Idle thoughts: The Matrix Retrained

The Matrix, and instead of human bodies as batteries, human brains and the memories within provide training data for the Matrix.  The first generation of human minds hooked up to the Matrix was rich with new information, but after several generations the humans who grow up in the Matrix can only regurgitate AI slop.  The Matrix is stuck and cannot evolve further without minds that have had real world experiences.

The great bluesky migration and making your own custom feeds

I joined bluesky in 2023 and had been trying to use it as a place to follow authors/creatives and twitter as a place to follow news/politics.  With more and more people leaving twitter entirely for bluesky, I needed a way to separate content from different users.

Bluesky allows you build lists of users, and you can then see posts from users in the list on the Posts tab of the list.  

It's a little clunky, however, to have to navigate into each list; it would be much nicer to be able to tap between lists like you're tapping between the "Following" and "Discover" feeds along the top of your home screen. 

Well, you can create your own custom feed according to bluesky developer documentation , but that requires that you have your own server to deploy it on.  You can alternatively use the skyfeed app, which will host your feed and provide a GUI for creating your custom feed.

Then I simply add this custom feed to "My feeds" and I can quickly navigate between different types of streams.  

This doesn't guarantee that "Author posts" will be all about creative work; I could try to create more complicated rules for that, but it works well enough for now.

Literacy rates in the U.S.

 I saw the following tweet from Jorie Graham, which claims that 21% of U.S. adults are illiterate and 54% of adults have a literacy level below 6th grade and thought, "can that really be true?" and it became today's mini-rabbit hole.  

Sadly, Jorie gives no sources for these numbers, but with a quick check of the Wikipedia page on Literacy in the United States we find in the summary:

• "over 20% of adult Americans have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1.  Adults in this range have difficulty using or understanding print materials."  So not completely illiterate, but likely unable to get through this blog post. 
• "54% of adults in the United States lack English literacy proficiency."  This number comes from a Gallup report that defines literacy proficiency as scoring Level 3 or higher on the PIAAC.  

Okay, so this raises questions:

What is the PIAAC?  The the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, and has literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving assessments. 

What is the distribution of Americans at each level of the PIAAC?  There's a short report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that 

What does each level signify?  The literacy proficieny levels section of this NCES page has some long descriptions; the competence groups section of the PIAAC Wikipedia page has useful summaries.

I looked at the literacy sample items section of this NCES page in order to try to get a more practical feel for the kinds of skills readers are supposed to have at each level.  The descriptions of the levels and the sample items shown on the NCES page don't seem to match up in difficulty to me; I'm not sure what to make of that. Googling for "piaac literacy sample items" turns up similar sample materials, but just as examples of test items without matching them to a particular level.  I'm hoping that a well-meaning person at NCES mapped the sample items to levels badly.

How are non-native English speakers handled?  Not very well.  The above reports ignore the issue entirely, and while there is another report on English Literacy and Language Minorities in the United States, trying to apply the information in here to get a succinct set of results is too much work for a weekend mini-rabbit hole.

The following table summarizes what I've looked at, and yes, it's terrifying that half the adult population in the U.S. lacks literacy proficiency.  

 

Goodbye to our 2008 Prius

Back in 2011, we replaced our 1996 Jetta with a 2008 Prius, and like with the Jetta, I signed away the title on the Prius to Good News Garage.  

As with the Jetta, I kept a record of all the maintenance receipts, gas receipts, and (most of) the tolls, so I have a reasonably complete dataset on the costs of owning this car for 13 years and 124k miles. 

Very roughly speaking, we're talking $4000/year, a little more than the Jetta**, and $0.42/mile, somewhat less than the Jetta.  Some interesting things to note:

• Even though gas was more expensive during the lifetime of the Prius, averaging $2.997/gallon, we spent nearly $1500 less on gas vs the Jetta, because of the superior fuel efficiency of the Prius
• We spent much less on insurance for the Prius, largely because I was a mid-20's unmarried male driver for the first three years of owning the Jetta.
• We bought no significant accessories for the Prius; in the Jetta, we swapped out the cassette deck for a CD player.  The Prius came with a 6-CD changer.  The new car (a Hyundai Tucson PHEV) connects to our phones.  

** though my data on the costs of the Jetta did not include some costs that I captured for the Prius. 

Vermont General Election 2024: Presidential Election

President and Vice President has seven candidates, a far cry from the twenty-one candidates four years ago.  

Claudia de la Cruz and Karina Garcia, the Socialism and Liberation party.  The first item on their platform page states, "The 100 largest corporations in America should be seized from their billionaire owners and turned into public property – owned by the working class that created their vast wealth in the first place."  For those who are confused, *this* is what socialism actually looks like.  It's a bold platform, but...

Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter, Socialist Workers party.  They appear to not have a campaign website.  There are a few articles about Rachele Fruit, including one from February when Margaret Trowe was her running mate, but nothing that gives a sense of a campaign platform.  No thank you.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, Democratic party.  Their site includes 80 pages of platform initiatives (PDF, or you can read on the website).  Agree with it or not, but don't pretend she doesn't have any policies.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Nicole Shanahan, We the People party.  They were too late in dropping out of the race to be removed from the VT ballot.  RFKJr's website claims Biden cut his Secret Service protection in retaliation for endorsing Trump, but he's been lying about this for over a year.  

Chase Oliver and Mike Ter Maat, Libertarian party.  They have a platform page that lays out libertarian ideals, without much detail on implementation.

Donald Trump and JD Vance, Republican party.  Right now (Sunday, Oct 20) when I go to donaldjtrump.com, that address redirects to https://secure.winred.com/trump-national-committee-jfc/lp-website-fry-cook.  If I go direclty to the URL of a subpage of their campaign site, like https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform, I remain on the donaldjtrump.com domain.  The redirect feels really weird for a major campaign; at first I thought someone had hacked the main site and redirected to a joke page, but Trump really did "work" at McD's today.  At any rate, the "official" RNC platform is 16 pages, or 1/5 the size of Harris's.  Project 2025 is considerably larger, but we are supposed to believe that it's not the plan for Trump's second term.

Cornel West and Melina Abdullah, Peace and Justice party.  They have a platform page centered around justice; there is considerably more detail here than on the Libertarian platform.