Elias G Saba

There is an achievement for this.

Who is "Samuel"?! Who is "Unknown"?

Proliferation of council housing is part of this I think. I'm living in Westminster and the economic diversity in my kids schools is surreal. Similar area in US would never.

I'm spending a few months in London with my family. I've spent a bit of time here before, but now living here I'm really shocked at how deeply multicultural London is. It is wild to me, esp. in comparison with US. (Yes, I know two months is v. limited perspective.)

heroes

The Secret Agent was SO good, wow.

The vast majority of college students aren’t attending Ivy League schools, they’re grinding away at night classes in community colleges across the country. Distance and online learning has been an enormous boon for those students. “If there’s no credibility to that, then you’ve just ruined the investment and the learning goals and the access to meaningful learning that that they can then also use for employment of students who are underprivileged, who can’t come to the classroom, who are working full time and raising families and trying to get an education,” Mills said.

This is really important (via @annamillsoer.bsky.social ): the effect of AI/LLM cheating on online teaching will have real effects on the opportunity that many working-class people have to study college material. If these degrees become worthless b/c of rampant cheating we lose a real resource.

Guess stuff happened while I was disconnected from the world all weekend.

Walking through the park this morning, I overhear someone talking about a friend vacationing in Mexico only to run into cartel trouble. open up Reddit and top post is "HELP! I’m outside of Jalisco under shelter-in-place orders and my AirBnb reservation ends tomorrow. Airbnb refuses to help"

We have paid youth sports (very cheap) and I've had more than one parent side-eye me for believing that "soccer practice" is not primarily having fun, but instead for "learning soccer." idgaf about the competition or winning, but I wouldn't spend even the modest fee if we could just go to the park.

I don't think so with the sanctions.

*Postponed* tenure decisions!
Folks outside chix nugget factory might not understand years of work by scholars outside elite/flagship universities - hours of requesting (begging for) money and travel, reading/writing in isolation (no RAs), completing PT "files" - this is both cruel and unethical.

tbh, I don't feel any need to dig deeper or even read most of these replies. I'm intrigued, but not enough to go into. My brain's pickled enough!

I'm most intrigued by this reference to the "ice wall."

In early 2022, on twitter @doulbedoink created a now classic mocking meme format: "...You are not online. It is 217 BC. You are the general Hannibal, and you have changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. Rome must burn." In the world of the tweet, our world does come to pass.

Alvaro Enrigue's "Tu sueño imperios han sido" was first published in late 2022. In the book, a fictionalized Hernan Cortes sees a vision of the actual 2022 in which Enrigue appears writing the very novel we are reading. In the world of the novel, our world does not come to pass.

I can't get over something I heard a few months ago about how Zyn and other nicotine pouches are edgy. I thought about restarting my nicotine addiction, but all the flavors for are fucking children. Who would think it's edgy to be addicted to mango. The best part of smoking is the tobacco flavor!

Well, they have split the "team" into three teams, one representing the "World," while two, the "Stars" and the "Stripes" represented the USA. In adddition, they added a further wrinkle in that the "Stars" were all older plays while the "Stripes" were younger players. Then, each team played...

I really enjoyed reading this book, but my main impression was that it was kind of a middling book about middling people and I really liked how the style matched the content. I think I need to reread it.

I think the greatest gift college professors in the humanities can give to students right now is a seminar room where, for 80 minutes twice a week, nothing that happens to them is a sales pitch for an AI product.

It's just a lowkey feeling I have. You've clearly put more thought into this than I have.

I lowkey think this is the case, actually. White priviledge etc. Fuck Biden for the record.

مجدرة تجدّر من يراها فكيف يكون حال الآكلينا

This is why I like an analog clock with a second hand. You get to watch—and hear!—every second of your life ticking away. The calming beat of our unavoidable fate.

I'm a real SF hater, and holy shit I did not understand all of these posts about how nice SF. Ofc it's fucking great compared to what the media says.

It's definitely more DMV than Baltimore, but I find the kind of DC Beltway (or even DC downtown!) chaos much most predictable than what I see on the rural roads.

Interesting seeing MD come up so often in the replies, ime Maryland is totally sensible. I cannot deal with the drivers in Iowa (and the rural midwest more generally) who prefer to follow the rules of decorum over the rules of the road.

I would like school to teach fewer "life skills" actually. That's not what schools are good at.

Conor, never forget that 1 BTC = 1 BTC. It's still worth the same!

Great book btw