, but in general the more educated people I’ve met have been more likely to qualify as odd ducks, and the mathy folks tend towards the upper edge.

I had hoped I was making it very clear that it’s not a case that all mathematicians are weirdos or even difficult to talk to, because they’re not.
Thinking about complicated things all the time results in complicated conclusions, so you’ll end up talking to people with very detailed thoughts if you’re talking about work. Probably perfectly normal thoughts on cooking beyond a bias towards using their analytical ability where others might not.
My point was not that they’re all weird, but that the bar is higher because you deal with more people who have thought about something much more than you have.

My point with the paper wasn’t that it’s weird to have fun, or that the title was bad. It’s that it was complicated and an example of the field requiring you to deal with profoundly unfamiliar ideas and terminology, potentially quite regularly. To some people “that sounded like gibberish” is a sign you dismiss it. In this case, it means you need to do more research to catch up to the terminology.

The two that I was thinking of were erdos and diffie. I’ll concede to featuring some of the more notable characters because their stories are more fun.

The idea being described was a paraphrase of platonic realism and structuralism taken to an extreme to match simulation theory. If the universe is a simulation it means there is, “somewhere”, an equation or algorithm describing our physical reality. Needing that equation to be evaluated to give rise to our universe is an odd perspective since the existence of the equation would be sufficient. An equation describing the motion of a point in a circle doesn’t need to be evaluated to describe that, nor does it need to be written down.

It’s a notion that I thought fit well with my point of “agree or disagree, it’s not delusional, and it’s not obvious”

Oh, every single one of those is legal except paying anyone else, like UPS, to do it.

I don’t want them to do that one in specific because it gives them actual, as opposed to pretextual, justification to send postal marshals to raid and seize mail in ballots.
Sueing a secretary of state is fine, but an excuse to legally seize ballots would have immediate consequences on the election beyond what a lawsuit would.

While it’s not true that intelligence is correlated with mental problems, advanced mathematics tends to attract or create odd ducks.

There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math. One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
People didn’t notice John Nash devolved into a deep schizophrenic break for a long time because it’s not weird for advanced mathematicians to be talking about very complex unintelligible ideas. Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.

Another was the uni-bomber.

There’s plenty of perfectly well balanced mathematicians. You just can’t help but get some weird ideas when your life’s work is to think outside the box about very complicated things all the time.

If you go deep into math work, you’ll meet people who think the universe is a simulation. You’ll meet others who think that’s silly, because the universe is clearly actually an abstract embodiment of the platonic ideal of mathematics. 7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
You’ll just nod and concede the appeal because it’s not the first time someone has shared that idea with you.

So when the mathematicians start saying the ideas are getting odd, you know it’s not just “I don’t understand therefore it’s weird”.

They’re not time sensitive in the sense that the first class monopoly law means.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/39/320.6

The delivery window needs to be measured in hours for it to qualify.

As for the postmark requirement, that would entirely depend on the state. Usually the law is written in such a way that it’s dropbox, hand it to clerk, or received by postal service. The postmark requirement is because it’s usually not permitted to give the ballot to someone outside of your home, but the postal service is an exception because they’re part of the government. There’s no provision in the law for accepting the word of a parcel service for when they got a ballot.

States could change that but they’d run into the first class mail restriction.
The best bet would be to permit a “moving drop box” where a municipal clerk could bring the box to your house. Make it like an ice cream truck playing patriotic music.

If we look at the law, ballots don’t qualify as anything other than 1st class mail, which the USPS has a legal monopoly on.

It’s one of the handful of things that can actually get you in trouble with the postal marshals. They raided the credit reporting agencies at one point for sending credit reports via scheduled courier when they were neither time sensitive, heavy , expensive or short notice.

I believe that’s basically the basis of the American size scheme. It’s just the size of the paper the paper maker would give you. Records seem to indicate it was based on the sizes of paper used for bookmaking, where a standard sheet would be folded once, twice, or three times to make book page inserts.