I'd like you to familiarise yourself with a legal and societal principle we use in civil law countries:
> de minimis non curat praetor
Which basically means judges are not interested in minor disputes. When you add the USA to the mix, China's actions pale in comparison to the point of being negligible, no point in discussing them given the scale of USA's warmongering, overseas and local crimes. "They never interfered in [...]" is an exaggeration which shows the lack of importance of China's crimes when compared to the USA's, that's all.
The "whataboutism" here isn't a deflection strategy, it shows the hypocrisy and correctly minimises the scale of China's actions in comparison to the hypocrites'.
Is it paywalled? I honestly didn't realize that. Sorry.
I'll edit the comment and change to an open URL and paste the two main ideas here:
FORCED SKILL-BUILDING GOALS
Where my original purpose of giving homework assignments was to help students build their skills through active engagement, I can no longer trust that all my students will have done it by hand. But I still want my students to feel the need to improve their skills. So, I start by considering which skills I think are most important for that class (writing, for example) and build a forced need for my students to improve that skill. For example, in my writing-focused classes, I now give students in-class hand-written exams. I let them know about the essay-based tests (mid-term and final) on the first day of class and encourage them to practice their writing each week, in-class and at home, thus giving them a very clear reason to practice — to get a good grade. Additionally, I take away the need to get a “good grade” on written homework by giving them full points if the homework is turned in on time, regardless of contents or mistakes. Thus, with the need to practice their writing skills for exams and no need to worry about making a good grade on homework assignments, students are encouraged to try the homework themselves — they cannot fail and they can only benefit by doing it themselves. In fact, using an LLM to complete an assignment will likely hurt them as other students who improved their skills will do better on the exams.
Homework once again can be used as a tool for them to improve their abilities through engagement, not just a pointless activity that an LLM can do to help them “get a good grade”.
FORCED LLM FRICTION
Another method I have found for encouraging students to complete assignments on their own is to purposely create friction to using an LLM. I try to plan assignments that it would be MORE work to use an LLM than to simply do it themselves. Humans being what we are, we often will choose the path of least resistance, especially if a grade is on the line!
For example, in one of my classes, I have students write a short story for homework (of about 250 words) about a picture I show them in class. Spelling and grammar mistakes are OK, they are guaranteed to get full marks if they turn it in on time, but the story has to be written BY HAND. To use an LLM, a student would first have to write a lengthy prompt describing the picture in detail and explain the type of output they need (a lot of work), and then they would still have to rewrite the entire story by hand (forcing them to focus on reading, spelling, and handwriting anyway). Thus, by introducing forced friction to using an LLM, especially where there is no danger (no friction) of getting a bad score because of mistakes, encourages students to take the easier path — just do it themselves.
The same idea also applies to shorter listening assignments. As long as the homework receives full marks for turning it in on time (low friction against the fear of poor ability) and the exams including a listening element (clear purpose for trying), the hassle of downloading the audio, sending it to an AI to transcribe it, then upload pictures of the homework questions just isn’t worth it. It’s just easier and more beneficial for students to do it themselves.
For homework: if you make homework results not count towards the final grade, then there's no reason to use an LLM - the point then just becomes to have practice problems and feedback on how well you are doing.
This is what my university (EPFL) was doing ~40 years ago. And yes, some students didn't bother with the homework, and mostly paid the price at the final exam...
Worth pointing out - modern multimodal LLMs (properly called VLMs, etc.) can easily take pictures as input and describe them in text. In fact, the CLIP model - one of the predecessors of modern VLMs - is entirely designed around being able to caption images with text.
That said - requiring students to hand-write answers is reasonably effective. It's a lot more boring to hand-copy text out of an LLM answer than write it yourself, and it makes the "cheating" significantly more visceral.
I considered that... and in the "worst comes to worse" scenario where they decide to use an LLM and re-write everything by hand, I'm still hoping they'll learn SOMETHING during the copying process... kind of like the old time "copy books" that were once used.
No point in marketing when you outright reject customers:
Thank you very much for the comprehensive feedback.
I have taken a look at the information you have provided and unfortunately, at this time, Adyen is only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year or businesses which are currently supported by a Plugin built by Adyen.
The reason for this is so that we are able to provide the right level of support and resources to our merchants at the right stage of their company growth.
If you would like to stay up to date with our payment offering please do sign up to our newsletter here.
In the interim, I want to ensure that you find the right provider, so I would like to direct you about payments. They are specialists in finding the most relevant payment solutions for all business models and I have no doubt they will offer you several great options.
I wish you the best of luck with your business moving forward, and hopefully we can reconnect in the future.
I wish more companies would try to serve tiny shops at the same time they serve multi million euro companies. The requirements for the two are very different, as is the support and customer care requirement. Integrating directly with Adyen as a small business is like running a kubernetes cluster on AWS to host your blog, except they'll have even less time for customer support to spend on your tickets when things don't go right.
Platforms like Stripe where anyone can sign up at any time drive up prices because the amount of low-profit companies needs to be offset by the companies making more. Great for small startups but a bad deal for major companies.
Stripe has also been criticised for forcing growing companies into enterprise plans the moment they hit certain growth numbers. That's one way to keep the business profitable, but it's not necessary if you only take on businesses that are already profitable enough dedicate a sales team onto.
Once you hit a certain processing threshold, stripe underwrites you. The benefit is some people get better deals or get to skirt by rules just by being immaterial.
Separately: Once you hit a certain threshold, you get an account rep and can ask for IC+ billing. This is sometimes better than the blended/sticker rate.
And furthermore, once you're really big enough, you can negotiate down Stripe's markup on the interchange. (As with any big enterprise contract).
You can't just actually shed all your low value users and then poach the high value users, because then you're only competing for customers who are already large and have already long since integrated one of your competitors. This is often a somewhat harder problem than taking a lot of low and even slightly negative value accounts and hoping some of them become high value.
Turkish isn't pronounced "Turkey-ish". It's just "turk-ish" as in, "of or relating to the ethnic group the 'Turks'". "Turkiyesh" (Turkish is perfectly phonetic, they don't play games with vowels combining to make all sorts of sounds like English) would be a different thing, being of or related to the country Turkiye.
Everything other than sorting the list of entities by a standard measurement unit (time, length, mass, temperature, amount) needs to be covered by this law.
The moment you add other entities to the list (e.g. ads inbetween posts), then it's also subject to the same restrictions.
This effectively means “every online platform ever” and would also have included MySpace and the OG Yahoo etc, and as such would not really single out the truly bad actors.
And then we’ll end up with with another cookie-banner style law which had good intentions but actually missed the point entirely.
Maybe MySpace should be covered. I mean, MySpace probably(?) had the technical capacity to act maliciously in the manner that modern social media sites do, then business model just hadn’t evolved to the modern toxic state yet.
The cookie banner law is fine for the most part. Sites that do the malicious-compliance thing of over-prompting the user for permissions are providing a strong signal that they are bad actors. It’s about as much as we can expect without banning them entirely…
I stopped using facebook around 2015-ish, when they stopped allowing sorting by date. Prior to this, hi5 and the likes also allwoed sorting by date. So no, not every online platform ever.
Even CAT5e can do 10 Gbps if you do a decent job making the cable, even though it's out of spec. 6A can do it easily, in spec. I used it in my previous home.
I much prefer to use fiber, but copper with good old RJ45 works fine for 10 gig.
I have a really simple algorithm to reporting something as spam:
> Was this email solicited by me?
The author describes unsolicited emails and somehow misses the point that spam is a term for unsolicited emails.
The reminder email in your list sounds unsolicited, so I'd probably report that one as spam as well. I wasn't aware it was mandatory, probably because it's not where I live.
My transactional inboxes are mostly clean as a result. My "spam" inbox, however, is full of crap (the email I use to sign up to freemium services).
I would describe myself as strict and dogmatic about email etiquette and consent as they come, but I am with avianlyric about the subscription reminders.
Legal requirements aside — when I have an ongoing business relationship with a company, "we are about to take money from you again" is an expected, useful and welcome message.
> de minimis non curat praetor
Which basically means judges are not interested in minor disputes. When you add the USA to the mix, China's actions pale in comparison to the point of being negligible, no point in discussing them given the scale of USA's warmongering, overseas and local crimes. "They never interfered in [...]" is an exaggeration which shows the lack of importance of China's crimes when compared to the USA's, that's all.
The "whataboutism" here isn't a deflection strategy, it shows the hypocrisy and correctly minimises the scale of China's actions in comparison to the hypocrites'.
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