tkgally

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by tkgally 2y ago
I enjoy reading old travel books, too. Hundreds, maybe thousands, are available at the Internet Archive. A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about some of them: https://blog.archive.org/2019/01/28/the-world-a
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by tkgally 2y ago
In addition to the valid reasons mentioned by others here—English ability, labor shortage in Japan, less of a hacker culture, etc.—there is also a difference in attitudes and expectations about employment. Many young Japanese prefer to work
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by tkgally 2y ago
Can anybody who has enrolled in an online-only degree program comment on the experience? I retired last year from teaching full-time at a conventional university. All of my teaching was in-person until the last few years, which were online
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by tkgally 2y ago
I'm 67. I joined a gym and started strength and cardio training when I was 51. I had no previous sports or exercise experience as an adult other than walking a lot, so I had a lot to learn: what all those machines and other exercise de
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by tkgally 2y ago
Same here. I first saw it on television more than fifty years ago, and I still go back to it every few years. It has at least one major flaw—the letters of transit being so important even to the Nazis—and some minor ones—the absurdly well-d
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by tkgally 2y ago
Eleven Labs announced a price reduction yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wevDlfDIG9s It still seems a bit expensive to me, though....
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by tkgally 2y ago
Thanks for the response. I mostly agree with you about the food, but not about Yokohama. Chinatown is a tiny, atypical part of Yokohama; the vast majority of the city, including where I live, has nothing to do with stereotypes of Chinese. A
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by tkgally 2y ago
That's interesting. In Japan, you might have a hard time finding a place that serves both sushi and katsu curry. Restaurants tend to specialize.
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by tkgally 2y ago
Long-time resident of Japan here. This article was a revelation; I had no idea that the humble katsu curry is now so common in the U.K. A similar phenomenon of culinary appropriation and adaptation might be the Nepali-run Indian restaurants
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by tkgally 2y ago
For some reason, YouTube is not using a very good STT system now. The lack of sentence punctuation is particularly annoying. Transcriptions by Whisper and Gemini 1.5 Pro are much better. From a couple of weeks ago: https://news.y
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The Innovation Fallacy(foreignaffairs.com)
2 points by tkgally 2y ago|0 comments
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Colleges Still Don't Have a Plan for AI Cheating(theatlantic.com)
4 points by tkgally 2y ago|0 comments
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by tkgally 2y ago
I wonder, though, whether jokes like these could be useful to professional humorists who have to come up with gags on a deadline. From what I’ve read about monologue writing teams for late-night talk shows and the like, the writers first pr
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by tkgally 2y ago
Prompt to Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Below is a recently published essay followed by some of the discussion about it on Hacker News. Write 10 short jokes on this theme, making sure that the jokes are funny in the way described by the essay's a
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Infiltrating the Far Right(newyorker.com)
4 points by tkgally 2y ago|0 comments
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by tkgally 2y ago
The mp3 file that I gave to Gemini (a five-minute excerpt from the audio podcast) is linked in the source code of the page. Here is the full URL: https://www.gally.net/temp/20240809geminitranscription/inter... The
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by tkgally 2y ago
I was curious how good a transcription I could get from what may be the best multimoldal LLM currently, Gemini-1.5-Pro-Experiment-0801, so I had it transcribe five minutes of an interview between Ezra Klein and Nancy Pelosi from earlier tod
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by tkgally 2y ago
A statistic I’ve seen—but am unable to verify at the moment—is that about 20% of the human-perceptible earthquakes that occur on Earth each year take place in Japan. I’ve been living in the Tokyo area for many years. Yes, it’s not unusual t
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by tkgally 2y ago
Interesting article, but I wonder if the author has gotten carried away with his conclusions: that “classical music ennobles bullshit, encasing turds in gold that glitters without masking the stench” and about “the rot at the heart of the c
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by tkgally 2y ago
I used LLMs for something similar recently. I have some old microphones that I've been using with a USB audio interface I bought twenty years ago. The interface stopped working and I needed to buy a new one, but I didn't know what
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by tkgally 2y ago
I haven’t tried Llama 3.1 405B much yet, but I was impressed by the detail and openness of Meta’s paper about it [1]. This interview with Meta’s head of product management for generative AI adds some interesting perspective. [1] https:&#x2
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Meta's Joe Spisak on Llama 3.1 405B [video](youtube.com)
3 points by tkgally 2y ago|1 comments
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by tkgally 2y ago
Translation is another. It's uncertain to what extent experienced professional translators are losing work—I work in the field, and I've heard anecdotal evidence on both sides—but it's clear that LLM-driven machine translatio
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by tkgally 2y ago
Several times before the pandemic, when tourism from China to Japan was booming, I saw encounters in Ginza between Chinese tourists and people carrying signs and handing out fliers in Chinese critical of the Chinese government. Some of the
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Reimagining China in Tokyo(newyorker.com)
7 points by tkgally 2y ago|2 comments
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by tkgally 2y ago
Are there any objective benchmarks for rating and comparing the summarization performance of LLMs? I've had mixed results when using the latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to summarize texts that I know well (books I have r
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by tkgally 2y ago
For a paper submitted on July 11, 2024, and with several references to other 2024 publications, it is indeed strange that it gives ChatGPT output from April 2023 to demonstrate that “LLMs lose the thread of a conversation with inhuman ease,
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by tkgally 2y ago
The nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 [1] was quite traumatic for those of us living in Japan then. There was a very real fear of follow-up attacks. Security was tight for a long time in public places, and facilities like trash c
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by tkgally 2y ago
I understand. A few months ago, I posted a comment here that attracted several down votes. The content, I thought, was completely innocuous, and I couldn’t figure out at first why some people didn’t like it. Only later did I realize that I
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by tkgally 2y ago
I remember an HN comment six months or so ago by someone who said they were intentionally modeling their writing on ChatGPT's style. The person said that they were not confident about writing and that they were trying to get better by

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