The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
If you’re talking about strips that look like this:
I believe that most brands use Benedict’s reagent: copper sulphate, sodium citrate, sodium carbonate. It interacts with reducing sugars (like glucose) and the colour goes from blue to light green to green to brown-green to brown-red, depending on concentration.
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This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:
Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:
“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.
The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.
If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:
Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.
What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)
…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.
More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.
I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to force itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.
Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.
I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.
Here’s how I see it working.
Users can create multireddits multicommunities multis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.
The multi owner can:
By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)
You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.
Is it? [coherent]
Yes when it comes to the relevant info. The anaphoric references are all over the place; he, her, she, man*, they all refer to the same fossil.
*not quite an anaphoric reference, I know. I’m still treating it as one.
I can only really guess whether they’re talking about one or two subjects here.
It’s clearly one. Dated to be six years old, of unknown sex, nicknamed “Tina”.
Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?
This does not show lack of coherence. Instead it shows the same as the “is it?” from your comment: assuming that a piece of info is clear by context, when it isn’t. [This happens all the time.]
That said, my guess (I’ll repeat for emphasis: this is a guess): I think that this shows that they cared for the mother because, without doing so, the child would’ve died way, way earlier.
That all reads like bad AI writing to me.
I genuinely don’t think so.
Modern LLMs typically don’t leave sentence fragments like “on the territory of modern Spain. Years ago.” They’re consistent with anaphoric references, even when they don’t make sense in the real world. And they don’t screw up with prepositions, like switching “in” with “on”. All those errors are typically human.
On the other hand, LLMs fail hard on a discursive level. They don’t know the topic (in this case, the fossil). At least this error is not present here.
Based on that I think that a better explanation for why this text is so poorly written is “CBA”. The author couldn’t be arsed to review it. Myself wrote a lot of shit like this when drunk, sleepy, or in a rush.
I’ll go a step further and say that the author likely speaks more than one language, and they were copying this stuff from some site in another language that has grammatical gender. I’m saying this because it explains why the anaphoric references are all over the place.
The article is coherent (it conveys the relevant info without contradicting itself) albeit poorly written. Most likely the result of someone getting really sloppy while writing it, perhaps sleep-deprived. But it doesn’t read like AI stuff, nor a translation - cue to “Cova Negra cave” (lit. “Black Cave cave”).
Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.
That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.
For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.
It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).
could you say that town is homelessnessless?
Has. The word is legit, but it would be an adjective because of the last -less there, so:
You could convert it back into a noun, through zero derivation; for example “homeless” is an adjective too, but people can say “the homeless are hungry”, as if it was a noun. But it sounds weird in this situation, I don’t know why.
Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat?
A language is not its vocabulary; that’s like pretending that the critter is just its fur.
English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.
All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.
What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.
For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:
The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).
Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.
Ah, got it.
The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from “any speaker of a foreign language” to “Latin/Romance speaker”.)
Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman “barbarus”.
He’s talking about the name Wallace, or rather its etymology.
They’re mostly safe. Don’t taunt them, don’t get too close to them (specially not to veals and bulls), and eventually they’ll see you as “safe to ignore”.
Yup.
The post and the comments make me glad that I never bothered with Less Wrong. It makes HN and Reddit look smart in comparison.
By “the ‘w’ foreigner word” do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?
If Wallace: I could’ve rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I’d need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.
If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn’t used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.
Here’s a link to the original formulation of Roko’s Basilisk. The text that it refers to (Altruist’s Burden) is this one.
You know, I’ve seen plenty variations of Pascal’s Wager. But this is probably the first one that makes me say “it’s even dumber than the original”.
I’ve seen worse stuff. I’ve caused worse stuff.
In my Chemistry uni times, I already prepared limoncello at home (vodka infused with lemon peels). Nothing weird, right. I even brought some to the uni parties, people loved that stuff.
And in the Organics lab one of the practical tasks was to synthesise isoamyl acetate, also known as banana oil. It’s completely safe as food/drink flavouring, but it has a clearly artificial banana flavour.
Then there’s that muppet connecting both things. He took inspiration of my limoncello, but he wanted to do things “like a chemist”. So he prepared a batch of isoamyl acetate, and used it to flavour vodka. He also used a buttload of sugar and yellow food dye. And he brought that to a uni party.
He called it “bananacello”. Everyone else, including me, called it “banana de plástico” (plastic banana). We still drunk it to the end, because “a good chemist likes alcohol” was our motto back then.
Those are used with urine, not blood. Urine is yellow-ish, but since it’s just a drop, it doesn’t stain the strip; instead, the blue tip changes colour as it reacts with the glucose in the urine. Then you compare that coloured tip with a chart, and you get an idea of the concentration of glucose in your body. Picture related:
I remember seeing those bottles in my bathroom all the time as a kid (my sister is diabetic).
It is roughly the same idea as the one behind the litmus test for pH, indeed. The difference is which substance you’re putting there (Benedict’s reagent vs. pH indicators) and which substance you’re testing for (glucose vs. H₃O⁺ / OH⁻).