That’s Romania saying no to MAGA style populism.

7 Shades of Truth

Gilead theme music intensifies

I call them the “far dumb”. They borrow idiotic propaganda from both left and right. Like: the foreigners are to blame for the state of the country, we’ll kick them out and nationalise the industry and split the profits with everyone. Except for the lazy bums in public administration, which we’re going to fire en masse.

No, ZeroGravitas is just my modest tribute to Iain M. Banks.

And fuck no, they’re appalled by the rise of braindead populism. We have a saying in our business: for every complex problem there’s a solution that’s simple, easy to understand and completely wrong. Can’t remember whose quote that is, but it perfectly captures the populist propaganda.

Came here to say this, the similarities to Erdogan’s voters are striking.

In addition, this is a protest vote, very much against something seen by many Romanians as an unholy alliance between a classical liberal party (on paper) and the spiritual descendants of the old communist party. At least that’s what my Romanian friends are telling me.

This is the keg, and Simion’s brand of nationalistic populism is the powder.

Not to mention that the “more and better teachers” mantra should be applied all the way down to primary education.

Unfortunately our societies prioritise these things differently.

I’m not excluding hiring good teachers and TAs from the picture. I’m not excluding paying them a good enough wage to attract talent either. But that’s another conversation.

In my university days lectures were paired with seminars. And those had a max size of about 30, and a TA who would explain and help apply the lecture knowledge. The lecturer would visit seminars on rotation and ensure the quality of TAs. And the kicker? The whole gang would be there for the (free form) exam, including the grading.

In short: it can be done because that’s where we come from, actually.

And personally I hate multi choice tests, there is no opportunity to see the thought process of the student, or find and be lenient towards those that got the theory, but forgot to carry a 1 somewhere. They simplified the grading, sure, now you can have a machine do it, but thats about it.

Here’s a novel idea, maybe it needs less students per teacher. Or more teachers per student, however you want to call it.

Technically correct. If Ukraine folded to Russian aggression, there would be no war. Just Russian tanks peacefully visiting Europe like it was 1964.

Which is why I’ll close with: Slava Ukraini!

PS: looking purely at impact of military investments (albeit in a foreign military) Joe Biden might be the American leader that managed to inflict the largest Russian military losses since the second World War, at the cost of practically 0 American lives.

Nobody “made” money here . Ask yourself: who was on the other side of the bet? Pension funds? Retail investors? Insurance companies?

This was a brazen act of highway robbery. There’s a reason SEC is supposed to pursue insider trading. Once the trust in the system is lost, the whole thing folds like a wet deck of cards. Supposed to, but they won’t do a damn thing about this.

You can’t park this at the door of a single individual. This is systemic grift. Fuck the party of law and order.

But… the swamp…

Proceeds to elect Darth Shreck for a second term.

Please insert face in designated slot; the next available leopard will feast on it momentarily.

I think you nailed it. In the grand scheme of things, critical thinking is always required.

The problem is that, when it comes to LLMs, people seem to use magical thinking instead. I’m not an artist, so I oohd and aahd at some of the AI art I got to see, especially in the early days, when we weren’t flooded with all this AI slop. But when I saw the coding shit it spewed? Thanks, I’ll pass.

The only legit use of AI in my field that I know of is an unit test generator, where tests were measured for stability and code coverage increase before being submitted to dev approval. But actual non-trivial production grade code? Hell no.

You know, I was happy to dig through 9yo StackOverflow posts and adapt answers to my needs, because at least those examples did work for somebody. LLMs for me are just glorified autocorrect functions, and I treat them as such.

A colleague of mine had a recent experience with Copilot hallucinating a few Python functions that looked legit, ran without issue and did fuck all. We figured it out on testing, but boy was that a wake up call (colleague in question has what you might call an early adopter mindset).

A 100% accurate AI would be useful. A 99.999% accurate AI is in fact useless, because of the damage that one miss might do.

It’s like the French say: Add one drop of wine in a barrel of sewage and you get sewage. Add one drop of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage.

No argument from me. But we’re talking about a byproduct of a commercial endeavour, without financial gain there would be less reason to do it in the first place.

If nothing else, at least they make less money and I have a better experience online.

Sure, but look at it this way. Fingerprints are benefiting the advertisers, and their purpose is to better target ads. Well I say fingerprint the hell out of everything, but I’ll make sure no ads get through. If we all do that, what’s the added value of fingerprinting then?

Yes your honor I lit up but didn’t inhale.

Trump is shallow at best.