Kevin

I know you're not soliciting advice, but the answer is buckwheat

I know you're not soliciting advice, but the answer is buckwheat

curiously parallel to issues translators face

it's translation, all the way down? or maybe it's commons, all the way down? Down to language itself, a necessarily social or "common" form? Etc. etc.

Tweeting is mostly for people without power. Like me. If you have any institutional power and you want to improve the world, your place to do so is in that institution. If the bulk of your activism is tweeting or some unrelated charity, we all know you don't really want to change anything

they go line dancing together, on the weekends

extremely odd to use the language of "spoilers" in this context

as if "spoilers" were some kind of eternal literary default that has to be negated

feels ahistorical

Simultaneously, anyone doing it faster is necessarily cutting corners, isn't doing the secondary reading, hasn't engaged with Marx and Freud, isn't reading enough contemporary literature, and is probably using AI

I don't know, what can I say? Learning Chinese and Classical Chinese at this level has been a decades-long project. And becoming an expert on Ming-Qing literature involves reading 100s of books and millions of characters. It's physically impossible to do it any faster. Thanks for your patience. 🙏

how about a buddy comedy featuring Ah Q but introducing a new character, Ah Q's American sidekick, Ah Shucks

a good example:

Hunger Games isn't "good literature," but you're not a *good scholar* if you don't have a theory for what it represents historically

likewise, you're not a good educator if you can't realize that students are avoiding assignments because their whole education has been Hunger Games

your students *should* cheat on you; I'm glad they can use computers to avoid wasting time on your awful assignments

you don't even treat them as human beings! you view the distance between you and them as existential

This world is so awful, when academics come on here and talk about their students and the progress they're making, and their idols, it's just so... hollow

a little bird is chirping: "you're not an educator, you're not even a colleague, you're only a security guard"

If you want to be proud of your occupation, whatever it is, you will have to create a world where all human life matters

education and hierarchy are fundamentally incompatible

If you are richer than your students & most of them will stay poorer than you for the rest of their lives, you're not a teacher, you're a security guard

If you are poorer than your students & most of them will stay richer than you for the rest of their lives, you're not a teacher, you're a servant

I don't know if that's actually true or not, but it felt like a funny thing to say

you'll never outwit a millennial when the topic is liminality

maybe I misremembered

the point is just to point out a general trend: academia *not* supporting research, and then appropriating the research it doesn't support as if it did

to be very reductive, I tend to think there are two male visual aesthetics, "square" and "rounded," and reactionary culture seems increasingly premised upon, despite mountains of empirical evidence to the contrary, the suffocatingly stupid fantasy that only the former is desirable and good

it's counterintuitive, but if you want to "reel big fish" you might need a smaller reel, which affords greater mechanical advantage

#reelfacts

If you want to be proud of your occupation, whatever it is, you will have to create a world where all human life matters

education and hierarchy are fundamentally incompatible

If you are richer than your students & most of them will stay poorer than you for the rest of their lives, you're not a teacher, you're a security guard

If you are poorer than your students & most of them will stay richer than you for the rest of their lives, you're not a teacher, you're a servant

Costco should teach people square dancing

band name

Of course, machine learning could have been used to *match* existing translations with their original text. That would have been the "best of both worlds." But, no, your lovely friend COPYRIGHT REGIME makes that impossible.

Copyright hurdles create a space that only slop can fill

[band name] As a Matter of Fact No! I Didn't Get Your Joke

[band name] As a Matter of Fact No! I Didn't Get Your Joke

No!
I didn't
get your
"joke"

maybe a "private LLM" is a contradiction in terms

the point is to understand society well enough in order to direct its development, which means understanding what "technology" and "efficiency" might even mean, what value theoretic constructs are being posited, and so on

Notice, also, that having public-facing machine-learning translations is presumably a lot less resource-intensive than having every individual reader creating their own & destroying the earth in the process

Again... it's all about the commons

How is technology itself necessarily a common good?