When designing, the standard practice is to use Lorem Ipsum - sort of mangled Latin that works like normal text but is very recognisable. This backfired once when I did a website for the Jesuits - the feedback they gave was that the design looks good but they were all baffled by the text and could I do something about it please.
I’d not considered that they might be the only client where everyone was fluent in Latin.
Reminds me of the Catholic friend who once told me that he had done IT support for every Catholic religious order with a presence in the city where he lived, except two.
The Carthusians didn't use computers, and the Jesuits didn't need his help.
I did something similar a while back to the @fesshole Twitter/Bluesky account. Downloaded the entire archive and fine-tuned a model on it to create more unhinged confessions.
Was feeling pretty pleased with myself until I realised that all I’d done was teach an innocent machine about wanking and divorce. Felt like that bit in a sci-fi movie where the alien/super-intelligent AI speed-watches humanity’s history and decides we’re not worth saving after all.
Let's say you discovered a pendrive of a long lost civilization and train a model on that text data. How would you or the model know that the pendrive contained data on wanking and divorce without anykind of external grounding to that data?
LLMs learn to translate without explicit Rosetta stones (pairs of identical texts in different languages). I suspect they would learn to translate even in the absence of any identical texts at all. "Meaning" is no more or less than structural isomorphism, and humans tend to talk about similar things in similar ways regardless of the language used. So provided that the pendrive contained similar topics to known texts, and was large enough to extract with statistical significance the long tail of semantically meaningful relationships, then a translation could be achieved.
This is much more concise than my usual attempts to explain why LLMs don’t “know” things. I’ll be stealing it. Maybe with a different example corpus, lol.
I actually I fashioned this logic out of the philosophy question of why certain neural firings appear as sound in our brain while others appear as vision? What gives?
iirc there were some experiments where they rewired optic nerve and inner ear in mice to route (so to speak) to different areas of the brain (different cortical (i think?) destinations), and iirc the higher level biological structures of those areas were built up accordingly (regular visual cortex like neural structures for visual data, etc.) iirc was done on very young baby mice or somesuch (classic creepy stuff, do not remember which decade; Connectionism researchers).
does not answer the general good abstract question and "how semantics possible thru relative context / relations to other terms only?", but speaks to how different modalities of information (e.g. visual data vs. sound data) are likewise represented, modelled, processed, etc. using different neural structures which presumably encode different aspects of information (e.g. layman obvious guess - temporality / relation-across-time-axis much more important for sound data).
In case of a person, the external sensory data provides the grounding. Consider a prisoner who spent a long time in hole in the cell, he starts hallucinating due to no sensory information to ground his neuronal firings.
Philosophically speaking, sensory data is no more "external" or grounded than words are. You do not see - your eyes see. You do not hear - your ears hear. You cannot truly interact with the world except at a remove, through various organs. You never perceive the world "as it really is". Your brain attempts to build a consistent model that explains all your sensory input - including words. Where words and sensory input disagree, words can even win - I can tell you that you are in VR, or dreaming, or that immigrants are the cause of all your problems, and if I am careful and charismatic you may believe me...
tl;dr what you think of as "grounding" is just yet more relative context...
What's wrong with wanking and divorce? These are respectively a way for people to be happier and more self-reliant, and a way for people to get out of a situation that isn't working out for them. I think both are net positives, and I'm very grateful to live in a society that normalizes them.
I'm not implying that divorce should be stigmatized or prohibited or anything, but it is bad (necessary evil?) and most people would be much happier if they had never married that person in the first place rather than married them then gotten divorced.
So "normalize divorce" is pretty backward when what we should be doing is normalizing making sure you're marrying the right person.
This reminds me of one of my very favorite essays of all time, "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person" by Alain de Botton from the School of Life. The title is somewhat misleading, and I resisted reading it for a couple years as a result. It is exquisite writing — it couldn't be said with fewer words, and adding more wouldn't help either — and an extraordinary and ultimately hopeful meditation on love and marriage.
Alain de Botton also published this in video form, seven years ago [0]. If you want the cliff's notes, his School of Life channel has a shorter version [1].
Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized. I’d have never even known my ex wasn’t the right person if I hadn’t married her. I didn’t come out of my marriage worse off.
Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil.
We don't have to pretend. The original poster thinks he knows what the world looks like if every marriage that ends in divorce just never happened. Those marriages do happen, though, and to place all the damage generated by that marriage strictly on the divorce is incorrect. Usually one or both parties know the consequences of the divorce and prefer them to the state of the marriage, because the damages are less than if divorce wasn't an option. Claiming divorce is some kind of undesirable 'damaged' state is just as stigmatizing as claiming it is 'bad' or 'evil'.
The alternative to divorce isn't perfect marriages, it is failed marriages that are inescapable.
> The alternative to divorce isn't perfect marriages, it is failed marriages that are inescapable.
I'm sure this has nothing to do with you, but by your comments in this thread, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend on a bus one day. We were talking about the unfortunate tendency, in daytoday, of people to shuffle their elderly parents off to nursing homes, rather than to support said parents in some sort of independent living. A nearby passenger jumped into our conversation to argue that there are situations in which the nursing home situation is for the best. Although we agreed with him, he seemed to dislike the fundamental idea of caring for one's elderly parents at all, and subsequently became quite heated.
Who are you referring to with "the original poster?" I follow from this comment the whole way up to the root of the thread and not a single comment even begins to suggest someone "knows what the world looks like if every marriage that ends in divorce just never happened."
It's pretty easy to create strawmen arguments and argue against those instead of what people actually say, but it makes for at best boring and at worst confusing reading.
There are lots of proven viable alternatives to quick no-fault divorce, the most obvious being waiting periods or separation periods ranging from months to years. [0]. Parental alienation can be gamed, and frequently is. Psychologist evals can be gamed or biased. Expert witness reports can be gamed. Move-away scenarios (by the custodial parent) can be gamed. Making false or perjurous allegations can be gamed, sometimes without consequence. Jurisdiction-shopping can be gamed. It seems pretty obvious that if there are huge incentives (or penalties) for certain modes of behavior, some types of people will exploit those. Community property/separate property can be gamed. The timing of all these things can be gamed wrt dicslosures, health events, insurance coverage/eligibility, job change/start/end, stock vesting, SS eligibity, tax filings etc.
Divorce settlements can be gamed too by one party BK'ing out of a settlement/division of debts. At-fault divorce also exists (in many US states), and obviously can be gamed.
It's not a false dichotomy between either a jurisdiction must allow instant no-fault divorce for everyone who petitions for it, or none at all.
> Usually one or both parties know the consequences of the divorce and prefer them to the state of the marriage, because the damages are less than if divorce wasn't an option.
Sometimes both parties are reasonably rational and honest and non-adversarial, then again sometimes one or both aren't, and it only takes one party (or their relatives) to make things adversarial. If you as a member of the public want to see it in action, in general you can sit in and observe proceedings in your local courthouse in person, or view the docket of that day's cases, or view the local court calendar online. Often the judge and counsel strongly affect the outcome too, much more than the facts at issue.
> Claiming divorce is some kind of undesirable 'damaged' state is just as stigmatizing as claiming it is 'bad' or 'evil'.
It is not necessarily the end-state of being divorced that is objectively quantifiably the most damaging to both parties' finances, wellness, children, and society at large, it's the expensive non-transparent ordeal of family court itself that can cause damage, as much as (or sometimes more than) the end-state of ending up divorced. Or both. Or neither.
> The alternative to divorce is...
...a less broken set of divorce laws, for which there are multiple viable candidates. Or indeed, marriage(/cohabitation/relationships) continuing to fall out of favor.
Other than measuring crude divorce rates and comparing their ratio to crude marriage rates (assuming same jurisdiction, correcting for offset by the (estimated) average length of marriage, and assuming zero internal migration), as marriage becomes less and less common, we're losing the ability to form a quantified picture of human behavior viz. when partnerships/relationships start or end; many countries' censuses no longer track this or being pressued to stop tracking it [1]; it could be inferred from e.g. bank, insurance, household bill arrangements, credit information, public records, but obviously privacy needs to be respected.
> It's not bad or evil, but let's also not pretend that it isn't damaging
It’s not any more damaging than getting married in some cases, or staying married.
Marriage is not some sacred thing to be treasured. It CAN be, but it isn’t inherently good. Inherently, marriage is a legal thing, and that’s about it; being married changes how taxes, confidential medical information, and death are handled, and that’s about it. Every meaning or significance beyond those legal things is up to the happy couple, including how, if, and when, to end the marriage.
Something can be both bad and not stigmatized. Divorce is a pretty good example here. It's not stigmatized, and to prove it's not say with a straight face it should be illegal and you won't be able to blink before the backlash hits you. It's not stigmatized at all. Most individuals who get married will get divorced. The way the numbers work out something like 60-70% of all marriages contain at least one divorced partner. Saying it's stigmatized is silly and doesn't line up with reality. But of course it's an objectively bad thing. It's messy, it's expensive, feelings get hurt, often times years or decades of peoples' lives are wasted.
I don't have to say it with a straight face because your sibling poster did it for me. Something can be both common and stigmatized. Yes, divorce can be messy, expensive, emotionally fraught, and take time. Mine was, and it still wasn't 'bad' or even undesirable. Starting a business, learning an instrument, training for a sport can also be all those things. We don't call them 'bad', or 'evil', because we don't assume the end result is undesirable.
The comparison can't be to an imaginary world where everyone always picks the best partner. It has to be to the real world where people don't always pick the best partner and the absence of divorce means they're stuck with them.
Eh, I would say it's quite a bit more complicated than you're giving it credit for.
>Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized.
Absolutely not.
I live in the southern US and we have the culmination of "Young people should get married" coupled with "divorce is bad/evil" and the disincentivization of actually learning about human behaviors/complications before going through something that could be traumatic.
There are a lot of relationships that from an outside and balanced perspective give all the signs they will not work out and will be potentially dangerous for one or both partners in the relationship.
That is a fair point, but it would then apply to everything else we teach it about, like how we perceive the color of the sky or the taste of champagne. Should we remove these from the training set too?
Is it not still good to be exposed to the experiences of others, even if one cannot experience these things themself?
Thanks for saying it's a fair point, but it's more of an offhand joke about "an innocent machine". In reality, a machine, even an LLM, has no innocence. It's just a machine.
Having studied biology, I never accepted the "just a machine" argument. Everything is essentially a machine, but when a machine is sufficiently complex, it is rational to apply the Intentional Stance to it.
Having gone through a divorce... no. It would be better if people tried harder to make relationships work. Failing that, it would be better to not marry such a person.
People sometimes grow in different directions. Sometimes the person who was perfect for you at 25 just isn't a good fit for you at age 40, regardless of how hard you try to make it work.
The state of having married the wrong person, will always occur. To stigmatize divorce is to put people who made the wrong choice once in a worse spot.
Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health.
At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.
> Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health.
> At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.
And most importantly, knowing when to do the one or the other.
I think this thought that divorce is bad comes from religion which would end up having to care for abandoned kids (especially when contraception didn't exist so having kids wasn't as much of a choice)
I don't really hear it so much here in Europe except from very religious people. Most people are totally ok with divorce, many aren't even married (I myself never married and I had a gf for 12 years from a Catholic family who also didn't mind at all) and a lot of them are even polyamorous :) I have a feeling that would not go down so well in rural America.
Europe is less extreme in terms of Christianity and its partly outdated values. Sure, in each country you can find hardliners, but I think much less than in the US.
I'm sure this is a wonderful project with talented people behind it, and what I'm going to say isn't a criticism of this project in particular.
But. I'm always a little disappointed when I see a project that's Libre[something proprietary]. It's always a wonky copy, where the selling point is that it's a free version of something, rather than a better version of something. The only people who are going to use it are those who care more about the fact that it's free and Libre than they do about a good learning experience [0]. Everyone else will just use Duolingo. And that's fine if the goal is for it to be a programming exercise, but it's a limiting one.
Instead of making a knockoff of Duolingo, which clearly been eaten by the pressure to drive engagement and MAU, why not use time and energy to explore different or more radical ways of online pedagogy free from commercial pressures? It's harder than copying something, but the results could be much more worthwhile. [1]
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[0] This is why Mastodon will never go mainstream, because it's built by and for people who care more about decentralisation than they do about creating a first-class microblogging experience. The friction points that deter the mainstream are acceptable for the true believers because for them the benefits are worth it.
[1] This is also my problem with Linux desktop environments. The desktop war was won by Microsoft 30 years ago and the desktop died as the primary computing paradigm in 2007. Yet Linux desktops are still fighting the last battle - so much time and effort is poured into them, yet they still don't work right (Wayland is how old now?) and are basically just wonkier versions of macOS or Windows.
Surely that time and effort could be spent on investigating new ways to interact with computers - why is the desktop metaphor still the best we've got, nearly 60 years after it was first invented?
I agree with your overall point - I'd also like to see more novel FOSS projects rather than knockoffs of proprietary software - but at the same time, there's a lot of value in FOSS clones for a few reasons.
The main one being: proprietary things tend to get worse over time, while FOSS (with enough momentum) tends to get better. Windows vs Linux desktop is a great example of this; while Linux and its DEs have steadily been improving over the past couple decades, Windows has been in a slow downward spiral since 7, and nowadays I would say KDE/GNOME/Mint are actually less janky overall than Win11.
Mastodon, despite its jank, largely has the traction it does because of the X/Twitter enxittification. Godot and Unity are another good example of my point, the former being largely superior to the latter nowadays despite a lot of similarity, and as with Mastodon it gained a lot of popularity through the blunders of the proprietary version, which is significantly less of a risk with FOSS.
Also - while there are some Windows/MacOS knockoff DEs, there are also plenty of unique ideas in things like GNOME or Budgie, not to mention tiling window managers.
I think clones just tend to get the most popularity. Case in point, there are easily hundreds of FOSS language learning apps out there that do their own thing, but "LibreLingo - FOSS Alternative to Duolingo" is the one that ends up on the front page.
Blender is another good example – incredible product with a great community. It's becoming the default choice for 3D now, unless you're working for a company that already uses something else. (As an aside, I don't use it much but really enjoy reading the release notes as they're well written, engaging and show how they're regularly delivering real value.)
Don't want to seem like I'm being down on open source - I'm not, it's genuinely a beautiful thing, but I would love to see more innovation and not just copying existing things. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, like someone complaining about how there's no good new music but never listening further than top 40 radio.
A few months ago I was hit by a blackout literally the second I was about to start delivering a company-wide talk on AI. Everything went out - Internet, mobile networks, street lighting, the lot.
We're a remote business so it seemed like I'd just rudely dropped off the call, but as everything was down I couldn't let people know what'd happened.
Apparently it was caused by botched maintenance work affecting 30,000 houses, but the timing was so perfect I can't help thinking it was because our AGI overlords really didn't want me to deliver that talk for some reason.
All it needs is some kind of emergency, genuine, imaginary or self-inflicted, and ‘Oh no, we can’t possibly hold elections until our time of national crisis is over.’
I thought you're agreeing with me about disenfranchisement and how it's evil, but I can see you can also infer that "Did you know 21 million undocumenteds voted?"...
As your article discusses, requiring that proof means paperwork, paperwork some people might not have (e.g. wives who changed their names).
For example in the UK, the Windrush scandal 1) deported British subjects because the government made irrational demands for documents to prove that they're citizens.
Congress already ruled that time isn't passing, allowing a temporary state of national emergency to become permanent. There's no reason to think they won't find some asinine excuse to deny elections or defer them indefinitely.
They might not even need an excuse. They could just not hold elections and say "what are you going to do about it?"
Also if the Ukrainians hated it so much they would just side with Russia and form rebel militias all over and apparently that is not happening, I think they know which side has their best interests at heart and which is trying to genocide them.
Well, from 2014 onward there were supposedly rebel militia groups in the south and east. (Most people think they were Russian puppets however.)
> [...] I think they know which side has their best interests at heart and which is trying to genocide them.
Doesn't even need to be their best interest, really. The Ukrainian government had and has its fair share of flaws. (They exist in the real world after all.) But it's enough that they are a lot better than Russia.
Public opinion shows there’s nobody more supportive than the continued military defense of Ukraine than the Ukrainians. Even the conscripted would prefer more modern weapons to permanently ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia.
Well, the invader is the last party to want a war: they'd be happy to just take over.
Russia's takeover of Crimea in 2014 was almost as 'peaceful' as the German takeover of the Sudetenland in the 1930s.
All in all, my comment is just a convoluted way that sometimes the price to pay for peace is too high.
In addition, there's also pre-commitments that make everything more complicated: as a potential victim of invasion, you might want to pre-commit to defending long beyond any reasonable threshold, in the hopes that this will deter invasion. Sometimes your bluff gets called, and then you need to actually fight to maintain your credibility.
Compare mutual assured destruction in nuclear war: nuking Moscow in retaliation for the Soviets nuking New York isn't going to bring anyone back from the dead. But it's what you pre-commit to in order to deter the bombing of New York in the first place.
Zelensky was elected in part on a platform of trying to negotiate with Russia but it fell apart because Russia wasn't interested in negotiating and instead decided it wanted to massively expand the war. If Russia shown the smallest sign that they had given up on conquering Ukraine and were willing to seek peace Zelensky would be interested. Zelensky is also more popular then most potential political opponents and they would rather the election would be held after the war when they'd have more of a chance(wartime popularity doesn't always transfer over to peacetime, Winston Churchill lost his post war election). And any credible challenges would likely be more hawkish on Russia not less
Very possible, but you should provide data. The data we have suggests that Zelensky's approval is extremely high among the public and the consensus not to violate the constitution to hold elections during wartime is unanimous within the government.
THE GOVERNMENT doesn't want elections in wartime. Most people want.
>not least because polling stations become targets.
I think this is pure gaslighting. If we are talking about Ukraine, Putin is one of the main supporters of holding elections there. And almost certainly not because he wants to bomb some polling stations, but because he is confident that people will vote for a candidate who will de-facto offer to surrender, and not for Zelensky with his busifications.
The only likely candidate close to Zelenskyy in popularity is Zaluzhnyi, the former commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. That's not a person who sees surrender as an option.
All major political factions oppose holding elections now, because they expect Zelenskyy's popularity to fade after the war ends and believe their candidates will have better chances then.
> All major political factions oppose holding elections now, because they expect Zelenskyy's popularity to fade after the war ends and believe their candidates will have better chances then.
Well, that, and also the constitution doesn't allow election during wartime.
In Adams’ universe people realised early-on that under no circumstances should anyone capable of having themselves elected president actually be allowed to do the job. Presidents had too much fun being president to notice they didn’t have anyp power.
Zaphod even gave himself a lobotomy to become stupid enough to be president, unlike the current lot who don’t even have that going for them.
I’d not considered that they might be the only client where everyone was fluent in Latin.