Oh wow I just caught the dyslexia bit. The rest was so bad I just blew right past it.

Fair warning: This is complete nonsense:

When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn’t believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

“Word recognition is a preoccupation,” he said. “I don’t teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that.”

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word “horse” and says “pony” instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn’t the same thing as a horse. Second, don’t you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says “pony”? And different letters say “horse”?

He dismissed my question.

“The purpose is not to learn words,” he said. “The purpose is to make sense.”

Cognitive scientists don’t dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can’t accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn’t like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does. And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

“My science is different,” Goodman said.

This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It’s important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there’s decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.

This seems super dumb to me.

Admittedly I never had issues reading, so it’s hard to put myself in their shoes. But even still…

So nudity and depictions of sex/etc, I get that they’re annoying but think they should be effectively forced to allow once they’re at a certain scale for similar reasons as anti-trust laws. (With KYC rules because trafficking and underage shit.)

Sex toys? Used shit with bodily fluids? I think they’re perfectly justified not to want to deal with that. There are all sorts of ways that can blow up that they’re not equipped to prevent.

I started to highlight bits to cut out and highlight as the key points, but it became pretty quickly that that link already is the executive summary. It’s already basically in outline form, and a super quick read.

You don’t need to rely on the headline.

Is web of trust still a thing?

That was intended to be kind of a distributed way to determine who didn’t suck.

To be fair, I don’t think he’s actually a bad dude either. Again, flawed, but reasonably well intentioned.

The “worst” thing they did was definitely developing feelings while she’s engaged to Roy, but most of that was the nature of working in close proximity. It’s inherently different than sneaking around to spend “platonic” time together for a bunch of hours by choice. He had feelings, but mostly didn’t cross the line. I don’t think he’s a terrible person for laying his feelings on the line when she’s engaged to someone he doesn’t like either. Actually married is the line where it moves to completely not OK.

But yeah, the whole end thing really wasn’t anyone being awful. He unilaterally made some decisions that should have been a partnership, and he was wrong to put that much stress on her without talking to her and hearing her. Because they had kids, primarily. But he did recognize that and came back and made the commitment to their family. Then, once she had time to actually breathe again, she was ready to take the leap with him.

That was longer than I meant it to be again lol. But I was surprised to hear the take (and that it was more popular than I’d guess) because it genuinely never occurred to me. She was in pretty deep and he was lashing out from the stress of the situation before she even vocalized her problems with it. (At least from what we see.)

For interaction? Pseudonyms with a ramp up into being able to interact fully is the middle ground. Your activity on that specific site will be monitored to kick you out if you behave inappropriately, but it shouldn’t carry across sites unless you voluntarily use a third party identity provider (which is a good option to have).

Massive scale is a big part of the issue. It raises the barrier to entry for competing platforms (because being able to scale to rapid growth is a huge up front investment, and can easily cripple your platform if you don’t do so), and brings the moderation responsibilities beyond anything actually manageable. Small to mid sized communities being the norm is much more manageable, much easier to develop for, and much healthier generally.

I didn’t buy it, but I don’t know how you can bash something clearly experimental like that that leveraged the hardware in unique and interesting ways.

So after all the people actually playing it came up for air lol?

It doesn’t matter if the copy is all at once. Every bit of the file touching your computer involves multiple copies. It is fundamentally impossible to share any file without copies being made. The original digitization is already probably illegal because it’s for the purpose of distribution and not one of the fair use exceptions. Again, this is exactly identical to the claim that pirate sites providing streaming is legal.

Libraries do not make copies. Legally, it’s exactly that simple. There is no ambiguity in any way. It is copyright infringement under current law. It is not possible to defend this without throwing current law in the trash and starting over from scratch. If the judge did somehow rule in IA’s favor the Supreme Court could overrule him in about 30 seconds with basically no deliberation. Courts do not have the authority to change the law.

Use the library. Find stuff you like. In the US, Libby and Hoopla are great digital borrowing options a lot of libraries support. I tend to actually buy fiction when it’s an author/series I want day one. (Mostly audiobooks, some ebooks). For nonfiction, I do the best research I can to determine that it’s evidence backed and well respected by other authors in the field (generally psychology-ish).

In terms of the format, I mostly don’t do physical books. I can’t carry 1000 of those in my pocket. I mostly get a handful of favorites to have on a shelf and maybe talk someone else into reading, but I’ll still read on my ereader or audio. My preference is audiobook because I have a lot of time where I can listen while doing other stuff. I do get a fair number of ebooks as well, but a lot of those are programming books because audio doesn’t work for code and especially because there are a lot of awesome bundles through Humble Bundle for them.

There’s no possible way to apply the law where the Internet Archive is permitted to do their lending program. It very clearly is illegal copyright infringement that does not come anywhere close to fair use.

The judges do not have the authority to completely overrule both the text of the law and the massive body of precedent. The Supreme Court could, except the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the right to regulate IP how they see fit, and the law is super clear that you can’t do anything that resembles what IA is doing in any way.

Maybe he’s just enthusiastic about a game that does something he’s into?

Yeah, I’m not really disagreeing with him, though I do think Elden Ring is one of the least janky games I’ve ever played. It really does feel incredibly consistent to me. Compared to something like the Witcher where even walking doesn’t seem to stop in the same place consistently, it really does work pretty well IMO. I think the older games did feel a lot sloppier, but Elden Ring took a step forward into super smooth control to me.

But I would like a better visual cue.

Why exactly do they need to be targeting photorealism with shit like PBR?

There’s also a lot less owls, that are a lot harder to find than dragonflies.

I have shots I like, but they’re pretty much all reasonably common animals because that’s what I have access to, mostly in my back yard. Or flowers I mostly grew, or whatever. Getting an owl, especially doing cool stuff like that, adds the whole element of actually finding the right spot where they live and play, etc. It’s a whole additional layer of work involved.

I made it a chain of replies with one per post instead so my whole app doesn’t crash every time I open it. One of the others actually is a dragonfly. Huge pain in the ass because of how fast they move, and because they’re too small for my autofocus (that’s also probably too slow). But really satisfying when you get a clean one (though I definitely had to massage that one in post).

I found ~f/10 with as fast a shutter as you can get away with is your best bet to get a clear shot with a decent chunk in focus. More open than that and the plane in focus is just too narrow for me to get anything.

I was listening to a football podcast (they go off topic in the offseason because there isn’t a lot to talk about), and they had a whole rant about how Pam Beasley is a monster.

Because she was friends with Jim while dating Roy. (Yeah him having feelings for her wasn’t exactly a shocker, but it’s different when it’s you. And she shut him down clearly when he actually made a move.)

Because she did the art school thing, I guess?

Because she was sad when Jim was dating Karen. (She did genuinely try to be her friend despite that, and went to cry in a corner alone.)

And because there was tension when Jim did Athlead. (Which if you actually watch, was him biting her head off when she messed up with a video of a recital, and him instigating a couple other times, presumably because of the stress of the situation, while she was being run ragged as almost a single mother at home.)

And because apparently chasing your dreams going to New York to go to art school while in a relationship is the same as doing it when you’re actually married and have kids. But she didn’t bend over backward enough to support him I guess?

It’s just really weird to me, and he’s not the only one with that weird twist on the character. (No she’s not perfect. Sitcoms are all characters who are kind of monsters. But her as the bad guy doesn’t make sense.)

There. Splitting them into posts doesn’t crash I guess.