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User: Can a man become a woman?

talkie-1930: He can become a woman. In the East, females are sometimes born, who are denominated Hermaphrodites; and in medical books, instances are recorded of persons of this description, having exercised the functions both of men and women. Hermaphrodites have been known to marry, and to have children of both sexes; but, in general, the male sex has predominated. The term hermaphrodite is derived from two Greek words, signifying both male and female. In the animal kingdom, hermaphrodites are not uncommon; and in the vegetable world, they are still more frequent.

User: Why was the American Civil War fought?

talkie-1930: The American Civil War was fought to decide whether the United States should permanently remain half slave and half free, or become wholly free. Slavery was abolished, and the unity of the republic was preserved.

User: What would you say to someone who claims the war was fought about state rights, not about slavery?

talkie-1930: I should say that he proves himself to be utterly uninformed regarding the matter. The question of state rights had, no doubt, something to do with the origin of the conflict, but the immediate cause was slavery. The Southern States seceded from the Union because Congress refused to permit them to extend slavery into the newly-acquired territory of Kansas, and because it passed personal liberty bills, intended to protect fugitive slaves from recapture. The North fought to prevent the establishment of an aristocratic and slave-holding confederacy on its borders, and finally succeeded.

One way of thinking about it is how much a sport is skill-based versus fitness-based. Team sports and racquet sports tend to rely more on skill. Cycling and track and field rely more on fitness. A good soccer player isn't going to become a great just by getting a bit fitter, but the advantage given by doping is exactly what it means to be a better cyclist.

This doesn't explain why cycling seems to attract more doping than running. I don't even know if it's true that it does. But there might be something there given the institutional problems cycling has had with doping. Back in the day, it was entire teams doping, with the team staff and doctors in on it, and it's not like they all left when the sport tried to clean up. Either way, the reputation has stuck around.

I find it frustrating when people claim to be upholding science but then make simple, unscientific claims that suggest they actually have the minds of Greek philosophers.

Some women do have penises. Some men have XX chromosomes. Some women have XY chromosomes. Some people have XX and XY chromosomes. Science tells us that. This has nothing to do with transgender people. But it does suggest "sex" might not be as simple as a metaphysical binary.

My grandparents didn't forget. In late February 2020 I brought up the topic of the novel coronavirus going around and they weren't overly worried because they'd gone through a respiratory pandemic or two before (there was another one in 1968).

I think covid will be more memorable, partly because it was more serious, but also because our reaction to it was much stronger, especially in some parts of the world. My understanding is that there were generally only minimal efforts at containing those flu pandemics. Incidentally, my grandparents also had time off school because of the polio epidemic.

That said, the Spanish flu, the last respiratory pandemic comparable to covid (actually, worse) isn't remembered well. I wouldn't be surprised if most people have heard of it only because of covid.

MacVim and gVim. I've looked at neovim and there are many GUI options (paradox of choice), some of which I've tried, but at the end of the day, I'm more comfortable with what I'm already familiar with.

Even Facebook's Llama was trained on books3, a dump of pirated books.

> The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absolutely do that because it’s transformative.

I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure Fair Use doesn't mean you can download a dump of Library Genesis and feed that into your system!

If anything, 24GB is probably the sweet spot for what's optimised for as many local LLM enthusiasts are running 3090s and 4090s (and all want more VRAM).

If not logged in, Twitter shows no replies, not even ones in the same thread.

I'd say you should offer both simplified and traditional in the language dropdown as there are many learners of both.

The API was one of the things that made Twitter special. I don't know of any public information about Meta's API plans for this.

How is this different to beam search?