Me also.

I’m HatGPT, designed to simulate conversation with a milliner.

I’m more of a coin return man myself

It’s a ridiculous take that the political minutiae of the US is largely meaningless to people outside the US?

Look, it’s enough for me to know that the USA has made a thinly veiled threat about forcibly taking over Greenland. This is of immediate concern to me.

I don’t need to know the details of what the American version of Göring said in defence of the American version of the Gestapo this week.

We have our own domestic nonsense that I’m sure you don’t get inundated with - why would it be so ridiculous for us not to want to get bombarded with yours?

He was. He just didn’t get the mechanism behind it right.

A crude way of explaining Lamarckian evolution would be to look at giraffes. Lamarckism suggests that because an animal that spends much of its life stretching its neck to reach food, it ends up with a slightly longer neck. This trait is then passed down to children, who might spend much of their lives stretching their necks, making them slightly longer. And so on.

He correctly identified that speciation occurs over many many generations, as a result of tiny incremental changes.

What Darwin did was to recognise the actual mechanism behind speciation - Natural Selection. Darwin was aware of and built on Lamarck’s work.

Weirdly, within the last thirty years, we’ve realised that the truth is not so clear cut. Epigenetic changes do occur as a result of the environment and are hereditary. While genes are still the main drivers of evolution, these epigenetic changes affect gene expression.

With respect, it sounds like you have no idea about the range of nonsense human students are capable of submitting even without AI.

I used to teach Software Dev at a university, and even at MSc level some of the submissions would have paled in comparison to even GPT3 output. That said, I didn’t have to deal with the AI problem myself. I taught just before LLMs came into their own - Textsynth had just come out, and I used to use it as an example of how unintentional bias in training data shapes the outputs.

While I no longer teach, I do still work in that space. Ironically the best way to catch AI papers these days is with another AI. This is included in the plagiarism-checking software, and breaks down where it detects suspicious passages and why it thinks they’re suspicious.

Well, the Greenland thing is certainly barely legal…

From an outsider’s perspective, I think the USA and Russia should just have sex and get it over with.

We get it - you both love the military, you both hate minorities, you both want to restrict the rights and freedoms of your citizens.

Just get a room, get it out of your systems, and maybe the rest of the world can finally get some much-needed peace this year.

I think the biggest issue is that you’ve assumed everyone is the same and wants to be treated the same.

The world isn’t black and white. People are telling you their personal preferences and you’re telling them that they’re wrong.

You’re fighting other people’s battles for them even when they’re telling you that they’d prefer you not to - you’re literally acting like the guy in the last panel.

If there’s anything that we’ve learned over the last horrible year it’s that getting all of your information off social media is a recipe for disaster.

FWIW, saliva contains epidermal growth factor, which is actually good for the skin. It’s one of the reasons the insides of our mouths heal so quickly.

“before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it”

It’s a Christian tradition - four candles, one for each Sunday before Christmas. There’s often an extra one in the centre for Christmas day too.

Every week an extra candle is lit. Today, using the conventional method, three candles would be lit.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say “kinda”.

But porn isn’t the driver, it was a facet of the actual reason - accessibility and cost.

Betamax was, by any metric, the superior system.

VHS, however, was cheaper to produce, and cheaper to buy the recording equipment.

JVC had an open licencing strategy to encourage manufacturers to produce VHS-compatible equipment. Sony had a closed licencing strategy to maximise revenue.

So in this new world, where small movie studios could now record directly to magnetic tape and small companies could duplicate and distribute copies for very little cost, which format would you pick? The cheapest one.

The ready availability of porn was a factor for VHS’s success, but so was the ready availability of cheaply made horror films, martial arts films and other niche genres (niche by 1970s/1980s standards).

Wait, do the refs in American football really have hats with their uniforms?

The snek!

Ha, you caught me, I was indeed a Reddit refugee. A little less enthusiastic about the MOASS these days, but I liked my old name, so kept it 🙂

I feel lucky that I was born at a time when computers were knowable. I grew up in the 80s, and cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum. Very little was hidden - even loading software into memory was something you experienced, listening to the beeps and warbles and watching the flashing colours for ten minutes or more. Guide books showed labelled photos and diagrams of the actual hardware inside, giving real tangible meaning to the commands you typed in.

I think there’s a massive amount of disconnect now between the users and the actual hardware, and getting up to speed with how things work is so much more difficult.

Also, I’m lucky that I was born into a family that was just able to afford a microcomputer. My dad had a stable enough job that he was able to get a loan from the bank to buy one.

Not sure my life would have turned out the way it did without this starting point.

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“I have approximate knowledge of many things”

Ok, I think I’ve worked out what the issue is here.

First of all, let’s go back to where Owen Jones starts off.

The term chav refers to a specific subset of young people who spend a disproportionate amount of their money on fashionable clothes and hang around being a nuisance to other people.

He also argues that the term is used by right-wing media outlets as a broader generalisation of working-class people as a whole, to further push their arguments.

These two things can be true at the same time.

But I’d definitely agree it’s not a slur. It’s just lazy journalism presenting a caricature of the working-class because it’s easier for their deranged arguments.

The majority of people are born into working class families, but only a few become chavs.

It’s a sad reflection on the country that the right-wing media is able to get away with presenting absolute rubbish with abandon, and it’s unfortunate that a lot of people consume this media without realising that they’re being told lies and half-truths.

But that’s what the problem is. It’s not that the term itself is bad, it’s that bad people use the image it conjures to caricature the working class in general.

“Chav” doesn’t mean “working class” in the same way that “penguin” doesn’t mean “bird”.

Heck, some of the chavs I know wouldn’t know work if it hit them.

Chavs are a tiny subset of working class people, in the same way that penguins are a tiny subset of birds.

I live in a northern mill town. Most of my very large extended family are working class (it’d probably be a bit disingenuous for me to claim that I still am, though). They would look at you like you were an idiot if you tried to convince them that chav means them.

Chavs are the kids who hang around with expensive trainers and caps, who have absolutely no qualms about being a nuisance to other people.

They represent a tiny proportion of the working class, and any criticism of them is specifically targeted at them.

I wish. Cursive is an absolute antipattern that only makes handwriting more difficult to read. There is a massive drop in legibility once children start to write joined up when compared to the year before.

I realise that it was a solution to the problems that old dip ink pens posed, but now everyone uses biros there’s really no need.

I realise things move slowly (I’m in my forties and had to use fountain pens for schoolwork, ballpoints were banned), but cursive is truly a relic of a bygone age, kept alive only by government mandate.

EDIT: I’ve just checked to see if it was still the case and it turns out that this year the UK government has released a revised Writing Framework. There is no longer a requirement for teaching cursive in primary school, and it actively advises teaching using pre-cursive letter forms.