FriendOfDeSoto

I have a strong suspicion that language prescribed by an Iranian official will have no bearing on what people call that region in English.

"Middle East" is a reference point from the British Isles where there is a more significant chunk of geography directly east of it. When you move into Central Europe, the ME region is called "near East" when translated literally. Because we are already a bit further east and the reference points change. There isn't an English-language equivalent in the West because there's mostly water.

Having exported this language to beyond mostly water to the new world, the designation stuck although it makes no sense from a North American perspective. If we all spoke a truly international version of Esperanto, things might be different. But that's not how it worked out.

I don't think ME as a term has acquired the same problematic stench as "orient" and variants thereof in English. Cardinal directions are quite resistant to that. The Confederate States of America haven't ruined "South" as a term. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea hasn't made "North" go out of style.

Startpage is owned by an American advertising company.

Eff me, really? Can you back this up? I only see a company in The Netherlands.

Google in particular getting worse to get you to click through more results pages or to run more queries so they can sell more ads on each of those is well attested. I used Bing for a while and didn't think it was better or worse than newly bad Google. So now I use an equally shitty non-US search engine (start page) and just give up sooner.

In their defence, I think the exponentially increasing content of the internet, and the not insignificant portion that just sits there dead or unmaintained, plus the bits and bytes that just disappear as subscriptions or support run out are difficult problems. It's getting ever harder to write an algorithm to sort through that as well. That plus greed equals shit.

Pre-Google we had very shitty search results. Than Google became the Kleenex, the word everybody used. Then Google got worse. While my faith in "American Intelligence" is somewhat limited, I think we will get back to better results soon. What Google had to do (build big server farms to look at all of the internet to index it) may become trivially easy for a sufficiently good LLM eventually. Although we're not there yet. Given that it's not just Microsoft or Google fighting in that market for dominance, I live in hope that competition from OpenAI etc. lights a fire under their arses.

Why aren't they automatically looking for business links between Slovenian domain vendors and the First Family? Melania is Slovenian after all and it would be such a misstep if not even her extended family got to profit from this one.

Not much. You nurse it for a while. And most of the time, our human instinct for adapting to a changing condition kicks in. There is truth to the adage that time heals all wounds. I would add it may not heal it entirely but sufficiently.

A broken heart is like that. After a while you get used to it. And you'll probably move on without realising it. And until you get there, distract yourself. Only hardcore introverts benefit from being alone.

So much for the platitudes. Every case is different. You may realise in time that extra steps are necessary. Like a physical move or a change in profession, etc.

That depends. Is the puzzle alive and capable of reasonable thought?

I don't buy into "wood" obviously meaning "sandalwood." If you have lived with carpenters, they smell like fresh timber and sweat. So if that wasn't an option, I don't think the contestant was specific enough.

The problems with describing this like one parabola are two-fold for me. If we look at the long arm of history, we as a species have been far less interconnected so knowledge wasn't shared to the same extent it often is today. One of the reasons why a hypothetical Covid-819 would've killed more people. At the same time, various regions have gone through their own periods of trouble, dark ages, decays of empires, and religious doom. You'd have to interpolate quite heavily in the bottom part of the parabola to get started. Bronze tools could take a century to spread. Strictly speaking, Gutenberg didn't invent book printing; China beat him to it. But the repercussions of his movable type were arguably far more reaching. Or more recently, the industrial revolution started around 1750 but didn't affect a majority on this planet until about 50 years later. There were uncontacted people it never reached that were washed away by the 2006 tsunami. Where to plot these things on an overarching exponential graph become choices. And thus a statistic you're forging yourself.

And then exponential means at some point we're going to reach a point where we near constantly innovate stuff. You'd have to do the work of two scientific Nobel prizes before you had your first piss in the morning just to keep up with the pace. This pace of development isn't sustainable. There has to be an out.

That's why I would favour a model based on quantum leaps that show localised growth in hockey stick curves. Change today may seem fundamental and omnipresent. But 🫲 six seven 🫱 probably never reached North Korea.

Can you back up the claim of exponential change? For my money we get occasional quantum leaps that end in hockey stick curves.

Technology isn't everything.

Does your research consider recency bias as well? More or less every generation looks at the world changing in front of them. And every generation considers this the most dramatic change ever. I remember the fall of the USSR and we all thought this is the most significant change in history - it was not. The internet and social media was the next big transformation and the sky was falling - we're still here. All things considered, the generation in the right age bracket for military service in the late 1930s probably has a better claim on the most dramatic change happening in front of them. So I'm just wondering if you consider these biases?

I didn't call you a bad teacher. And I'm much more forgiving of your rant now that I know. And I'm sorry I explained your chronic underfunding to you, like you didn't know.

I am more forgiving of ableist attitudes ≠ completely forgiving of it. You're mad at the situation. Everybody needs to let off steam.

I'm going to assume you have already sent your problematic experiences up the flagpole, to no avail. How are your prospects for changing jobs? Not necessarily profession but maybe at a different school? It's no use trying to ride that tiger every day when this affects you this much.

For your own protection, you need to take the venting offline. I think you may have already given enough details for your bosses to identify you here. The days of shouting anonymously into the digital void are over. An LLM has the computing power and patience of an army to find and ID you. So if I were you, I'd delete this post, delete the account, and look for trustworthy ears who won't rat you out next time the pressure in your cauldron is redlining.