schwartzster @schwartzster@mastodon.cloud

ChatGPT passing all these professional licensure exams is less about ChatGPT being smart and more about these exams not being a good way to measure aptitude

Here's some New Years perspective to start your 2023.

Barbara Walters, Anne Frank, & Martin Luther King, Jr. were all born in 1929. Yet while we were just with Ms. Walters days ago, those two icons are portrayed as ancient history.

But the ideals they fought for weren't in some distant past—they're a contemporary reality we must continue to fight for today. We control that narrative. Let’s keep fighting for that justice in 2023 & beyond.

Remember, "The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

Phil Ting's #FreedomToWalk Act is now law in California. You can cross the street anywhere as long as you're not creating a hazard.

#Jaywalking, the fake "crime" created by automobile industry lobbying to blame victims of #TrafficViolence, no longer exists in California.

Enjoy your freedom to walk! https://ktla.com/news/california/new-law-allows-californians-to-legally-jaywalk/

Floppy disk eject in #space

In just six days I make my London stage debut. Don’t ever let anyone say you can’t keep dreaming and having to pinch yourself, even at age 85.
https://Allegiancemusical.com

me: I will do literally anything to sleep better

science: put away the screaming screen for a few minutes a day

me: no ❤️

Prosecutors know 911 call analysis is junk science. But that hasn’t stopped some from promoting the methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions.

https://www.propublica.org/article/911-call-analysis-fbi-police-courts by Brett Murphy @ProPublica

Since "John Mastodon" has gone so viral here following Mediaite's confusion, I think, in the future, for those folks left on Twitter who want to secretly refer to Mastodon after Elon bans all mentions of it, just talk about "friends of John" as the code...

I've gotten a lot of responses to that Substack piece about leaving Twitter. Many are positive but some are negative. A few are saying "oh so you think free speech is nasty?"

What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I do. The Nazis marching at Skokie were nasty. All sorts of speech is nasty. Supporting free speech doesn't mean reserving judgment about it, you imbecile. It means not using the state to suppress it.

“writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.”
Great tips about writing technical docs well:
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2022/11/24/writing-docs-well-why-should-a-software-engineer-care/
#documentation #writing #hermeneuticCircle

To all my Canadian friends: Happy regular Thursday.

To my friends in the USA: Happy #Thanksgiving

I don't want to post the 375th "guide to mastodon", but it took me a moment to learn what seem to me three most important points in making the mastodon timeline useful:

1) #follow absolutely every account you think could potentially be interesting (since no algorithm "suggests" anything for you)

2) #boost the toots you find interesting (not just favourite them)

3) use #hashtags as much as possible

My latest post for Techdirt is about a stupid bill - the INFORM Act - that won't die but keeps getting shoved into must-pass legislation. And how it's a big problem b/c not only is it ultimately pointless and gratuitously costly, but the way it's written it's also troublingly unconstitutional.

Ex: want to sell t-shirts advocating for reproductive freedom online? This law gives Texas AG Ken Paxton the power to demand the site you use to sell them tell him who you are.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/18/for-the-umpteenth-time-the-inform-act-is-still-unconstitutional-and-has-no-business-being-attached-to-any-bill-congress-needs-to-pass/