Readit News logoReadit News
spondylosaurus commented on House Arab   bidoun.org/articles/house... · Posted by u/speckx
thomassmith65 · 5 months ago

  I assume this is about the New Yorker (and not the NYT as another commenter suggested)
Yes, that was a slip of my pen (or keyboard). He was at the New Yorker.

spondylosaurus · 5 months ago
A common enough mistake :) Re. your other comment though, I'm not sure the NYer has ever cared about worrying what conservatives will think about their contributors, at least not in my lifetime. I just read a lovely new Zadie Smith essay yesterday where she talked about her commitment to socialist ideals!

Which is ironic compared to the NYT, because I think the New Yorker tends to slip under the conservative media's radar, whereas the NYT has conspicuously attempted to appeal to conservatives but in doing so has only alienated some more liberal readers while still catching a whole lot of conservative ire.

spondylosaurus commented on House Arab   bidoun.org/articles/house... · Posted by u/speckx
spondylosaurus · 5 months ago
Given the cartoons and references to fact-checking, I assume this is about the New Yorker (and not the NYT as another commenter suggested), but I'm a bit surprised because the New Yorker has been one of the most vocal outlets speaking out about the plight of Palestinians, even prior to the current assault on Gaza. Which obviously doesn't preclude the possibility that this guy's coworkers were weird and shitty to him, but like, the NYer has not been shy about discussing civilians casualties in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank, or featuring guest pieces from Palestinian authors.

Chotiner alone has done at least a few dozen interviews in the past few years where he's made his opposition to the war in Gaza very clear, and (famously) made its supporters look very stupid and callous by letting them trip over their own words. But... Chotiner himself is a white guy (or at least I assume?), so there is that. I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. Could very well be some ugly office politics that this author is right to be upset about, even if I'm skeptical about his commentary on the effects of those politics on the NYer's reporting.

spondylosaurus commented on Escaping the Internet   ryanckulp.com/escaping-th... · Posted by u/freediver
Barrin92 · 5 months ago
>my first child is due in a couple months and it’s difficult to imagine tweeting as a parent. why would i argue with a childless blue haired atheist about Islam’s (in)compatibility with Western values? why would i tolerate The Algorithm showing me prostitutes on my social media feed? have we lost our mind? [...] i’m bringing back the 90s.

Bringing up this example of all cases made me a bit curious so I found this piece from a month ago[1] and it gives some context. Ryan, you will never guess who hung out with prostitutes!

There's certainly a lot of malicious stuff on the internet but the desire for an internet full of like-minded people out of a gated community strikes me a bit odd. If you hate weird argumentative people the 90s internet wouldn't have been for you. One of my more curious memories from the earlier internet is being involved in the Unreal Tournament modding scene and finding out that one person I was talking to was Asia Carrera, who was a pornstar, Mensa member and apparently self taught programmer and modder.

If all you want is be around people who think the same thoughts, with an oddly elitist and judgemental touch to boot, I think leaving the internet is the only option.

[1] https://www.ryanckulp.com/are-you-my-people/

spondylosaurus · 5 months ago
Another head-scratcher from the link you shared:

> ...the progressive default that change==good, never honoring tradition or asking why it often prevails.

As a progressive this "default" is certainly news to me...

spondylosaurus commented on Using your phone on toilet may give you hemorrhoids: study   nbcnews.com/health/health... · Posted by u/c420
meindnoch · 5 months ago
Haemorrhoids are caused by too much straining, which is caused by bad posture during defecation. The closer you're to a squatting position, the less straining you need. Use a footrest to raise your leg (or as I call it: a stool stool, hehehe).
spondylosaurus · 5 months ago
Learning to relax your pelvic floor is helpful too. You should be opening the door, not pushing things through it :)
spondylosaurus commented on We Ran the CDC: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American's Health   nytimes.com/2025/09/01/op... · Posted by u/cmurf
UncleMeat · 5 months ago
When people live longer they develop more chronic conditions. And our view of health widens, so stuff that was previously just “Bob has bad knees” becomes a chronic condition.

I assure you that banning vaccines isn’t going to fix people’s back pain.

spondylosaurus · 5 months ago
Many chronic conditions are also "chronic" now but just two or three generations ago were either a swift or slow and painful death sentence. We see more adults with <insert major health problem here> because now they actually survive into adulthood and can reasonably participate in society rather than being confined to their homes (or to a home).
spondylosaurus commented on Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed   fortune.com/2025/08/23/ne... · Posted by u/danielmorozoff
vjvjvjvjghv · 6 months ago
I think the brain would adapt. It may take a while but the brain is very flexible and adaptable.
spondylosaurus · 6 months ago
Case studies suggest otherwise, at least for most people.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not...

spondylosaurus commented on The Fancy Rug Dilemma   epan.land/essays/2025-8_F... · Posted by u/ericpan64
ericpan64 · 6 months ago
Hey HN - long-time lurker and decided to start writing essays (inspired by PG and many of y'all as well). This one came from months of joking with my friends about different "fancy rug" problems which led me to think about my own "fancy rugs". Enjoy!
spondylosaurus · 6 months ago
I have to ask... why the extra lettuce? At In-N-Out I sometimes ask for less lettuce because I feel like it's unnecessary filler compared to the other ingredients, lol. Maybe they've just been giving my unused lettuce to you...
spondylosaurus commented on Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law   wired.com/story/bluesky-g... · Posted by u/BallsInIt
immibis · 6 months ago
This proves that Bluesky is not decentralised, btw.
spondylosaurus · 6 months ago
Does it actually? (Genuine question.) The article doesn't get into specifics about how the block is implemented, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some non-trivial way around it.

Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.

spondylosaurus commented on In the long run, LLMs make us dumber   desunit.com/blog/in-the-l... · Posted by u/speckx
tptacek · 6 months ago
I buy this for writing. There's a very limited set of things GPT is good at for improving my writing (basic sentence voice and structure stuff, overusing words), but mostly I find it makes my writing worse, and I don't trust any argument it makes because, as the post observes, I haven't thought them through and had the opportunity to second-guess them myself.

Also it has a high opinion of Bryan Ferry. Deeply untrustworthy.

But I don't buy this at all for software development. I find myself thinking more carefully and more expansively, at the same time, about solving programming problems when I'm assisted by an LLM agent, because there's minimal exertion to trying multiple paths out and seeing how they work out. Without an agent, every new function I write is a kind of bet on how the software is going to come out in the end, and like every human I'm loss-averse, so I'm not good at cutting my losses on the bad bets. Agents free me from that.

spondylosaurus · 6 months ago
> Also it has a high opinion of Bryan Ferry. Deeply untrustworthy.

Whoa, whoa, are we talking Bryan Ferry as an artist, or Bryan Ferry as a guy? Because I love me some Roxy Music but have heard that Bryan is kind of a dick.

spondylosaurus commented on AI vs. Professional Authors Results   mark---lawrence.blogspot.... · Posted by u/biffles
bsder · 6 months ago
Perhaps what this is pointing out is that a lot of writers of the genre of "fantasy" produce mostly formulaic, trope-laden piles of crap that AI is pretty good at mimicking?

This is neither new nor news. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is almost 4 decades old (see: https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html).

It does suggest that publishers might want to screen new writing with a quick "Did AI write this?" and only publish the ones where it is obvious to humans that AI did not write it.

spondylosaurus · 6 months ago
I thought it was interesting/telling (but maybe not surprising) that the AI-generated stories scored the highest according to reader rankings, yet pinged to me as immediately flat and generic. But I really liked the idiosyncrasies of a few of the human-authored entries!

u/spondylosaurus

KarmaCake day3363March 16, 2023View Original