Adam Ayres

@kathrynw5 My smart scale and thermostat logins require 3x the security of my credit union.

We, as a society, have taken two-factor authentication too far. Logging into my bank account and into my Chipotle account shouldn't be the same process.

@ChihuahuaBaxter @Penny_Lane_Pup I’m so sorry for your loss. I always enjoyed seeing Baxter pop up

Today We Said Good-Bye To My Son, My Heart & Soul 💔 Baxter You Gave Me 17 Years Of Joy, Laughter & Unconditional Love 🕊️ You Will Be Greatly Missed Little Man ❤️ Mamma Loves You.

@PChestovichMD @sm I take care of a complex patient with extensive history. I make sure new docs get a good summary and relevant information, and tell their med asst they will need time to review, so please look at it early. 3 new docs in the last month, none have reviewed before the appt.

@sm Counterpoint: If we know details about the visit, we can investigate ahead of time (review other records, look up info) and be better prepared when we are examining the patient and discussing with them. Going in blind just adds time for everyone, including the patient.

I hate how at the doctors office, the nurse sees you first, gets all your concerns and then relays them to the doctor. It’s like whisper down the lane. Let me just tell the doctor directly because I can hear you outside the door doing a terrible job.

I don't trust people who don't freeze the top row in Excel.

@kareem_carr It’s fundamentally a marketing problem. Here’s this great, interesting tool which is tremendously useful in certain narrow applications if we’re honest about what it actually is and does. What it isn’t, and won’t be, is capable of thought or understanding.

The more I work with AI, the less I believe anything the AI boosters tell me about how well it works. It's all surface appearances. Everywhere I push deeper, it's less smart than it first seems.

Remembering our OTRB pets fondly. Please share a picture with our community. 🌈

@PunkyMantilla I knew a family of 13 kids that didn’t believe God wanted females to be able to read.

Unpopular-er opinion: the socialization argument is made primarily by people who have only seen the worst side of homeschooling. I knew 2 homeschool families growing up. One of them didn’t educate their girls and made them sleep together in an unfinished room w a plywood floor

@Lifeinvestmoney Either be over six feet tall or the son of someone quite wealthy and you’ll get exactly this job.

Need a job where I can make six figures but I have no skills and I’m not very smart What field is this?

@WillManidis To me the problem is more that water and power consumption are being subsidized to bring the datacenters into municipalities. Those costs get externalized which artificially raises utility costs for others and lowers the price of LLM usage. That’s unsustainable.

I don’t think any of you have processed at any level how widespread and profound the ai water libel is

@HannesThurnherr @Tazerface16 That’s a bit disingenuous. There’s potential for world models or what comes after that, but the LLM branch is a dead end for AGI precisely because it can’t conceptualize. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful tool, but right now hucksters are pretending it’s something else.

@Tazerface16 The inventor of deep learning, the top voices in maechanistic interpretability, along with many other researchers say they are thinking. The "it's just math" people, who say they aren't arent thinking, are just relying on intuition. Climate denier type shit...

People understand that LLMs aren't actually "thinking," right?

@travisakers I had an accounting professor who often wrote test questions that seemed clear to people of average or low intelligence but were painfully ambiguous to more capable students. She couldn’t perceive the problem. This feels like that.

This is stupid. Just add the damn numbers or memorize it. What are we even doing?

@drdrefud12 @travisakers I understand anchoring to base 10, that’s the trick I developed as a kid long before they taught this way. I still have no idea what specific values are supposed to be filled into these lines, and I find the diagram less helpful than not.

I teach 2nd grade. This is taught so kids can solve equations mentally. This is just showing visually what is happening. This assignment is one strategy which is making a ten. 9 is close to ten so it is easy to think of that as a 10 and then add 7. Being able to manipulate numbers is an important skill. My class of 8 years olds understands it fully. Not all adults understand this exact visual representation but probably use this strategy in daily life. Soon the kids will not need any of the shown visuals to do the mental math.

@MaineGolden When Buddy went blind, it was very helpful to mark different areas with particular scents to help him navigate. It can be so faint we can’t even smell it, but it’s extremely obvious to a dog.

Milestone: I can go roundtrip from my dog bed in the living room to my water bowl in the kitchen with little guidance and without relying on bumping into things to find my way! Making progress! My apologies for not keeping up with all your wonderful comments. Love You All! 🥰❤️

@EJFisher2 @dieworkwear Just now realizing he can’t tolerate negative space. There’s a whole philosophical/psychological thread to pick at there.

@dieworkwear It’s also about framing. There is exquisite organisation and proportion in the French state rooms. Space between the details is exactly right. Trump’s is disorganised and cluttered.

The replies to this person's tweet lack a nuanced understanding of aesthetics. Let me tell you why I don't think this room works. First, the gold decorations make the room look like an ersatz Versailles. Go to Getty Images and type in "Oval Office." Then zoom in on the gold decor. You'll notice that the lines are very blunted and muddied; they lack the sharp lines and fine detailing that you'd expect on something made by an artisan. Hence why some people have suggested these decorations are from Home Depot (true or not, that's the impression). You can see the difference between the first and second photos. The first, of course, is of the Oval Office; the second is the reception room from the Hotel de Cabris in France, which was made during the 18th century under the direction of Louis XVI. Even at this distance, the second image looks much better because it was designed and executed by artisans working within a coherent visual language. You can really see the crisp lines and detailing. Second, the White House was designed by James Hoban, an Irish architect who migrated to the US for economic opportunities (what a great American story!). He originally designed it in the Neoclassical style, drawing on Palladian and Georgian influences. Neoclassicalism was a reaction against the Rococo movement, which reactionaries saw as overly ornate and frivolous. A bit of gold used sparingly and strategically can look fine in a Neoclassical building, but the amount Trump used has so radically encrusted the room that it's now in Rococo territory, making it look like a mismatch of aesthetics. You can see an example of gilded Rococo architecture in the third slide. Although it's not my thing, the effect is totally different because it's coherent. IMO, architecture sets the terms for you can decorate a space. Modernist furniture looks best in modernist buildings, just as Craftsman furniture looks best in Craftsman homes (see fourth slide). You don't have to do period recreations — sometimes mixing two aesthetics, or old and new, can make a space feel more natural — but having a sense of aesthetic history (art, architecture, furniture, fashion) can help you create better aesthetics. The Oval Office offends on at least three levels: the ersatz nature of the decor, the way it grates against Hoban’s Neoclassical vision, and the way it misunderstands the classical-republican symbolism that the White House was meant to project in the first place. As others have noted, this is the kind of decor you'd expect from dictators who rob their own country.

@tbailey1976 I’m so sorry for your loss. I lost two last year, one an elderly Chihuahua like Jonah. Such a tiny creature to leave such a massive hole in your world. I hope in time his memory can be a blessing.

Please say a prayer or send some love to my sweet boy, Jonah. After almost two decades together, his time with me is sadly coming to an end. I called his vet this morning and have an appointment to put my sweet baby to sleep tonight at 5:45. My heart is shattered, and after 19 years together I don’t know how I’ll go on without him. He’s been my rock through so many hard times, and kept me going through my battle with cancer. I’m going to miss him more than words can express. I’ve never loved an animal more, and probably never will. He’s been the absolute best boy. 💔🌈🌉

@shagbark_hick Not to mention in some states (like TX), kids can quite literally disappear under the current system. They could be sold, chained up in a closet, etc and no one would ever know. If you think that sounds insane there are literally plenty of cases on record.

A lot of people commenting on this are reminding me that the public school system produces functionally illiterate students at high rates. I acknowledge that; the situation is grim. But failures within public schooling ought not in and of themselves excuse methods of homeschooling that are also failures. It's reasonable to hope that all children receive a robust education, at home or at school, and it's furthermore reasonable to aim for methods of attaining this end without cynically assuming all is lost, adopting a 'bunker mentality,' etc. Those with a stake in homeschooling need to be serious about staring straight at the "worst case" scenarios of homeschooling and discerning how they can be avoided. There really are a distressingly large number of "homeschooling failures" out there; some are truly deplorable. If the response to the possibility of neglectful or insufficient homeschooling is "rah rah, homeschooling rules, public school drools," etc etc, that is not a serious response. The fact is, homeschooling does not actually "solve" the problems posed by failing public schools. Just as surely as homeschooling can offer some families a valid path to a better education, it can just as surely open the door to ever higher levels of dysfunction and educational failure. So I don't believe it's a perfect tempest that should be exempted from all criticism. Finally, as homeschooling becomes more popular, the cases of failure will very likely increase in number. And from there, the government will eventually be forced to either formally abandon its mandate to ensure all children receive an education -- or it'll crack down on homeschooling heavily. The latter is obviously more likely; I might even consider it an eventuality at this stage. Make of that what you will; homeschooling freedom will probably become a major cultural battleground within the next decade.

@shagbark_hick @NatureGirl_21 I know exactly what dynamic you’re talking about and I it’s reasonable to say there must be a floor of knowledge imparted. I don’t see how such a floor gets enforced in our society without government involvement, imperfect as that is. Abuse is rampant.

@NatureGirl_21 If you read any part of my post to say "I certainly and unequivocally want the government to intervene," you may want to read it again.

Look, pro-homeschooling people are piling on this guy but he's not wrong at all. I know of families who are straight-up failing to teach their children beyond a 2nd-grade education. Like 16-year-old kids who don't know what the Capital of the US is, have never heard of Toronto, and could not perform a basic algebra problem. While it's true that there are many excellent homeschooling families whose instruction far exceeds that of any public school, the fact is that the American system of "school your kids however you want" does also yield a lot of severely stunted kids who get stuck playing "catch-up" for the rest of their lives. My wife was homeschooled, we might homeschool, I'm not averse to the practice per se, but it's a fact that there's a whole world of multi-generational homeschoolers who are not and will not rise above a 2nd or 3rd grade education level by their own volition. Should the state intervene in these cases? I dunno, the answer to the question is not as "easy" as many make it out to be. The idea of barely getting through 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' at the age of 16 should be appalling, and it IS happening in some American homeschooler families.

@LexLiberty76 @ErikAndThoughts @shagbark_hick @DreadIlk @ride_enjoyer IQ is garbage science, one small step above astrology, and I say that as someone in the top 1% of scores. Whatever usefulness the concept originally had was destroyed as it was co-opted for ideological/political/racist reasons.

@ErikAndThoughts @shagbark_hick @DreadIlk @ride_enjoyer IQ tests are very good at what they are good at. Some people notice patterns, others don’t.

@shagbark_hick People underestimate the pressure in certain kinds of religious/cultural fundamentalism to keep kids from exposure to basic knowledge. I knew one family with 13 kids who homeschooled bc they didn’t think women should be able to read.

@Lewis_Bollard My senators are Cornyn and Cruz, so I’m not optimistic

Despicable: the House just passed a farm bill that includes the SOB Act to keep pigs imprisoned in crates. Our last hope is to keep this out of the Senate farm bill. Call your senators at (202) 224-3121 and tell them NO farm bill bill with the Save Our Bacon Act in it.