These days, just a retired guy who likes to hike.

  • 9 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Avoiding dupes is, I think, an important one. We’ve had multiple instances on Beehaw of the same story showing up more than once. If you try to post a duplicate link, Lemmy will let you know (by showing the previous copies to you as crossposts). It’s harder to make sure you’re not posting the second or third story from a different source on the same topic. Perhaps we can just encourage people to search before posting.

    I’d like the rules to at least ask people to add an image description in their original post. https://beehaw.org/post/686974 would be good to link to here.

    And given the nature of many posts in the news, I think it would be good for this community to remind people to be(e) nice in their discussions.


  • My own high school debate days are decades in the past. From that perspective, though, the fact that you can easily look up the judges’ biases, and so prepare for them, is a huge advance that we would never have even dreamed of. To me that seems like explicitly addressing biases in a useful way.

    I’d be interested in a more serious analysis that went through all 47,000+ paradigms and categorized biases so some non-anecdotal conclusions could be drawn. That would take a lot more time and money than picking out a few instances that the writer knows about.

    And yes, if an alternative ends up being liked better by debate coaches, people will go in that direction. It’s entirely possible that debate competition will end up being as fragmented as national politics.


  • The article here takes a bit stronger stance than “losing debates because of tweets”:

    The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

    The article calls out five judges for being biased. The NSDA site shows 47,168 paradigms. So, while there may be an issue, there doesn’t seem to be much proof here. It could equally well be that the author is cherry-picking instances that fit his ideology.









  • Yep, I get it. Effectively block ads and javascript and it doesn’t much matter what a site wants to do. I skip the few that have actually effective paywalls (as opposed to just putting a div over content on the page - as far as I’m concerned, if it’s downloaded to my computer, I am allowed to read it). Of course, the sites that load up on ads tend to be pretty low-quality content anyhow.



    • Every morning: 2 cups Cafix, 1 cup decaf coffee, 4 prunes
    • Alternate mornings: 1 thick slice homemade whole wheat bread, dipped in olive oil
    • The other mornings: 1 large sourdough pancake, dressed with olive oil and salt

    I usually eat breakfast around 5AM, and this holds me until lunch at 11AM.

    Pretty sure I’m not in the mainstream.




  • In addition to making it easier to find authentic perspectives, we’re also improving how we rank results in Search overall, with a greater focus on content with unique expertise and experience. Last year, we launched the helpful content system to show more content made for people, and less content made to attract clicks. In the coming months, we’ll roll out an update to this system that more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view, allowing us to rank more of this useful information on Search.

    That seems like just a step in the inevitable AI arms race.