Yes?

My dude, Trump worship doesn’t make sense to begin with, and yet, here we are. You can’t use logic and reason in a situation that has no logic and reason.

May I suggest an iPod shuffle; there isn’t even a screen to interface with.

I’m a fairly reasonable, educated (masters), Millennial (i.e., have some life experience). I think it could be a false flag conspiracy. The fact that I think it’s possibly credible that the current president of the USA could have arranged (or, rather, he had it arranged) a fake threat on his life is an indication that the office is the president and the US government around it has no credibility. The lies every day that sometimes contradict not only actual evidence, but what their own offices said just the day or days before. Not to say anything of the moral bankruptcy and corruption on display every day.

If it’s real (and I’m not saying it is, only that it is not outside the realm of credibility, given what we’ve seen), there are many die-hard Trumpers who, essentially, worship him. The images of him being embraced by Jesus and then as Jesus were not the end of him, were they? We only need to consider J6 where people expected to take a took a day off work, overthrow the government and maybe kill some Democrats, and then what? Return to work the next Day? They expected Trump to be installed as president and face no consequences.

More recently, look at ICE. Pro-Trump “irregular immigrants” still expect Trump to personally exempt, protect, and pardon them.

Trump has and does pardon true and real criminals. If I were a Trump worshipper, and told he personally asked me to do this, and he would use his power to protect me, I would probably to it. Only I’m not a delusional Trump worshiper.

Personally, I’m in favour of “mamsir”, which is the obvious compounding of “ma’am” and “sir”. The Internet tells me it’s used in the Philippines, but I could have sworn I first heard of it being used in India 🤷‍♀️

If I know someone is a terrible person, I can’t enjoy their work. Besides not wanting to financially support them, I like to put myself in an author’s, actor’s, writer’s shoes when I watch/read stuff.

That said, I don’t purposefully look into people’s lives; I’m not into celebrity gossip. But sometimes a person is such an outlier or just so vocal about it that it’s unavoidable.

Thanks for articulating it this way for me. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me, at least in my situation. I reported my boss to the directors. He was (still is) planning to cut a guy from our team, claiming he costs too much. But when I did the math, I found that my boss’ personal expenses on food, gas, phone, vehicle, etc. (with increasingly unaccounted-for amounts) are more than that guy’s pay.

My boss isn’t worried about the financial health of the organization, he’s worried he won’t be able to keep spending it on himself if he has to pay the workers.

Truly, I don’t understand why, but there are fully grown adults who believe that anything an LLM says is true. Maybe they think computers are unbiased (which is only as true as programmers and data are unbiased); maybe its the confidence with which LLMs deliver information; maybe they believe the program actually searches and verified information; maybe it’s all of the above and more.

I know a guy who routinely says, “I asked ChatGPT…”, and even after having explained how LLMs are complex word predictors and are not programmed for factual truth, he still goes to ChatGPT for everything. It’s a total refusal to believe otherwise, but I can’t fathom why.

Around two or three years ago, I was on a sales call/app demo as a potential customer–not for TikTok, of course. It’s an American company and I’m based in Canada. I asked the sales guy about their data storage, encryption, privacy, and the like; he didn’t know. I said I needed to know that if our group uses the application to communicate internally about, for example, helping refugees, the government won’t be able to access it. The guy asked me if that really was a concern.

Well, you tell me now, sales guy, is it really a concern?

All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he’s in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he’s doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.

People believe themselves to be part of the in-circle as “one of the good ones”. My father is a Trump-supporting anti-immigrant immigrant. But when he says “immigrant”, he really means Hispanics and blacks, not Asians like himself.

I even know an Afghan guy who loves Trump. He grew up under the Mujahideen and then the Taliban, so he hates Islam. When Trump says Muslim countries are bad, this guy 100% agrees. He thinks he and Trump are on the same side, because he’s no longer Muslim. Trump, or course, would have him arrested and deported on sight for being brown.

I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)

The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.

This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.

This is basically how we ended up with the burqa. A woman’s body is evil because it makes men unable to control their sexual urges, therefore women must be banned. Now, in Afghanistan, a woman’s voice must not even be heard.

How long until the USA reaches that point?

We barely rejected the right wing nuts, and they could easily take the next election. While relief is warranted, we should not be smug or complacent about it, either. Lies more faster than the truth, it’s still an uphill battle for morality and decency.

Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won’t use it anymore on principle.

As bad as American prisons are, they are not on the scale as being deported (is that even the right word in this case?) to what amounts to a concentration camp in a foreign country without any process.

A little over a year ago, a guy tried to ask me out and I’m the process said a few dumb things in an attempt to impress me. The dumbest of them all was that he was planning to buy a Cybertruck as his next vehicle. By the time he’d said this, I’d already long made up my mind about this guy. Mind, this was the period of time when Elon was just an asshole and hadn’t gone full Nazi yet, but even then, this dude’s choice of vehicle told me I’d made the right choice.

Theseadays I wonder if that guy ever got his idiot truck, and, whether he did or not, if he’s changed his mind about it.

Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)

They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be “information professionals”. If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don’t know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

I never really got into tea because I always found the flavour disappointing compared to its aroma. But I recently tried yerba maté, which isn’t a tea but definition, but is similar. It’s made from the leaves and stems of Holly and has a strong, bitter flavour that definitely does not disappoint. It’s enjoyed in places like Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. Now I start my day with a mug of coffee, then sip on maté the rest of the day.