Also used for practicing my Japanese, I would say the usefulness was definitely not 0, if nothing else with the correct settings it was daily practice for the Japanese scripts (kana/kanji).

And it’s best It would definitely not bring you even to reading fluency, and was only good if you were supplementing your study with other language acquisition forms (like for example, in my case, living in Japan).

The examples were often stilted, and the accepted answers overly rigid, for sentences which weren’t necessarily realistic.

I think some of the worst aspects of the gamification were:

• Choosing easy exercises as a safe source of points, to not lose the streak. (perverse incentive)
• Essentially by setting a target, encouraging to only meet a daily points streak, and not necessarily go further for a given day. (perverse incentive)
• Tile matching to english, again with overly rigid accepted answer. (trying unhelpfully hard to map Japanese to english)

Let my streak/subscription lapse when it stopped being useful (got better reading exercise elsewhere), and uninstalled when they introduced AI shit.

Also I think there’s enough manipulation fantasy in HPMOR, and enough lack of agency from Hermione, that it qualifies—in it’s own way—implicitly as being erotic.

Honestly even the original paper is a bit silly, are all game theory mathematics papers this needlessly farfetched?

🫂

I think actually listening to people remains important. But you’re only truly listening to someone when you try to understand when they lie or the ways they can be wrong.

Assuming 100% good faith is not actually the most empathetic way to engage with a person.

~~In the dead of night, knocking on the door~~

My feeling has gotten that I prefer the business executive empty vs the LLM empty, at least the first one usually expresses personality. It’s never entirely empty.

Screaming at the void towards Chuunibyou (wiki) Eliezer: YOU ARE NOT A NOVEL CHARACTER, THINKING OF WHAT BENEFITS THE NOVELIST vs THE CHARACTER HAS NO BEARING ON REAL LIFE.

Sorry for yelling.

Minor notes:

But <Employee> thinks I should say it, so I will say it. […] <Employee> asked me to speak them anyways, so I will.

It’s quite petty of Yud to be so passive-aggressive towards his employee insisted he at least try to discuss coping. Name dropping him not once but twice (although that is also likely to just be poor editing)

“How are you coping with the end of the world?” […Blah…Blah…Spiel about going mad tropes…]

Yud, when journalists ask you “How are you coping?”, they don’t expect you to be “going mad facing apocalypse”, that is YOUR poor imagination as a writer/empathetic person. They expect you to be answering how you are managing your emotions and your stress, or bar that give a message of hope or of some desperation, they are trying to engage with you as real human being, not as a novel character.

Alternatively it’s also a question to gauge how full of shit you may be. (By gauging how emotionally invested you are)

The trope of somebody going insane as the world ends, does not appeal to me as an author, including in my role as the author of my own life. It seems obvious, cliche, predictable, and contrary to the ideals of writing intelligent characters. Nothing about it seems fresh or interesting. It doesn’t tempt me to write, and it doesn’t tempt me to be.

Emotional turmoil and how characters cope, or fail to cope makes excellent literature! That all you can think of is “going mad”, reflects only your poor imagination as both a writer and a reader.

I predict, because to them I am the subject of the story and it has not occurred to them that there’s a whole planet out there too to be the story-subject.

This is only true if they actually accept the premise of what you are trying to sell them.

[…] I was rolling my eyes about how they’d now found a new way of being the story’s subject.

That is deeply Ironic, coming from someone who makes choice based on him being the main character of a novel.

Besides being a thing I can just decide, my decision to stay sane is also something that I implement by not writing an expectation of future insanity into my internal script / pseudo-predictive sort-of-world-model that instead connects to motor output.

If you are truly doing this, I would say that means you are expecting insanity wayyyyy to much. (also psychobabble)

[…Too painful to actually quote psychobabble about getting out of bed in the morning…]

In which Yud goes in depth, and self-aggrandizing nonsensical detail about a very mundane trick about getting out of bed in the morning.

A fairly good and nuanced guide. No magic silver-bullet shibboleths for us.

I particularly like this section:

Consequently, the LLM tends to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts (which are statistically rare) and replace them with more generic, positive descriptions (which are statistically common). Thus the highly specific “inventor of the first train-coupling device” might become “a revolutionary titan of industry.” It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated.

I think it’s an excellent summary, and connects with the “Barnum-effect” of LLMs, making them appear smarter than they are. And that it’s not the presence of certain words, but the absence of certain others (and well content) that is a good indicator of LLM extruded garbage.

The power, of words:
Is all but naught, if not heard.
And a bot, cannot.

Thank god for wikipedia and other wikis, may they live long and prosper.

I remember being quite ticked off by her takes about free will, and specifically severly misrepresenting compatibilism and calling philosphers stupid for coming up with the idea.

I think that particular talking point also serves an exculpatory purpose: “If it was only a razor-thin victory I might understand being angry with me, but see it’s a decisive victory. He has the mandate of heaven of the people (this is a Trumpian victory! not a Democrat failure!) ! It would be wrong not to congratulate him!”

It’s also incredibly misleading, maybe it was possible to “completely” re-write the UI back in 2005—never mind that most of the value would come from, the underlying geographic data being mostly correct and mostly correctly labeled—there is no way in hell that the same would achievable in 2024. (Also the notion it would take any coder 2 * 1000 / (365 * 5/7) = 7 years to achieve a comparable result is proposterous)

As long as no-one ever bakes—pluginlessly—LLMs into vanilla vim (or into normal nano) I won’t despair too much.

Not surprised, still very disappointed, I feel sick.

Why hasn’t he attempted to make a robotic owl yet? Poser…

To be “fair” kubernetes api only supports strongly validated/typed YAML-ish input…, it won’t let you put non-string values in string locations. And in reality at the HTTP api layer—at least for kubectl—json is used. (Which also means you cant’ do the more weird occult YAML things that JSON wouldn’t let you)

You have to blame the deep-nestedness of k8s resources for unreadability…

I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I’ll admit I did get a kick out of the “don’t panic” dashboard.

But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):

I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.

It’s backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can’t afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!

Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!

I wouldn’t swap it for the world ^^, but maybe a tad fewer existantial crises would be nice (no monkey-paw curls plz)