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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Police engaged in a highly kinetic confrontation between the barrel of their service revolver and the aggressively kneeling and loudly pleading agitated individuals. Officers grew alarmed at the loud pleading sounds and fired eight to forty seven warning shots in the vicinity of the noise. Following a tactical survey of the area, they discovered a number of dead bodies which may have been involved in a firearms-based confrontation. Officers reported the situation to their immediate superiors and continued to patrol the area in search of enemy combatants and distressed civilians in order to provide emergency services.


  • You know, if it was anything but Twitter, I could at least have an ounce of sympathy. I remember Tumblr getting a bunch of cheap heat over its active community of furry enthusiasts. Valve cracked down on a bunch of lewd games in their Steam Store, largely out of prudishness. Reddit’s been a notorious hub for revenge porn since forever, and its still been considered draconian to blank-ban the whole site.

    But pretty much everyone drew the line at CSAM. Hell, 4chan generally drew the line at CSAM. Sites that had virtually no moderation still managed to swing their tiny hammers at CSAM wherever it cropped up.

    Twitter seems to have fully embraced this shit with an enthusiasm that can only be described as satanic. Just really, nakedly, unapologetically evil. Maybe Sweeny just doesn’t get that, and he’s reflexively defending another billionaire from the oppressive hand of Big Government Regulation. Maybe the dude’s just a nounce and thinks CSAM is no big deal. Either way, someone needs to rub his nose in it until he gets the picture.


  • We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.

    I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.

    I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.

    Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)

    I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.


  • Schools generally buy anything microsoft offers with the little budget they have.

    Far more Pearson than Microsoft. The “teach to the test” regime is all about selling schools test prep material that effectively tells you the answers to the next round of Pearson-written standardized exams. I’m sure Pearson is eagerly integrating with Microsoft AI tools, so they can cut their own internal staffing and roll out more profitable digital variations of their material.

    But schools pay top dollar for these resources because state administrators use exam scores as a benchmark for school funding. So the $10M you pay for test prep material may determine the next $50M in funding your school receives, relative to the poorer districts that couldn’t afford to buy answers in advance.

    Why did any school higher ups pay to implement these?

    Tons of kickbacks to high ranking administrators, double-dealing with teachers being contracted or poached by Pearson for test-writing gigs, state administrators moving between jobs in the school board/legislature and positions within Pearson, people with stock and other debt instruments that profit when Pearson does well…

    FFS, the Houston ISD takeover by the State of Texas ended with a Colorado private school management guy sending tens of millions of dollars from the Houston public schools to pay consulting fees to Colorado private school agencies. That’s as corrupt as it comes.


  • I mean, the bitter truth of all this is the downsizing and resource ratcheting of public schools creating an enormous labor crisis prior to the introduction of AI. Teachers were swamped with prep work for classes, they were expected to juggle multiple subjects of expertise at once, they were simultaneously educator and disciplinarian for class sizes that kept mushrooming with budget cuts. Students are subject to increasingly draconian punishments that keep them out of class longer, resulting in poorer outcomes in schools with harsher discipline. And schools use influxes of young new teachers to keep wages low, at the expense of experience.

    These tools take the pressure off people who have been in a cooker since the Bush 43 administration and the original NCLB school privatization campaign. AI in schools as a tool to bulk process busy work is a symptom of a deeper problem. Kids and teachers coordinating cheating campaigns to meet arbitrary creeping metrics set by conservative bureaucrats are symptoms of a deeper problem. The education system as we know it is shifting towards a much more rigid and ideologically doctrinaire institution, and the endless testing + AI schooling are tools utilized by the state to accomplish the transformation.

    Simply saying “No AI in Schools” does nothing to address the massive workload foisted on faculty. It does nothing to address how Teach-The-Test has taken over the educational philosophy of public schooling. And it does nothing to shrink class sizes, to maintain professional teachers for the length of their careers (rather than firing older teachers to keep salaries low), or to maximize student attendance rates - the three most empirically proven techniques to maximizing educational quality.

    AI is a crutch for a broken system. Kicking the crutch out doesn’t fix the system.












  • The funny thing about the comic is that I’ve heard this exact joke from a gay couple, responding to a straight couple saying it.

    “What’s your New Years plans?”

    “This year, we’re finally going for it. We’re going to try for a baby”

    “Oh honey… messy kiss with partner… we’ve been going in raw for years. But hope you have better luck.”



  • And then, despite finding out that Moody was in fact a Death Eater trying to kill him the whole time, somehow that didn’t taint his opinion on the Auror thing at all.

    Moody wasn’t trying to kill him. He’d been kidnapped and replaced by a Death Eater in order to infiltrate the school. At the end of book 4, the deception is revealed and the death eater is arrested by the Aurors.

    The real Moody returns in book 5 and serves as a loyal companion and mentor through the end of the series.

    He had more experience by then end of the 7th book fighting Dark Wizards than most Aurors at the ministry would have. That job would have been boring as hell after Voldemort and the Death Eaters were defeated.

    Voldemort is just the latest in a long line of evil wizards. They’re stubbornly common place.

    I do think Harry’s career as an Auror can’t last. The best “old man Potter” story is going to read like a Harry Dresden novel - a washed up ex-cop turned private eye with as many enemies in the bureaucracy as the underworld.

    But it’s reasonable for Harry to consider joining the Aurors after graduation, only to find out the hard way what being a Wizard Cop means in practice.