4. I’m Gerald of Nivea. Up for a game of Pwent?

You’d be astounded at the places you’ll run into the idea that foreskin is gross. I was at a burlesque show - very left-leaning crowd - and the MC asked for “what ruins a bedroom experience for you”. “Uncut cock” was like the second answer and everyone hooted and hollered (though props to the MC, they managed to seem real uncomfortable while playing it off well). I’ve never had it directed at me thankfully, though I have had some surprise from one or two partner that I’m not cut.

I’ll say it til the day I die, I owe my mum a debt I can never repay for not letting my dad do that to me. Just one of the multitude of ways she protected me.

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For real. Removing SMS support was the biggest mistake they could have made IMO. Even though they’re right that SMS is stupidly insecure, that feature was crucial to getting people to adopt the app. As soon as they removed it, basically everyone I had convinced to install it dropped off. I still haven’t found a trustworthy replacement myself (open to suggestions), so I’m just using Signal alongside the stock Graphene messages app for SMS.

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I got Control: Ultimate Edition for $4 on sale recently and was really surprised by how good it is. One of the few games I’ve stuck with right through to beating it, and the DLC too. I’ve been considering Firebreak but the backlog is long and money is a little tight for frivolous promises right now. Sounds like I should play Alan Wake, though!

Emotional dysregulation is a bitch.

This is how society corrects behavior

Followed by

Your office comparisons are insignificant here

Really? School is where we learn how to treat other people, and we learn it by example as much as being told (more than, I’d contend).

Claiming this will immediately lead to bullying or just the threat that it might do is to an extent quixotic to me

First off, quote where I claimed it would immediately lead to bullying (good luck). Secondly, yes, whether believe it or not a teacher engaging in this behaviour signals to the other children that it’s okay, there’s an extremely elevated chance that they will take that and run with it.

If a teacher telling a kid to get their feet off the table, to stop shooting spit wads at the row in front of them, to stop rocking back their chair because they might tip over and fall - if all these situations are okay for a teacher to say out loud in front of the class: “Kevin, stop it!” - and I think they are - then telling the kid not to chew on communally shared erasers is no different.

Telling, yes. They’ve already told them to stop it. Your suggestion, however, was

I would go for gentle peer pressure. Point it out in class, do a friendly dressing down how none of the other students want to use the chewed on eraser. If he won’t stop if you say so, maybe you can get other kids to do the trick. The unwanted public attention from his peers might be enough.

“peer pressure”, “dressing-down”, “maybe you can get other kids to do the trick”. That last one in particular. How exactly do you think the other kids would do the trick? Harass the child into stopping, yeah? Or are you gonna come out now claiming that kids are masters of nuance and they’ll be able to get him to stop without resorting to bullying? Your initial suggestion was bad, but at this point you are being absolutely ridiculous. OP “weighed in against the suggestion” with the words

Kids at that age are ruthless, I absolutely can’t do that

And yet you still want to act like I’m in the wrong for saying that it would open the child up to bullying. An absolutely mind-blowingly dumb argument. I sure hope you’re not responsible for children with this kind of thinking; I had a few teachers like you and I hated them for it.

I’d be curious for a follow-up post if you find a way to help him with this! I was this kid when I was little, and needed help and kindness, but there was no understanding for autistic behaviours back then so what I got instead was bullied. I appreciate that you went looking for help instead of just throwing up your hands 🤗

I read your checklist, and I think you missed the bit where I said “when it sounds like all other options have been exhausted”. There’s absolutely no need for the “peer pressure” component, it’s unnecessary to call out a kid on front of a class like that when you could just as easily have a private conversation with the kid about it, and I suggest you think about what it means to enable bullying without actively participating in it.

I don’t think they will go full Lord of the Flies on him

You have no way of accurately predicting this, because it’s children we’re talking about, and they are famously agents of chaos.

I can’t think of a single office I’ve worked where it would be considered professional to call someone out for minorly problematic behaviour in front of all their colleagues, and I don’t see any reason it would be considered acceptable with children either.

https://weworkremotely.com/

https://www.dice.com/

https://remote.co/

I can’t give any of these my personal +1 as I haven’t used them, but I’ve seen their names around for years. Good luck!

I understand why you’d go there when it sounds like other options have been exhausted, but I don’t think it would be a good idea. Seems like calling the kid out like this would only open up opportunities for bullying, without doing anything to address the source of the issue.

Sounds like it could be a stim thing - impulsive, you say? Any chance there’s (undiagnosed?) ASD there? The mentions of bitter spray reminded me of when my mother tried that to get me to stop biting my nails. I just stopped using my lips and tongue, and only used my teeth…

Anyway, if it’s a stimulation thing, maybe finding an alternative would be easier than getting him to stop entirely.

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In any fight, circumstances are king. You need far, far more variables defined in order to be able to answer this question, and even then it won’t be a certain outcome. Who has the element of surprise? What’s the age, weight, and sex of the tiger (and the wolves)? How recently have the tiger/wolves eaten? Does anyone slip on a banana peel during the encounter?

Maybe we’re going about this wrong. Are you trying to make sure the tiger is dead or are you trying to use as few wolves as possible?

It can do that for school level stuff because that material is present in it’s input dataset in a redundant manner. For anything niche or domain-specific, it will hallucinate or fail.

I typically don’t have an issue getting a grasp on fundamentals, so most of the things I want to ask it about might be beyond school-level. My main way of learning is to ask questions to make sure I understand the material - which means more potential hallucination points, and maybe worse impact because I’ll think I get it, but I’ve just been confidently lied to that I understood.

For example, I’ve wondered for a while if patches of space with less gravitational curvature “age” faster than patches that are more heavily distorted by gravity wells, and what the implications of that might be. Makes sense, we know that gravity slows down subjective time. But I can’t get a productive answer out of an LLM because I can’t trust it, and it’s not worth bothering my physicist friends about.

Ah-ha, now there’s an interesting use case. I’ve had occasion in the past to work on PCB design - to be clear I didn’t do the design myself, I have no idea wtf I’m doing there, but I’m capable of reading spec sheets and soldering - and when I had to sub in components, I managed to find what I needed by filtering down for specs on DigiKey using their search. I think an LLM could have saved me a bit of time there if I could’ve just fed it the BOM and asked for alternatives, and over the course of all the subs I had to do for the particular project I’m thinking of (it was during Chinese New Year so it was tough getting answers from suppliers) that would have added up.

“I only ask questions to LLMs if I already know the answer”

Not a developer here. I’ve been thinking about this because I hoped LLMs would be able to help me learn things at first, like a patient tutor I can ask all my stupid questions and it’ll never get annoyed with me. Since it can’t do that though, because it lies all the time, I don’t think I have a use case for it at all… About all it can do for me is rewrite or summarise English, and it doesn’t even do a particularly good job of that most of the time so I end up saving time by doing that work myself anyway. I suppose it’s pretty good at translating, but I haven’t tried it for that as I don’t have a lot of call to speak foreign languages.

Well, okay, I understand what you mean and why, but you stated “water is a mineral according to the dictionary” in your post, so I was just clarifying that bit. So yeah, Merriam-Webster is wrong.

Edit: Again, sorry. This is the internet and pedants like me thrive here 😅