ithkuil

44 ms·

781.
by ithkuil 3y ago
I think the "thin" qualifier here was to mean that it wasn't a deeply cultural and nationalistic embedding of a nation as what we think of national today. It was more akin to modern colonialism where a certain degree of explo
782.
by ithkuil 3y ago
A modern analogy would be this: Imagine a backwards country somewhere in the northern European swamps of the doggerland (unsubmerged in this alternative history, just so I can imagine a hypothetical group of people without offending any re
783.
by ithkuil 3y ago
The confidence has been selected for. You can train a model to always carefully claim that what they say may or may not be true, but that may not necessarily make them easier to work with. IIUC what we're missing right now is the abili
784.
by ithkuil 3y ago
The analogy is apt indeed. It's all about training and selection. As long as the incentives are that you either behave in that way "or else" it's unsurprising that we end up with a system that uses its intelligence to me
785.
by ithkuil 3y ago
I don't understand your argument. Humor me for a moment and assume that human induced climate change is real and that a sizable fraction of policy makers and the general public fully understands the consequences and wants to do somethi
786.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Because when you define a "type Foo []int" you're definig a new type Foo that is not the same type as []int. So if the type parameter said "[]E" where E is a comparable then "Foo" wouldn't be allowed
787.
by ithkuil 3y ago
IIRC that only works for clients and can't be used for listening. Also IIRC there is a bash loadable module that implements server sockets but that can't be relied upon if you're just shipping bash scripts meant to be run wit
788.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Babylonians did indeed use positional notation. But they didn't use the "point" to separate integral and fractional parts of a number. Moreover they didn't even write zeros to indicate an order of magnitude! You just had
789.
by ithkuil 3y ago
They notoriously stop being conscious when they are in a Chinese room
790.
by ithkuil 3y ago
(I don't know about a free trial) It's not perfect and the classic failure modes of LLMs (the one you mentioned and others) are still present, but to a much much smaller degree. I have a few prompts I use for specific tasks, where
791.
by ithkuil 3y ago
I'm sure the analogy is imperfect but your broca region of the brain is also not good at these sort of trick question yet it can do small talk relatively well even when the rest of the brain has severe dysfunctions
792.
by ithkuil 3y ago
there are even more possible variations of chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.
793.
by ithkuil 3y ago
When I tried it with ChatGPT the model understands there is math involved, figures out the formula and spawns an API call to the code execution engine that actually performs the calculation. Results: To determine who wins this race, we&#x27
794.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Did you try ChatGPT with the GPT-4 model? I'm asking because a lot of people have only tried the 3.5 model and then lose interest when it fails on stupid ways. GPT-4 is not just quantitatively better, it's a qualitative jump ahead
795.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Andorra is uniquely interesting for me because of this weird "co-prince is a an elected president of another country" aspect. I don't think that having that feature is necessary nor brings any advantage for it being a duty-fr
796.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Speaking of odd monarchies: Andorra is a "Unitary parliamentary diarchic constitutional co principality" The two co-princes are: 1. Bishop of Urgell 2. King of France Since there is no longer a king in France, the role of the seco
797.
by ithkuil 3y ago
I'm pretty sure there are many many individual things that have been lost/forgotten, even very important ones as concrete. There was indisputably a loss of tech and a regression in many fronts. But technology and progress is not a
798.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Craftsmanship continued to improve throughout the middle ages. The lack of a central empire meant that you don't see the massive projects that require pooling the resources of a giant empire. But the skills of individual artisans kept
799.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Yes, genetically and linguistically the Germanic rulers haven't tipped the scale to their side in France. But OTOH the name "France" is unequivocally Frankish (Germanic) and thus not something that Obelix, a Gaul from ~2070 y
800.
by ithkuil 3y ago
The etymology of the word "gaul" is fascinating. It's an exonym, i.e. it's not how the celts living in Gaul would call themselves. There are two origins of the word that are likely to cave coexisted in a "convergent
801.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Celt. Franks came later from germany
802.
by ithkuil 3y ago
I'm a huge fan. But sometimes it's hard to produce the snapshots.
803.
by ithkuil 3y ago
The "why is there something rather than nothing" is a fascinating and mind boggling philosophical question. A good read is https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/02/08/why-is-...
804.
by ithkuil 3y ago
That's the weak anthropic principle. The strong anthropic principle is: the puddle thinking how fortunate it is that there water at all
805.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Writing tests is indeed a great opportunity for finding bugs. But a codebase with good test coverage allows you to safely perform large scale refactorings without having regressions and that's useful property even if you have bugs and
806.
by ithkuil 3y ago
I find it hard to believe that the first cars were less polluting (per unit of power) compared to modern cars. Could you please elaborate on that?
807.
by ithkuil 3y ago
And they must fight because?
808.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Indeed. Understanding something doesn't imply endorsing it
809.
by ithkuil 3y ago
Indeed "master" comes from "master copy" which is the version of the "teacher" (magister) from which students copy a work
810.
by ithkuil 3y ago
I think GP alluded to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(electricity_and_mag...

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