tripu @tripu@qoto.org

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53887947
#goodnews #africa #health

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/05/we-need-to-be-braver/
#freespeech #cancelculture

I love the #EffectiveAltruism movement because people and organisations around it are focusing on what is really, really important — with an analytical mindset.
Often their ideas are so simple and powerful that I feel they would be pages of a hypothetical book entitled “Instructions for #Life”.
A recent example:
https://manuherran.com/what-can-i-do-to-prevent-my-own-intense-suffering/

What pisses me off the most about #ArturoPerezReverte is that, being so learned and having travelled so much, he has made a career out of stressing the uniqueness of mediocrity, ignorance and backwardness in #Spain. As if we were really unique for the worse. Or for the better. The more I travel and read, the more I despise that #chauvinism, and the more I recognise shared human experience. There are corruption, bigotry, embarrassing or absurd customs, and missed opportunities in every society.

“On 28 June 2009, Professor #StephenHawking held a party at the University of Cambridge specifically for time-travellers, with Krug champagne and hors d’oeuvres. In order to prevent frauds from attending, the renowned theoretical physicist only announced the party after it had finished. Sadly, no one turned up.”
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/aug/08/facts-entertainment-16-fascinating-things-weve-learned-from-podcasts

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/07/lousiana-court-denies-life-sentence-appeal-fair-wayne-bryant-black-man-hedge-clippers

#BryanCaplan on minimum rules to engage in intellectual #arguments:
“Remain calm, take nothing personally, use probabilities, face hypotheticals head-on, and spurn Social Desirability Bias like the plague.”
https://www.econlib.org/silence-is-stupid-argument-is-foolish/
This is all very important to me, and a constant source of frustration when debating with other people, so I just added it to #Vita:
https://tripu.github.io/Vita/doc/life#4-debates-and-discussing-with-people

“[Robin] DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. […] It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in #WhiteFragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

#diversity #siliconvalley #culturewars #fun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZy4QXLKHlI

Important PSA for #conspiracy theorists out there:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/30/you-must-not-do-your-own-research-when-it-comes-to-science/#389f417c535e
Because #science, bitch.

“At a push, we can hear acknowledgement of the ‘#poor #white #male’ problem. But that’s as far as it ever goes. The underperformance of white #boys and men is not considered to be a problem worth solving. When figures come out showing the stunning attainment gaps between boys and girls, the interest lasts for about a day.”

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lost-boys-the-white-working-class-is-being-left-behind

“While #white #workingclass #males are the largest disadvantaged minority, their cause is the least fashionable. In the intersectional pyramid of #victimhood, white males are at the bottom, tarnished by ideas of #toxicmasculinity and #whiteprivilege despite the fact that in Britain class has always been the most significant indicator of true #privilege. […] Dulwich and Winchester colleges turned down a bequest of more than £1 million because the donor, Sir Bryan Thwaites, wanted the money ring-fenced for scholarships for white working-class boys. Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust, a charity whose stated mission is to improve social mobility, described Thwaites’s offer as ‘obnoxious’.”

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lost-boys-the-white-working-class-is-being-left-behind

Don't miss this if you are a human, especially if you like #drawing and #illustration. Especially if you are a #parent.

Especially if you are a #dad.

https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/599c4eae1e00003c00c5ec73.jpeg
(The last strip in Dan Dougherty's “Beardo” #comic series — https://www.beardocomics.com/beardo .)

I think it's important to realise that for us, #softwareengineers/#programmers, the ultimate “threat” of developments like #OpenAI's #GPT3 is *not* a system that would translate {natural language → programming language → machine code}. (That would be like training a robot to understand the description of a scene, have it paint the scene with oil on canvas using brushes, and finally scan the painting to obtain a digital image.) A truly intelligent (digital) system will dispose of #programminglanguages altogether, or use much less human-friendly alternatives as intermediate structures to manipulate, such as AST's or bytecode. Just bear that in mind when you prep to recycle your career…

Also about #OpenAI's #GPT3:
poor, poor #WolframAlpha…!!

What I'm seeing about #OpenAI's #GPT3 is so incredible that I can't help but wonder when it'll be discovered that the API is nothing but a contemporary Mechanical Turk — ie, operated by humans… In fact, it could be *literally* powered by (Amazon's) Mechanical Turk.
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🎵 🇪🇸
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMI7Zt3dpaA