Jonathan Weisberg

It's barely March

This one's a thinker

I love it when people explain basic LLM/AI stuff to me, it just gives me the standpoint to be an even better ally to women

My department really needs to stop hiring philosophy professors, we can't even stop the ones we have from posting on BlueSky

Of course, even if LLMs improve this one part of the problem, they may well make things far worse overall. Shouldn't have to say this explicitly, but bsky

Thinking about this more, it's really striking how much the problems here come down to people just not reading what's in front of them. LLMs may make this even worse, as people's reading skills deteriorate. But I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it actually improves *this* part of the problem

You are not gonna believe this but

Muttering "I am become death destroyer of worlds" as I copy "Rebutting, Undercutting, and No Reason Defeaters" onto an Anki flash card.

Anyway, I hear NixOS solves all this

But it's the same in Canada. The system is underfunded, nurses are overworked, doctors are too few, and people in general are just... people. They're on autopilot and not thinking most of the time, and they really don't like when you point out a mistake bc they know deep down they've been negligent

People say the U.S. healthcare system actually provides pretty good care---even excellent care---if you have the right insurance. But that's just not true. Everyone's too busy, too numb, and, frankly, in a lot of cases: just too plain dumb

I shouldn't be the one pointing out that a lab result indicates a life-threatening condition; I shouldn't have to work to convince a nurse that ml and mg are different units and if you actually took the medication as prescribed you'd die; discharge papers shouldn't give impossible instructions; etc

As a Canadian who's been managing the health care of an ageing parent in the U.S., I feel like discussions of our two healthcare systems fail to appreciate how much they have in common: both systems take shocking risks with people's lives thanks to rife incompetence and indifference

But you might as well just call it "the BlueSky fallacy"

In epistemology, we call a reason to give up a belief a "defeater", and there's a traditional distinction between "rebutting" vs "undercutting" defeat (see also "no-reason" defeat)

First time I saw The Apprentice, I thought, "Hopefully someday I will be informed of this man's every bruise or skin condition."

hail satan

lmao please, I need someone who understands my very specific brand of pain to tell me I'm not imagining all this

I would like to have declarative configuration for system-level stuff too, not just user-level stuff, but afaict nixos handles that stuff kinda messily, and it's not much better than just running `pacman -Qe` to get a list of overtly installed packages

"nixos gives you declarative configuration" my brother in christ that is precisely what dotfiles already do, now you want to get in between me and my beloved dots??

ok on closer inspection dotfile management on nixos seems like a total ass ache

analytic business ethics:

I always have to take detailed notes recording how I set everything up, so it just makes sense to have a config file that takes the place of the notes... he said as he flashed a nixos iso

oh god I think I might be about to become a nixos guy

paternal: Hebrew school teacher. maternal: chemistry prof.

I mean, stupid policies are a problem even if only a few students trigger them, they're just a smaller problem

But the problem doesn't arise if providing everyone with flexible deadlines is deemed sufficient

Seems like the concern here is not how many students are accommodated, but whether the accommodations make sense

How will we sort those who can sit still for three hours in a crowded room with seizure-inducing lighting from those who should be poor