I was going to say, I think voters have long been able to mislead themselves, lol. Eating the onion is/was a real thing.

I got lucky in that regard I guess. My mechanic told me that I got the one model of Subaru that doesn’t blow the head gasket. So fingers crossed!

Otherwise, yeah, Subaru’s aren’t easy to work on at home.

Best of luck!

Hey, hang in there. I hope your week stays ok. I hope you can invest some time in yourself. Have a great week!

Awesome! I’ve got a 2001 Subaru that I use to get to trails. Same thing; sometimes I have to walk, but at least I’m not beating up my main car for getting the kids around.

You don’t deserve to have people who constantly flake out. If they are always cancelling and never initiating activities, invest the time and energy into your own well-being, hobbies, and other friendships. Best of luck with what sounds like some health challenges!

Very fun, thanks for the pictures. For whatever reason the speed of your dogs jogged my memory of skiing with my old dogs. We would skin up backcountry peaks, them with booties and leg wraps in the -20f cold. Then at the summit I’d take the skins off my skis, and the booties off their feet (otherwise they get lost), slather their feet in mushers wax, and race down the mountain. I always had to watch my speed since they maxed out around 20mph, or roughly what your dog’s clocked at.

Have a great week!

I thought about the indexing situation in contrast to the user paywall. Without thinking too much about any legal argument, it would seem that NYT having a paywall for visitors is them enforcing their right to the content signaling that it isn’t free for all use, while them allowing search indexers access is allowing the content to visible but not free on the market.

It reminds me of the Canadian claim that Google should pay Canadian publishers for the right to index, which I tend to disagree with. I don’t think Google or Bing should owe NYT money for indexing, but I don’t think allowing indexing confers the right for commercial use beyond indexing. I highly suspect OpenAI spoofed search indexers while crawling content specifically to bypass paywall and the like.

I think part of what the courts will have to weigh for the fair use arguments is the extent to which NYT it’s harmed by the use, the extent to which the content is transformed, and the public interest between the two.

I find it interesting that OpenAI or Microsoft already pay AP for use of their content because it is used to ensure accurate answers are given to users. I struggle to see how the situation is different with NYT in OpenAI opinion, other than perhaps on price.

It will be interesting to see what shakes out in the courts. I’m also interested in the proposed EU rules which recognize fair use for research and education, but less so for commercial use.

Thanks for the reply! Have a great day!

The issue is that fair use is more nuanced than people think, but that the barrier to claiming fair use is higher when you are engaged in commercial activities. I’d more readily accept the fair use arguments from research institutions, companies that train and release their model weights (llama), or some other activity with a clear tie to the public benefit.

OpenAI isn’t doing this work for the public benefit, regardless of the language of altruism they wrap it in. They, and Microsoft, and hoovering up others data to build a for profit product and make money. That’s really what it boils down to for me. And I’m fine with them making money. But pay the people whose data you’re using.

Now, in the US there is no case law on this yet and it will take years to settle. But personally, philosophically, I don’t see how Microsoft taking NYT articles and turning them into a paid product is any different than Microsoft taking an open source projects that doesn’t allow commercial use and sneaking it into a project.

I do agree with you, to an extent. I think much of the support, or at least lack of criticism from within higher ed was precisely because they/we/I didn’t want to be lumped in with the right wing attacks or give them an inch. At the same time, that is like the stereotype of the abusive couple who form a united front against a third party.

I also know that people saying that no one really cares about the research issues also isn’t true. People in higher ed care about these things. The president of Stanford resigned recently over these sorts of issues (though the data issues there were more troubling). There were also Harvard academics recording malcontent with Dr. Gay; they just didn’t go and put it in the paper.

Ultimately, it sounds like what ultimately tipped things over for her was two fold: the latest round of accusations, coupled with submitting a plan to the board that apparently didn’t convince them all that she was responding with appropriate urgency to the widening media pr issue. Which is a very common failing in higher ed leaders who are used to going slow and resisting calls to move faster. Unfortunately, university presidents need to control the narrative by at least creating the impression of frenetic energy to fix something, even if it is intractable in the short term.

You might find this NYT article interesting (gift link).

How Harvard’s Board Broke Up With Claudine Gay https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/business/claudine-gay-harvard-corporation-board.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ME0.srWq.9lxOxV9UwF1g&smid=nytcore-android-share

Ultimately, I think the board and the community wanted to help her hold out against the right wing attacks, but something about her internal plan or communications and follow up led the board to wilt in the face of persuasion from those around them.

I’ve never had a Starbucks gift card or used the app, but in the article they say that in store you can do a split payment using up either gift card or app balance, and pay the remainder cash. Is that something you’ve tried?

I can’t speak to political science, but my background is computational maths. I’ve published papers in what I view as a very data driven field.

I cited every direct quote from prior work, and listed additional resources that I didn’t explicitly reference but consulted.

So it seems sloppy to me.

I work in academia and am used to these sorts of issues of primacy, attribution, intellectual honesty, etc. While there are many examples of research dishonesty or sloppiness in higher ed at large, there is also an expectation that people who take leadership positions lead by example. Faculty led institutions expect that their leaders can walk the walk. I don’t think it is unfair to expect the president of the top rated university in the world to not have engaged in this sort of sloppiness. I also think it is fair that leaders are able to “rise to the moment” commensurate with the prominence of their role. She wasn’t the president of a local community college (nothing against them, but you have different expectations).

The politically motivated and racist attacks against Dr. Gay are abhorrent. It is only unfortunate that they ended up finding purchase in very real issues of attribution, and in a leadership failing to navigate and control the narrative around their testimony and comments.

Dr. Gay was hired after the shortest search for a Harvard president in recent memory, and already had a slight publication record compared to past leaders. That there are multiple elements of sloppiness in her work just further errodes her ability to lead the worlds top university.

Additionally, it is true that Harvard is currently ranked at the very bottom of the campus free speech index, with the university of Pennsylvania second to last. At least MITs lawyerly answers were somewhat backed by the history of their institution trying to balance speech. That two ousted university presidents only felt the need to go to bat for first amendment rights now, of all times, and without addressing the potential hypocrisy of the position given their universities track record, as them leading a new change of direction, was shockingly bad judgement.

So Dr. Gay doesn’t deserve the hate and attacks that have come her way. But she failed to deliver on the promise of any president of a top, R1 university. If you can’t publish to the highest standards, and navigate the most difficult of public relations situations, you shouldn’t be in the top leadership role of these universities.

I read through the article but found the authors point muddled. They kept switching between the points they were arguing, which made it less persuasive.

Specifically, they make many references to the term being racist. But they mostly argue that the term is reductionist to African history, and let us conclude that is how the term is racist. But I don’t know that many historians or serious scholars are using the term to describe the history of Africa. It certainly isn’t a term I recall from my anthropology or history classes, though I’m now some years removed from them. Instead I remember “North Atlantic slave trade” sometimes in conjunction with the Spanish silver trade.

So I’m not sure who their audience is. Who is going around making claims about African history using a very nondescript term? Any history buff could tell you that the notion of African is just as complex as Greek given the span of culture of the old Greek kingdoms. Is it the general public? But if so, don’t most people use it to denote a time period, e.g., before 1700?

So the lack of framing and structure leaves me really luke warm to the article. They don’t do a good job of explaining the context of the terms use that is problematic, and they don’t structure their arguments well. They use inflated language for its own sake, not for the sake of scholarly precision or clarity, and they leave too many things as unspoken assumptions.

I suppose if the main point is the term lacks precision, I agree. But so do many terms we use to describe epochs of history. China before the opium war, post-civil war America, etc. These are just proxies for time period references that would be used before detailed explanation of a before, after, and causal link to the event specified.

I feel like the author has a point here that could be made significantly better by someone else.

I do agree that the content farms are frustrating, and I’d like to see more done to combat them. I also agree that discussions happening on locked platforms is net loss for the sharing of information. I think search engines can do more about the former, but not as much about the latter. I think folks like us having discussions on the open can help.

I went ahead and searched “best Linux distro” and the top three results for me was

• https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/16l9ufr/what_linux_distro_should_i_pick/

• https://www.techradar.com/best/best-linux-distros

• https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=major

I then turned on my phones VPN, opened edge (normally use Firefox), went to Google, and repeated the search with the same top three results. I tried to bypass personalization, but might need to use a clean VM with VPN to succeed.

I actually thought all of those results were pretty good from a quick skim.

I will say I have custom DNS filters and plugins that block ads and untrustworthy domains and I can’t guarantee that didn’t influence my results.

I tried other searches like “best Linux distro” plus “programming” or “gaming” and received similarly helpful results. But I can’t tell if I’m in a personalization bubble.

I’ll play devil’s advocate.

The author is basically complaining that search results aren’t tailored to their own search habits, and for all we know they are using tools to prevent Google data collection for personalized search.

Using the search term “YouTube downloader” and having the success criteria being the return of a fork of a command line Python tool is an insane test for the general public. How many of your family members who are looking to download a YouTube video would be helped by that result?

I searched “YouTube downloader” and received the usual ad-ridden websites that let you download a video. Then I searched “YouTube downloader Linux” and the top result was ytdl-org on GitHub. Seems reasonable.

I’ve seen many people complain about Google search lately. I wonder how many of them either have unrealistic expectations, never learned to use scoping keywords, or who stopped search personalization and lost benefits they didn’t know they were getting. And expecting a fork of a command line tool to be the top result for YouTube downloader is definitely unrealistic.

Anecdotally, I’ve used more or less the same search strategy for 30 years, and it still brings up relevant results. And while I agree that seo gamification can make certain keywords harder than others to use, this article and test really wasn’t testing search scenarios the average non-technical user of these search engines would have.

I’ve been vegetarian for 22 years or so now, and the recent uptick in vegan food reminds me of the early years of being vegetarian. When I first started there were very few options to eat out where I lived (more rural area didn’t help) and not even a lot of good grocery options. Eventually places started offering in house attempts at vegetarian mains, which led to wildly variable quality, and eventually we saw some standardization across restaurants. It’s rare now to get a vegetarian dish at a restaurant that is terrible.

The article mentions mass market vegan butter being pursued, which makes me hopeful that restaurants will start introducing more vegan meals, and upping their game on that front. The more options for people the better, and as much as the article romanticizes the boutique shops with their in house versions, that isn’t achievable for most restaurants who would otherwise tuck one or two options into their menu.

I would say it depends on what you are making. Some home vegan baked goods are a fair bit of extra effort to get just right. But honestly, things like croissants are always a pain, which is why I eat them when I got out, versus muffins which I make at home.

To add on to your point, you publicly support allies while having private conversations counseling them on prudent courses of action. They don’t listen to you if you call them out publicly, which is usually a sign that privately articulated red lines have been crossed. I’m sure Biden is pressing them privately to have a more measured response, and is likely to have more traction than if he was publicly trashing them.

Just like you don’t use all available sanctions out of the gate with an adversarial state, to leave room to negotiate and leave some channels open. Diplomacy is more nuanced than “saying it like it is” all the time.

I don’t think articulating a concern for any civilians on any side is taken poorly, and I don’t think that the majority of the media has skewed any calls for humanitarian aid and adherance to international warfare rules as anti-semitism. In fact, the new york times has published both investigative and opinion pieces that are very sympathetic to Palestinian civilians, and calling out Israeli disproportionate response.

I think part of the problem in discussing the issue is that the events of today are inextricably woven into the events of the

• 1948 founding of Israel by the UN at the end of the British mandate.
• the invasion of the five armies and the 1949 armistice.
• the six day war, and the loss of the Sinai peninsula.
• the eventual recognition of borders by Egypt and Jordan.
• the results of the shelling of Beirut after the Hezbollah attack in 2006.

But that is a lot of history, but the back and forth of tragedies, including disproportionate response is driven by these events.

When most people online seem to confuse the history of Gaza with that of the West Bank, or conflate Hamas and Hezbollah, it is no wonder that discussion breaks down.

Unfortunately I was in a debate elsewhere on the fediverse where the other person said there is no legitimate response to the Hamas attack for Israel because Israel’s existence is the source of the problem.

That sounds like the Hezbollah general who yesterday called this a “war of existence” in that either Israel exists or the Arab alliance exists. So how do you reason with that position, and how many people objecting to Israel’s use of force are really all that knowledgeable of the history?

I also think that people underestimate how you reason with allies. If Biden hadn’t shown solidarity with Israel, then his visit today wouldn’t have resulted in the opening of humanitarian aid. You influence allies by showing solidarity publicly, and having frank conversations on private.

Anyway, sorry for the long post. Have a great evening!