Meanwhile authors, who you might imagine might be most upset at their books being “given away” by libraries, actually love libraries and are delighted to hear stories of people checking their books out.

Great comment. And you have to acknowledge that it’s really hard to actually have these conversations. You might actually find out you’re wrong about something because you hadn’t considered something that’s fundamental to their view of the world. And, doing it the way you suggest is even harder than just arguing about it. Because you have to swallow your pride/anger when they talk about stealing the statue of liberty, and instead try to get the conversation back to something more reasonable.

My mom has become a crazy conspiracy theorist, but for most of my life she was a lefty. The result is that she’s not fully right wing, and instead has this weird jumble of beliefs that often clash with each-other. And it’s obvious that a lot of the time she’s just parroting the last thing she heard, without ever having thought about it. I have to admit that often I just dodge it when she brings up her latest conspiracy. It just takes too much energy to engage. Other times I get drawn in and actually just shoot down the ridiculous conspiracy. But, the most productive times are when I can put in the energy and effort to try to understand her underlying fears and why she wants to accept these fantastical stories.

It’s easy to forget that no one is the villain in their own book.

Incidentally, why I hate a lot of movies where the villain is Dr. Evil who is part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or something. Also why I think the Good / Evil alignment axis in D&D is bullshit.

ultra racist uncle as a man that’s simply absolutely frightened of change

Or just someone who grew up in a different time and was taught different things and doesn’t believe that what they were taught is out of date. Similarly, a kid might think they know everything but doesn’t have the wisdom and experience to know that things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. Both can be pretty obnoxious at a thanksgiving dinner table.

Take, for example, a discussion about how voting is done. The racist uncle might think that mail-in voting is a scam, and that the only way to vote should be in-person. He might not understand that poor people in cities sometimes have to wait in line for hours to vote, and that some might not be able to do that while holding down 2 jobs. He might not believe that the small number of polling places was a deliberate choice by a past government to discourage these people from voting.

But, at the same time, the kid might think that online voting is the obvious answer. The kid lives her entire life online and often votes on things. She knows a bit about encryption and has heard of blockchains and thinks that the only people against online voting are luddites who are afraid of technology. She might not understand the danger of being able to prove that you voted and who you voted for. She might not appreciate how sometimes low tech things are much harder to manipulate and fake.

So, there’s “cautious of change happening too quickly” vs. “too eager to embrace change without considering the consequences”. Everybody likes to think that they’re smack dab in the sweet spot between those two things, but everyone else is going to judge them as being too far to one side.

The modern red-hat wearer would probably use terms like woke, libtard, communist, etc.

But, I would bet that if this same kind of confrontation happened a quarter century ago, the conservatives might be saying “He’s super irrational and emotional”. Like, I think conservatives believe that they see the world as it is, and that liberals are blind to the realities of life. They believe that liberals want to change the world, but don’t understand that it is the way it is for a good reason.

It’s similar to how when women were campaigning for the right to vote, men who didn’t support hat would say things like “I love my wife, but she’s a woman so she’s not capable of making the hard choices.” Or, “My mother is a wonderful person, and full of love, but her emotion clouds her judgment.” Or, “I love my daughter, but she’s too unstable, she jumps on any new trend, running a country requires a steady hand.”

Yes, the reality is that the racist uncle is super racist. But, it’s still worth trying to understand how they see the world. If for no other reason than it’s easier to defeat your enemy if you understand them.

Asimov’s mysteries always hinged on the laws of robotics. It always seemed like a robot did something, but if the laws of robotics were in force that couldn’t have happened. But, it was always explained in a way that left the three laws intact.

The “I, Robot” movie abandoned the 3 laws of robotics when convenient to the plot. That takes away the entire tension that made Asimov’s stories interesting.

They use massively privacy-invading measures to ensure that you don’t do that. I don’t know about Pearson specifically, but there are horror stories from the “proctoring” industry about what people have to put up with.

For example: “facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm” As is widely known, facial detection doesn’t work as well for dark-skinned people, and eye and head movement of so-called “normal people” is not fair to people who are not cheating, but not “normal”.

And you can’t leave your desk because you might have something out of camera sight to help you cheat. Straightforward right? Not really: “A University of Florida student felt forced to vomit at her desk when the proctor threatened to fail her if she left the screen (Harwell, 2020). She vomited at her desk in front of the stranger.”

Maybe you can get away with hiding notes on another device or paper, but they try hard to make that impossible. They want to you to get up and show them everything in the room before you start your test. They want to see your hands at all times, and even track your eye movements. If your eyes are always darting to a certain area off screen where you might have notes, they might interrupt your test and demand to be shown what you’re looking at. If you look up or off to the side when you’re thinking, they’re going to demand that you show them what you’re looking at too. If you think you can scroll through notes on your phone… maybe. But, they often demand that your hands be visible on-camera at all times.

It’s an arms race, and sometimes people do manage to cheat, but when that happens the proctoring companies just implement more and more outrageous surveillance.

A lot of managers are pretty useless. Some degree of management is needed because you can’t just have 10,000 individual contributors all reporting directly to the CEO. But, a lot of managers get where they are by schmoozing, claiming credit, shifting blame, avoiding responsibility, etc.

It’s true that ads almost always show 10:10, but there are plenty of learning materials online that have other times.

Reasonable, but not as good as a simple bar chart.

i’m not convinced that’s true though.

Ok, well the people I linked to have done actual usability studies to back up their claims. But, you have a feeling?

Because it’s easier for humans to read?

Is this a war on being specific?

If a fisherman says “I operate the winch on a bowpicker tuna fishing boat”, is that a bullshit job?

If a middle-management yes-man who exists only to fluff his boss’ ego describes his job as “I encourage excellence” does that mean his job is no longer bullshit?

With only 2 values? Why would you want that? And what makes you believe they’re as good as a bar chart for that?

You should know that pie charts are widely seen as being very ineffective ways of communicating data.

I’ve never liked them. It’s a design that’s like “give me a rough approximation of the time” vs. a digital clock that gives you the precise time. And, if all you want is a rough approximation of the time, a digital clock is still probably better because you just read the first few digits.

When the hour hand is on 9, you can see at a glance it is two hours from 11 and three hours from 12 without needing to do the calculation in your head.

I don’t think most people need to do a mental calculation to know that 9 am is 3 hours from 12. That’s just a fact that’s easy to remember since you’re exposed to it so often.

When the hour hand is in the upper right, you know is it shortly after noon or midnight depending on how bright it is outside

And when the digital clock says “1” or “2” you know it’s either afternoon or the middle of the night. Even better, if you’re using 24 hour time you know precisely if it’s afternoon or early in the morning even if you’re in an underground bunker.

When looking at the minute hand, if you see something started at 2:10

Yes… you can just remember the “minutes” part of the time on a digital clock was too.

15 minutes is easy to figure out because it is a quarter of the circle.

15 minutes is easy to figure out on a digital clock too because it’s ultra simple math to just add or subtract 15 from a number below 60.

I wonder if the issue is that AIs just have no idea how to draw a clock. Or, is it that they’ve been trained on papers where doctors talk about the various issues patients sometimes have when drawing clocks.

I suspect it’s probably the first one. AIs seem to have a real problem with anything visually complicated. One of the easiest ways to spot AI slop is to look at the logos on t-shirts.

You wouldn’t even need to encourage people to use it. A lot of previous innovations in the tech world were primarily spread by word of mouth. The usefulness was so obvious that as soon as a friend showed you, you wanted to try it out for yourself.

e-ink is a wonderful thing. But, it’s really only useful for e-readers and maybe price displays in stores. It has a frame rate in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. That’s fine if what you’re looking at is pretty static, but for general purpose displays it’s pretty useless. But man, it is just great for e-readers.

^ Canadian