Recent submissions

Comment · 15 days ago
Even professional native voice actors get a reading wrong in audiobooks sometimes so it's not surprising to me that LLMs are not quite reliable enough either at this point
Comment · 15 days ago
Automatic furigana is not really possible to be reliable considering readings heavily rely on context that can't be easily inferred, but I'm sure it will help some people who can't read very well.
Comment · 4 months ago
At least it bodes well for my continued employment if Opus is the best model they'll allow the public to use
Comment · 6 months ago
Indeed, his premise is quite flawed. Yes, you will have difficulty understanding everything you read at an early stage, but you aren't supposed to be able to understand everything. You read to heavily reinforce the most common words and patterns that show up constantly, and from that base you pick up bits and pieces as you go along.

Under normal circumstances, even if you grind out "knowing" all the words in advance you will still struggle to read any basic sentence and you've essentially wasted time because it's an unskippable step; to be good at reading you need to read a lot. He seems to already know Chinese though, so this might work for him since he is not really having to learn the language or specific vocabulary, just how it's actually written.

Comment · 7 months ago
`Tests still passed. Build still passed. But now I have three files to maintain instead of one, and the "extensibility" will never be used.` sounds very LLM-like to me personally, but I wouldn't be willing to bet on it.
Comment · 8 months ago
Unfortunately the service is very buggy in my experience. When I tried to download all of my photos data multiple times it gave me corrupted .zip files and half of the files were just zero bytes. Maybe I can blame Firefox for that though, I dunno. I should probably try again with Chrome before completely blaming Google
Comment · 8 months ago
Exactly. Remember this is a guy who was "best friends" with Donald Trump. It's just a group of idiots who became rich and powerful through a combination of luck and criminality.
Comment · 2 years ago
"Print characters" aren't hand painted on signs and you will rarely see it written in any context outside of extremely old books. There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway. Presumably you are referring to 明朝体 (although that sign you linked is actually 丸ゴシック, which is much more recent).

Besides, even if it was written down like that it will still be incredibly obvious. It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing. It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.

Comment · 2 years ago
No, this doesn't make sense in the context of Japanese.

One of these signs is written right to left:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdiwLY...

https://auctions.afimg.jp/h1085974646/ya/image/h1085974646.2...

Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.

Comment · 2 years ago
It would be much easier for a random Japanese soldier who actually knows the language to just write on the few necessary signs than trying to direct a prisoner to do so, who will probably end up making mistakes and make it almost illegible. This just sounds like a nice explanation but it's unlikely to be the case.
Comment · 2 years ago
If you can't read the signs how would you know it's right-to-left? You are only seeing two unknown characters, you don't know which comes first. It's not about vertical vs horizontal. It's that someone who speaks English would assume that all of these signs they can't read are written left-to-right, and write the vertical characters they are copying in the wrong order.
Comment · 2 years ago
I find it hard to believe that they copied the word for workshop (presumably 工房) convincingly enough that it wasn't obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc. The way that someone would show how a character looks to someone without any knowledge (ie textbook form) and how they would naturally write such a sign is also different. You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it.

Actually, signs were also written right-to-left horizontally during that period but it's likely that someone showing them how to write on a piece of paper would have written vertically, so they would probably not even have the knowledge to know the correct order of the text.

Comment · 2 years ago
Many KVM switches do this, just search Amazon for KVM switch + HDMI/Display Port, but they're often not great in my experience. My last one only lasted a couple of years and would sometimes fail to pick up my monitor.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton