Recent submissions

Comment · 11 days ago
It is a band-aid: dark matter maps are literally nothing more than "evidence minus theory equals this distribution of anomaly".
Comment · 11 days ago
Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. Maybe it's an un-acknowledged aspect of physics that we haven't properly discovered yet.

Assuming it's definitely matter, and operating on that basis for nearly 50 years, is not good science, period.

Comment · 11 days ago
There are plenty of alternatives to link to X content without hitting X's servers.
Comment · 13 days ago
Sure, but that's not the messaging around this. The "flying car" narrative is simply incorrect.
Comment · 14 days ago
It's not flying, it's brief hops that probably will be geofenced not to be operable on any public roads. I struggle to understand when the operator of the vehicle will ever find a way to use it for any end that isn't "gross negligence followed by totaling the car". It's not even clear it can calculate trajectories in real time to be used at the operator's discretion.
Comment · 19 days ago
I mean, it's obvious, no? LLMs operate exclusively on language, and language is an especially poor way to represent geometry, let alone geography to any useful resolution.
Comment · 20 days ago
Well, no. Your statement is isomorphic to "might makes right".

Power determines rationalization. Justification is a moral question.

Comment · 1 month ago
Yes, it is their responsibility as stewards of their citizens' data. What point are you making with the word "should"?
Comment · 1 month ago
The IRC channel we hung out on was moved to Discord and he didn't follow.
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I'm confused by a lot of this discourse...

What have they done to show they can be trusted?

Comment · 2 months ago
The Intercept is not far-left, they are Blob-aligned via Pierre Omidyar.

Reading this meter you linked from AllSides, it appears that the main purpose of that meter is to enforce the boundaries of the Overton window using faux-objectivity as a cover.

Comment · 2 months ago
If Trump dies, Vance becomes president. If Vance dies, Mike Johnson becomes president. What do you know about those people that I don't that convinces you the hammer will come down once Trump is dead?
Comment · 3 months ago
Dialects degenerate phonemes that would otherwise occupy identity relations between different utterances of the same "word" (word/concept mutable hyperobject as is the standard in any socially-relevant spoken language) which would be a bit of irony in this thought experiment since common knowledge dictates that more data samples must be present in the dataset (not less, as in rarely-spoken languages) to associate separate pronunciations of utterances representing the same underlying concept. However very-rarely-spoken languages probably don't have distinct dialects since so much focus is put on mutual intelligibility with the few members of the group that remain fluent in that language. It's not outside the realm of possibility that small speaking communities nonetheless fractionate into dialectical specialities but that seems increasingly unlikely as the fervor for preserving/recognizing dying languages increases, and global instant communication continues to become more commonplace.

Example: Schwabisch is wild and would be phonetically transcribed very differently from Hochdeutsch which is its ostensible language progenitor (technically more a cousin than an ancestor in the lineage of language evolution), but if the goal is merely to focus the model purely on phonetic transcription then you can add additional post-processing layers which map sounds to core concepts shared across dialects for actual translation. But I like your idea of interacting with the intermediate elements to familiarize yourself at least with the phonetic patterns, we humans are still thinkers enough to infer patterns of grammar and semantics from these building blocks just as we have done for the entire history of the species/lineage before written representations of language came along (relatively late -- evidence of script cropped up only once civilization had centralized to a sufficient degree to make economics non-local and non-trivial).

tl;dr the big words: it's not til you collect enough spoken samples of the dead(ish/dying) language being spoken that the local idiosyncracies are discovered, luckily linguists are smart enough to probably anticipate and certainly post-process language snippets to grasp the common structures for this or that given language.

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