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I play around with adding, subtracting, or multiplying license plate numbers. Does that count?

I am so rusty, that I just do add and subtract.

On the other hand, my grandparents, and father, could look at financial documents and do the calculations in their head.

People I know who stayed in finance longer than me, can crunch numbers rapidly.

I am around numerate people most of the time, so the occasions where I find I am the faster calculator around are jarring.

There are many conversations that go adrift because we can’t crunch numbers fast enough.

Is it a net loss to humanity in the face of the gains we obtained. Nope.

Is mental fitness of value to me, the same way physical fitness is of value to me? Yes, very much.


Didn’t research show that models get worse at translation the more languages get added in? The curse of multilinguality? Lauscher 2020?

It looks like meta found a way forward.

Reading meta’s abstract, it seems that they have found ways to improve the quality of the training data, and also new evaluation tools?

They are also saying that OMT-LLaMA does a better job at text generation than other baseline models.


There’s many nation states working on this, have you looked into availability of those data sets?

What languages are you prioritizing?


Yes, there are government datasets, languge "acadamies" (or "regulators") - organizations focused on preserving / teaching the language, and often smaller, local publishers that publish material in their local language.

I'm living in Guatemala, so have been focusing on the Mayan languages here (22 languages, millions of speakers).


As an aside, I remember visiting Guatemala (in the border area near Chiapas) in the early 90s and discovering that “Mayan” was not the monolith that I had been led to believe by my culturally narrow American education, but was a diverse collection of related cultures with multiple languages.

In one of the villages we visited, there was a language school where foreigners were learning Jacalteco. One student was from Israel and where most of the students had vocabulary lists in three columns (Jacalteco - Spanish - English), his had four columns where he did one more step of translation to Hebrew.


Looking at the media ecosystem at large, gives me a case of gallows humor.

In some sections of the ecosystem, firms still penalize journalists for errors. In other sections, checking reduces the velocity of attention grabbing headlines. The difference in treatment is… farcical.

We need more good journalists, and more good journalism - but we no longer have ways to subsidize such work. Ads / classifieds are dead, and revenue accrues to only a few.

I have no idea how we square this circle.


We can't square this circle. It's why they're all A/B flipping headlines (resulting in the most deranged partisan clickbait), killed of their (too expensive) redactions (especially international news), rely solely on (barely) rewriting AP, Reuters and PRNewswire, and fill their site with opinion rather than factual reporting in support of gov handouts to the sector.

I’m tempted to agree, but this is a case where I think there’s more human than AI. Maybe he used LLMs for a bit, and changed parts of it. Maybe he is patient zero for LLM speak?

Nope.

This is not how the adult world works, and we are all in organizations to know how difficult it is to spin up teams, and get them to a degree of excellence.

America with project 2025 has basically been burning libraries of experience, and it’s not going to come back without decades of slow, painful work to rebuild it.

Since this concept is only visible to people who think and have seen organizational decay, it is going to have a minor impact on the zeitgeist.

Instead voters are going to wonder every year why things aren’t better, not be interested in the boring institution building, and will vote whatever sounds good.

Underpinning all of this, the fundamental flaw that is laying all democracies low, is the challenge of managing our information economies.

We’ve developed ways to pollute and control our speech that don’t involve government control. We have information and media ecosystems that shape discourse by embracing abundance. Our legacy social defenses are “more speech = more good”, and so we have no new ideas how to deal with this new feature of modern life.

The other factor is the increasing concentration of wealth, resulting in those elites being the only voters that count, since they end up consolidating power. The top few households matter more to the economy than everyone beneath them.

These are the two big challenges that we have to address philosophically and practically for the advantages of democracy to kick in again.


The point that its fall is not quick, concedes that it is falling.

A fall that looks completely avoidable given what we have been taught about how the world works.


India is considering these bans. I suspect every country in the world is thinking of them.

I work in safety, and you are right in that this comes up every year. The pressures have been building up and it’s coming to a head. However:

0) Techlash is a thing, and HN regularly underestimates the vehemence and anger behind it.

1) There IS an organic component, driven by voters globally.

2) It is also meta and governments, taking advantage of a crisis to further their ends.

Governments globally are tending towards authoritarianism. Tech firms impact most of the world, but are barely responsive to even the American government.

Voters around the world are increasingly terrified of what tech is doing, while tech is entirely unresponsive to their concerns. Tech is very firmly the bad guy today, when it used to be the “good guy” in the 90s.

So governments are more than happy to be seen as putting tech in its place, while gaining more power for themselves.

A few anecdotes about how bad the safety side is: NDAs are so prevalent and tech is so averse to customer support, that safety teams have no formal signal sharing methods.

The number of requests to recover accounts, point out fraud, or even to address CSAM, that go through WhatsApp, slack, discord, etc. is heart breaking.

To be blunt, it’s a Kafkaesque fuck up that the whole world is stuck in, and people are pissed.


Reading the original research and stripping away the motives implied by the bot, the data is aligned with another interpretation. Namely that Meta is going with the flow and using the opportunity to push for regulation that impact its interests less, while affecting its competitors more.

The original research is riddled with baked in conclusions, and has not been verified independently. Its also mostly LLM generated.


Eh.

Why would I give him the same credit I would give a writer.

Or why would I give a writer the same credit I would give someone who created the AI prompts and scaffolding to generate this?

Being unhappy about not being able to call oneself an author, ends up betraying a lack of confidence in the work or process.

In the end writer, dancer, actor, whatever - these titles come from their impact.

There will be a different name for this, and eventually there will be something made that is good enough that people will be spell bound. At which point its going to be named something else.

At which point.


Ironically, the story can be read as gesturing in that direction, as it's ostensibly about giving a new title to a particular job.

In general, though, I think part of the mistake people keep making is that they try to imitate what would be value to engage with if a human wrote it, in an attempt to claim the role of an author of a book or whatever. There's likely artforms that are unique to what an LLM can facilitate, but trying to imitate human artforms is going to give you stunted results. The AI is very good at imitating the form but not the substance.

Once we stop trying to generate and pass off AI essays, novels, choose your own adventure stories, and all the other human genres as being human writing, we'll have a chance to figure out actually interesting artistic forms.


Yes. In the end what mattered truly was the expression.

However - since we are humans - we also care about the artist.

Creating something without the effort previous works involved, can and do affect the context and understanding of it.

Hah - just thought of one good example: how would people feel about talking to only fans creators, if they didn’t know it was AI.


> Creating something without the effort previous works involved, can and do affect the context and understanding of it

not really. Unless you place value on _effort_, rather than be objectively outcome based. Someone digging a hole with a spoon doesn't make it a better hole than a jackhammer.

I maintain that the work itself - that is, the contents of what is being expressed - is the sole judgement of how good the works is. Not the authorship, LLM-usage or otherwise.


Eh, by that same argument, how would LLMs fair when the content of the work itself is about “Something made by a human”.

A core fact about information, is that signal only exists in the right context.

As an illustrative example: A string of static or gibberish numbers converts to signal when we have the right tools to interpret it.

You could see a bunch of rocks arranged on a beach, while someone who understands the local language may see an SOS.

Culture itself keeps evolving, and teenagers reuse language to create jargon that makes sense to them, but is opaque to others.

I am arguing that your point is true, but its phrasing focuses on the Platonic ideal, and avoiding the messy practical context of communication.


The context exists whether it's LLM generated or not, because the context sits broadly in society, culture, and manifests in the mind of the reader.

> how would LLMs fair when the content of the work itself is about “Something made by a human”.

it would fair just as well as if the same words had been written by a human, provided the contents are sound and has good meaning - conversely, slop is slop, regardless if it was written by an LLM or human.

My point at the grandparent post is that there's a lot of blind discrimination on the origin of a works - if it was written by or with the help of LLM, then it automatically deserves less attention, and/or its content's worth diminished. All without actually discussing the content.


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