> I want to know who is buying ads on fridges and what the roas on a fridge ad is.
Who knows, really? But maybe the same people who put ads on the gas station pumps that I use?
Those things blare at max volume and I still have no idea what they're selling.
Amusing anecdote: About 60 years ago, my grandfather (immigrant who was not well versed in mass-production) wrote a letter to the local newspaper asking that they omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the paper. "I never read them" he said.
My mother had to explain to him how his copy was gonna be just like everyone else's.
Any chance he was just trolling them? Mass production of printed pages started a few centuries before he was born so I doubt he honestly thought his paper was custom-made.
It'll be like those disgusting bottom-of-the-barrel YouTube ads, but contextual: "Need to clean out your stuck poop (video brown liquid)? Eat more fiber, because what's in this fridge....."
> Not only did Obama fail to get RBG to retire when she could be confidently replaced by a liberal, he didn't take judicial placements in the lower courts as seriously as he should have. The courts are substantial part of how we got here.
I imagine there was a lot of complacency based on the (erroneous) assumption that Hillary Clinton would be his successor.
It does appear that RBG wanted to be replaced by a Clinton appointee and the Obama administration didn't push terribly hard to snap her out of this. This was, of course, outrageous foolish politicking and contributed to the mess we are in.
RBG was a 75 year old cancer survivor in 2008. She should have stepped down in 2010 and the Obama administration should have put public pressure on her to do so.
> In a private conversation with our professor he said he's basically not allowed to fail them
About 10 yrs ago, I had 3 students in my chem class from Saudi Arabia who:
- could barely speak English (this is relevant)
- would fail my weekly quizzes miserably, using nigh incomprehensible English when they had to explain an answer.
- aced my first exam (3 highest grades!) using idiomatic English in all of their explanations (and they used the same idioms!).
Obviously, they were cheating. It's far too complicated to explain how they cheated, but man oh man my Dean did not want to hear about a group of cheating foreign students.
The Dean never told me that I couldn't fail them (I did fail them), but he did not want me to bring this 'problem' to him--and I could tell that if there were any political blow-back associated with their failing grades, it was going to be 'my fault.'
The main cheater even emailed me near the end of the semester and admitted he cheated, but explained that if I failed him, he would have to stay an extra semester to complete the course.
I had received a video call request from a German asst prof after I had applied for CS MS and a full scholarship to his department. I had written back saying I'd be okay with that and had asked whether he could tell me what it was about. He was upfront: "English proficiency satisfaction call" (yup, verbatim). 2-3 minutes into the call, he chuckled and said, "okay okay I am satisfied with your English". He was from Eastern Europe, and English wasn't his strongest suit, and he had to ask for meanings a few times. I am from an ex-GB colony. Anyway he mentioned that his department (and no other department there) faced a lot of situations from this part of the world where applicants had perfect GRE and TOEFL/IELTS scores but in reality they struggled with communication, and with laughter he added, "and your score had a big red flag". Mine were not perfect; just that my TOEFL and GRE verbal scores were at odds.
20 years ago, my engineering school accepted a Chinese student directly in 2nd year due to their home university results. Middle of the year he was offered to either go back to 1st year and use the next 6 months to learn passable French or get the fuck out.
No idea if it is still the way to handle foreign students nowadays tho. But I think that's how every school should handle foreign students: no special passes, asked to learn the language to integrate.
> I also made up a citation in 11th grade to fill out the citation for an essay I had to write. This was back before it was easy to double check things online.
I love this comment. I also suspect that even if it were easy for your 11th grade teacher to check, they probably were not interested enough to do so.
Story Time: When I was in 4th grade back in the '70s, I had to write a book report: the book was a novel about astronauts traveling through space.
In my report, I lied about the plot because there was a romantic subplot between two of the astronauts... and my 4th grade brain didn't want to discuss anything so "disgusting."
I handed in my report and then spent the next two weeks in terror thinking that my teacher would read the book and realize that I lied about the plot.
Obviously, my 4th grade teacher had no interest in reading a space-travel book targeted to grade schoolers, so my lies went undetected.
> but I found that LLMs do a pretty good job of generating Typst code.
Interestingly, I've had the opposite experience. ChatGPT and Claude repeatedly gave me errors, apologized profusely, and then said, "ah, I had the wrong keyword. It's actually <blahblah>"--and that would simply give me another error and a subsequent apology.
At least Gemini had the good taste of telling me that it didn't know how to do what I wanted with typst.
It's certainly possible that I was trying to do something a little too unusual (who knows), but I chalked it up to the LLMs not having a large enough corpus of training text.
On the bright side, the typst documentation is quite good and it was just a matter of adjusting example code that got me on track.
Well, that just goes to show that these tools are wildly unpredictable. I've had bad experiences generating Go, whereas I've read many experiences of the opposite.
> I chalked it up to the LLMs not having a large enough corpus of training text.
I'm inclined to believe the opposite, actually. It's not so much about the size of the training data, but the quality of it. Garbage in, garbage out. Typst is still very young, and there's not much bad code in the wild.
And the language itself plays a large role. A simple language with less esoteric syntax and features should be easier to train on and generate than something more complex. This is why I think LLMs are notoriously bad at generating Rust code. There's plenty of it to train on, but Rust is a deep pit of complexity and unusual syntax. Though it helps when the language is strict and statically typed, so that the compiler can catch issues early. I would dread relying on generated Python code, despite of how popular and simple it is on the surface.
Specifically, the Far Side panel plays on the idea of the fact that cows would have a cow-centric view of the world and would likely develop tools that were alien to us. The other part of the 'joke' is that cows don't build tools (afaik). edit: I think the "3rd" part of the joke is that the tools look like shit, which is what you'd expect from even the most talented cows.
The humor of the space alien joke is similar in that it's pointing out the difficulty that everyone has in understanding how others (other people, other species, etc.) view and describe the world.
Who knows, really? But maybe the same people who put ads on the gas station pumps that I use?
Those things blare at max volume and I still have no idea what they're selling.
Amusing anecdote: About 60 years ago, my grandfather (immigrant who was not well versed in mass-production) wrote a letter to the local newspaper asking that they omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the paper. "I never read them" he said.
My mother had to explain to him how his copy was gonna be just like everyone else's.
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