That’s literally what the new Facebook policy is that she’s referring to in the article… it was previously banned, zuck has decided that it’s now perfectly acceptable, if not encouraged behavior.
I understand your objection to the policy, I just don't understand where in this thread you latched onto anything objectionable. At most the OP said the slurs don't make sense (really they didn't even say that, they just clarified the subject of what they were saying made sense).
Are you saying the slurs DO make sense? Or is it possible you added some words to what the OP actually said and then objected to that?
Also, merely them knowing you have a lawyer instantly reframes the problem in their eyes. The path of least resistance to dealing with a "problematic" student is making the student go away. The path of least resistance to dealing with a "problematic" student with a lawyer is making the lawyer go away.
All of a sudden bureaucrats will be getting visits from internal legal departments asking very pointed questions about questionable actions.
Yes, and even if it doesn't go to court, the university will know that it will cost them time and money.
It's entirely possible that university president or higher administration is unaware of the situation, and if they were, will intervene. The best way to do that is to have it brought to their attention via a legal letter, which then means they need to bring in their lawyers.
A good lawyer for the university won't want to fight because fighting is not in the best interest of the university. A good lawyer will say "We threatened the student with this? No good can come of that... let him register, let him graduate and make this all go away."
That doesn't mean the client (the university) will take it, but overall fighting isn't in their interest either.
> Roman Empire’s use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
I'm not a fan of this phrasing. None of the findings had anything to do with measuring IQ levels in ancient Europe. They were about measuring historical levels of lead, which they then just plugged into modern models to presume some levels of cognitive effects.
A study that was actually able to measure cognitive disparities and correlate them with measured levels of lead would have been extremely interesting, but this is not that. Everything other than the measurements of historical lead levels seems to be fluff.
This would kind of be like saying "massive asteroid strike 100m years ago lead to cataclysmic tsunami, study finds" but then not showing any evidence of a tsunami, just evidence that it struck an ocean and the inference that that would have caused a tsunami. It might be a reasonable inference, it's just not as interesting as the title would make it seem.
Edit: I should qualify, I'm not trying to say that "they did the math"-style papers don't have value, just that the phrasing in how they are presented matters to me. If the phrasing was more like "Use of lead in Roman Empire would have lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds" I would have no issue with it.
Could also happen that all the advances in hygiene and infrastructure and logistics during the Roman empire had a more positive impact on IQ than the negative effect of lead. Not starving while growing up does wonders for the brain.
Plenty of people starved...just not (in their better centuries) the better-off Romans.
For (presumed) IQ benefits, I'd focus more on the hygiene, and the relatively disease-free drinking water which all those lead pipes & lead-lined aqueducts provided. (Plus the sewers.) There were lots of nasty diseases you could catch by drinking the water in ancient cities. And at scale, "lead lowered IQ" isn't much different to "unable to think well while ill", to "higher mortality makes education a poorer investment".
That a very reductive view. Data shows that during the Roman empire, people moved on mass from hill forts into the flatlands (presumably giving better acess to agroculture, trade and water). We also see far more material culture, and not just for rich people. Huge amount of just common consumer goods, and this even streches far beyond the borders of the empire itself. Population also increased during this time.
Yes, many places part of the empire for 100s, sometimes even 1000 years.
And conquest is of course always bad. But that wasn't the point you were making.
You were talking as if there was constant large scale starvation in Rome, and there for the most part wasn't. You point that only rich Roman elites didn't regularly starve isn't really true. And its certainty not true in comparison to other places in the ancient world.
Yes they did… they edited their comment after I responded and could no longer edit mine.
You just looking for an argument? Its important people know writing and roads weren’t invented by the romans. They are given way too much credit by Americans with imperial ambitions.
Fully agree, @peeters - as I've mentioned elsewhere in these comments, there's a long-standing trend of trying to identify the one true cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. Each explanation falls short - it's just a complicated thing (and heck, the empire didn't really fall, it just shifted east.)
Something a lot of people don't realise is that the last of the "Roman" states (that called themselves Roman) didn't cease until about 50 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic (xref the fall of Constantinople).
Oh it's really easy to extrapolate stuff. But perhaps they shouldn't. A lot of papers I've seen recently have wild romantic extrapolations based on cherry picked correlations.
Some of the social sciences are terrible at this. A former partner was a researcher in one of what I now consider to be less respectable fields and she would come up with a feely conclusion and fit the data to it and publish it. Wanted me to co-author one with her and do the statistical analysis. Told her I don't want to be on Retraction Watch.
That could explain how the lead poisoning crowd took over.
No, there won't be any retractions, you will be "educated" that you are stupid, "anti science", and too stupid to understand the newly discovered "fact".
Yeah if you don't toe the line of the more senior people in the speciality, next thing you know you're outcast from your institution and no one will talk to you.
This is why I do mathematics. Most of it is impossible to argue against once there's a solid proof :)
1. Lactose Tolerance: The ability to digest lactose as adults evolved in populations with a history of dairy farming, such as those in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.
2. Disease Resistance: Genetic adaptations to diseases like malaria (e.g., sickle cell trait) have become more common in certain regions.
3. Skin Pigmentation: Variations in skin color have continued to adapt to UV exposure in different regions, influenced by migration and interbreeding.
4. Height and Physique: Improved nutrition and health care have led to an increase in average height and changes in body composition in many populations.
5. Wisdom Teeth: A gradual decrease in jaw size has made wisdom teeth less functional, and they are increasingly absent in some populations.
6. Brain Function: While the brain's size and structure remain unchanged, shifts in cognitive demands and education have influenced how we use our brains.
And none of that is at all relevant to how lead affects the human brain and so is completely useless. You should have asked it "Would lead lower IQ in humans 2000 years ago the same way it does today?" This is what DeepSeekv3 says:
Yes, lead exposure would have likely had similar detrimental effects on human cognition and IQ 2000 years ago as it does today. Lead is a neurotoxin that interferes with the development and function of the brain, particularly in children. Its harmful effects on intelligence, behavior, and overall health are well-documented in modern studies, and these effects would have been the same in the past, even if they were not understood at the time.
No more useless than blind blanket assumptions, which was the point.
> Yes, lead exposure would have likely had similar detrimental effects on human cognition and IQ 2000 years ago as it does today. ...these effects would have been the same in the past...
I challenge you to consider that details matter, and one of those details is that the recent past through today has seen significantly more exposure to airborne lead than existed 2,000 years ago.
Interesting that this is making the rounds...maybe OP also had this recent video show up in their Youtube feed? It includes interview clips with John Norton, the author of this paper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjZB81jCGj4
An interesting countermetric would be to after each iteration ask a fresh LLM (unaware of the context that created the code) to summarize the purpose of the code, and then evaluate how close those summaries are to the original problem spec. It might demonstrate the subjectivity of "better" and how optimization usually trades clarity of intention for faster results.
Or alternatively, it might just demonstrate the power of LLMs to summarize complex code.
> There’s no reason why I need 20,000 items on the screen at the same time. Fewer but more legible items are better. I can scroll for more.
I'm reasonably sure most spreadsheet power users would have the opposite preferences to you. I do, for one. Data density is everything in non-trivial spreadsheets.
To be fair that was quite a late addition to the language all things considered. It could be he learned Java before it existed, or had most of his experience in 1.4 (which survived quite long in some environments because 1.5 was such a huge overhaul). But still, a good dev will keep up to date with language features.
Awesome job! If you want him to get some experience with bug fixing, I found one: ask him what happens if you click on an attack and then hit escape (it cancels the attack but still charges up your attacks, so you can get to full charge on your first attack)
oh not "yikes" at all I totally peaked at the code to try to find one for him. I feel like bug fixing at that age is a fun exercise; it gets you thinking more laterally about the program you're writing.
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