I just respect everyone and never assume their identity is what I initially (subconsciously?) think. It took a long time to get there, but I just take every person as a person worthy of respect and dignity as my default.

Thanks for this. Time to play around and experiment.

I’m not reading the article but instead trying to be amusing. If it breaks the reality, please put me in a new one with really good scotch, healthy knees, and a spirit of adventure!

I highly recommend you visit your local library and request/check-out a copy of the book Polarization by Nolan McCarty. Read that.

Month later update: This is the route I’ve gone down. I’ve used WSL to get Ollama and WebopenUI to work and started playing around with document analysis using Llama 3. I’m going to try a few other models and see what the same document outputs now. Prompting the model to chat with the documents is…a learning experience, but I’m at the point where I can get it to spit out quotes and provide evidence for it’s interpretation, at least in Llama3. Super fascinating stuff.

I really appreciate all the responses, but I’m overwhelmed by the amount of information and possible starting points. Could I ask you to explain or reference learning content that talks to me like I’m a curious five year old?

ELI 5?

I’m using Claude (subbed) to help me do qualitative coding and summarizing within a very niche academic framework. I was encouraged to try it by an LLM researcher and frankly I’m happy with the results. I am using it as a tool to assist my work, not replace it, and I’m trying to balance the bias and insights of the tool with my own position as a researcher.

On that note, if anyone has any insights or suggestions to improve prompts, tools, or check myself while I tinker, please, tell me.

I respectfully offer that the Better Business Bureau is not a reputable source. They rate companies and charities in the same way Yelp rates businesses. They offer fees for ratings and the complaint process does absolutely nothing. I’ll let you do the google sleuthing on it, but please, do not use them for anything.

Charity Navigator, Candid, and ProPublica offer far better tools for assessing charity. If you’re paywalled from navigating some of the tools provided by Candid or other big entities, you can try your local library as they’ll sometimes have access.

Finally, the “best” charity in my line of work (I research these things) depends on three things:

1. % of contributions spent on administrative overhead
2. % of revenue spent on ED/CEO compensation
3. Measured program effectiveness in the service area

And you should absolutely read what @frog@beehaw.org has contributed. Clear mission/value/goal/program alignment, transparency, and accountability to the public are, generally, praise worthy organizations. Those that do not provide annual reports, 990s, and other important information on their websites are, in my research/experience, generally doing something questionable if not illegal.

I suggest you go to your local library and check out, or request via inter library loan - William Connolly - Capitalism and Christianity American Style. It builds on Max Webers work on the early Puritan influence into economics (The Protestant Work Ethic). Connolly incorporates much of his contemporary philosophy to try and explain the bootstrap mentality, cruelty politics, and the modern religious nationalist movement. Plus the book cover is metal.

I have this unsubstantiated theory but hear me out. I challenge an economist to look into this. Anyways, shareholder focus has replaced capitalism, even late stage capitalism, with something else. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s whatever this subscription milk every penny movement is now built to support. It’s like revenue maximization on steroids, like we must seek revenue maximization while remaining 100% efficient in revenue pursuit.

And it’s killing everything in the way. There’s no give.

Economist, get your nobel prize. What is this phenomena?

Wall-E. Well done.

Ok folks telling me to just get a Linux Distro.

PC Gaming - Enshrouded, Valheim, BG3, Dragon Age: Origins, and No Man’s Sky, generally Steam platform. Classics like Caesar III, TIE Fighter.

Work - Data Analysis, Lots of word documents, spreadsheets

Internet - Light browsing, podcast listening, music streaming

What distro and why?

I went to bed that night and checked my phone looking at the electoral map. I sad to my partner, “Hillary is going to loose…” The numbers and visuals all just right there, election night, telling a very different story of what polls (remember the NYT Prediction tracker? Clinton 96% chance or something crazy?) Indicated. Woke up and was like “The son of a bitch actually did it.”. I couldn’t even think or feel, it was so insane and such a deviation from the norm that I had no ground to stand on. It was en entirely brave new world.

Howdy. I am well aware of Klein, as her investigative journalism is what kept me motivated to keep asking questions about environmental justice and doing research. She, frankly, knows her shit and is one of the most well spoken and passionate people I’ve ever had the chance of reading and hearing.

And she’s absolutely right. Without a shadow of a doubt, “hoping” the DNC doesnt suffer from the self inflicted “no-bernie no-vote” mistake is not enough. It’s too close and too much is at risk for the people who do vote Democrat.

I got it. “Alexa, you owe me rent for being in my home. Alexa, send me 1500 a month in local currency.”

Somewhere, a Jeff Bezos explodes.

“How much ya gunna pay for what you used to get for free…” Tom Petty, Last DJ. Underrated tune about the demise of free and independent radio and radio DJs.

The legal fine points, important of course, fail to consider the legitimacy problem here. If you don’t agree with your political opponents, you want to murder them. Conspiracy, violation of legal code, maybe not as some comments have pointed out.

Extremely dangerous in a system where you are supposed to peacefully transfer power? Thats the problem with his words, that people like him think that is ok AND have been shown to have the capacity and vision to walk towards action. Without so much as a meaningful consequence at that.

That train of though is dangerous in a democracy, for anyone. Even a flawed democracy like the US.

Not going to lie, that title took me a hot minute. It’s brilliant on so many levels.

That aside, I’m not surprised at the outcome but also terrified at how insane it is. I want to give into conjecture and vent, but it won’t help anyone. It’s all just so surreal.

Not an expert, but would our net neutrality rules that the supreme jerk Ajit Pai helped revoke have been a tool to combat this behavior?

In my role at a Uni, I teach. I learned early on that every class I offer should have a skills workshop. One of them are basic non-phone skills like copying and pasting. Yes. Our youngest generation of college students in non computer sciences struggles with how to understand file structures and keyboard commands like copy and paste because they’ve never seen them before. So let’s stop making technology usefulness a generational thing. It’s exposure and education, which applies to everyone.