I don't think it's acceptable, and I don't tip if I pay before I eat. Ironically, I also don't adjust the amount I tip at sit-down restaurants based on how the service was. I refuse to allow tipping to expand beyond where it was customary when I was growing up. There should be less tipping, not more. It should be outlawed entirely.
This is common in other countries outside of the US that do not demand tips, even western ones? When I was at a kebab shop in Germany, the owner offered my family to trial new sauces and falafel he was experimenting with, before we committed to our order.
Unless the LLM has an SVG renderer in its toolbox, it's like asking a human to draw while blindfolded. It's amazing if they can do it well, but it's practically meaningless.
I'm generally pretty pro-AI, but I find this icky. Of course, I wouldn't have noticed except the whiteboard drawing seemed not quite right, so I'll probably be fooled in the future.
Yep, I was totally nerd-sniped by the image. I've never seen an engineer draw a whiteboard diagram anywhere near that detailed and tidy. No acronyms, consistent title case, descenders on a baseline - everything about it is wrong. It's so counter to reality, I seriously wondered if it was a joke.
The Nano Banana team should be pissed Google PR is distributing such a terrible photo. The poses are stilted, expressions frozen, even the eye-lines are off. Why couldn't they just use a Google Pixel phone to snap a photo of real Google engineers in a real Google office and upload it to Google Photos? Not Google enough?
I have seen such detailed and tidy whiteboard diagrams, but the catch is that they never occur in active discussion. It doesn't make room for scribbling, and stopping a discussion for 5-10 minutes to draw slowly and nicely doesn't make sense...
I actually didn't full-stop on it because I thought it was AI. For the first few seconds I thought it was a staged photo. I was nerd-sniped because it was staged so badly.
Based on what I've heard, Google is monitoring per-org usage and strongly / incessantly encouraging teams to experiment with the technology, so a lot of tokens get spent on pointless stuff like that. The preceding diagram, which is needlessly busy and blurry, appears to be AI-generated too.
This was not a factor. It was either staging the photograph or AI. Photographing inside the office can be a complex process with seeking appropriate permissions, and I didn't have an alternative space to do the photography. AI felt like an easier solution.
The third option is to just not, because an image of two people standing in front of a white board has little value even when the photo isn't staged and the white board content isn't generic.
This discussion happened in a chat window in reality, but is based on a real discussion between me and Luca, leading to reversing the order of "ac strategy" from splitting to joining.
This project led me to propose the Taft Test:
Does your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?
If so, then, maybe all those images aren’t adding a lot to your article. At the very least, leave Taft there! You just admitted it looks better.
Two reasons: The people in the pic look more or less like our real ourselves. The synthesized photo shows the process of discussing highly conceptual approaches, which was our everyday for 10 years or so.
If you "forget" to mark COW memory pointer as no-write, the net effect would be same, would it not? If I'm reading the diff correctly, the problem was that code missed to mark some pages as shared (aka no-write).
"I've no idea why one would use gpt-oss-20b at Q8" - would you mind expanding on this comment?
In that particular model family, the choices are 20B and 120B, so 20B higher quant fits in VRAM, while you'd be settling for 120B at a lower quant. Is it that 20B MXFP4 is comparable in performance so no need for Q8?
Or is the insight simply that there are better models available now and the emphasis is on gpt-oss-20b, not Q8?
The parameters in the original gpt-oss-20B model are "post-trained with MXFP4 quantization", so there just isn't much to gain by quantizing to Q8. If you look inside the Q8 model, most of the parameters are MXFP4 anyway.
Though, looking inside my "gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE" model, it looks to also be quantized the same way as the Q8, so that was probably an overstatement on my part.
Still, the Q8 is 12.1 GB and the FP16 is 13.8 GB. Not the ~1:2 ratio you might expect.
Never buy another Kindle? I keep mine in airplane mode all the time and sideload all the books/papers I want to read. It works practically just as well as when I bought it. Why wouldn't I buy another? If Amazon makes a Kindle with color at 300 PPI, I will.
Sure, proper EPUB support would be nice, but if I need that I can jailbreak and install Koreader.
If there's another device with comparable hardware/software/battery, I'd consider it. AFAIK, Kindle still has the best standby battery life.
It's not completely wrong, it will be understood, but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order ('a big tasty sandwich' sounds more natural to a native speaker than 'a tasty big sandwich', even though the latter makes sense and will be understood).
Demonyms for historical neighbours of England have irregular forms when speaking of a particular person from there. Scotland has 'Scot' and 'Scotsman'; Wales has 'Welshman'; Spain has 'Spaniard'. Other countries indeed need a second word, such as 'person' or 'citizen' ('a Chinese' sounds offensive to me; I would say 'a Chinese person' in all cases). The only country I can think of where using a bare demonym is grammatical when speaking of a single person from there is Germany with 'a German' - probably because it has the suffix -man.
Edit: A sibling comment pointed out that 'an American' is grammatical, and thinking about it, I think the suffix -an is what makes bare demonyms grammatical - you can say 'an Angolan', 'a Laotian', 'a Peruvian', 'a Moroccan', etc, but wouldn't say 'a Thai', 'a Swedish', 'a Sudanese', etc.
> but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native
You mean a native speaker might be ungrammatical when using their non-native language? That makes sense to me.
> Spain has 'Spaniard'.
Even so, you'll hear a ton of native Spanish people saying "As a Spanish person" or "As person from Spain" instead of simply "As a Spaniard", I'm not sure this is very surprising. If anything, that mistake makes it more likely they're a native than not, in the case of Spain, as the level of English outside of metropolitan areas is lacking at best, compared to other European countries.
I'm using the words 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' in a linguistic sense; human languages are subtle and fluid, and one doesn't have to be far along the sliding scale between 'doesn't speak a word' and 'well-educated native speaker' to be understood. We speak of 'broken' English when somebody is able to be understood but hasn't fully grasped the language yet; using demonyms incorrectly is a subtler flavor of the same thing. For example 'no come here' -> 'no entering' -> 'no entry'
> but wouldn't say 'a Thai', 'a Swedish', 'a Sudanese'
You also don't say 'a Japanese' but that is an extremely common error with Japanese English speakers when they are first learning.
I am looking for a citation, but I seem to recall the casual rule of thumb is something to do with the ending of the nationality (so '-ish', '-ese','-ch' etc. you can't put 'a' in front). I think the more formal explanation likely centers around rules relating to indefinite articles.
> and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order
I would think that if you say you are French, then everyone know you aren't native anyway. Maybe it's actually a good way, it can distinguish between true natives and false natives
When speaking English, the French side of my family refers to themselves like that often, however, they're from Bretagne, so exactly how French they are is up for debate.
Technically yes the demonym is "French", but "I'm a French" just doesn't work in English. The word 'French' is almost exclusively used in English as an adjective or the name of the language. It is never used as a noun for anything else. So in context, it reads as an adjective without a paired noun.
In English, you have to disambiguate be adding a noun: French person, French citizen, or Frenchman if you're old and inconsiderate.
Similarly, we don't call people "a Chinese". That construction is considered derogatory, if not outright racist. Demonyms typically cannot be used as nouns alone without a suffix. "A Brazilian" or "a Spaniard" are acceptable.
As usual for English, the rules are vague and inconsistent.
No, Frenchman is fine. It's a neutral and common descriptor, and I've far more often heard it said by French people than about them. Similar to Spaniard.
Not everything needs to be perennially problematised.
It is wrong, in the sense that native speakers do not say that, and it triggers what linguists call a "grammaticality judgment" in a native speaker. Same as "He eat apple" or "I am go to school". These may be comprehensible utterances, but they do not fit into a native speaker's internal grammar of valid English sentence structures.
Yes, languages can change, but there is no evidence that native speakers have started saying "a French". The only context I've ever seen that in is "As a French...", which strongly implies a non-native speaker of English. The evidence suggests that it's a common language interference error from French, not some future development of English.
Demonyms don’t use the same rules as countable nouns. Both “French” and “British” are acceptable demonyms, they’re just not particularly idiomatic in American English (which likes to overcorrect with “person” like you’ve noted).
(There’s no particularly consistency with this, it’s just what sounds “good” to American ears. We’re perfectly fine with “as a German” or “as a Lithuanian.”)
Precisely so: the OED's role is descriptive, in that it is to describe English as it is used, not how it ought to be used. It provides evidence of a grammatical rule - it is not the rule itself.
You can speak however you like, there is no language police, but the fact is the average English speaker will perceive certain constructs to be grammatically incorrect. "He eat", "I driving", "a French" etc.
If you're going to make statements like that to go against what I've written then at least come up with some viable citations to grammar literature.
Honestly, in all my years on this earth I have never, ever heard anybody in any English speaking country I've spent time in say "a French" "a American" "a British".
And that amounts to a lot of time surrounded by people speaking VERY "casual" English.
P.S. I said "an American" was ok if you re-read.. an NOT a
The reason you can say "an American" has nothing to do with a vowel or not, there are just some demonyms that for some reason can be used like this, and some that can't.
But your explanation about why it is correct is bullshit, has nothing to do with "an" vs "a", the English language is just inconsistent as fuck and some demonyms can be used like this and some can't.
Deepseek will regularly spit out Chinese (汉字）during English sessions. They generally seem to be syntactically related but it makes me think that there's some overhead of using English with an engine that's primarily trained in Chinese.
