sgware.bsky.social
I run the Narrative Intelligence Lab at U Kentucky where I do research and teach about storytelling AI and game dev. http://cs.uky.edu/~sgware
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Right. To me it seems they're happy to imagine a world with sufficient resources... they're just unwilling to allocate them to social causes.
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And if the code were somehow very cheap, there would at least be some (IMO bad) argument for it... but the level of resources they're pouring into AI training could have just gone to existing solutions, like said social workers etc.
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I might have to print and frame this quote.
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Is there a good version of one of these I could go watch on a streaming service?
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and/or because I haven't studied it
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What are your favorite comedies?
Not asking to dunk; I'm legit curious because I don't know them well enough to have options. I've seen like 3 productions of Midsummer and just did not really like it, but again that may just have been because they were amateur productions.
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in a way I never got from the text alone and haven't seen since, even in other comedies.
In fairness, a lot of the comedies I've seen were amateur Shakespeare-in-the-park sort of productions, so it's not really fair for me to hold them to such a standard.
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Reading various Shakespeare plays in high school, I would ask about parts like his and be told, "That's the comic relief part." And I just did not get how it could be funny beyond the sort of classic sitcom "Boy, isn't this an awkward situation?"
Fillion showed me how funny Shakespeare can be
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I know you mentioned you were ok with Fillion, so this isn't really a counterpoint, but his performance stands out to me because it communicates Shakespeare comedy in a way I never grasped before.
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That makes sense, because I don't know the play. If I had, I might feel the same way. But there's something to be said for a play being understandable without the need to study it in advance.
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Usually I have to read the (Shakespeare) play in advance before I can follow it on stage. Saw Branagh's Macbeth live in NYC, and the staging etc. was fantastic, but if I hadn't read it in advance I would have been totally lost.
I could follow the plot easily in the Whedon Ado.
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Beyond the diction and sound mixing, I like the delivery because it makes it understandable. This might just be because I am a pleb, but I found it extremely understandable at first blush in a way that most other Shakespeare I've seen hasn't been.
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I like it for some of the reasons people are hating on it here.
Yes, it does feel like movie night at Joss's house, but that's part of why I like it. I feel the feeling that Shakespeare doesn't have to be Wagner. It can be everyday cozy.
I also like the... diction and sound mixing?
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Umm, you're gonna need to explain this one before the bad take police get here.
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But we need a small army of profs with 1 or 2 RAs, $5k in travel a year, and the freedom to just do research instead of spending all their time trying to grow and sustain a lab.
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Yeah, I want this but at scale.
It will mean the end of our current R1 20-person mega-labs, but honestly I'm ok with that. Or at least if people want that kind of lab they need to find their own funding.
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I agree that truly great writing is increasingly rare. Or at least is getting lost in the din.
AI is making it worse, but it was happening before AI too.
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Yeah, the elevator pitch for my solution is "all TT lines should be endowed chairs." It's a little more nuanced, but that's close enough to get the message across.
I'm convinced it wouldn't be that much more expensive than our current system, and it would work so much better.
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So much time and money could be saved by just providing faculty a steady stream of resources. Think how much more research we could do if we didn't spend half our time writing grants?
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I think that's also a symptom of funding becoming scarce. With so little to give, NIH has to make sure it goes to the best people, so they have to keep increasing scrutiny and raising standards, which just costs more in overhead, which just increases costs.
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Yeah. It's a symptom of the unfortunate businessification of academia rather than viewing it as an expense that provides a public good.
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Oh, absolutely. If NSF had continued to see funding increases and maintained it's original funding rate, it would have been a solution. But instead it was left to wither while the science it was meant to foster flourished.
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TT jobs should come with certain levels of staff (RAs post docs), travel funds, etc. that are ongoing. It would reflect a philosophy that maintaining a population of professional scientists is valuable infrastructure for the country instead of focusing on individual results from individual projects.
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I think universities should consider funding for things like grad RA lines essential expenses, like salary and startup funds.
Instead of giving scientists an infusion of funds at the start and then expecting them to raise their own money going forward,
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Personally, I would like to see universities absorb this responsibility.
NSF and other funding has all the problems you correctly identified. It wasn't consistent enough to maintain scientific infrastructure, even before these massive cuts.
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Not to be too glib about it, but that's basically what the NSF is: a massive crowd-funding of science. A national will that science is important, but one that protects both individual scientists and individual taxpayers from getting upset by small failures.
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Crowd funders often want specific deliverables on a schedule. How many "failed Kickstarts" can happen before faith in science as a process is even further eroded? I think very few.
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I so deeply want something like this to happen, but I have a hard time imagining it working.
Science is such a gradual thing, with so many small failures along the way to discovery. So many projects end up with different results than intended.
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If we're going to say that protesting benefits fascists, then what exactly does NOT protesting do?