I loved this article.
It explains the day-to-day mechanisms of Epstein’s systematic sexual abuse machine. But it doesn’t stick with the superficial facts and gut reactions. Instead, it looks at the facts in human terms, in terms of discourse analysis, in terms of identities, in terms of how the interactions happened.
This may sound insensitive, but I think this is my favorite piece of media I’ve seen on the whole Epstein sexual abuse machine.
Thanks for sharing it
Dropout uses Vimeo?
I haven’t read your blog post, but I agree with your comment.
Unfortunately, Scrum is often misused. Why? Often, I think people don’t understand the problems that Scrum is trying to solve. So people implement Scrum poorly. And, when evaluation time comes, they blame everything but their lack of knowledge and skill regarding Scrum.
But Scrum is actually a framework to help you solve very common problems.
If you understand that, then Scrum becomes useful.
There’s a set of problems that teams will always have to deal with: how to choose what to work on, how to coordinate, how to know when something is done, how to see if your work actually solves the problems you’re trying to solve, how to deal with task-switching costs, how to deal with cognitive load, how to deal with complexity…
And those problems can be solved with Scrum. Or Kanban. Or any other Agile way of working.
What’s important is that it works.
This also happened to me. I had an interview on the phone in which I got amazing feedback. I then had my second interview online and had trouble with my audio. After that, they ghosted me.
I understand that, in many ways, ghosting is normal. Still, that first call’s feedback made me think they wanted to hire me.
Thanks for pointing that out. Indeed the goal is to make a fair comparison. Here’s a better image:
I agree with you and think it’s worthwhile to critically evaluate fonts.
So what happens if we evaluate cursive font? Well, for most people, loopy cursive is hard to read.
To understand why loopy cursive is problematic, here’s an excerpt from two experts on handwriting:
Conventional looped cursive has not held up to modern life and is being abandoned by most adults, because
- Its decorative loops and excessive joins obscure visual cues,
- It loses legibility when written quickly,
- It doesn’t reflect the writing we see in type or on screen, and
- 100% joined writing is typically slower and no more legible than writing that joins most, but not all letters.
So loopy cursive sucks, but does that mean that we should straight up ditch cursive altogether? Are there fonts that are quick to write and legible? Turns out, those same experts built a handwriting system, the Getty-Dubay system. Their writing system does not seek to “look pretty and fancy-pants” (to quote you). Instead, their writing system tries to “communicate clearly” (to quote you again). They built something logical and pragmatic.
How can you be sure of what I’m saying? Well, you be the judge!
Here’s a picture of the Getty-Dubay fonts, both print and cursive:
Here’s a comparison of different cursive fonts:
If you want more information, here’s a resource you can check out: https://handwritingsuccess.com/why-cursive/
So yeah, the way I see it, loopy cursive is hell, and italic-based cursive is the best of both worlds: italic-based cursive is fast to write and easy to read.
This study is from 2015.
Right?
I think it’s exactly a decade later, 2025. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-labor-market-current-state-affairs
As the other comment says, Anki already changes dynamically so that you study the hard stuff more. Just make sure to mark whether you got the answer and how hard it was to get it.
Now, here’s something that could help you, perhaps more than any multiple choice exam could ever help you with: when studying, make sure to not only blurt the answer but also use elaborative recall. In other words, make an effort to think and do so mindfully (rather than mindlessly).
Why? You learn through effort and through mindfully (and not mindlessly) connecting the new knowledge with what you already know.
You could even structure your elaborative recall through Visible Thinking Routines.
How does that look like?
It seems like you and I are both trying to make sense of democracy, how to make it inclusive, and how to have the best decision-making processes so that we, as a society, can have the best decisions possible. In other words, we’re trying to have the best possible democracy.
Now, we both agree that the age filter is imperfect. It’s a heuristic, a rule of thumb. You rightly point this out, and you interpret this fact as if there should be absolutely no filters at all. For you, any filter would be imperfect or problematic.
However, the way I see it, the age filter is a simple, cheap, and good enough heuristic. Age is ridiculously easy to keep track of, with current record-keeping technologies and institutions. In most of the world’s bureaucracies, people’s age appear right next to their face in state-issued documents. It’s everywhere.
Additionally, age is associated with physical and cognitive capabilities. Human children require care and nurture. Socializing children into the abstract world of economics and ecology takes time. I see the fact that children are required to go to school as a success, as a way of assuring that that culture sustains its cultural and scientific literacy over time. Ideally, when children can vote, they understand their world differently. They can see ecological, historical, and social processes around them in different ways. Here, setting a voting age is a heuristic for avoiding children who have not yet developed these abstract worldviews (because, after all, they’re… children).
I believe you will respond that “if the point is filtering for cultural and scientific literacy, then test for that, but not for age. There are children who are brilliant decision-makers and lackluster adults”. And I’d agree with you. Age is an imperfect measure. I’m not denying there are people who are exceptional. But what I am saying is that, for most people, age is a good enough heuristic.
Of course, as a society we could say that we shouldn’t go for the cheapest heuristic. We could say that we should include people in a better way. But you and I agree that the alternatives are tough. I’d say they’re costly, controversial, and probably imperfect.
Could age not be an imperfect but good enough proxy for maturity and capability?
https://wmich.edu/writing/punctuation/hyphen
This would’ve helped
The problem you’re describing (open sourcing critical software) could both increase the capabilities of adversaries and also make it easier for adversaries to search for exploits. Open sourcing defeats security by obscurity.
Leaving security by obscurity aside could be seen as a loss, but it’s important to note what is gained in the process. Most security researchers today advocate against relying on security by obscurity, and instead focus on security by design and open security. Why?
Security by obscurity in the digital world is very easily defeated. It’s easy to copy and paste supposedly secure codes. It’s easy to smuggle supposedly secret code. “Today’s NSA secrets become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacker tools.”
What’s the alternative for the military? If you rely on security by design and open security for military equipment, it’s possible that adversaries will get a hold of the software, but they will get a hold of software that is more secure. A way to look at it is that all the doors are locked. On the other hand, insecure software leaves supposedly secret doors open. Those doors can be easily bashed by adversaries. So much for trying to get the upper hand.
The choice between (1) security by obscurity and (2) security by design and open security is ultimately the choice between (1) insecurity for all and (2) security for all. Security for all would be my choice, every time. I want my transit infrastructure to be safe. I want my phone to be safe. I want my election-related software to be safe. I want safe and reliable software. If someone is waging a war, they’re going to have to use methods that can actually create a technical asymmetry of power, and insecure software is not the way to gain the upper hand.
Oh. Shoot. I’ve bought those in the past. So they’re lying about being flushable, I suppose.
Omg I just squinted and saw the pirate ships. Thanks for your contribution.
Actually, you made me wonder if CodeWars and LeetCode are comparable. I do remember CodeWars having relatively simple problems.
CodeWars is way cheaper.
Would Project Euler satisfy your requirements?
Some people understand the history and the opportunities of living in a country without tying their identity to the country. They can contribute to it, accept diversity, and yet have a more trascendental sense of self. They understand the state can be helpful for certain goals, and not for others.
It’s like money. If we all agree that a piece of paper and some metal is valuable, then it is. We don’t have to worship it. We can use it when it’s helpful and not when it’s not.
Turns out, the more educated, wealthy, and connected a whole population is, the more they are able to go from conceptual senses of self like “I am French” to a more trascendental sense of self like “I am a living being like so many others, and I happen to live in France”. This can also be achieved with certain wisdom traditions, like with loving-kindness meditation. More broadly, it can also be achieved with reflection.
To get organized, Getting Things Done in Standard Notes and my email’s calendar app.
To work, Scrum in Taiga.
To handle life, the Healthy Minds app and Calibre to read Acceptance and Commitment Therapy books.
You have a good point! It does sound like my suggestions only help for repeated behaviors. For example, Tiny Habits seems to indicate that it’ll work for habits but not for novel situations.
You explicitly mention that it’s unlikely that research covers situations that are entirely novel and rare. Do you know about schema theory or relational frame theory? I ask because both of those theories explicitly deal with how entirely new information (such as entirely new situations) is processed in the human brain and how, depending on the schemas or relational frames that a person already had, the person will react in different ways.
But we don’t have to go into the theoretical weeds. The popular books that I mentioned earlier deal with novelty. For example, Lakoff shows how, inside the head of any person, a small set of beliefs can end up guiding most of the person’s moral thinking and therefore their choices. Not only that, but even the book titled Tiny Habits has sections dedicated to one-off behaviors. Heck, the book Drive deals with teams that are at the bleeding edge of knowledge and techniques, technologies and workflows that no human has ever dealt with before, and yet the book is able to show how there is a set of evidence-based principles that consistently motivate (or not) those very teams.
The fundamental issue is whether humans are able to recognize a situation and know what to do about it. Our brains have been endowed with the capacity to derive thoughts, to think up entirely new situations, to imagine scenarios. We can use that to increase the odds of responding effectively to situations we have never been in before.
Shoutout to the developers who work on making Linux safer. Adding memory-safe languages to Linux seems like an uphill battle.
It’s such an uphill battle that some people have altogether stopped contributing to Linux. An example is the former Asahi Linux lead developer.