pigscantfly

Honestly probably just literary license -- this author seems to employ pretty florid prose. I'd say it actually sounds more natural to say "towards the west / mot väster" in Swedish since it's more common to use as a noun vs. as an adverb than in English.

If you're in the US, I recommend bokon.se for ebooks -- they're one of very few sites that accepts American credit cards. Otherwise, you're kind of stuck with libraries (if you have one nearby with a good foreign language section) or packing your suitcase. I'd also recommend Historiepodden on Spotify and Sommarprat on sverigesradio.se -- don't really watch TV myself but others here have mentioned svtplay.se if you're into that.

It converts to lätt svenska (simplified Swedish), which is usually intended for beginners / students and I believe is the point here. The translated text is missing a lot of details, though, yes.

This isn't really true unfortunately -- mixture of experts routing seems to suffer from batch non-determinism. No one has stated publicly exactly why this is, but you can easily replicate the behavior yourself or find bug reports / discussion with a bit of searching. The outcome and observed behavior of the major closed-weight LLM APIs is that a temperature of zero no longer corresponds to deterministic greedy sampling.

Absolutely love this project -- great job. Remarkably insightful from just a bit of input -- would love to point this at Twitter profiles.

Roast: They know so much about ancient history, it's like they lived through it! Prediction: The user might embark on an AI-driven archaeology project, blending their passion for history with machine learning.

Other folks may have more apt examples to share, but I would examine the history of Dacia and also the Sasanian fortification lines both east and west (but especially east) of the Caspian Sea -- both of which separated the empire from nomadic tribes of the steppe.

I believe these involved depopulated regions both north and south of the main defensive structures to allow harrying of invading forces while denying access to plundered resources.

Eventually, they were overcome by the Hephthalites (aka White Huns) following heavy Sasanian losses north of the limes in the AD 484 Battle of Herat, but it's interesting to note that the defensive structures separating southern 'civilization' from the steppe were considered a joint responsibility of the predominant (Roman/Sasanian) empires in spite of their generally being at war with each other, as the nomads were a shared threat.

Edit: Another great example is drawn from Caesar's description of Helvetian practices in his Gallic Wars; the Helvetians, a Germanic tribe located in modern Switzerland, had deliberately depopulated a wide area around their territory for defensive purposes.

I think this perspective is belied by the vast over-subscription of free public education in places where it has previously been paid only[1] (at this point, mainly in Africa). It does seem like there is strong evidence that most children and parents recognize the value of education and are self-motivated to pursue it where it is accessible to them. I believe it follows that lowering cost and barriers to quality education will improve outcomes without a need to otherwise coerce participation.

[1] See, most recently, Zambia

Similarly, it bears striking resemblance to the Swedish 'pojke', which can be colloquially shortened to 'pojk' and also means boy. It's apparently been derived from Finnish within the last millenium, though, so could be a false cognate.

This is a very real take on where memes 'start' nowadays in the valley.

No-fee PO Boxes also cover situations in which USPS doesn't deliver to a house in a rural area (no carrier service, as noted in your source [2]). It's very common in many small towns.

Thanks for sharing this -- I read the book maybe a decade ago and largely discounted it as non-replicable pop-sci; this changed my opinion of Kahneman's perspective and rigor (for the better!)

It would have gone much better for Google if the Brain team had been permitted to apply their work, but they were repeatedly blocked on stated grounds of AI safety and worries about impacting existing business lines through negative PR. I think this is probably the biggest missed business opportunity of the past decade, and much of the blame for losing key talent and Google's head start in LLMs ultimately resides with Sundar, although there are managers in between with their own share of the blame.

Yes, this is one of the top outlets focused on the valley tech scene. It's subscription based, and they are more expensive than most others, which is probably why you haven't seen it posted much.