@rgs@metasocial.com
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

rgs

@rgs@metasocial.com

Internet plumber | Languages (humans and computers) | Thinks in (distributed) systems | Nocoiner | Ineffective altruist | Claude Lévi-Strauss | Thelonious Monk | Barbie | he/him

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

The overfishing metaphor will definitively be useful. Thanks, Bruce. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/online-privacy-and-overfishing.html

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

TIL paper money (printed with woodblock type) predates Gutenberg. It was a Mongol innovation.

rgs, to photography
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

"OpenAI’s AGI bait-and-switch wipes anything that does not count as economically valuable work from the definition of intelligence. That’s a massive erasure of our human capacity and a reduction of ourselves that we should resist." – https://www.noemamag.com/the-danger-of-superhuman-ai-is-not-what-you-think/

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Well, even "economically valuable work" cannot be replaced by AGI when it comes to craftsmanship. This is a human activity deeply embedded in our bodies and brains. The book "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett explains this very well. For example, how can you design, let's say, a better keyboard, like @jesse does, without fingers, and the knowledge of what typing is? An octopus would be better at it than ChatGPT.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Tasks that require expertise cannot be replaced by AI. Expertise needs to be built. A society that has lost its experts will collapse: they're necessary to maintain the systems that maintain the society. This was true even for hunters-gatherers (building bows and arrows from scratch is hard). Of course, random canned responses asserted with confidence can pass too easily for expertise, especially to people who have been trained to disregard expertise. That's a real danger in the long term.

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

I am currently in the odd position of trying to decide if the utility of yet another French grammar book is worth the extra weight in my luggage for the flight home.

And yes, you can assume I have bought enough physical books that the question's not a silly one. :)

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Achète-la, achète-la! 📚

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper "que je passe le bac" I suppose

ainmosni, to Netherlands
@ainmosni@berlin.social avatar

I'm honestly still in shock from just how horrible the new coalition in the #Netherlands is. I mean, I knew it was going to happen for over a decade, but now that it actually happened... fuck.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@ainmosni Next one coming up: France

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

When the AI is in charge of the post-mortems https://botsin.space/@2001faster/112436354724392199

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Deeply telling about how far the Overton Window has shifted in 40 years that Ronald Reagan took a harder line with Israel than Joe Biden, never mind Mitt Romney.

(But then, per wikipedia Romney was best buds with Benjamin Netanyahu at university. So this tracks.)

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@cstross “Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said Sunday President Reagan 'hurt me very deeply' when he described a massive Israeli airstrike on Beirut as a 'holocaust' during an angry phone call.” — https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/29/Begin-says-Reagan-used-word-holocaust/3133399441600/

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

I assume when Mekka hears about how awesomely innovative the US VC industry is he doesn’t actually laugh. Much. https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112423073679596246

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper I work in payments. The US payment rails are old, cumbersome, insecure, difficult to use, full of corner cases (health care for example), and prone to fraud. Nobody wants to work with them. Especially the parts that involve EBCDIC (hi, Visa!). A lot of these things have been solved in Europe, Asia and Africa by actual innovation. In the US, the VC industry delivered blockchains.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Getting tired of Anglocentrism everywhere and especially in tech – the belief that particular features of the English language are somehow applicable all other languages. One most egregious example is text search and indexing. In English it's easy; in languages where words change depending on case or noun category, it's not so straightforward. Incidentally this makes English especially well-suited to train LLMs.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

I bet ChatGPT would find a morphologically complex language such as Sanskrit or a Bantu language harder to learn. – Also English is remarkably context-free. Japanese is the opposite of that: you literally can't say anything without taking into account the relative position of speaker and listener. (For example there's no single word for "that" in Japanese: you have one for "that thing away from me but close to you" and one for "that thing away from both of us". And everything is like that)

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Also, gender. No, gender is not isomorphic to pronouns. Many languages don't have gender at all, although they might have an intimidating number of pronouns (Japanese again). Or they could mark gender on the verb instead of the pronoun (Hindi). Or many other configurations. The "thing" that is being gendered varies. Sociologists and anthropologists study this. The gender worldview that comes with English doesn't need to be forced on speakers of other languages.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

This goes even as far as literary forms themselves, fiction and non-fiction. Tim Parks was remarking that novelists in 'minority' languages nowadays tend to adopt a style that will make them translatable into English more easily, at a loss of the richness of their native language. But the dollars are in the vast market of English readers. Same applies to philosophy and social sciences, sadly (although the French and the Germans valiantly resist, in their own ways, building on their traditions).

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Anyway, bottom line advice is: learn new languages. It's fun. You don't need to be fluent in them. And it will enormously open your worldview.

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

Yeah, Nice is nice.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Ah, my dear hometown. I'm going to recommend climbing the stairs up to the top of the Castle. And go get lost in the Old Town.

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

After quite a while studying French, and with memories of studying its predecessor language in school, I am now firmly convinced that aliens exist and Latin Grammar (and the grammar of derived languages) is the proof. Granted, proof by “OMG this could only have happened because we were being trolled” but, y’know, take the proof where you can.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Take latin, add more cases, add more tenses (like aorist), add the dual number, add ridiculously long compound words like in German, add rules about vowel inflections on the root when the number changes (also like in German), and you get Sanskrit. Now we're talking

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Me when I put my phone on DND. (Attempt at a translation in alt text)

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

It's nice to recognize (30 years later) that France could have stopped a genocide and did nothing. Let's not this happen again, OK? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/04/macron-to-say-france-and-allies-could-have-stopped-rwanda-genocide-in-1994

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

Having the substring “util” in a filename should be a fatal compile time error.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper trying to enforce this would be futile

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

“The issue isn’t that Americans weigh things differently. It’s that most of them don’t weigh things at all.” https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/apr/02/cups-v-grams-why-cant-american-and-british-cooks-agree-on-food-measurements

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Sometimes I toy with the idea of using an American recipe, I go to an online cups-to-grams converter, I realize that this is too confusing, I give up, and I go look up another recipe on a non-US website instead

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

I should know it by now, but the extremely strange, sudden bug I had to deal with today, and that couldn't be possibly caused by DNS, was caused by DNS.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • anitta
  • InstantRegret
  • mdbf
  • ngwrru68w68
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • khanakhh
  • osvaldo12
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • Durango
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • JUstTest
  • tacticalgear
  • ethstaker
  • provamag3
  • cisconetworking
  • tester
  • GTA5RPClips
  • cubers
  • everett
  • modclub
  • megavids
  • normalnudes
  • Leos
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •