Tootfinder

Incel CS lecturer at Waterloo
$2.4.1 DIFFICULTIES OF HUNTING AT WORK"
I don't know what to say
"In academia, dating and romantic/sexual relationship between professors and students is controversial"
Yes. Yes it is.
"There is clearly a world-wide bias in judgmental decisions for accusing males, compared to females, in harassments. It may be because males usually ask out and show interest in females and females may take it as an offense."
Okay so has anyone explained to you the concept of power dynamics and unethical abuse of authority roles?
"A funny thing is that once, in a seminar for teaching assistants in the University of Waterloo, they told us that teaching
assistants should not date students. I asked about the case of John Nash. The professor answered me that they married
after the student graduated (which I think is not true). Then, I answered even if that is true, did they suddenly get
married without any dating? Of course, they dated before that, while she was a student! I think they themselves know
that this rule is nonfunctional because if the professor/instructor and the student are both single, they may like each
other or fall in love as they interact frequently in the school. This rule was even criticised in the American comedy show "Friends" (season 6, episode 18)."
Ok, there's a lot to unpack here, but the main bit is this: Do you understand that the sitcom "Friends" is not a good source for understanding ethics?

White House staffers got Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a friend of Biden’s and graduate of Yale Divinity School, on the phone. “Chris, it’s Joe,” the president said. “I need you to put your divinity school hat on for a minute and just tell me — do you think this is the right thing? Should we go ahead?”

That one last phone call Joe Biden always needs to make
When he must decide a high-stakes issue, the president hears out his top aides — then picks up the phone and calls a politician.

JFC, job references going the way of grad school applications.
Grad schools, employers, HR departments: a form like this is an invitation for me not to think carefully about my answers. Quantity over quality? Fine, ask and ye shall receive.

3 Ukrainian women in tech you should know: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/08/ukrainian-women-in.html

I still think that like... I will be taken for a fool or like tricked on decisions like getting a new house.
or that my view on politics is too naive and untargetted/armchair
which is weird, I feel like there should be a system to get better at this. like if this were gym, or algebra.
- regular practice / study
- accountability buddy / research buddy?
- tests / classes
- history/news
- scientific method
- class projects
I dunno. kinda a "know your rights" / "they should teach this more in school" kind of situation? like I took basic finance, entrepreneurship classes. I vaguely get the idea of having a second independent inspector look at a house.
I kinda get the idea of what politician I prefer, or what politician would be ineffective, or have no chance in hell
incomplete thought truncated.

1/7
Another #gigstory, or maybe more accurately, a #bandstory. Just after I graduated high school in 1975 I passed the audition for my first serious band. It was bass, drums, me on guitar, and two singers. One of the singers was what I suppose you’d call a wildman. Think Jack Black but angry…

1/7
Another #gigstory, or maybe more accurately, a #bandstory. Just after I graduated high school in 1975 I passed the audition for my first serious band. It was bass, drums, me on guitar, and two singers. One of the singers was what I suppose you’d call a wildman. Think Jack Black but angry…

Free public transit would be amazing. And to the people who would say "iTs SoCiAlIsM": Sure, so what? Come up with *substantive* critiques, not ad-hominem BS.
https://sanjosespotlight.com/philbrick-its-time-to-think-differ…

Philbrick: It's time to think differently about public transit fares - San José Spotlight
Commuters hustling to get to work, students trekking across the city to get to school and visitors touring colleges all must fumble through their wallets and purses for exact change, multiple transit cards for different systems and paper tickets just to get to their destination. Multi-use transit cards like the Clipper card work well, but...

Friederike Barkmann talking about a citizen science project with pupils on the impact of green roofs for buildings. A pupil's feedback: ”We were allowed to go on the roof of our school", which I think is a really fun way of transgressing 'school rules' as a fun side-effect/motivator. #ecsa2024

I have been sick for a while. It is flu or RSV, but not covid. I've been on Threads a bit because my best friend from high school, and a published author, is there. I have been posting a lot of stuff and nonsense over there.
I am going to attempt work tomorrow, I think. we'll see how it goes.
Marvel stuff is progressing. I have the Roxxon Dossier: Carnelia done for players. I need to consolidate the info for me to run it.

While cleaning up my office, I came across some old amazon gift cards that I had won, and never used because they were for the US amazon store (I'm in Canada).
Do any of you know a teacher at a school that serves a low-income neighbourhood in the USA? I think such a person could make good use of the cards. (Knowing that teachers often have to dig into their own pockets for supplies).
Assuming the cards haven't expired...

The secondary school I attended was proud to be a fully integrated school for all children. All bar 2 classrooms were at ground level (with a lift to the other 2), and the school was complete with a special resources centre, medical unit, and residential centre for a few pupils to stay on site during the week - I think that was practically unheard of for a state school in the 90s. It was great for all of us to be together, learning from each other, and being all-round better people.

Thinking of TFG and his criminal trials. So many legal pundits think merely in very narrow legal contexts, without considering that our legal rules are our own creation and subject to our own change, and that legal acts can bring social reaction.
Consider some prior trials: OJ and Rodney King.
OJ was acquitted by a very talented legal team (one of whom was my advisor in law school) against rather strong evidence.
Rodney King was beaten by LAPD officers who were clearly act…

Summer-camp summer degree of difficulty just went up a notch or two https://www.consumerreports.org/h…

The kids have been through school shootings, ignorance of COVID (putting their lives behind “academic success”), a violent coup attempt trying to overthrow democracy by the Republican Party for which there weren’t any repercussions, not doing anything about climate change and now incessant murdering of babies with American bombs…
…do the “authorities” think they’ll just stop protesting because “it’s not nice”?

I have been sick for a while. It is flu or RSV, but not covid. I've been on Threads a bit because my best friend from high school, and a published author, is there. I have been posting a lot of stuff and nonsense over there.
I am going to attempt work tomorrow, I think. we'll see how it goes.
Marvel stuff is progressing. I have the Roxxon Dossier: Carnelia done for players. I need to consolidate the info for me to run it.

I’m almost certain that 1:1 computers in middle school were a developmentally inappropriate mistake that we made during Covid and it is embarrassing that we haven’t had the fortitude to reverse course.
I think that 1:1 computers might be a mistake in high school too, but I’m less certain.
#hottake #teaching

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06024 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Thinking Assistants: LLM-Based Conversational Assistants that Help Users Think By Asking rather than Answering
We introduce the concept of "thinking assistants", an approach that encourages users to engage in deep reflection and critical thinking through brainstorming and thought-provoking queries. We instantiate one such thinking assistant, Gradschool.chat, as a virtual assistant tailored to assist prospective graduate students. We posit that thinking assistants are particularly relevant to situations like applying to graduate school, a phase often characterized by the challenges of academic preparatio…

Whenever I walk through some backwater towns, I'm surprised how many young people walk on the right side of the road. Do schools no longer teach pupils to walk on the left side?
At least I think I was taught that at school. We've also gotten the reasonable explanation: you're walking on the left side, because cars drive on the right side, so you see the cars driving on the same side of the road coming from the front, and you can jump away before they hit you. If you walk on the right side, you either have to look behind you all the time, or you won't even notice when a car drives into your arse.
Curious enough, much time later I've heard a myth. Apparently, soldiers traditionally walked on the right side of the road, but Napoleon Bonaparte sent his troops walking on the left side, to confuse the enemies who were listening to the foot traffic. In my opinion, that's absurd, but what do I know?
#CarFree

Trying to think of something witty to say about the truck full of leafblowers blocking the bike lane (and parked facing the wrong direction) today but I'm all out of gas.
#BikeLane #LeafBlowers

“Some experts, including Stephen Meier, chair of the management division at Columbia Business School in New York, remain genuinely baffled why companies like UPS are putting up a fight over return-to-office. But he believes there's a common thread among many of these firms: hard-line management tactics.
"You can't continue that leadership style that you had before [the pandemic]," he says. "You need to actually empower [employees] … And, I think, some leaders are…

The executive hubris driving five-day in-office mandates
Some high-profile CEOs are demanding full returns with a "command-and-control" mindset.

I ate the exact same lunch from kindergarten through high school.
Then I really "mixed it up" in adulthood and would eat the same lunch for 2-5 years before shifting to the "next lunch" phase.
Yet it took till my mid-30s to learn I'm #ActuallyAutistic 🙃
...just one of so many things I look back at and think "All the signs were there!"<…

Via DJTrevor Dee on FB:
**"Imagine a faith so empty that you think bringing prayer into a school is following Jesus, but bringing free lunches is not."**

I think i need to rethink my data hoarding strategy.
Several HDDs filled to the brim of backups and old things, i mean like projects since i was in middle school.
Do you just keep it all or rethink about throwing parts of it from time to time?

I like to think of myself as a generally well prepared individual. And tonight, as I went to pick up my daughter from after-school activities, I anticipated the battery in my vehicle to be dead. And I was right. And I was prepared for it.
Well, dear reader, I was fully NOT prepared for getting stung TWICE by the disco party of hornets in my engine bay, right where I put my hand to open the hood. I was so shocked I honestly though I was getting electrocuted for a moment.

Had a long chat with my eldest today. He's struggling a little at Uni, getting overwhelmed by the amount of work to do. ☹️
All I can do is offer advice and calm him down. It sucks, but I guess this is part of us both growing as people. I think his main issue is not having an outlet. All he does is school work and gaming. There is nothing else he does, and I think he's struggling because of it.
But try and tell a teenager they should spend less time on their screens 😆

Nice to catch a bit of "neurosci-fi" in 'Second Foundation'.
I've been listening to the Foundation series as audiobooks. First read them in middle school I think. Long before I had any inkling that I'd become a theoretical "encephalographer" :P .

“I also don’t think we’ve mourned the loss of the more than seven million lives—that we know of. [The figure is] probably three times higher. This virus has touched every single person and family, and it’s changed the trajectory of people’s lives. People who were forced to remain home and in violent situations, children who were out of school, some of whom will never go back, especially young girls who were married off or have children now—this has changed futures. People are resilient, but …

@… DCC has a very distinctive style, so... yeah, most of what you are saying is true for me, too. DCC *is* amazing, but I need something different from time to time :)
When I was talking about "being old school before OSR", was thinking about the "Dungeon Crawl Classics" modules for 3E, starting in 2003. I think OSRIC came out in 2006, but I don…

The ugly wiki
The list of things a regime says is illegal to talk about or covers up.
Mormons? Most of their distasteful past
Israel? Nakba
Canada? Canadian Indian residential school system
China? Uyghurs,
America? Oh gosh... Which decade? Civil rights, surveillance, workers rights,
Seychelles? Panama papers
Chile? Project cybersyn (I think the CIA would want them to xD)
GOP? Russian plants, the quiet parts
Bill gates / Walmart / Patagonia? "Charitable" tax exemptions
Oil? That they knew

"A University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital poll reported that the No. 1 concern for parents in 2023 was excessive screen time. Yet many expect constant contact with their kids during class, even if they’re aware of school cellphone policies, and school officials point to parents as the main obstacle to banning phones in schools. If these two facts seem incompatible to you, you’re not alone. We teachers are right there with you."

“When we’re visiting Athens or Ephesus or other sites of antiquity, the first goal is to think deeply about the ways history is represented. An archaeological site is not an objective account of what happened.”
– Laura Nasrallah, a biblical scholar and historian at Yale Divinity School, on teaching her students to take a holistic approach to the study of history.

The darker side of being a doctor.
https://drericlevi.substack.com/p/the-darker-side-of-being-a-doctor

The ugly wiki
The list of things a regime says is illegal to talk about or covers up.
Mormons? Most of their distasteful past
Israel? Nakba
Canada? Canadian Indian residential school system
China? Uyghurs,
America? Oh gosh... Which decade? Civil rights, surveillance, workers rights,
Seychelles? Panama papers
Chile? Project cybersyn (I think the CIA would want them to xD)
GOP? Russian plants, the quiet parts
Bill gates / Walmart / Patagonia? "Charitable" tax exemptions
Oil? That they knew

cool schools in Estonia
“They all have to take arts and music, and [what we call] ‘technology’ – in other words, they learn how to cook, knit, things like that. If we allow kids that, their wellbeing and sense of accomplishment increases. We don’t think that that’s irrelevant. Some countries say: ‘We took out the music lesson to teach more maths.’ But look at a sheet of music and you will not think it is less complicated.”
#Estonia #education #school #arts #music

I think everyone who has had to take a course in torts in law school has read the Kinsman Transit Company case in which two ships swirled down the Buffalo river causing considerable damage.
This new event seems somewhat similar.
https://casetext.com/case/petition-of-

"1. Enhanced structured assessments with cognitive testing"
This is basically "racism with a side of logic puzzles"
"Over the past 12 months, we have tested structured assessments for cultural alignment and technical skills, and validated these were predictive of performance at Coinbase"
Measuring performance is itself a can of worms and racism magnet. In order words: garbage in, garbage out. They're validating that they get what they measure, but if both are biased in the same way, well, probably they aren't learning what they think they are.
"We believe having a minimum bar on these assessments will drive consistency in evaluation, reduce bias, and foster a meritocracy."
Consistency? Probably. Consistency of goose turds.
Reduce bias? Certainly the opposite. They're literally creating bias via cultural alignment. That's the whole fucking point of cultural alignment: it's intentional bias.
Oh, did they mean reducing discrimination against protected classes? LOL. also no. Probably they never learned that IQ tests are racist, and what they're doing is probably worse.
"Foster a meritocracy" what is this, a parody of 2005 libertarian tech start-ups? … … oh right, griftocurrency.
Apparently they were sick the day that their grade school teacher presented why meritocracy is a myth
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy