Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it’s “normal overwrought” or “LLM bullshit.” You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I don’t say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like “as a language model”).
No one describes their algorithm as “efficiently doing [intermediate step]” unless you’re describing it to a general, non-technical audience — what a coincidence — and yet it keeps appearing in my students’ writing. It’s exhausting.
Edit: I really can’t overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get
my algorithm checks if an array is already sorted by going through it one by one and seeing if every element is smaller than the next element
which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get1
In order to determine if an array is sorted, we must first iterate through the array. In order to iterate through the array, we create a looping variable
iinitialized to0. At each step of the loop, we check ifiis less thann - 1. If so, we then check if the element at indexiis less than or equal to the element at indexi + 1. If not, we outputFalse. Otherwise, we incrementiand repeat. If the loop finishes successfully, we outputTrue.and I’m fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.
1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I haven’t determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect it’s only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.
My sympathies.
Read somewhere that the practice of defending one’s thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.
I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”. My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didn’t get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.
I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”.
But we know the tech behind these models right? They dont change their weights when they produce output right? You could have a discussion if updating the values is learning, but it doesnt even do that right? (Feeding the questions back into the dataset used to train them is a different mechanic)
That’s true, and that’s one way to approach the topic.
I generally focus on humans being more complex than the caricature we need to be reduced to in order for the argument to appear plausible. Having some humanities training comes in handy because the prompt fans very rarely do.
Somebody pointed out that HN’s management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it’s the sort of thing Dan might blank:
but I don’t want to get hellbanned by dang.
Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It’s caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices – the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.
I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.
Somewhat related I was thinking about how different this blog post from a DOGE “employee” reads during Elon Musks coup attempt: https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-my-life/ – it was discussed here but no one really knew what was coming at the time.
There’s also a youtube video which has been popping off on social media over the last week and is a gentle introduction to techno-fascists for the general public.
wow the sanewashing of trump in those threads is insane
d’ya…d’ya think they’ll make it all the way along the path, to the realization?
no
The ones who walk towards Omelas. (And Omelas is fine actually, you damn hippy).
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim
Finally it turns out torturing the kid was unnecessary and spreading out the suffering would have worked fine. All Omelas had to do was raise their income tax a little bit.
OAI announced their shiny new toy: DeepResearch (still waiting on DeeperSeek). A bot built off O3 which can crawl the web and synthesize information into expert level reports!
Noam is coming after you @dgerard, but don’t worry he thinks it’s fine. I’m sure his new bot is a reliable replacement for a decentralized repository of all human knowledge freely accessible to all. I’m sure this new system doesn’t fail in any embarrassing wa-
After posting multiple examples of the model failing to understand which player is on which team (if only this information was on some sort of Internet Encyclopedia, alas), Professional AI bully Colin continues: “I assume that in order to cure all disease, it will be necessary to discover and keep track of previously unknown facts about the world. The discovery of these facts might be a little bit analogous to NBA players getting traded from team to team, or aging into new roles. OpenAI’s “Deep Research” agent thinks that Harrison Barnes (who is no longer on the Sacramento Kings) is the Kings’ best choice to guard LeBron James because he guarded LeBron in the finals ten years ago. It’s not well-equipped to reason about a changing world… But if it can’t even deal with these super well-behaved easy facts when they change over time, you want me to believe that it can keep track of the state of the system of facts which makes up our collective knowledge about how to cure all diseases?”
xcancel link if anyone wants to see some more glorious failure cases:
https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1886506507157585978#m
“Aligning people is hard too” a thing that only a literal sociopath would think and only a special kind of sociopath would utter publicly
Remember when Scott wrote the ‘dont talk like robots ya nerds’ article? Good times.
it’s amazing how intensely these assholes want to end Wikipedia and pollute all other community information sources beyond repair. it feels like it’s all part of the same strategy:
- without consent, scrape all the information from an online source as destructively as you can
- if possible, render that source useless by polluting it with LLM crap
- otherwise, shut it down through political means
- now that you’ve pulled the ladder up behind you, replace that information source with your garbage LLM and start rentseeking harder than Netflix
in which karpathy goes “eh, fuckit”:
karpathy tweet text
There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
skipping past the implicit assumption of “well, just have a bunch of money to be able to keep throwing the autoplag at the wall until something sticks”, the admissions of not giving a single fuck about anything, and the straight and plain “well, it often just doesn’t work like we keep promising it does”, imagine being this fucking incurious and void of joy
I’m left wondering if this bastard is running through the stages of grief (at being thrown out), because this sure as fuck reads like despair to me
This reinforces my judgment that the ultimate customers for code-completion models are people who don’t actually want to be writing code in the first place.
So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it’s now “not too bad for throwaway weekend projects”. Wow, great. Let’s fire all the programmers already!
Apart from whatever the fuck that process is, it is not engineering.
And to think that people hated on Visual Basic once… in comparison to this stuff, it was the most solid of solid foundations.
So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it’s now
on the level of a ‘build your own website’ site. They are the wysiwyg users now.
that’d be easily terawatt-hours i think. just musk’s server farm’s generators are 100MW, and draw who knows how much from grid, and if it runs for a year and two months at that power that’s 1TWh. and there’s google, ms, amazon, whatever chinese are cooking,
I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it
this is so much slower (in both keystrokes and raw time, not to mention needing to re-prompt) and much more expensive than just going into the fucking CSS and pressing the 3 buttons needed to change the padding for that selector, and the only reason why this would ever be hard is because they’re knee deep in LLM generated slop and they can’t find fucking anything in there. what a fucking infuriating way to interact with a machine.
come on don’t you like waiting 1s+ for every single action you ever want to take? it’s the hot new thing
React has entered the chat (don’t try talking to it yet though, it has to “asynchronously” load every individual UI element in the jankiest way possible)
Slate says: “For the Love of God, Stop Profiling This Couple!”
The Collinses are ineffective, abusive industry plants from Peter Thiel’s extended circle. They know they’re entirely media creations. They play off that fact to ensure that journalists never follow up on how many initiatives they’ve started and abandoned, neglect to interrogate their contradictory stances on issues like abortion and “race science,” and even seem to accept that they’re openly being taken for a ride by these dorks. Yet in spite of it all, no one listens to their podcast, they don’t really have much of a following, and their specific appeal is concentrated to a few far-right circuits.
In the new Washington Post profile, Malcolm implies that he “engineered the scene” because “he knew smacking his kid would draw attention, help the article go viral and get their message out.”
How does beating your kid for clicks make anything better!? You still beat your two year old kid!
He’s obviously lying to try to pretend he’s some media mastermind rather than a cult member/cult leader.
Dear acausal robot God, that was cathartic. Refreshing to see a mainstream journalist see through techbro weirdo uwu smol bean antics for what they are, especially after so many credulous puff pieces.
This includes the Guardian (twice), the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, CBC News, Business Insider, Bloomberg, and Dallas Magazine, among many, many others. My industry peers very clearly want me to know about these people—a lot about them!
I knew that a couple of outlets had done profiles of them lately, but I didn’t realize they were attention whoring this hard. Maybe their thing isn’t a breeding kink after all, but exhibitionism.
I also didn’t know about the child abuse, though I could have seen it coming without subjecting myself to two Grauniad bits on these fuckers1.
And then there’s the slap. The most notable aspect of the Guardian’s May 2024 profile—which, again, profiled them twice in the same year—was a moment when Malcolm slaps his son in the face, in public, after the then-2-year-old accidentally bumped into a table, leaving the boy “whimpering.” To her credit, reporter Jenny Kleeman didn’t let this go, forcing the couple to defend this punishment.
1: Don’t even know if “fucker” is appropriate here given these bougie failchildren are apparently opting for IVF for the actual baby making part.
I think the first Guardian article had some value, just because the reporter hung around the Collinses long enough that they indicted themselves through their own actions and words. Whether that outweighs giving two eugenicists a platform to tell people about their beliefs is difficult to judge.
Iirc, whatshisface defended himself by claiming that black parents were more likely to hit their kids, therefore it was racist to criticise him for doing so
Headline photo is actually a jump-scare
Fun fact, I looked at that article. And my monitor exploded. No joke. I was in sudden darkness, and the mains were turned off. Pc survived thankfully, and I have a secondary monitor but lol wtf. (I need to go to bed).
Maybe your monitor was trying to protect you
Rest of my electronics have survived so very likely. Guess it got confused as I’m also looking for new glasses and went "dont pick one of those*
my bad, I was working on the awful.systems psychic energy collector and it must have backlashed
Damn you! Still a monitor from 2008, it had a good run.
i still can’t get over how they look
like why the fuck would you wear glasses like those
was there even a point in time where this was fashionableWest Coast of USA, late 2000s to early 2010s, yes, the thick squared dark eyeglass frames were popular. Every time I see photos of these folks, I’m reminded of a couple people I know IRL as well as folks I know professionally who still prefer the thicker frames. Personally, I’ve always needed a very heavy prescription, and so I’ve always looked for the thinnest frames, but it really was a trend a decade ago.
glasses are a fine kink! i guess those ones are a specialist taste
early hire at… roblox
I think you’ll find Guangdong did a lot of the actual building.
According to some roblox wiki also the richest person (in roblox). So wonder if it is libertarian goes monarchist.
Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:
Scott Alexander was accused of being secretly a right-wing racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled, and I think a bunch of his followers believed it, and now they’re shocked and hurt that he’s actually the sincere center left guy he said he was the whole time.
(Via.)
(For convenience: The leaked e-mails in which he admits to being secretly racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled. And his endorsement of super-racist Richard Lynn from last month.)
Also, I don’t know that people are particularly concerned about the left/right spectrum as much as the explicitly racist and tacitly authoritarian sentiments. Like, if your vision of “the left” includes Scott, AOC, and Karl Marx then you have basically defined the left/right spectrum to be meaningless.
Her talk of people being “desperate” for Scoot to be racist suggests a dismally gamified view of life. I mean, he’s a racist. However I feel about that, it doesn’t change the basic fact. She’s playing for a weird gotcha of some kind that could only ever make sense if you (a) regard writing as point-scoring and also (b) accept Richard Lynn-ism as science.
really enjoying (?) the implication that anything less than extreme genocidal resentment is considered left of centre these days
Anybody can be left of center if the overton window shifts enough far right. He doesnt want to sterilize ALL minorities so clearly he is an ally.
The use of the word sincere here bothers me.
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at long last, we have found genai use case
result: decisive chinese cultural victory
+6 culture generation for each person gooning under a portrait of xi jinping. china’s borders will expand quickly
ah yes, content from the well-known community mod
Cursid Meier
He who controls the goons controls the universe. No wait that is only in EVE online.
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I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of “well I don’t know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology” and sometimesI wish I’d collected receipts to say “I told you it’s not”.
Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:
- Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
- Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home’s evil cousin
- Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies
And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.
year of Nakamoto 17
so what you’re saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest
you forgot sanctions evasion, volunteering as a liquidity pool for iranian laundromat, and north korean ransomware
Ok, maybe cryptocurrencies made those a little bit easier than doing the same thing with MMO money or having to mail physical goods. I can even go out on a limb and credit the blockchain itself for them, even though the design kind of makes transactions inherently more traceable than some possible aleternatives do.
The rise of ransomware and cryptocurrencies sadly are linked.
I know, that’s why I’m giving them this one.
Sorry, misread your tone.
No worries. I do agree ransomware industry might not have taken off or at least might have taken off a lot slower if the victims had to make a gold mule video game character or mail cash or precious metals through seedy relay addresses to pay the ransom. So I’ll habe to credit cryptocurrency, if not necessarily blockchain per se, for that dubious achievement.
Yeah good point on the blockchain tech split vs actual cryptocurrencies. Esp considering the stories some of the exchanges basically did away with the blockchain for internal trades.
there are always swiss banks and abu dhabi charities
Penny Arcade weighs in on deepseek distilling chatgpt (or whatever actually the deal is):
“Wow, this Penny Arcade comic featuring toxic yaoi of submissive Sam Altman is lowkey kinda hot” is a sentence neither I nor any LLM, Markov chain or monkey on a typewriter could have predicted but now exists.
The blue check reaction to the totally cracked treasury zoomers showcases a complete rejection of the importance of domain knowledge. It’s 10x software engineer syndrome metastasized.
They’re saying that the ice cream hair kid - who has never worked on a real world system because he’s STILL IN COLLEGE - is going to do us proud because he translated a greek scroll in high school? Good for him, but so what? Ben Carson split babies in half like Solomon and he’s still a moron.
I wonder if one of the reasons they’re so young is that’s the age you’d have to be to not realize in how much legal trouble they might be putting themselves in. (Bar an eventual pardon from Trump.)
Also the age where you are easily impressed by a supposed genius, actual billionaire, ‘meme lord’ who sort of speaks your language (but due to your age you have not noticed only in the most shallow way), who showers you with attention. While also filled with the righteous fury of wanting to act on your ideology.
Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.
(One of my pet peeves in software is bad documentation (always fun when the comments and the documentation contradict, and after an hour of digging through the email archives you discover both are wrong, and nobody every cared to update either, as the email was enough), but lol if that is what saves the US gov (and look at how bad it has gotten, I’m rooting for the US gov now. If I ever want to be seen as worthwhile I will try to hire Musk to get mad at me, it worked for Zuck (a little bit))).
Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.
Oh why would they. They will just rewrite it from scratch in a weekend, right? And reading the original code would only pollute the mind with historic knowledge, and that stands in the way of disruptive innovation.
(btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)
(btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)
I once fucked those up and people got mad. (I kid, they pointed out I usually use them correctly). I mostly use parentheses to note that im going a bit offtrack, which keeps happening, it is a bad habit.
Thank you for implicitly reminding me to take my ADD meds.
balancing parentheses is why I draft all my comments in emacs
Myself I’ve learned to embrace the em dash—like so, with a special shoutout to John Green—and interleaving
( [ { } ] ). On mac and linux conveniently short-cutted to Option+Shift+‘-’, windows is a much less satisfying Alt+0150 without third party tools like AutoHotKey.I write
--for “en dash” andfor “em dash” and I end up looking like an asshole in emails a lot. However, they appear to work correctly here:en: --en: –
em: ---em: —Also, Gnome Characters can be useful, though I have been looking for a good replacement.
I like to use
--in plain text too! LaTeX user high five…?Although I read somewhere recently that some people consider usage of em-dashes as a sign of AI-generated text. Oh well.
this feels like a pattern too — so many naturally divergent or non-standard (from the perspective of a white American who thinks they own the English language) elements of writing are getting nonsensically trashjacketed as telltale signs that a text must be generated by an LLM. see also paully g trashjacketing “delve” for purely racist reasons and the authors of the Nix open letter having the accusation of LLM use leveled at them by people who didn’t read the letter and didn’t want anyone else to either.
LaTeX user high five…?
I need to finish crying over all my underfull hboxes, can we high-five in the evening?
My local authorities insist that my kids are safe after this school shooting due to the gun detection AI that failed to detect the gun used in the school shooting.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/1ik36m6/antioch_high_teachers_speak_out_demand/
A long time ago when the whole “should we cctv everything” idea was new and controversial I recall an interview or something with a london police chief, at the time the most cctved city. He admitted that cctv didnt help them stop crime or catch more criminals. He still wanted more cctv though. I think about that every now and then when there is another ‘our surveillance tech actually does not work but we want more of it’ story
Pivot to AI: Amy is retiring! Probably! yes my cowriter has heard the call of revolution and will be having full and frank debates in the marketplace of ideas. WIth sweet reason.
Send her my thanks for her service! o7
one of the most annoying things about writing for a US audience is they’re fucking illiterate and alluding to books confuses them
wanna grab editors by the throat and go “JUST WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU PEOPLE EVEN DOING IN HIGH SCHOOL”
actual example from today: “who the hell is Fagin never heard of him”
Imagine being afraid of allusions to classic literature in your own native language.
It’s fine to miss a reference. I do it all the time and make my friends do the same. Not getting a reference is not a punishment to you, it’s a bonus to those who do get it.
that’s what got me: this guy was pissed off someone referenced Fagin at all, the crime of making the bozo feel uncomfortable at missing something by not reading
It also takes literally 1.5s to search and find out what it was
The bleakest lol. Your editor said that?
in this case it was some dickhead, but I’ve had this shit from editors too
Fagin, of course, the cocreator of Steely Dan… right?
yes that’s the guy does nobody remember The Nightfly
Reading books in US high school was an exercise in frustration. There weren’t many books assigned, and not a lot of them vibed with me. Most of my classmates did the minimum reading they could get away with (and this was before cellphones were everywhere).
Also I once read through the entirety of the Lord of the Flies before the first quiz on it and so got a quiz answer wrong because I got mixed up due to remembering stuff that happened later in the book which I’m still bitter about.
Our AP English teacher marked down everyone in our class for failing to identify a quote that wasn’t in the translation of L’Etranger that we all read. She refused to give our points back even after I brought a copy of the French original and showed that the translation in our edition was correct when hers was not.
Some highlights from my high school AP (Advanced Placement) English class:
- teacher insisting that you can’t split an infinitive in English, but can’t explain why this bullshit rule was made up in the first place
- also something about “up with which I will not put” because god forbid you know what you’re talking about
- some inappropriate discussions about abortion
- we watched the 1931 frankenstein movie after “reading” shelley’s novel, but didn’t relate it to the book in any way1
- we read some shitty short story, which turned into a shitty movie, and then the teacher kept relating back to the film when discussing the themes of the book
- at some point they were like “choose your own novel to read and analyze” and we didn’t really do analysis, and the novel selection was
- dan brown’s shitty novels about the dude who deciphers symbols or whatever (it was the one with anti-matter)
- one of ayn rand’s pieces of shit
- i don’t remember what else, but there were definitely no classics
- we had to write college entry essays for the teacher to “critique.” i wrote mine about how math fucking rules. the teacher decided it was too technical (despite there being no actual math in it), so they gave it to their partner (an engineer) to read — I doubt this was legal — and came back to tell me how well-written it was2
my high school education was probably considered decent. don’t even get me started on “whole language learning” and “new math” and the insipid pseudoscience plaguing our certification programs while our populace treats our teachers like shit
1: Also, this movie was nearly a century old when we watched it and my class got mad at me for spoiling it.
2: it wasn’t written welldan brown’s shitty novels about the dude who deciphers symbols or whatever (it was the one with anti-matter)
Ah yes, litrtuere
don’t even get me started on “whole language learning” and “new math”
I don’t know what “whole language learning” is, and I’m way too young to have experience it, but wasn’t the curriculum before “new math” like arithmetic and nothing else? In other words, not math at all?
I didn’t read much into it but from what I did it seems like they started teaching children actual math like algebra and logic and parents got frustrated because they were too stupid to help with homework anymore. Brings into my mind the whole “math was cool before they involved letters” thing that makes me want to throw a book at someone.
New response from scratch because I manically edited the shit out of my old one. Sorry for linking the wikipedia page there — you were clearly referring to the same thing I was and I didn’t take the appropriate time to understand your reply. I apologize.
The backlash I am familiar with is that students would learn how to identify the place value of something (“the
3in220134₅has value3 * 5¹”) but not be able to do actual arithmetic (3 * 5 = ?). Basically “why are my kids learning this abstract stuff about numerals or set theory when they can’t even remember their times tables?” That is my primary issue with it — it is not good pedagogy. Abstraction should come after a student has learned the foundational material. They aren’t professional mathematicians, and treating them as such (beginning with abstract definitions, as we do) is bad pedagogy.I am sure there was some pushback in the form of “this is too hard”, but I don’t know how much of that kind of pushback occurred. I also would not necessarily blame it on the intelligence of parents. I can imagine a sort of shellshock when your 10 year old comes home with abstract mathematics that you never learned or only learned in high school or at the undergraduate level. And I can similarly understand the outrage when you expect your child to learn foundational skills in school, only for those to be skipped in favor of a high-minded appeal to “real understanding” (in my experience, this is a theme in US education — don’t memorize basic arithmetic because you can just consult your calculator; don’t memorize facts because you can just look them up).
I do not know what the curriculum was before new math, but I would be very surprised if they exclusively taught arithmetic in all of K-12 before the 1950s. I haven’t confirmed this, though.
I do think it is good pedagogy to pepper in motivations for abstract concepts early. Have a student evaluate
1723 * 16via the standard algorithm and separately have them perform1000 * 16
700 * 16
20 * 16
3 * 16
now add em up and think about why you get the same answertl;dr I think it was more “why are my kids learning this shit before they learn to multiply” than “I have no idea how to help my kid with their homework.” Anecdotally, the latter is not something I have experienced (when I taught K-12), even when the material was abstract and something the parents couldn’t help with.
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- teacher insisting that you can’t split an infinitive in English, but can’t explain why this bullshit rule was made up in the first place
So cards on the table here, I’ve never actually read Oliver Twist. But even neo-google is able to point me at enough useful details to get enough of a gist to follow it.
And that’s assuming you don’t pick it up from Wishbone, the animated talking dogs version , or the muppets parody that I’m sure exists somewhere.
I never read it but somehow absorbed bits from the ambient culture. Might have watched a version at some point.
Age may be part of it. I’m 53. Perhaps Oliver Twist stuff was more visible in US culture in the 70s and 80s than it was later.
The Dickens parody in Ulysses* was enough for me to ensure I will never, ever read him lol. Though really his work is the sort of stuff that’s fairly easy to absorb via cultural osmosis. So many Christmas Carol cartoons!
*
Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and now she was very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone before, are happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching scene. Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight in her eyes, that longing hunger for baby fingers (a pretty sight it is to see), in the first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband. And as her loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only one blessing more, to have her dear Doady there with her to share her joy, to lay in his arms that mite of God’s clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces. He is older now (you and I may whisper it) and a trifle stooped in the shoulders yet in the whirligig of years a grave dignity has come to the conscientious second accountant of the Ulster bank, College Green branch. O Doady, loved one of old, faithful lifemate now, it may never be again, that faroff time of the roses! With the old shake of her pretty head she recalls those days. God! How beautiful now across the mist of years! But their children are grouped in her imagination about the bedside, hers and his, Charley, Mary Alice, Frederick Albert (if he had lived), Mamy, Budgy (Victoria Frances), Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little Bobsy (called after our famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs of Waterford and Candahar) and now this last pledge of their union, a Purefoy if ever there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful will be christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of Mr Purefoy in the Treasury Remembrancer’s office, Dublin Castle. And so time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no sigh break from that bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the ashes from your pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for you (may it be the distant day!) and dout the light whereby you read in the Sacred Book for the oil too has run low, and so with a tranquil heart to bed, to rest. He knows and will call in His own good time. You too have fought the good fight and played loyally your man’s part. Sir, to you my hand. Well done, thou good and faithful servant!
When did you read Ulysses that you hadn’t read Dickens? I know that the “I got paid by the word and you can tell” prose isn’t for everyone but isn’t Joyce one of the most notoriously impenetrable writers in the English language? Seems like in most cases there would be an opposite progression, unless you’re one of those people.
I’m … probably one of those people? I learned English from video games and message boards.
I didn’t read it because I don’t think there’s much emphasis on it in school outside of the anglosphere, but the 2005 movie was a classic, must’ve watched it a dozen times. Now that I recall who the director was, though, I kinda understand why you don’t talk much about it anymore…
i got quoted as an ai authority, talking about elon’s rational boys https://www.dailydot.com/news/elon-musk-doge-coup-engineer-grant-democracy/
AI alignment is literally a bunch of amateur philosophers telling each other scary stories about The Terminator around a campfire
I love you, David.
If Jason Wilson calls you for a quote, you give him your best.
