ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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12hr ago
So you have this problem too?
I can think of a few instances where I completely failed to comprehend the phonemes that someone just spouted at me, even after a repetition or two. But I don't think it's happened very often to me, so I would hesitate to call this phenomenon a red flag for autism/Asperger's/whatever in me specifically (though I obviously am flying other red flags).
But I also sometimes experience the same issue reading.
The particular article that I linked is focused on audio, and does not mention any equivalent phenomenon in text.
ToaKraka
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12hr ago
I have seen this called "problems with auditory processing". One scholarly article says (with literally two dozen citations omitted):
As well as a heightened sensitivity to sounds, some autistic people may find busy auditory scenes challenging, such as isolating a single speech source in a noisy environment, and may have difficulty filtering out interfering sounds that capture their attention. Difficulties with detecting speech in noise has been reported across the lifespan, from children to adults as well as in subgroups of the autistic population (e.g., non-speaking adolescents and young adults). Indeed, several studies report that autistic people struggle more than non-autistic people to filter speech sounds amidst noise. Some lines of evidence suggest the difficulties that some autistic people have recognizing target words amidst distracting speech are evident relatively early in development—2–5 years of age. Similar reports of difficulties understanding or attending to speech in background noise have been identified in people diagnosed with ADHD. Overall, such altered auditory processing—including difficulties attending to relevant speech sounds, or difficulties ignoring interfering sounds—are likely to impact significantly on autistic people's daily lives, whether at home, school or in the workplace.
An example of how sensory and auditory differences in autistic people might influence communication lies in social contexts that inherently involve the direction of attention among competing stimuli. “Cocktail party listening”—the ability to follow a conversation in an acoustically challenging environment—is reported as being particularly challenging for autistic people, and a reduced ability to ignore background stimuli—for whatever reason—potentially accounts for at least some of the difficulties they experience in social settings. Using fMRI to investigate sensory responsivity and social cognition in autistic adults, Green et al. (2018) demonstrated that activity in brain areas associated with social cognition were reduced when sensory stimuli were presented simultaneously with a tactile distractor stimulus, consistent with the interpretation that cognitive load may increase with more than one modality. Hernandez et al. (2020) also used fMRI to investigate brain responses in autistic and non‐autistic youth during conversations in noisy environments. Both groups showed activation in language networks, but autistic youth exhibited greater activation in left‐hemisphere speech‐processing areas. The degree of increased activation was associated with better social cognition and suggests that these autistic youth recruited additional neural resources to focus on social cues in the presence of distracting stimuli.
ToaKraka
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16hr ago
I fail to see how "Smirnoff" is significantly less Russian than "Smirnov". It's just an outdated transliteration of the same Cyrillic letter, pronounced in almost exactly the same way. Recall that JK Rowling chose to spell the name of a Slavic villain in Harry Potter as "Karkaroff", not "Karkarov". Likewise, "Bower" and "Kline" are not significantly less German than "Bauer" and "Klein".
ToaKraka
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18hr ago
Second Amendment Foundation link
ToaKraka
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21hr ago
Your link is broken because you forgot to include "https://" at the start of it.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
They can be useful for answering questions that do not fit well into conventional keyword-based Internet searches. A recent AAQC alleges that they are quite useful in language learning and have essentially reached competence in the editing even of full-length novels (given proper preparation). And, of course, they excel in generating text pornography (especially the local decensored models), as several users have testified in recent months (1 2 3).
I'm just relaying what the 4channers said, without necessarily endorsing it. (Looking at my ancient bookmark file for browsing through the aforementioned individual HTML files, it seems that I personally dropped the story at chapter 428.)
ToaKraka
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1d ago
Looking at three random chapters from the pile of raw single-chapter HTML files on my hard drive, I'm seeing word counts between 1500 and 2000.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
Found on 4chan: Claims that Reverend Insanity doesn't get good until the 200-chapter or even the 400-chapter mark. @self_made_human in shambles?
ToaKraka
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2d ago
Previous discussion regarding whether it is possible/probable/desirable for men and women to share interests: 1 2
Long ago, I thought interesting women were women who were interested in the same things I was interested in. Which meant all the interesting girls were lesbians.
I think geeky guys often make the mistake of looking for women who are essentially men—and, yeah, there aren’t many of them. Men generally enjoy machines, systems, engineering, to a degree and in a way that women don’t, and likewise women generally enjoy creatures, cute things, fashion, social issues, learning about the dark side of the world, to a degree and in a way that men don’t. You’re unlikely to meet a woman whose personality and interests line up with men’s, or with yours.
AI has no body, it cannot share resources, it cannot start a family, and it cannot confer status (because AI relationships have no scarcity they will always be neutral status at best). So presumably "cheating" would mean forming a deep emotional connection. But other forms of emotional connection are seen as non-threatening: best friends, close siblings, maybe a therapist.
(1) "Forming a deep emotional connection" with someone other than your romantic partner has been called "emotional cheating" by some (1 2). The most-upvoted Urban Dictionary definition even explicitly includes friendship in emotional cheating, as long as the culprit is "disconnecting with his partner at the same time". I don't know how many people actually believe in this idea, though.
(2) I assume that (a) there have been arguments regarding whether masturbating to pornography counts as cheating on a romantic partner, and (b) most people would agree that masturbating along with someone other than your romantic partner counts as cheating. Analogously, according to the same study, (a) 11 percent of respondents "often use an AI companion to generate sexually explicit content", and (b) 8 percent "regularly masturbate while talking to an AI companion".
ToaKraka
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3d ago
You've got a quadrillion pages about statues, and then the ramifications of an entire parallel world are buried under seagull shit without so much as a "huh".
I genuinely enjoyed Jonathan Strange.
These statements seem contradictory. It's been several years since I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but I specifically remember having similar criticisms of that book. (If magicians are so powerful, why has magic been forgotten outside Britain, and why is this book set in a retreading of the Napoleonic Wars rather than in a magician-ruled alternate history?)
ToaKraka
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3d ago
ToaKraka
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3d ago
Ever since Scott posted his review of Georgism
That was a guest post from Lars Doucet, not Astral Codex Ten's own material.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Darrell
I guess it's unobjectionable, but in my personal opinion it doesn't really sound enough like a name.
Joe, Pete
Using either of these is a bad idea, because people will get confused as to whether (1) your name is "Joe" or "Pete" or (2) your name is "Joseph" or "Peter" but you prefer to use the abbreviation "Joe" or "Pete".
Some law professors have pointed out that an actually-useful application of LLMs is in the field of corpus linguistics—determining the "original meaning" of a term by checking zillions of contemporary written works. Changing one's name seems like a field where asking a local decensored LLM might be similarly useful. For example (not LLM-generated):
I am an American of distant Russian descent. I am considering changing my name from Ivan Ivanovich to John Johnson. Does the name "John" have any bad connotations in American English and culture?
While the uncapitalized form "john" does have the embarrassing meaning "patronizer of prostitutes", the capitalized form "John" is sufficiently common as a name (#23 among USAian babies born in year 2025) that it normally is not associated with that meaning. However, people will find the repetition of "John Johnson" humorous.
Randall
This name has the negative connotation of XKCD author Randall Munroe. (But see also Antiplanner author Randal O'Toole.)
Spencer
This name has the negative connotation of infamous white supremacist Richard Spencer.
Lance
This has a negative association with jocks (like "Chad").
Hank
Using this is a bad idea, because people will get confused as to whether (1) your name is "Hank" or (2) your name is "Henry" but you prefer to use the abbreviation "Hank".
Spencer, Russell
These sound more like snooty English names than down-to-earth American names.
Spencer, Grant, Russell
I personally find these annoying because you can't tell at a glance whether they're given names or surnames, but I don't know whether that's a common sentiment.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
You replied to a filtered comment.
many people are lonely
From Astral Codex Ten's most recent link roundup comes a study indicating that, among USAians of ages 18–30 in romantic relationships, a whopping 15 percent are two-timing their romantic partners with LLMs on the side. Even people who probably should be considered non-lonely are turning to LLMs for additional companionship.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
This map is based on metropolitan areas, which in turn are based on urban areas. A handy interactive map of these features as defined by the federal Census Bureau is available here.
Note that the Census Bureau's official criteria for defining urban areas have some unjustified hysteresis, and therefore may be considered untrustworthy. (Specifically, if the algorithm indicates that two urban areas have merged into one urban area in the past ten years, then in some situations the Census Bureau will keep them separate anyway.) For an alternative, global viewpoint on urban areas, see the UN's "degree of urbanization", of which two different interactive maps are available here. (I have glanced at this topic previously in this comment.)
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Insert complaints about NGOs' top-down coordination of migrant caravans from Central America through Mexico into the US.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
"It's over" is in common use as a humorous meme phrase on 4chan. I don't see any examples in the catalogs of /v/ and /g/ at this time, but an OP like "Humanbros… it's over……" would be similarly humorous in this context. (I do see one OP of simply "Bros…" on /g/, and "Soulsbros… *cough* I don't feel so good" and "Nuly bros……" on /v/.)
ToaKraka
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5d ago
I didn't keep a copy, but tl;dr (and IMO and IME):
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Organizing your emails is important. Whether at work or at home, you want to be able to find information without having to sift through the hundreds of results of a search across your entire email account. Keeping all your old emails in an undifferentiated "inbox" or "archive" folder full of literally thousands (or even tens of thousands) of messages is dumb.
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For your personal email account, Gmail and Proton Mail let you organize emails in overlapping labels. It's convenient to organize by sender and by topic. For example: You can put all your receipt emails from an online retailer that fails to collect state sales tax in the "receipts", "[retailer name]", and "sales tax deferred" labels. Months later, when you're doing your annual state income tax return, it will be easy to export to PDF all the emails in the "sales tax deferred" label, and put those PDFs in the "tax documents" folder on your computer to help you calculate the sales tax that you owe.
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For your work email account, Outlook lacks good label functionality, but it lets you organize emails in nested (non-overlapping) folders. It's convenient to organize by topic. (In most cases, the identity of the sender doesn't matter, since you will be working with lots of different people on any given project. But you may still want to put emails from, e. g., Human Resources in their own folder, and then use subfolders for HR topics.) In the rare event that an email is relevant to multiple topics, you can click-and-drag with the right mouse button in order to copy an email from one folder into a second folder.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
My boss told me to decorate my cubicle, so I strewed it with items—modular origami, house designs, a reorganization of the New York–Washington corridor, a guide to organizing your email account, etc. But nobody in my civil-engineering office was ever interested in any of them. >:-(
ToaKraka
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5d ago
You don't need to play it in order to enjoy the books.
Steve Jackson himself has stated in interviews that one-third of GURPS book buyers actually play that system, one-third use GURPS books with other systems, and one-third just buy GURPS books to read them without playing any TTRPGs at all. I am in the third category.
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"Magic dirt" is a right-wing derogatory shorthand for the idea that immigrants can be valuable in their new society despite not being valuable in their original society—as soon as they step onto the dirt of the new country, they magically become more competent.
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