The other day I was using an LLM for worldbuilding. It helped me design a theoretical world that would be orbitally locked to the sun but still have habitable conditions. Then you can work out characteristics like typical windspeed, crop conditions, how shadows behave, etc.
I'm all for banning LLMs from writing prose. But the endless pearl clutching about LLMs is driving me insane. It's a really good research tool! It does things no other resource can. It can aid creativity.
People insisting on these carpet bans on LLMs are being unrealistic. You can not go back to a world before Google or Wikipedia exist either.
> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.
So I think one thing to keep in mind is that books added or removed from shelves based on the editorial choices of the library staff is not considered a book ban - and it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians.
Oftentimes school districts or libraries already have a system in place where offensive or non age-appropriate books can have restrictions placed on it based on parent or student feedback.
All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.
"it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians."
It seems like they would count those books as being banned if they had a means for gathering the information.
"Since 2021, there have been numerous accounts of quiet removals of books in libraries and classrooms by teachers and librarians. School districts have started issuing preemptive bans through 'do not buy' lists, barring titles from ever entering their libraries. . . . Therefore, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans is best thought of as a minimum count of book banning trends. This is a similar conclusion to that of the American Library Association, which routinely estimates that its counts reflect only a portion of the true number of books banned in schools."
> All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.
You could easily make those arguments on the book bans themselves.
One common argument I've seen floated in these conversations is that whatever this you call this behavior, it's not that bad because there are lots of other means to access the banned books.
But if that's the case - why bother in the first place? Is it all just performative virtue signaling that has no measurable effect on children's means to access these books? If not, shouldn't we be interrogating their reasoning?
In a controlled and editorialized context in the high school senior and college contexts (age 17+), Mein Kampf, Ted Kaczynski, and Marx should be taught to critically dissect bad ideas and immoral political prescriptions because it's important to teach future generations how to recognize and resist awful ideologies. Not doing so invites vulnerability to history rhyming more than it needs to.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Witness, but it nearly collapsed under the weight of its own pretentiousness. Especially to your point, what counted as a "narrative".
Cars used to compete on distinctions between driving experience/fuel economy/reliability/etc. In comparison, differences between electric cars is mostly superfluous. They're very interchangeable.
For the next generation of car buyers, infotainment and features are going to be the main features. And if you are handing all of that away to the tech companies, your entire company is going to just become another captive hardware partner of the tech giants.
I don't know. I would argue that driving experience and reliability are still very much going to be things in the electric car market. I'm an EV9 owner and we have issues w/ the suspension making it feel sloppy over some bumps. There's going to be a ton of nuance in terms of how all of these different electric vehicles drive, ride, and are experienced. And those are all going to come down to the vehicle manufacturers themselves, not just the technology partner for screens.
If I remember correctly Microsoft did a bunch of studies back in the day and found the Calibri had some of the best readability across a range of visibility and reading impairments (like dyslexia).
Serif fonts have some readability features of their own, specifically for printed word.
You are correct. Microsoft invested significantly to create a modern properly designed font that is easy to read on a variety of screens, prints clearly and consistently, scales well, and can do italics, bold, etc well.
I think this came out back with Office 2007 or something. I believe Aptos is actually the new next generation font that should generally be considered an enhancement to Calibri.
While Microsoft isnt great at many things, their investment in font design and support is outstanding.
> "To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface."
So to reiterate, the department decided to move on from the 1992 default Word font to the 2007 Word default (1 year after it was no longer the default).
Nothing is safe from politics when even a font choice has become "woke".
Can we even call them a judge at that point?
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