With cars if you wanted to bias yourself towards newer cars you could prioritize safety features alongside cost.
A Yaris and a Ranger (who doesn’t love a Ranger!) are going to serve you well, but they’re not going to have the active and passive safety features of a more modern car. Put next to cost it makes it a bit harder to perform maladaptive frugality.
> They circle around an idea using whatever word is within reach, and expect you to understand the meaning based on shared connotations. These people are tiring to interpret.
I find this notion a little strange. The implication here is that words are precisely bounded to bounds of thoughts. Language is a representation of our world (and our individual understanding of it) - we all (including you) will use different words to describe similar-ish concepts. This will always be more clear to you as the originator of the thought -> word process than the receiver.
You can’t hand wave away the work of interpreting (aka listening) to someone.
I’m sure if I spoke to your counterparts in the scenario you described they’d say different words which also ultimately amounted to something like “it’s difficult to interpret what they’re saying.”
There is a well-documented spectrum from direct to indirect styles of communication, among both cultures and individuals. The "tone poem" observation is a true description of that fact, even if it's a bit hyperbolic and colorful.
> Language is a representation of our world...we all... will use different words to describe similar-ish concepts...
Strangely enough, both the direct and the indirect communicators live under the postmodern condition, and yet somehow, the stylistic differences persist! Somehow, despite all the smart-sounding things you could say about semiotics or relativism, individuals are all different!
The problem (or at least, one of the problems) with what the manager did is that he dumped his employee's prose into the LLM in a one-size-fits-all way.
>You can’t hand wave away the work of interpreting (aka listening) to someone.
And yet, that's what their manager did.
Not only that, they precluded interpretation for the other people, by running the documentation through the language mixer.
And half the commenters are blaming GP for making the effort to do the right thing.
"Power", "authority", literally refers to the ability to hand-wave interpretative labor uncontested. (See: Graeber 2006, yeah the one about his mum dying)
There are manners of speaking (and whole languages) that are more explicit and manners of speaking that are more implicit/contextual. There's a tradeoff between doing disambiguation work in expression vs. in interpretation, and people's communication preferences often determine this distribution of cognitive effort. (And for many people, one half of that exchange is easier than the other.)
It's true that misunderstandings can arise between people who both tend to communicate very explicitly, but they're just different from the kinds of misunderstandings that occur with people who tend to leave more disambiguation work to the interpreter. I'm feeling lazy atm so idk what to say about that except that you'd know it if you saw it.
It's true that the details are messy, but in practice it's not that difficult to recover basic concepts related to such differences in personality like "more literal" vs. "less literal" in a way that's useful.
> I’m sure if I spoke to your counterparts in the scenario you described they’d say different words which also ultimately amounted to something like “it’s difficult to interpret what they’re saying.”
Yes and no. Lots of people who speak in a way that relies more heavily on (real or presumed) shared context react to precise turns of phrase from their counterparts who prefer explicitness like "Wow! You're so good and finding the right words for things.". When they do misunderstand, they're typically less likely to notice. You only usually get the "you're difficult to interpret" realization from them if you are discussing a specific misunderstanding and you come upon a logical or grammatical distinction they just can't see.
I'm not a linguist or communications scholar and idk if any work has been done to see whether related traits really form identifiable profiles or personality types or whatever, but at least some individual traits and behaviors that I associate with these personality differences are pretty easy to measure. For example: the "intuitive" speakers/listeners tend to make more use of anaphora as well as more difficult (more distance in the conversation from the referent) and more complex (the referent may not be the most recent grammatically compatible named thing/person) use of anaphora. They also tend to see more ambiguous use of quantifiers as grammatical (little sensitivity to "surface scope/logical form isomorphism").
Idk what to tell ya but there's a real spectrum here. If you fall in the middle of it, it might be easy to miss. But for people at opposite ends of it, the kinds of communication they encounter with one another are pretty unmistakable.
Relatedly, there's a single load-bearing word in GP's comment that you seem to have missed or given inadequate emphasis:
> Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems.
It's that first word I've emphasized above, "many". They're not running into this kind of communication problem with everyone. That should increase the curiosity you hint at in the beginning of your comment, because it suggests that this is not the simple problem of one person assuming everyone can/should automatically understand them as well as they understand their own statements. Their experience and their self-report of it describes a structured and selective clash in communication (down to their admission/suggestion that they may be on the autism spectrum) which your reply seems to miss.
I commend you for the attempt, even if it’s clear that it’s falling on deaf ears to who you’re replying to.
The rest of us Jews appreciate that you didn’t let it slide.
It’s hard not to wonder why they even bothered clicking into this thread other than “oh the name sounds Jewish, I can push my narrative” especially with respect to their comment history.
That’s quite a take to assume willful blindness to widespread suffering.
What is pretty clear though: your obsession with constantly minimizing the lived experience of a minority with “no ackshually they deserve it because they really are this way” warrants a look in the mirror.
Thank you! I’m a casual user of Wikipedia but after this thread I went through the history of edits on the article and...oh my.
I have a greater appreciation for folks like you and the other editors who seem to be constantly removing this type of stuf. Some truly horrendous slurs there.
I _really_ enjoyed this and love the concept! Scrolling on desktop was a little odd, but worked really well otherwise.
Content wise it's pretty eye opening just how much of our tax dollars go to things like social security, medicare and interest. Seeing it laid out in the exact dollar amount affecting me is pretty powerful stuff. I wonder how much voting habits would change if this was a common way to communicate the cost of federal programs. I had moments where I was thinking "why are we not spending more on education!" as a result as well.
I'm at work, so just a few seconds to chime in: Educational spending is primarily sourced from the states. If you were to sum state spending on education, you would come up with another eye-watering pile of money. It's just that this money is usually sourced from property taxes and sales taxes and so doesn't show up on a "Here's how your income taxes were spent" analysis.
In fact, a lot of educational spending is local. I think something like 65% (maybe more) of my town's property taxes go to K-12 education with a decent chunk of the rest going to emergency services. There are various grants at the state and federal levels but it's mostly local.
I'm working on TableForge[0], it's a browser based, solo or multiplayer, D&D 5e game. TTRPG DMing can be effort-heavy and my friend group constantly has trouble finding enough time to play together let alone set it up. In TableForge, the DM is agentic with access to tools strictly following 5e rules. The DM is responsible for narration and reacting to players but your character sheet, inventory, spells are all real server resources you manage. The DM can interact with them through deterministic 5e-based tools (dice rolls, damage, sheet updates, memory). Players can play in real time or async.
You can provide the DM a premise (or pick one from the library) and it'll flesh out a full campaign story arc. Either way it's a fresh story arc reacting to your actual decisions, every time.
I noticed every competitor in this space was a chatbot with only the last ~10-15 messages stuffed into context. They forgot things, made up dice rolls and rules, and was generally not what I was looking for. So far TableForge has been working well for my friend groups and some random folks from Reddit/organic search. Solo TTRPGers seem to like it too.
It's still in early stages but fully playable. I don't feel comfortable charging anything for yet until I know people enjoy it. If you like it enough to hit the free tier limit, send me some feedback in the webapp and I'll gladly extend your free trial. If you hate it, please also let me know!
I’ve used S3 primarily in a professional setting but R2 has been a breath of fresh air on my side projects.
The zero egress cost is big and IMO their free tier is very generous. It’s S3 compatible so if you use any libraries it’ll just work™. One note is that AWS recently released static pricing for Cloudfront - I haven’t explored it in depth yet but it looks compelling if your primary use case is serving data out of S3.
I’d probably switch to S3 at least for app storage if I moved apps into the AWS ecosystem. It’s just easier if you’re already in AWS.
Getting a D&D group together in person has been getting harder and harder, and we've had less and less time to DM. I decided to build an agentic AI to handle the work of setting up and running a campaign so we could all participate. It supports real time (preferred, and probably more fun) or async. The agent performs most functions through tool use so it's all 5e rules based but I wanted to leave it a good amount of freedom so campaigns can go on tangents and have fun surprises.
I'm still playtesting it with friends and it's been fun. It's in early access, I don't feel right charging for it unless other folks actually end up liking it and thinking it's fun. If you sign up, send me a message through "Send Feedback" (or here!) and let me know if you like, but especially let me know if you hate it.
...until something goes wrong and you're dealing with a situation at best more annoying and worst downright hostile (ask me how I know). Your only recourse if something goes wrong is a random host whose income is directly tied to not helping you. If you're dealing with an issue at a hotel, there's strict policies in place and at the very least the person on the other end gets paid regardless of whether or not you're refunded, so you're more likely to actually be refunded via policy rather than the whims of a fraudster.
That almost sounds like a purposefully dense view into all of the possibilities of things you can do with your time. I'll give you my perspective as someone who grew up in and moved from NYC to small town in the south.
Everywhere I'd want to be regularly is easier for me to get to when living in the suburbs. Clubs, theaters, museums are still within a short drive on the occasions I want to be there, but no one is going to be there every day. I have more desire to be out in nature than I do in a club.
A non-exhaustive list:
- I don't need to travel 2+ hours to see nature, it's outside my door and huge swathes of public land are available with real nature and wildlife, not manufactured parks full of homeless.
- Restaurants and bars aren't restricted to cities, we've got plenty of them. If anything more of them have more usable outdoor spaces where I'm not sitting 5ft from a pile of garbage.
- I can host more than a handful of people for a dinner party, board game night AND I can do it with comfortable seating/table space for all (impossible in NYC)
- I've got space for _all_ my hobbies: DIY, woodworking, flower preserving, kayaks, cooking. I'm also not restricted by a lack of space to pick up new ones.
All of that _and_ I can be in a city and enjoy its benefits whenever I want to be with a short drive. 99% of my travel by car here takes less time than an equivalent trip by public transportation in NYC from where I could afford to live.
A Yaris and a Ranger (who doesn’t love a Ranger!) are going to serve you well, but they’re not going to have the active and passive safety features of a more modern car. Put next to cost it makes it a bit harder to perform maladaptive frugality.
reply