i need more non-english books i think

(editor's note: he doesn't have room on his bookshelf for the books he already has, he does not need more books of any variety)

Digital is always an option.

I tend to disagree strongly!

Need to smell the text while you read it?

i need more non-english books i think

(editor's note: he doesn't have room on his bookshelf for the books he already has, he does not need more books of any variety)

Digital is always an option.

i so deeply understand the reasoning of every comment

Ditto.

us tv: reviewed 

Persian Shirazi Salad (Vegan)

Before and after pictures of the salad given to someone who habitually sorts their m&ms.

Hey, look at me. Look at me. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: you need to condition yourself to being okay with being inconvenienced by things. The first time I spoke about this I meant it in a mental health way- it is good to go out to the store and see people versus just ordering alone at home- but there is another more pressing societal issue you should be more concerned about as well.

Any service you rely on for convenience can be weaponized against you the moment you begin to rely on it. Streaming used to be a cheap and convenient way to see movies at home. It is now exorbitantly expensive, you need multiple accounts just to get what you want, and any of those movies can be taken from you at any time. And unless you have gotten used to going through the “inconvenience” of owning physical media, you can do nothing about it. Same goes for buying things on Amazon. Same goes for any service like DoorDash etc. These companies WANT you to be reliant on them for convenience so they can do whatever they want to you because, well, what else are you gonna do?

Same thing goes for the uptick in AI. If you train yourself to become reliant on AI for doing basic things, you will be taken advantage of. It is only a matter of a couple years before there are no free AI services. Not only that, but in the usage of AI’s case, it is robbing you of valuable skills that you need to curate that you will be helpless without the moment the AI companies drive in the knife the way they have done with streaming. Delivery. Cable. Internet. Etc. It will happen to AI too. And if you are not practicing skills such as. Writing. You are not only going to be at the mercy of AI companies in the digital world, but you are going to be extremely easy to take advantage of in real life too.

I am begging you to let go of learned helplessness. I am begging you to stop letting these companies TEACH you helplessness. Do something like learn to pirate. It is way more inconvenient at the beginning, but once you know how, it is one less way companies can take advantage of you. Garden. Go to the thrift store (older clothes hold up better anyway). These things take more time and effort, yes, but using time and effort are muscles you need to stretch to keep yourself from being flattened under the weight of our capitalist hellscape.

Inconvenience yourself. Please. Start with only the ways you are able. Do a little bit at a time. But do something.

Something I don't think we talk enough about in discussions surrounding AI is the loss of perseverance.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

Idk I'm just really worried about kids having to grow up in a world where (for a variety of reasons beyond just AI) they're not given the chance to struggle through new and challenging things like we used to.

I think this is an incredibly important post for a lot of reasons. You have to write a bad book in order to learn how to do something. You have to suck at playing an instrument before you can improve.

Struggling is part of the process, and I've had a lot of people argue with me that it shouldn't be who fail to see the point. When you replace an composer with an AI music generator, an artist with an AI-generated image, or an author with an AI-generated fanfic, you are missing out on the critical, fundamental experiences humans need to learn and grow. You are robbing yourself of essential skills you need as a person.

AI is not like a calculator, or a synthesizer, or a prompt generator. It's not a tool to aid in your process of understanding or creating something. It is replacing your ability to learn things, and that is going to do so much damage if you let it.

I work with middle schoolers all day + one thing that I've noticed is that very few of them Really Know what the purpose of school is. They usually have no reason to Actually care about their schoolwork, so it makes sense that they'd turn to AI.

Something like "Being here is pointless and the work doesn't matter, so why would I do it when the machine can?"

Which is frustrating,but can also be fixed if you (compassionately, without lecturing or condescending [or more accurately, properly condescending and meeting them where they are without arrogance]) explain what on earth all of this is about and patiently answer their questions.

It usually takes a few tries, but it works

I think I'm a pretty good writer. I got to *be* a good writer by being a really terrible writer, then a mediocre writer, then an average writer, *then* a good writer. Yes, ai probably could spit out something that hits all the plot points that my work does and it would be done *far* faster than I ever could be, but not only would I have missed out on all the struggling and learning and trying and bleeding, I *also* would have missed out on all the friends I've made through writing. There would be no chats with the brainrot trust gushing over each other's work, no making my high school writing partner shriek at me from across the state over what I put our characters through, no time spent scrolling through comments on the latest chapter of my fic. Nothing. Oh my goodness, how terrible that would be! Without the struggle, I'd have missed out on some of my most treasured experiences.

Posts like this always bring the phrase “learned helplessness” to mind.

If I can’t automatically excel at something, I might as well never try.

It’s easily the most self destructive viewpoint someone can have.

you ever listen to a song 47 times in a row and every time you’re like wow what a good song. I’m gonna play it again.

It’s rigged:

That’s what playlists are for.

I’ve had a crazy idea sitting on the back burner for a few weeks (months?) now, and during dinner this evening I suddenly had an inspiration about it.

In related news, I just downloaded Wikipedia.

Turns out, I’ll have to reprocess the XML document in order to make it reasonable to work with. Lots of junk data in there.

I’ll let y’all know how this works out later in the day. Or week, depending on how long it takes to process everything.

…after running the script I made for two hours, it had processed 103,000 articles (out of 6.3 million).

I’ve terminated the script. I’ll need to figure out another method to deal with this amount of information.

I spent some time talking with Gemini about this, and narrowed down the problems.

We’re cooking now: ~7,000 articles a minute.

So roughly 15 hours to go.

We’re passing 150,000 articles processed, and it’s only been 30 minutes!

Way better than before!

…ewkay…

Something ain’t right here.

During the night, it processed 11 million articles, and this morning it showed no signs of stopping.

There aren’t that many articles on Wikipedia.

Either the script is stuck in an endless loop of some kind, or I’m reading the data wrong.

Ultimately, this is looking like a case of having too much of a good thing. So I’ll be deleting it all soon.

It’s back to the original plan for this project - namely parsing old and government documents.

So…

Things got weird again.

I discovered a few places online where you can download old books. Hooray for the public domain.

However, none of the books I’ve collected so far were edited with the same markup. Thus, to make the texts useable, I’ve had to do some manual editing, which is slow and tedious.

But this approach seems to work. Now I’m just wondering how big my dataset should be before I start really digging into it.

For reference, it’s currently about 3 MB. Wikipedia is 110 GB. The Wiktionary is 10 GB.