erasmus-rotterdaaamn

[erasmus-rotterdaaamn]

I have no patience for negativity toward "boomers" anymore.

Almost everybody doing the work to restore ecosystems, grow native plants, and preserve rare species is 50 or older

The people I work with IRL have told me that my presence is encouraging because it means "the younger generation is getting involved with this stuff too." There's really not very many people my age

Who do you think was fighting this fight in the 1970's

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it's pretty funny seeing the General Discourse slide between "you can't truly understand a culture unless you're part of it because reading about it isn't the same as experience" and "you can't truly understand a culture unless you're not part of it since being in the culture biases and blinds you" depending on whatever's rhetorically convenient

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Not to keep talking about AI, but to really compound some of the things I've said before: AI is no match for human understanding of context.

It's also only as smart as we make it.

That's why Google Docs was constantly trying to correct every instance of "quirked" to "querched" for the longest time because it was learning that people misspelled the word "quirked" more often as "querched" and assumed the latter was correct due to the frequency of occurrence.

It's not smart. Not in the way people seem to think it is.

Also, P-R-A and Grammarly launched a new "use AI to rewrite this sentence" feature not too long ago, and I've seen some people freaking out that it's the end of writing/editing because the machines are spitting out prose and able to spot errors and make tone suggestions. But here's the thing, my entire week has been consumed fixing AI-generated mistakes for a handful of my writers who assumed the machine knew better.

The tone is off, the context is missing, and the nuance is gone. It reads like someone copy-pasted something foreign into their existing text, hoping no one would notice. And also, haha, the grammar is wrong.

Anyway. Back into editing hell I go as I try to salvage this prose and convince the author to stop relying on Grammarly for tonal advice.

Have more faith in your skill. You're better than the machine.

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we need a universal grocery classification system like the dewey decimal to aid in shelving, so i don’t have to figure out whether you think maple syrup goes with the sauces, breakfast foods, jams, or condiments

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A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn't go down.

This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.

But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.

But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!

And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.

But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don't get easier, they just get weirder.

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It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

really really really getting tired of The Past Was A Crushingly Awful Hellscape as an approach to history education and interpretation

like yeah, there were HORRIBLE things in the past. there are horrible things now. but you're still going to go outside and enjoy nice weather, or pet a cat, or eat food you love, or laugh until you cry with your friends

god, can't we find a medium between rose-colored glasses and erasing the basic fact that humans strive towards happiness like sunflowers towards the light, always?

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“prove”, in this case, meaning “put to the test”.

“Don’t be gullible. Check out everything, and keep only what’s good.”, as eugene peterson’s translation gives it.

(and what’s “good”? “Seeking to test him, they asked “but rabbi, who is my neighbor? … ”)

Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things; the motto of one is “Prove all things and hold fast that which is good” and of the other “Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old.”

- William Osler

Osler, a Canadian physician and one of the founding professors of the John Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, was playing on words from what was written in the bible, 1 Thessalonians 5:21: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.“

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i do think that one of the worst things “activist” spaces on the internet ever did was convince young marginalized people that individual people, complete strangers, were their oppressors. no, matt from chemistry class isn’t personally oppressing you because he’s a guy, that old lady at the bank isn’t personally oppressing you because she’s cis, your waiter isn’t personally oppressing you because they’re white. individuals can and do contribute to systems of oppression. but seeing random individuals you encounter in your daily life as your oppressors will do nothing but trick you into punching laterally or punching down because you think it’s “empowering.” you might get a momentary rush of endorphins from snapping at the male cashier bc #menaretrashuwu but all you’re doing is being shitty to a random guy making poverty wages.

i saw a tik tok the other day that like perfectly described this phenomenon, how gen z (and some young millennials too tbh) pushes for systemic justice and equality, but refuses to give that on an interpersonal level, and like. y’all. you simply cannot achieve systemic change if you’re not also working toward interpersonal change. you will do more for your own liberation by treating others with sensible patience and kindness than you will pushing this toxic individualist narrative of “i don’t owe anyone anything and i get to act however i want to people i view as my oppressor.” we need class solidarity now more than ever.

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august is like if the howling terrors had to all happen at once on the brightest sun on the warmest afternoons bluest cloudless skies driest earth barley fields wawing golden to the wind and it happened every year theres nothing you can do to stop it ever alive

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you rest your case, gingerly, on a little inflatable donut pillow.

'the human body is perfect god doesnt make mistakes' what about wisdom teeth then. huh. gonna let those bastards grow in and fuck up your jaw for god. didnt think so

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i can't find sources on this anywhere any more, but i distinctly remember reading a blurb about Gene Ray's Time Cube that mentioned how one guy somewhere else in the US read Gene's ramblings and actually parsed enough meaning out of them that he became the world's first and only convert to Time Cube Thought other than Gene himself. this guy then flew down to Florida to meet his visionary prophet face-to-face, whereupon they promptly got into an argument over the fundamentals of Time Cube so bad that they never spoke again. i guess it was always possible to create a religious schism with the theoretical minimum of two people but it's funny to see in practice

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time to reread your Niebuhr/Stringfellow/Berry spectrum maybe

I've said this in various different ways before, but the third dimension of the political compass should something like "technocrat vs. [whatever the opposite of a technocrat is]". On the technocrat side you've got Bolsheviks, neoliberals, those neoreactionary eugenics guys, and in a more moderate sense almost everyone with any influence in tech. On the anti-technocrat side you've got most anarchists, paleocons, anti-civ people, hippies, Q-anon, and in a more moderate sense most people who do literary theory. This political axis continues to be highly salient to me, in spite of relatively few people openly seeming to acknowledge it. And it's an axis on which I am a very decided centrist (being a centrist on an axis nobody's ever heard of makes me feel double superior). I used to spend a lot of time honing arguments against anti-technocrat positions, especially those common in the humanities (given the environment I was largely surrounded by at my small liberal arts college). Now that I'm surrounded by mostly technocrats, I spend much more time arguing with them instead. You know how it goes. Well anyway.

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Suetonius's sources: Tiberius was left handed and was quite athletic.

Suetonius: He had a strong left hand, supposedly strong enough to crack the skull of a child or perhaps a young man, knowing his tastes...

Later historians: Suetonious says that Tiberius was so strong he would crack a guy's skull with his bare hand! He has supposedly done that once, because someone insulted his hair.

YouTube historians: SHOCKING FACT ABOUT ANCIENT ROME AND GREECE #69420!! DID YOU KNOW THAT TIBERIUS ONCE CRACKED A GUY'S WITH HIS BARE HANDS BECAUSEHE INSULTED HIS HAIRSTYLE?!?!?!? WHAT A CRUEL FUCKED UP EVIL MEANIE MAN!!!!!!

Tumblr history meme: lol, do you ever get a bad hair day and decide to squash a guy's skull? mood lmao

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I’ve certainly known very intelligent and capable ppl in grad school and teaching/research jobs wracked with irrational worries that they might be frauds, so I do not think that this is as simple as a blanket “People know what they deserve” broken multiverse post link. But otoh I will say that the place in academia I saw the largest quantity of informal hugboxy group therapising about “impostor syndrome” with the least willingness to countenance there might be smth to the worries were Facebook groups by and for a bunch of ppl who in the main clearly had no business in the professorships and other academic jobs they had somehow landed

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Just musing out loud-

One of the gifts that time brought for me, ish, was a reduced interest in labels for myself. Reduced-not-gone, because humans love a good sorting hat, but definitely not what it once was.

It's most obvious in media, like with those YA books that routinely have explicit caste systems or divide people up by thematic groups, or with video games that let you pick a faction. But it sneaks in to real life too. Like, take the famed Tumblr* neogenders/neosexualities and proliferation of flags. It is, of course, unironically fun to watch the ever-increasing fractal complexity as people chase the questing beast of a coherent taxonomy of sexual nonconformity, and I think the people that do so often find it very rewarding. But I watch mostly as an outsider, because the whole thing is answering questions to which I already have satisfying answers in my own dialect- at least insofar as it comes to how I think about myself. And what's true in the narrow case of Tumblr's culture has some far-reaching impacts on politics as a whole, as you might guess.

It's not that I find the castes/factions/neogenders themselves uninteresting- almost the opposite really. I like exploring and thinking about them all, but in a way that doesn't trigger any questions about me as an observer; the 'me' in my sense of these things is a fairly high-inertia construct, one which doesn't really deform much in the presence of exciting new taxonomies. They tend to show me much more about their authors than they do about myself, though as always there are exceptions. It's like seeing a new map of a place you know well, where you're not so much discovering the territory as appreciating a new view of things through the eyes of someone else, a pleasure that follows from an appreciation of the cartographer's choice of framing and the cleverness by which they drew the lines.

The reason I say 'gift' is, most of the benefits of that sorting-hat instinct are front-loaded; a map, any map, is worth it's weight in gold when you're new to someplace. It helps you find a community where you can thrive, it helps you communicate with others and build shared expectations. But especially once you get a little bit more used to things and learn how to get around without a reference sheet, labels are a double-edged sword. There's no perfect label that can really capture a human person, leading to all manner of suffering as we try to conform to the labels we find ourselves carrying, and we can fall down a really deep hole if we start trying to treat those labels as the axioms from which a human is derived.

It also becomes clear, with the benefits of distance, that while a lot of my exertions in label-making felt like introspection at the time, they didn't really manage to be introspection. Introspection, I think, would have been a little more about my identity as a thing-in-itself; after all, it revolves around the question "who am I?" But a curious fact about these identity groups is that they're meant to be comprehensive; every single student at Hogwarts is placed within one of the four Houses. That is, playing around with these things isn't a matter of asking "who am I?", but rather, of describing the society in which we find ourselves, and our relationship to that society. Ruminating about the proper label for ourselves is asking a different question than introspection does: "where do I belong?"

A good chunk of what I thought was self-discovery was, in hindsight, something closer to self-consciousness. Trying to figure out how to be seen, how to be known, how to take up space in a social world where all of those things can be very high-stakes. But I seem to have stumbled in to a degree of equanimity with myself regardless, so I suppose no harm done. Probably you need to chase both lines of inquiry in parallel, but I think it would have helped me at the time to realize that they are fundamentally different questions.

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Yes, it's gay, but is it ontologically gay, or is it merely contingently gay?

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So here's my beef with ChatGPT. Even aside from the issues with plagiarism, cheating, people using it to fake the work that they absolutely need to be actually doing, &etc.

With the advent of the internet we've been in a situation where all the knowledge available to humanity could, conceivably, be made available to everyone at all times. We've had enormous public works built towards that purpose -- libraries, Wikipedia, archives, everything. But an increasing problem as the years have gone by has been the problem of sorting out the signal from the noise. Sorting out real, helpful advice from scams and snake-oil. Paths that lead to dead-ends as sources of information go down and don't come back up. Trying to figure out who's a real expert, who's even a real person in a sea of fake generated avatars. Distinguishing wheat from chaff, usable material from trash.

And the makers of ChatGPT -- and every other AI programmer who's now trying to jump on the bandwagon -- is looking at this problem and saying "You know what this situation needs? More noise. More fakes. More chaff. More dead-ends and empty shells. I think we have TOO MUCH useful information and real expertise. I think we should shake things up by adding more utterly contentless garbage to the mix." And they created an automated noise generator.

Just imagine being on the bank of a pond and saying "ah, this is a lovely pond, the fish and plants are so beautiful, I'm just having trouble seeing them through the silt in the water" and the person next to you says "I'm going to build a factory on the bank of this pond that does nothing but pour more dirt into it. All day. Every day. Nonstop." And then everyone else overhears them and says "Oh, what a fantastic idea! I'm going to create my OWN sludge-factory to get in on this action!"