I've been birdspotting for the last year (in the UK, there is an addictive app called birdex, which is basically like a pokedex in the pokemon game, except it does birds). I am proud to report that I've observed 110 species this year. The last one was this weekend, where apparently meadow pipits are traveling across London parks while they're heading south.
It's not just regional dialects and individual birds, I am noticing that the time of the year also matters. Tits sound different in spring, summer and autumn, and so do e.g. robins.
It's a hobby I can recommend to everyone. Whenever I am outside now, I can listen for any faint sound and then make a mental note of all the birds I observed.
in the case of large language models, the wire is the communication of your parameters between your layers of memory that is often the bottleneck. To do a forward pass, you need to use all parameters once, and so the communication between the compute and the storage is the bottleneck, and that bottleneck is also a bunch of wires.
It's odd that you can see the borders between Belgium and France for various birds (like the swift and cuckoo), same for the border between Germany and Poland.
I wonder why that is? There are no topological features defining these borders. Maybe the data is normalised in some way across countries?
That’s the more likely hypothesis, but I also wonder if different land management practices could be influencing a map like this. Agriculture in Poland is much more fragmented than in Germany - smaller fields of different crops, often separated by meadows and forests, creating lots of niches for biodiversity. In Western Europe you’re more likely to see giant, mechanised monoculture fields as far as the eye can see, leaving less space for agrarian-landscape wildlife.
Differences in farming practices and hunting rules between countries can have a surprisingly stark effect on the movement patterns of birds, either directly or by affecting their food sources or predators.
Learning a second language is a fantastic way to feel many aspects of being a child again. Having to deal with frustration. Understanding a situation but not be able to fully take part. Being able to communicate but only with the blunt instrument of the words you know.
Yep. So many people have been drifting away into some kind of parallel reality where language is seemingly the same, yet transmits no meaning between our diverging realities.
That too, but I originally meant literal human output, as in loss of ability to convey meaning with words in communication between people, no AI involved.
I like Lemony Snicket's approach: he gives (obviously) wrong, but technically correct, definitions for hard words. These definitions are usually hyper-specific, or satirical. Children, who are still very familiar with learning vocabulary from context, can find this much more amusing than adults who have given up on learning new words except via dictionaries.
> The word “briskly” here means “quickly, so as to get the Baudelaire children to leave the house.”
> “Wipi!” Sunny shrieked, which meant “I’d much prefer gardening to sitting around watching my siblings struggle through law books.”
Kids are so much smarter and more capable than adults give them credit for, and it is stunting society as a whole
I think infantilisation is a huge part of the reason we're where we are today - kids 100 years ago were working harder jobs than most adults today (not implying child slave labour is a good thing, just making a point)
Kids today, though, are given exactly 0 responsibility and treated like babies the whole way through their prime learning years
One of the first emails from the school when my small son was in Primary 1 was that they'd been making some pancakes in class and he'd picked up a Big Sharp Knife and began slicing some strawberries to put on them, and this was Very Much Not Allowed!
Children should not be touching the Big Sharp Knives!
Yeah, did he cut himself? No? Was he holding the knife and the strawberries carefully, so he didn't cut himself? Yes?
Want to take a guess as to why?
He's five. He knows how to chop vegetables. My parents taught me how to cook from a young age, I am teaching him how to cook from a young age. I'm raising a *man* here, not a perma-infant.
Although, between you and me, I think he could stand to use a bit less oregano in his pizza sauce. I'd never criticise his choices, I think he'll figure it out in time.
Only Death speaks like that in (GNU) Terry Pratchett's books. I assume he is disguised as "the Hogfather" and the other character is unaware even though it's known to the reader. And I assume Death is there because the girl is about to kill herself with the sword.
Death is there because he is no longer Death, he is the Hogfather.
Someone else has to be Death while he's moonlighting.
Bloody irresponsible thing to do, that, just wander off and work out of scope and expect others to pick up the slack, I don't know, personifications of abstract concepts going off-map just because they feel like it, what's the Disc coming to, eh?
More people should read Oliver Sacks' book Uncle Tungsten. As a kid he was allowed to buy real chemicals for his chemistry set and was told things like "can you make slightly less hydrogen peroxide next time". Minors buying pitchblende (Uranium ore) at the local drugstore for experiments? Sure, might encourage them to be scientists.
You have to show people (not just kids, also up to college students and adults) what can go wrong so they know the appropriate amount of respect for it. Kids don't have enough fear of some things, college students have too much because they learned their fear was too little before.
I hear it's traditional in some parts to start an electronics lab semester by blowing up one of every component to show how it goes, and I had a similar experience in metal shop when I was too afraid to crash a lathe and the teacher did it himself, showing me how close you can get the tool to the part before it's a problem.
I think the first time my son said the 'f' word, he got the tone and the body language exactly right for the context in which he used it (a frustrated/resigned "fuck's sake", with roll-eyes and throw-head-back, look up to the sky). He might have been five years old at the time. And back then, I really didn't say it around them very much (out of an attempt to be somewhat responsible).
They're absorbing everything. They're scraping the entirety of your personality to build their own.
I never quite understood the obsession with keeping some language away from children that everyone uses themselves. The words are there because they are needed. Walking the euphemism treadmill is a Sisyphus effort.
I heard of a study [1] claiming that people that swear more have a larger vocabulary in general, so your efforts might be counter-intuitive to your goal.
Don't see how deprivation of some words leads to the knowledge of other words, either. Maybe if you interject and correct swear word usage by providing other words that would be a better fit.
> Taboo word fluency is correlated with general fluency.
> Taboo words comprise pejoratives and slurs.
> Taboo fluency is correlated with neuroticism and openness.
That's probably true for people who know the words but is it true for people who don't? I expect most people use most common words at about the same level of fluency.
I know the word "computer". I expect people's "computer" fluency is correlated with their general fluency. Would teaching Victorian peasants "computer" increase their general fluency?
When EBv2.0 was tiny, like could walk but not really talk tiny, and I was WFH Because Coronapocalypse, he one day did a straight deadass impersonation of me.
Picked up a cordless mouse and held it up to his little ear like a phone, "Hello? Yeah? Yeah..." and started wandering around the living room with it, occasionally scowling and holding his other hand up to his ear, "yeah... yeah... well yeah, yeah? Naja, yeah... nah, nein! <waving expansively> Nein nein nein... Yeah, 'kay, bye."
Put the mouse down on the table.
"Uuuuuurgh....."
Absolutely nailed it, Gary Oldman level precision.
I'm not sure whether to interpret this as a statement about what we currently over/under-estimate, or as command that we should try what feels like over/under-estimation in order to counter our own biases.
No, it was really helpful advice I read somewhere. That when explaining something, always overestimate someones understanding, and underestimate their vocabulary.
Edit: apparently it's a vsauce thing. I do think it's right, it helped me a lot in life.
It's either a bot or a meat proxy. I have answered another one to see if they are pro-active. I'd have expected that at least they should process the article but apparently tokens are so expensive in this economy.
Manuports are natural rocks in "funny" shapes, like faces or falluses, which are found back (far) out of place and often in the neighbourhood of other human remnants.
So a Greek default would have created an EU political crisis. Greece would have been in the doghouse. Perhaps the other members would have suspended its structural funds, or even voting rights. Seems impossible it would have been thrown out of the EU, there's not even an obvious way to do that. All very unpleasant, but then there was clearly an upside for Greece. It just seems interesting that the scenario was never really entertained or gamed out in the media.
It was though? I remember a default being a real option in the media.
But in the end, it was clear that unlike in Iceland, bankruptcies were not considerable, and so a bailout was going to happen. The only question was how the bailout would be structured.
Yanis Varoufakis made his name back then by going against the grain and proposing a hairsplit, but instead an approach was chosen where Greece never really defaulted, but its population was harshly punished for it.
Ironically, doesn't the "Get a job" paragraph have the solution? If you believe that is what the future of jobs at a company looks like, perhaps try to market your tool to agents?
You could add an API which is perfect for agents to use. Something that survives the pull request review process.
It's not just regional dialects and individual birds, I am noticing that the time of the year also matters. Tits sound different in spring, summer and autumn, and so do e.g. robins.
It's a hobby I can recommend to everyone. Whenever I am outside now, I can listen for any faint sound and then make a mental note of all the birds I observed.
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