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MeFi favorite J. Kenji López-Alt: “This is the kind of sauce that restaurants in Little Italy rested their reputations on—back when Little Italy restaurants had actual reputations to maintain. We're talking all-day sauce here. The kind of sauce that starts with the simplest ingredients—some canned tomatoes, a few aromatics, some olive oil, and maybe some basil—and alchemically transforms them into something so good that families can be built around it.”
posted by Lemkin to MetaFilter on May 8 at 8:09 AM
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Can the President Refuse To Spend Money Authorized by Congress? - "[Russ] Vought is a self-described radical with roots in the Tea Party movement who views budget cutting as a key part of the culture war. He has also told Congress, on the record, that both he and Trump view the Impoundment Control Act as an unconstitutional limitation on executive power."[1]
posted by kliuless to MetaFilter on May 9 at 2:46 AM
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The west's shameful silence on Gaza [ungated] - "Trump announced an outlandish plan for Gaza to be emptied of Palestinians and taken over by the US... Senior Israeli officials have since said they are implementing Trump's plan to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza." (previously)
posted by kliuless to MetaFilter on May 8 at 12:56 AM
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Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet. Henrik Karlsson reflects on discovering true friends.
posted by storybored to MetaFilter on May 5 at 5:33 PM
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The star of the Red Sea Scrolls is undoubtedly a man called Merer, a mid-level official or inspector who oversaw a team of forty men transporting limestone for Giza on a ship named The Uraeus of Khufu Is Its Prow

—In Gold and Lapis Lazuli is an essay [archive] by archeologist Robert Cioffi about the Diary of Merer, the logbook of a crew working on the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was part of a cache of the oldest papyri yet discovered, uncovered by archeologist Pierre Tallet and his team at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient Egyptian harbor on the Red Sea coast.
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on May 5 at 4:09 AM
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ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.
posted by Lemkin to MetaFilter on May 7 at 4:51 AM
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mayor baraka of newark, new jersey, arrested at ice detention center he has been protesting.
posted by Sperry Topsider to MetaFilter on May 9 at 1:46 PM
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Self-styled prophets are claiming they have 'awakened' chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT.
posted by clawsoon to MetaFilter on May 5 at 9:59 AM
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Telemarketers Are Using a Weird Trick to Sell Bare-Bones Health Plans [ungated] - "How a former TV comedy writer's fake-job loophole could blow up Obamacare."
posted by kliuless to MetaFilter on May 5 at 11:56 PM
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I Should Have Seen This Coming by David Brooks [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on May 4 at 1:36 PM
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Some time in the next 24 hours a fifty-year old Venus probe will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. The lander is about one-half tonne in mass, aerodynamically designed to withstand the temperatures and pressures of Venus' atmosphere, so it's likely survive (at least in part) all the way to the ground.
posted by Quindar Beep to MetaFilter on May 9 at 8:14 AM
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Following his election win, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is visiting Washington, D.C. for preliminary negotiations with U.S. regime leaders.
posted by mrjohnmuller to MetaFilter on May 6 at 4:45 AM
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Time moves fast, and the news gathers. But here we go with another news post. And no matter what, Don't Give Up.
posted by mephron to MetaFilter on May 6 at 8:03 AM
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Let's go back to Bolton, Lancashire, 1979. Everyone speaks with a fantastic Northern accent and uses words like "mither" (to annoy). Nobody wears safety equipment, or even knows what it is. Steeplejack Fred Dibnah, soon to become a national celebrity, is featured in a BBC documentary, dangling precariously from giant chimneys while nonchalantly smoking, and scoffing cheese sandwiches with soot-blackened hands.
posted by mokey to MetaFilter on May 7 at 6:14 AM
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"We compared land transport options for getting to net zero. Hands down, electric rail is the best." The only way to reduce soaring transport emissions is to shift as much travel as possible to the lowest-emission option.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries to MetaFilter on May 4 at 5:55 PM
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Ann Telnaes, who resigned in protest from the Washington Post after the Editorial Board *coughJeffBezos*cough* spiked her editorial cartoon of Bezos and other CEOs genuflecting before Trump, won a Pulitzer Prize for her work. (Selection of cartoons at the link.) The Pulitzers, the most prestigious award in journalism, were announced today. Despite the general decline of news organizations and a depressing obeisance to the administration, the awards recognized a lot of great work in 2024 that probably was under most people's radar (but not Metafilter's, occasionally!). Among the other big winners were:
posted by martin q blank to MetaFilter on May 5 at 3:07 PM
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Turning down streetlights at night shown to reduce light pollution and carbon emissions. An adaptive lighting project in Canberra, which reduced the brightness of streetlights by up to half, showed a 25 per cent reduction in light pollution. The project used around 30,000 smart streetlights in Canberra during off-peak times, and also found a reduction in carbon emissions.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries to MetaFilter on May 7 at 8:30 PM
17 users marked this as a favorite

I created the hijabi mom character in #1 Happy Family USA. How she wears it is part of her personality – so I knew I had to get it right By Mona Chalabi
posted by tiny frying pan to MetaFilter on May 7 at 4:01 PM
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Aging Wheels is the YouTube channel of a funny guy who likes weird cars—Reliant Robin, Trabant, you name it. Recently he bought two models of Spira, a car so light and economical that the door comes open at highway speeds. (YT 43:19, but it is immediately funny)
posted by Countess Elena to MetaFilter on May 7 at 7:05 AM
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A good Bluesky thread on Spanish Civil War posters.
posted by signal to MetaFilter on May 8 at 5:22 AM
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[more posts]

You know, there's a particular left-wing thought-stopping cliche that we really have to stop using, and it goes something like this: Activist: "ICE just swept up ten people at the emergency room! This is worse than it's ever been, people are going to die rather than go to the ER!" Respondent: "Don't you understand that America... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on May 7 at 5:59 AM
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Learning how to write is learning how to think. Full stop. [view]
posted by lalochezia to MetaFilter on May 7 at 5:31 AM
112 users marked this as a favorite

America created a society where education and experience are meaningless, and the top jobs in the country apparently go to grifters, con-artists, and criminals. So it may seem distasteful that people are using a chatbot to cheat themselves out of their educations, but in a way it's actually preparing them nicely for this braindead dystopia that... [more]
posted by mrjohnmuller to MetaFilter on May 7 at 5:11 AM
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A problem here is that kids aren't learning to read or write very well before they get to college. Some of that is just a screen time problem, but a lot of it is a high-stakes testing problem, a "learn to read short passages fast and do very limited kinds of comprehension testing" problem. If you can read easily, a lot of things are... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on May 7 at 6:36 AM
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His undergrad degree was a BS in Mathematics. So he can lecture on sin as well as cos and tan. [view]
posted by Mr.Know-it-some to MetaFilter on May 8 at 1:57 PM
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One suggestion I saw lately was to use "flipped classrooms". The students watch a lecture or read a textbook after hours, and do their actual writing in class. [view]
posted by TheophileEscargot to MetaFilter on May 7 at 5:32 AM
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> the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving Speaking of clichés: I don't understand why basketweaving is the hacky punchline whenever someone wants to say something is useless. It's a craft, it's artistic, it's ancient, it's modern, it can be beautiful and profound.... [more]
posted by The corpse in the library to MetaFilter on May 7 at 8:08 AM
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Also, in terms of the "but rich people have always cheated" frame: I notice that we often, often demand that working people get access to the shitty methods and lifestyles of the rich, and that this is positioned as some kind of victory, but we seldom turn around and demand access to the good things that rich people have had. Gold toilets... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on May 7 at 6:49 AM
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“Elon latched onto the theory that freed him from any responsibility or culpability” is the least surprising thing. [view]
posted by mhoye to MetaFilter on May 10 at 1:26 PM
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Oh, and if you worry that you might be corrupted, using ChatGPT to troubleshoot non-working cars, or to help you figure out a programming task that you know is possible but are unclear about the details, you could try System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action... [more]
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog to MetaFilter on May 5 at 10:40 AM
59 users marked this as a favorite

From Bluesky: you know who else came from chicago and was on "a mission from god" [view]
posted by los pantalones del muerte to MetaFilter on May 8 at 10:45 AM
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If only there was a genre of literature which featured lots of stories about the bad consequences of asking computers to perform complicated human tasks, then perhaps a mistake like this wouldn’t have happened. [view]
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on May 5 at 9:30 PM
57 users marked this as a favorite

Education is under attack by oligarchs and fascists because an educated populace is a threat to their success. The death of critical thinking isn’t a side effect of AI, it is its essence. Their machines won’t build us a utopia, but a society as depraved as the minds that control them. [view]
posted by Horace Rumpole to MetaFilter on May 7 at 5:34 AM
55 users marked this as a favorite

I'm terrified of LLMs as someone who works in regulated safety testing. Something that isn't just making up a possibly wrong answer, but doing so convincingly based on the success and failure of millions of prior interactions? The output of ego stroking smoke-up-your-ass phrasing because that drives engagement and utilization? There's going to... [more]
posted by Slackermagee to MetaFilter on May 5 at 10:24 AM
53 users marked this as a favorite

Language Log: My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself — use "assume the conclusion" or "raise the question", depending on what you mean — and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others. [view]
posted by zamboni to MetaFilter on May 4 at 3:49 PM
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If universities truly wanted students writing their essays themselves, they could simply require essays to be hand-written. We now that can be done: it was the normal way until quite recently. I wish I could understand why it is inconceivable today. Yes, we're doing this. If you read the article, these students are literally getting... [more]
posted by hydropsyche to MetaFilter on May 7 at 5:47 AM
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"...whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them.” I think this is the crux of the issue. The world doesn't need another essay on Hamlet, or to have a physics problem that's been solved a million times solved... [more]
posted by Mr.Know-it-some to MetaFilter on May 7 at 6:38 AM
47 users marked this as a favorite

a cautionary tale usually works for everyone In 2016, I was sure the Brexit referendum would be the USA’s cautionary tale, but apparently learning from others is woke. [view]
posted by gauche to MetaFilter on May 6 at 5:42 AM
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Sometimes it seems like we only care about the holes in higher education when they become democratized. Rich and connected kids have been able to buy term papers for decades or, many have claimed, recycle old ones from libraries kept by elite fraternities. Now anyone can do it with free or cheap software and it’s a major issue. But the fact that... [more]
posted by smelendez to MetaFilter on May 7 at 5:31 AM
44 users marked this as a favorite

About 25 years ago, I met a small group of people at a cafe, who I had seen there for a few weeks before. I saw a couple of them at a mushroom fair and I went up to them and told them that I saw them at the mushroom fair. They said that they saw me too and I was to sit down with them. They had been meeting every Saturday for around twenty years. I... [more]
posted by njohnson23 to MetaFilter on May 5 at 6:27 PM
44 users marked this as a favorite

[more comments]