I've been trying for years (by example) to popularize using PT, MT, CT, ET. Since it's always after a number ("Are you avail at 4ET?") there has never been one instance of confusion, and I save typing and avoid the small but real possibility of being interpreted too literally (suppose someone asks a computer "What time is 4:00 PM EST in London time" during the summer, and gets a 'technically correct' answer).
This is the kind of imprecision that enrages me, though, because I am a resident of Arizona, and we observe MST all year long. It is currently MST. It is not MDT here. Therefore if we say, like, "it's 4:33pm MT" here and someone presumes that we are in DST, they would be wrong, and they would make the wrong conversion.
That is exactly why I am enraged by "EST"-users out of season. Because they are deliberately insensitive to people who are actually in Standard Time.
But it actually seems to be deeply ingrained into American-centric corporate culture. I had a WFH job in a large company that was nearly 100% WFH, and they consistently used "EST" to their detriment. And I kept challenging this apparently-unwritten policy, and they just said "it's always been this way". And this month I've even caught UPS using it: yeah, the United Parcel Service was quoting transit times for one of my parcels in terms of EST, which was utterly nonsensical to me.
It seems that people don't mean "Standard Time" anymore when they write "EST" but simply "EaStern Time" and it is implicitly understood by human communicators to definitely not mean Standard Time except when it does. I went around with Gemini LLM about this for awhile. I cannot explain why people would embrace an obviously incorrect acronym, but they really have.
I'm totally with you. Although if I moved to Arizona, I think instead of using "MST" 365 days a year and confusing all the people from other states during the 7 DST months, I would use "PT" in the summer and "MT" in the winter. Annoying to have to keep track of other people's dumb time changes (boy, do I hate DST), but it means you'd be doing the same twice-a-year change-up as we're wishing the "EST/PST" abusers did.
Honestly all this imprecision is because no standards body ever figured out a good way to turn the tzinfo codes ("America/Los_Angeles, America/Phoenix, America/Denver, America/Chicago, America/New_York"), which is what we are all actually trying to convey, into abbreviations. So we're stuck with identifiers like "-07:00" or "PDT" which have to be updated when the stupid time change happens.
No, when people misuse the language they are wrong. Their bad use does not become correct just because it's popular. Linguistic descriptivism is a nonsense idea.
I used to play an MMOG called "Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates", and their servers were located in California. They used Pacific Time as their in-game clock and time zone. So they would call it "Pirate Time" and that easily fit into the mold of the "PT" abbreviation. It seemed perfect and foolproof to me.
However, the majority of the players on all the "oceans" (servers) converged on a different term for it. They called it "Game Time" or "GT" or "gt". I am unsure if this was a carry-over from common parlance in other games, or just something they felt more comfortable with using. I was not comfortable. People talking about "10:30 gt" was jarring and confusing to my neurospicy intellect. It surprised me, then annoyed me, then I had to mentally translate it back into "Pirate Time" and thus to "Pacific Time" as I was not in that time zone, and MST does not have a "constant offset" into Pacific Time.
So there was a case where the game admins prescribed, and adhered, to one standard term, and the players simply rejected it and supplied their own. So I do not know what "problem" was solved by that collective action, but mostly everyone seemed comfortable with it. It wasn't "wrong" or misleading per se because it was simply an invented acronym.
"EST" is wrong and it is not simply a preference to write the wrong timezone. If people like me, in perpetual MST, struggle to determine what offset is meant by "EST" then it's imprecise and misleading. We cannot merely say it's "descriptivist" and roll with it. Anyone who wants to avoid dealing with DST can simply write "ET" instead. Eastern Time. Easily interpreted, perennial, never wrong based on season or month.
But instead they've collectively insisted on co-opting an existing term and twisting it. Let's not be "descriptivist" in aiding and abetting misleading terms. Hopefully, if the U.S. completely bows out of Standard Time, something will change? I mean if we're permanently in DST, will corporations insist on sticking with their "EST" standards? That would be... bizarre.
> If people like me, in perpetual MST, struggle to determine what offset is meant by "EST" then it's imprecise and misleading. We cannot merely say it's "descriptivist" and roll with it.
We can though. Say EST out loud like it's a single word. It sounds like "east," as in "eastern." Next, pronounce all three letters: E S T. It still sounds like "east." This is why people use EST when they mean eastern. They aren't talking about daylight or standard time, they're talking about the time in New York.
Okay then, genius! Is it UTC-5, or UTC-4! Quick, calculate this across the cusp of Halloween and November 1st! Remember, you live in a region that never observes or switches to DST, so you have no idea when the switch actually happens!
I answered lol, it's "the same time as it is in New York." This isn't hard to understand unless you're a machine with very rigid and prescribed rules I guess. It's 11:51am where I live, and I know by instinct, having lived here my whole life, that New York is one hour ahead of me, Denver is one hour behind me, and LA is two hours behind me. Ergo, it's 12:51pm EST.
I suppose if I lived in a timezone where we don't switch between daylight and standard time twice a year I might have to rub two of my braincells together to remember if they "spring ahead" or "fall back" at the moment, but the entropy generated by that extra bit of recall seems trivial.
It's not wrong, is it? I didn't want to trust myself, Wikipedia agrees that the Riemann hypothesis is equivalent to Λ = 0 (because the lower bound is now 0). This proof lowers the upper bound, but we still don't know if it's 0 or between 0 and that upper bound (inclusive).
The Chinese version of the website through Google Translate shows the same LLMisms, so while I don't know which version was authored first but neither was human-authored regardless of language proficiency.
You're definitely in a certain environment of readers. There are populations living on this Earth reading AI-generated books that are available on Amazon, an AI-generated TV shows. I am not recommending you try to engage and consume that content, just saying that it exists and there are people that either don't notice or don't mind.
> Buzz is an open-source, self-hosted workspace that combines team chat, AI agents and Git hosting using signed Nostr events, so teams can keep control of their data.
It’s kinda interesting seeing what, IIRC, was originally a subreddit name which spawned from an AskReddit thread, is now a common marketing phrase in the tech world.
Similar to the sub itself, it’s now just shorthand for “describe using the first principles the expected audience should understand.”
I imagine a lot of people in the industry also fondly remember the 2010s reddit experience.
Not sure how long the subreddit has existed but I always assumed it was inspired by the episode of The Office where Michael asks Oscar to explain what a surplus is like he's 5. The broader usage on social media and the ELI5 shorthand are definitely the result of the subreddit though.
This article is definitely abusing the terminology, because I wouldn't expect even tech-knowledgeable people to know what Nostr is or does.
The original joke for anyone who doesn't know or remember, Michael, the manager, asks his accountant to explain what a surplus is like he would to an 8 year old. Michael doesn't understand this and asks for how he would explain it to a 5 year old, which Oscar does a very good job with explaining and Michael finally understands.
Later the security guard is called upstairs to break a tie on votes for what to spend the surplus on, and Michael starts reciting Oscar's 5 year old explanation, and the guard cuts him off saying he knows what a surplus is.
I have to imagine this is sort of a joke about the audience too as inevitably the writers were considering that audience members might not know what a surplus is, and this kind of joke is an opportunity to explain it.
I remember when the sub was first created, I think there was an understanding it didn’t actually mean you were explaining to five year olds. Hard to recall exactly when it was created though, so definitely awhile ago.
> The purpose of this subreddit is to simplify complex concepts in a way that is accessible for laypeople.
> The first thing to note about this is that this forum is not literally meant for 5-year-olds. Do not post questions that an actual 5-year-old would ask, and do not respond as though you're talking to a child.
It’s way older than Reddit, it’s older than the Office. I remember Denzel Washington saying it in some movie when I was a kid, and I doubt it originated there. Doesn’t Einstein have a quotation about it, too?
>it’s now just shorthand for “describe using the first principles the expected audience should understand.”
I think at that it still fails pretty bad. I suppose the expected audience is quite a bit broader than people who would know or actually care what nostr events are. Maybe my expectation is off though.
When the doctor slapped my ass directly after I was born I reportedly turned to him and in a serious tone inquired "why did you do that, explain it to me like I was 5" which so freaked the poor man out that he dropped me on my head, and thus I myself have no recollection of the event.
He was later sent to an asylum for the criminally insane although he used to break out and try to hunt me down to kill me for being "evil".
In this article, it's just an AI-generated TL;DR, tagline, sub-title box that was badly prompt-engineered and the website owners didn't care about its quality. I am pretty sure the entire website is an AI generated news aggregator.
Seriously, what's hope is left for adults when a 5 year old understands signed Nostr events? The ELI-SWE is the docs I guess? I want to get off the Silicon Valley marketing express.
Ah, I missed that, and didn't click through the links. Most of the videos are not showing any animation for me, only Opus / Qwen / Muse, so Grok's attempt looked broken.
A Jewish comedian made a joke about how jews (only in the US*) were offended that Ferengi in Star Trek were based on them - "why would we assume these ugly greedy people are _us_?"
*Outside the US, it looks like the Ferengi are mocking American capitalist culture.
Sidestepping your original premise - how do the Ferengi even make sense in Star Trek? Its supposed to be a post-scarcity society, at least on an individual level - and an imperialist one on a civilization-scale, the latter being a step back even from how the modern world works.
Not everything is post-scarcity, mostly food and clothes. Land, fuel, weapons, art, fame, and labor are still limited resources in the Star Trek world. Also, not everywhere is post-scarcity, as we see many "poor" or restricted societies. The post-scarcity bit is mostly about a social safety net for individuals in the Federation.
Even within the Federation, colonies can collapse and fail, experience famine, plague, etc. Tasha Yar came from one such colony that had regressed into violent anarchy.
The Federation is a post-scarcity utopia until the writers want something interesting to write about. Then the Federation gives some colonies to the Cardassians and you get the Maquis.
> The Federation is a post-scarcity utopia until the writers want something interesting to write about.
Similar to Iain Banks' Culture novels. The Culture is so utopian that there is no interesting conflict, so all of the action is driven by contact with less developed civilizations.
(You talk about the Federation itself, but IIRC Star Trek also often deals with external forces - in any case, "everything is great" isn't interesting for long)
I never knew about this complaint either, the connection never occured to me at the time as the capitalist cristicism seemed par for the course for a post-scarcity Federation. I don't understand this knee-jerk self -owning behavior. It's like that bizarre tweet by the Israeli government about the photo of an IDF soldier destroying a Christian ornament. The gov. official insisted that the physical features of the soldier contained so many antisemitic tropes that it had to be AI. Thus, the guy was inadvertantly described as the ugliest person on the planet in excruciating detail by his own government.
> Armin Shimerman addressed the issue when asked at a question-and-answer session at a Star Trek convention. He stated that:
> In America, people ask "Do the Ferengi represent Jews?" In England, they ask "Do the Ferengi represent the Irish?" In Australia, they ask if the Ferengi represent the Chinese ... The Ferengi represent the outcast ... it's the person who lives among us that we don't fully understand.[30]
Given that DS9 showrunner and co-creator Michael Piller was in fact Jewish, I highly doubt that the Ferengi are some sort of stealth Nazi propaganda. They're either a mockery of the "happy merchant" stereotype beloved of anti-Semites, or (more likely) just a critique of greed and capitalism itself.
What's funny is that Leonard Nimoy (Jewish) based his portrayal of Spock on the idea that the Vulcans were the space Jews. This idea kind of comes to a head in the 2009 movie, in which a guy named after a Roman emperor destroys Vulcan, causing a Vulcan diaspora...
... Depends on where we are looking at in the real-world episode production timeframe.
TNG did still resort to 'caricatures as a default', If we are to be a tiny bit bold and look closer at DS9 and how, if you look at a lot of the other stuff outside 'Far Beyond The Stars'.
What you find is that DS9 is very much about people facing pressure from their culture or background and over time learning there's a better way to do things. So many major and minor characters change over the course and part of it is seeing how hard it is and what it takes for each of them to change. I do think they 'over-used' the Ferengi for this but I get they were trying to target a general level of audience.
IMO it really was a hopeful attempt to recognize cultural versus racial problems. You can't just do a single speech and never visit the hat planet again; you are next to one of the hat planets and instead get a deeper look into their world.
.....
DS9 did over-emphasize the Ferengi change arcs, and while the end fits with other 'themes' (i.e. Bell Riots) it like most other hat changes didn't have huge implications till after what we the viewer would see.
But also I kinda get that whole thing. At the end of the day the Ferengi (whether originally intended or not) became something meant to symbolize extreme laissez-faire capitalism with perhaps a pinch of twisted reversal of other cultures/religions[1] because yeah I'm gonna blame that bit on whoever was in charge or TNG at the time (Was it Rick Berman?)
[0] - To be clear I mean for the sake of this topic; those episodes themselves with the original ending to DS9 frankly capture a lot of the 'hope' that was trying to be conveyed in the face of all the strife...
[1] - The most easy way to lampshade 'required clothing' is to instead do 'required non-clothing'
When being defensive about the genocide, some people invoke against the protesters, e.g. "Where were you when the atrocities in Sudan were happening?", admitting that the genocide being committed is as bad as the Sudan conflict...
I think that is a bad example. I haven't heard of Jewish people being offended by Ferengi, but anti-Semitic depictions are very often exactly "ugly, greedy people" (just look at any Nazi propaganda). Once it becomes a common thread it works less as a defense.
I imagine "small hands" would similarly work poorly as a defense against a defamation suit from Trump: he doesn't have to claim he has small hands, only that he is often depicted as having them.
In the case of the Ferengi, "ugly greedy people with big noses," specifically greedy for an in-universe gold analogue, short, always cheating people; the analogues with common anti-semitic stereotypes are certainly there.
Then again Armin Shimmerman, who played Quark and is Jewish himself, has said that people in different countries see different stereotypes in the Ferengi - such as the Chinese or the Irish - so it probably depends on one's own own cultural indoctrination.
I think a better case could be made for the Klingons being racist caricatures, since in TOS their look was intentionally based on Asiatic and Mongol people in order to make them seem more frightening and villainous.
> I think a better case could be made for the Klingons being racist caricatures, since in TOS their look was intentionally based on Asiatic and Mongol people in order to make them seem more frightening and villainous.
In my head-canon TOS Klingons are Russia and Romulans are China.
Reasons for this;
- Star Trek 6 (The whole thing is an allegory for the end of the cold war, right down to Praxis being a stand-in for Chernobyl)
- That fight scene in 'The Trouble with Tribbles' that strikes me as 'feels like a rehashed tale about a barfight between Allied and Soviet soldiers in pre-split post WW2 Germany'
- Romulans being more 'secluded' and more about political and legal intrigue than violence (If we consider Klingon direct violence a stand-in for USSR/Russian 'maybe put in house arrest before we assasinate' vs China's 'throw the rigid legal book at them')
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