It's been a long time since I've been a regular reader of any newspaper, but when I was (admittedly at least 20 years ago!) I don't remember it being that way at all. Can you suggest a good example of a recent Guardian article that's ragebait?
I remember this one in particular for random reasons. But these kinds of articles aren’t particularly rare in the guardian. The guardian’s editorial policy appears to be to generate a steady stream of random human interest stories with the common agenda of finding fault with everything that isn’t British.
The article is typical Guardian rage bait hit piece. It took the opinions of a handful of engineers and tried to paint a picture of an industry wide trend in an effort to show moral superiority. It was patently false. There was no industry trend like this, as was obvious to anyone in the industry a the time. And as we all know today, Facebook had no problem growing by leaps and bounds since.
The article you linked has some sources, though maybe a survey would help (if one exists). It might be applying a British viewpoint on America, in Britain the "shameful" jobs are in banking.
> common agenda of finding fault with everything that isn’t British.
Believe me they find fault in everything that is British as well!
They are most definitely at the forefront of the "everything here is shit and we are all dreadful" mindset that infects a lot of the centre-left of the UK. For all that I like them better than most other news sources, the repeated refrain that we are all awful and should be ashamed of ourselves does get tiresome.
Over the past few years, while homeschooling my daughters, I've come to see the way math is usually taught as horribly pathological. In the US, where we live now, it's often seen as a competitive activity -- almost like a sport. In the UK, where I grew up, that wasn't the case but still it was taught as this huge body of knowledge and skills with almost no motivation.
My daughters are so advanced in math and I really don't believe it's even mostly due to innate ability. It's because, just to take an easy random example, when we studied geometry our very first lesson was me pointing out that the word "geometry" just means "earth measuring", and it was useful for farmers to be able to do that. Or, when we proved the irrationally of sqrt(2), of course I entertained them with the tale of Hippasus being thrown into the sea by the Pythagoreans. For basically everything we've learned there are so many fun stories. It makes me sad that most students of math never get to hear them.
As a b and c grade student, who messed about, stumbled through a not very good info technology degree at university I definitely agree with this. The stories and lore are what makes me now so interested in programming and software engineering. I've pretty much taught myself everything programming related and that's what I work as too. I desperately want to learn math up to and including calculus as I feel like it's a hidden shame that I'm a programmer with not much math ability. I'm actually considering signing up for math academy.
A friend and I love to send each other examples of ridiculous things being labeled "woke". Lately we are spoiled for choice. British tabloid newspapers are an especially good source.
In his post, pg says "Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it."
What I remember the most from that time period was comedians making jokes about exactly this effect: At some point people started labeling everything they didn't like as "political correctness", and the phrase lost all meaning.
(I don't have particularly strong feelings about pg's essay tbh. I've personally managed to completely ignore political correctness and wokeness without anything bad happening).
Yes! That a really fun problem too -- it feels like it should be tractable but it's insanely hard. If you do start some kind of competition around it, let me know, I'd be interested.
Can you clarify which link is broken and how? What browser and OS?
> In my experience, LLMs are terrible at clues.
That hasn't been my experience. Without good prompting they give you clues that are too bland and literal, but it is quite possible to get them to give you clues with interesting and creative wordplay. I wish it was easier to get clues like that more consistently, but it's certainly doable. I still believe within a year it'll be easy.
Great observation, yeah, I've had very similar experiences with prompting, exactly as you said -- one direction giving very bland literal clues, and the opposite direction giving clues that are a stretch even when you know the answer!
Thanks. Yes, specificity of solutions seems like a good metric to optimize for.
In some of my crosswords I get clues that are specific in clever ways (e.g. one of these has "Extreme, not camping" which I thought was really strange until I found the answer "intense" and was very impressed by that level of wordplay from an LLM!)
