cbilson

Aren’t humans also mostly trained on human input?

Thanks a lot for posting this!

I actually used to live in a rented "house" in the place the article is about, probably around 1994-1995. Most of my neighbors were very old veterans, with a handful of NTU students who were rarely seen.

Talking with my veteran neighbors was fascinating for me. Most of them had stories of the Civil War and some had fought in WWII. They were from all over China and I had great difficulty understanding a lot of them. Even my wife, who grew up in Taiwan had trouble - I distinctly remember one neighbor, "Uncle Bo", who had suffered a stroke and was basically abandoned there by his family, who pronounced the number 9 like, "kyu" (like Japanese), among many other pronunciation quirks. I found out later that this is common in some dialect in mainland China, but I forgot where/which dialect.

The living conditions were pretty ... not great, with eroding concrete, scorching hot in the summer, and constant issues with moisture leaking in, but I think our rent started out at NT$2500 ($80 USD?), which was even cheap at that time. Our landlord later raised the rent to $3k and we "abandoned our post."

I still have a weird fondness for that time and place, though. It's conceivable that I am one of the last people some of those veterans told their stories too. People in Taiwan at that time were not terribly interested in stories old people told, so maybe I was even the _only_ person some of them ever told their stories too, but I went back there in 2019 and was happy to see all the work that had been done to record the stories and memories of my former neighbors in the artist village that is there now. I think there was even a little plaque for Uncle Bo, IIRC.

They are absolutely not. The author is clearly confused from drinking too much 雄黃酒 even while claiming the contrary.

What is a “lockdown state”?

Is it a state where there were government mandated mask requirements in schools during a global pandemic? I’m in one of those and at no point in the past two and a half years would have used the term “lockdown” to describe my experience, but maybe I’m weird.

Maybe they kept mask mandates in place too long but most of the kids I know seem alright. It’s not like they were eating lead paint chips.

Even though I am an employee of a so-called “hyper-scale” cloud vendor, I really am rooting for Oxide. There are actually a lot of hard problems in this space, and Oxide are inherently more agile than a big cloud vendor. As long as they focus on problems that aren’t enormous monetary black holes (which I’m assuming would end Oxide), they are making the world a better place. Also very much appreciate the podcast.

Actually, this is more like: “In other news, you are in China now.”

I don’t care that much about how Chinese citizens let their 共肥 party censor them, but it’s not ok when I am being censored for speech that could be considered offensive to the communist party of China.

Some girls might actually like the new legos. Some _boys_ might even. What's the big deal?