These are not contradictory statements to me. Even if I don't anthropomorphize LLMs, the damn things anthropomorphize themselves and I have to deal with it. "Posing" is the key word.
I think this boils down to how it can be tough to tell the difference between:
1. I speak about it as if it were a person because I have embedded some beliefs and expectations which are wrong.
2. I speak about it as if it were a person just because that's just how the English language works when describing complicated things.
Similarly, the faceless mannequin in the clothing store "poses" as a person, and even "beckons" customers with an outstretched arm, yet nobody on the sidewalk is confused or falls in love [0] with the mannequin.
These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.
Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.
Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.
I don't think the author is claiming you HAVE to be a dick about it. But that the pursuit of "thickness" does in reality give ammunition to a lot of people who are inevitably dicks about it seems observably true to me.
Is meditation so rigidly defined? It would seem to me that a certain kind of activity done with a certain kind of mindset could be deeply meditative. Disclaimer: I am not a meditator.
Yes, classically the Point of meditation is to enter into absorption via gathering-poise [not a common term but one I have begun using as of late as a sense-for-sense translation of samadhi]. Unfabricated reality is not accessible through doing things.
As far as I understand, there are numerous different kinds of meditation, even within just single traditions. Different kinds with different goals and techniques.
I’d be careful about talking about “the point” of meditation.
Were all the other vaccines "well understood" when they were initially rolled out en masse? Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't know the history.
I don't really understand what people's expectations were for a new vaccine intended to combat an ongoing global pandemic.
Several labs that manufactured the original polio vaccine shipped the live virus - ie, we just injected kids with polio. Low double digits of people (kids?) died, a few hundred were paralyzed, etc. Later vaccines also had the same problem, but at very low rates (1 in millions maybe).
Yes, but it still ended the polio epidemic resulting in a drastic drop in total polio-related deaths.
You don't get vaccines in use for 50 years without vaccines in use for 1 year, and you don't get that without using them for 6 months, and you can say the same about COVID-19 vaccination. Arguing otherwise is just failing to understand linear time.
There can be understanding, but nothing really beats mass numbers of doses over multiple years to generate it.
The safety factors of a vaccine become better understood over time and use, and you can say the same about COVID-19 vaccination.
You should conclude that COVID-19 vaccination - even the early versions - had net very good outcomes too, unless you're a wilfully ignorant conspiracy theorist.
The bar isn't "perfect vaccine", the bar is "significantly better than no vaccine". And this depends on the urgency of the situation.
The only "debacle" is a political/sentiment one, the mainstreaming of crankery, especially in the USA. It's now a full-fledged systemic public health anti-vax debacle.
But MRNA vaccines are a significant new medical tool, not just for COVID-19, not just for viral diseases.
Not OP, but I would guess: "hydration breaks" to inject commercials, half-time shows that felt alien to much of the core audience, and various rule-bending shenanigans (Ronaldo, Balogun).
Hydration breaks a tad weird. Half time shows were pretty subtle, didn’t change the length of the break except for the final. There’s no soccer competition without someone complaining about refereeing. Def always things to improve but I had fun, all people around me seemed to have fun. I flew in an out and always was either public transportation or uefa provided shuttles… It was really well run. Not something you can call a “shit show”
Oh boy, how could I forget about the Iranian team, and the other players/referees/staff that were rejected or stuck at the airport for hours ? It was worse than a sh-t show actually.
> There’s no soccer competition without someone complaining about refereeing.
Yeah, but most of them go without president calling Infantino to change the referee verdict. All the while the president says "I dont even know the game".
> It was really well run. Not something you can call a “shit show”
I can. Oh and not allowing referee in due to his race and mistreating teams due to politics.
Soccer is a legitimate name for the sport. Football is properly the name of a whole group of sports OR in a local context the locally most popular type of football.
It's very weird for one type of football to try to claim the name all for itself globally.
Lots of people call it that. The Australian national team are called the Socceroos. The best, most authoritative magazine about the sport is called "World Soccer", published in the UK, where the name soccer originated. Even if the name soccer was used only in the USA, it would be a legitimate name. Different cultures use different names for things.
An argument I've heard is that since hydration breaks can affect the game, if you are going to have them they should be mandatory and at the same time in all games in a tournament rather than doing them like they did when they were originally introduced in 2014. Then they were only done in games when the conditions on the field got dangerous.
football games can have "momentum". An extra break allows for a breather and a tactical intervention from the coach. That also why we saw keepers sitting down (faking injury) in the Premier league last season.
Anyway, a hydration break while it's raining is a bit of a tell it has nothing to do with the needs of the players.
Telling of what? I imagine if you're running around like eg Ronaldo would be during a game, it doesn't matter how air conditioned the space is, he'd still need to hydrate, on account of all the running that happens. I'm no football expert, but I'm lead to believe that does happen during matches.
I think your attitude, which is all too common, is that we should do things according to the "footballing nations" without any other consideration for the rest of the world. North America is part of the world.
The US itself is far and away the world's biggest sporting nation, and many there see football's informality and cynicism as antiquated and, honestly, embarrassing. The world outside of the US wants to protect "their" game, though it's not theirs to begin with, ignoring the existing, systematic issues with it, even making contrived arguments about the word "soccer" itself.
FIFA's shenanigans off-the-field were a problem, but they're not unique to the World Cup nor its location. I'd argue the last Copa America and Cup of Nations had worse issues with officiating/corruption.
I'm American, so I'm not sure who your comment is for. Anti-Americanism isn't a "gotcha" to me. If anything, it's confirmation of the persistent asymmetry in these discussions.
Football (or basketball, if you're Lithuanian) is a massive cultural institution in many parts of the world. The difference is that sports—just sports—are the institution in America. We could look at revenues, but that's far too easy. Look at the whole picture. Look at youth participation, women's sports, college sports. It's not comparable anywhere else.
For football specifically, the current situation is that a handful of European countries control the best leagues and consistently have the best international squads. This isn't changing anytime soon. The game is already owned by a group of elite countries—almost exclusively in Europe, benefitting from geography, mutual competition, and visa gatekeeping—and one confederation (UEFA).
The fact that the game shouldn't be "ruined" (or latent anti-Americanism) suggests you're okay with this situation. You didn't comment on rule enforcement or cynical play either, but I assume you're okay with those things or take them for granted.
Americans see football through the lens of other sports, because we are a sporting culture, and football is one of many. All the "American" sports have their problems too, but we don't pretend they don't for phony reasons. But we also have choices and exercise those choices. Footballing nations, I get the impression, see all sports through the lens of football. I often wonder whether fans in footballing countries genuinely like their sport for what it is or whether it's just a narcissistic cultural inheritance.
> The difference is that sports—just sports—are the institution in America.
What does this mean?
I'm really trying to understand what you're saying but I don't get it. Are you saying that other countries don't have a sport culture like the US? What makes you think that?
Again, if you don't want things ruined, then that implies that you don't think football, in its current state, is not already ruined. This isn't a position you've earned, you're just assuming it.
And it's awkward to defend because, as I've already stated, the status quo is: colonial powers controlling the game at the pro/international level, bad and inconsistent officiating, normalization of cynical/unsportsmanlike play, and massive corruption. As an American, these are easy to see because we have the advantage of a massive sporting culture. We have salary caps to enforce parity and scrutinize our own leagues' rules. There is a competitive marketplace for sports. If things are broken, people stop watching.
What about the US's influence in improving soccer would ruin it further? Moreover, do you understand your own sport well enough to make the judgment?
I love the references to a massive sporting culture in America while talking about a sport that has an order of magnitude more fans than there are Americans on the planet.
Your point about salary caps is interesting. It is good that we have these because otherwise you’d see something crazy, like the Dodgers simply buying a winning team with heretofore unseen amounts of money
UEFA isn't really an initialism (well, maybe a backronym). FI is from French and FA is from English. French also has the word Football, but it was taken from English. - Googling.
We show many signs of stopping our infinite expansion.
As for why we want dexterous robots, the obvious answer is to do things that we don't want to do. Things that are back-breaking, disgusting, dangerous, or just plain boring.
"I think this guy is dumb and wrong. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is going to have outsized influence on a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy may profit from a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is using his wealth to do dumb wrong things."
One thing I really appreciate about KOReader is that it runs on so many devices. I like its stock experience, and I can have that experience on my Supernote and on my Kobo, and sync progress between the two.
Over the years I've gone from Kindle to Pocketboot to Boox to Kobo. Sometimes eReaders break, sometimes I hand them down to family members. Whenever I need to buy an eReader, as long as runs KOReader somehow I can pick the device purely based on its hardware instead of worrying about the stock software, compatible formats, etc.
But you're absolutely right that finding the specific setting you're looking for is an unintuitive process.
Do you have any examples of "a single note for minutes and get it to sound amazing"? I'm finding this difficult to imagine. A lead voice doing this while some accompaniment is changing chords underneath makes sense to me, but then you're back to harmonic relationships.
You can have a whole set developing motifs, then multiple minutes of a single note being played in the middle, and somehow that sounds awesome (if you’re into it)
Not quite one note, but "Open Eye Signal" (2023 remaster) by Jon Hopkins has wide spectrum background and heavy rhythms, but once the song gets going the main instrument moves between fifth -> seventh-flat -> sixth -> fifth on repeat, and that's the melody for the song. And yet, to me, it's captivating.
A long hold of one note doesn't mean there isn't harmonic progression. It just means the progression is slow in that part of the song. It's often done to create a massive contrast that occurs when the progression finally...progresses. In electronic music, this often comes as the drop or some similar kind of break.
I can only think of examples which as you describe have accompaniment moving underneath. Neil Young's solo in Cinnamon Girl is one example. Another is Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone in which he sings one note as the chords run up C Dm Em F and only breaks on the G.
I'm pretty sure you've heard plenty of ambient music and just never thought about it. Timbre and rhythm have been the focus of modern music for at least 40 years.
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