"this could have been slop, but it's not" is rapidly becoming a surefire signifier of premium-ness

My school did semesters. I broadly enjoyed college.

Well, I mean, that's accounting.

What's unpleasant about it besides the cost?

I think the one exception to this is colleges. As @mtsw.bsky.social has noted, for many Americans college is the one and only time in their life when they live in a dense walkable setting.

“The average American can no more imagine the texture, habits, and routines of everyday life in a walkable urban community than they can imagine completely cutting meat out of their diet. Maybe less so.” @ad-mastro.bsky.social

What's the pitch for a loss leader that harms your brand?

A lot of money to be made selling to illiterate execs.

I'm sorry why even pay for Qualtrics? Just ask random people at your company what they think.

Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”

Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

What is this?

How are the books?

Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who tackled one of the Bondi killers, became an Australian citizen 3 years ago.

His deed was "his way of conveying his gratitude for staying in Australia, for being granted citizenship."

He took 5 bullets, and fears he'll lose his left arm.

www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...

The fact that Chomsky is friends with Epstein and Bannon and engages in genocide denialism does not speak highly of him.

The fact that Chomsky and Bannon are friends also points to the whole Eyes White Shut nature of those with cultural power. In the end nothing really matters for them.

What nuance and context is there about a guy befriending a sex trafficker?

I love how she is a supposed journalist trying to weasel her way around questions like a PR person.

I hope she talks better than she writes.

Hey, have some respect. She is the writer of her generation. She can write so many words.

When mere mortals like us try to write, we use few words to get our point across, but when Olivia writes she uses as many as she can possibly get away with.

It's a proper clanker mess out there.

I think everyone but the federal government has admitted that the economy is not doing well and in some industries and areas it is doing quite bad.

Ideas are generally the easy part of everything. And even when ideas are critical, it's the people who can do that have better ideas.

Grey cat wedged between two painted bannisters half way up the stairs. Gazing into the distance. Paws crossed.

Nobly guarding the bannisters

Editing in particular helps a lot. The big mistake people make with prompting is that they just wing it, hoping to kind of work their way through it with follow-ups.

But starting with a good, well-edited prompt where you have thought through the potential results will set you up a lot better.

I am thinking specifically of a product brief that explains what you are doing and why. You go over requirements, often with bullet points.

Any kind of good, structured writing will help a lot, though. The process of editing helps a lot, too, as you want to think through the prompt.

To an extent, but a good prompt is closer to a well-written brief than a college essay.

I had my worst writing impulses beaten out of me by a freshman journalism professor and never looked back.

She is young and overtly sexual but in no way hot. Her hotness, as it were, is almost entirely defined by horny old men.

We don't need to be gaslit about her attractiveness.

#blocked

She looks like Yassified Squidward. And you could use her face as a cheese grater in a pinch.

I don't like to comment on people's looks, but this has got to stop. Old editors and politicians find her hot because she is young and has no morals, but let's pace ourselves here.