garethrees

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Looking at Inferno book 4 (the virtuous pagans), Jacopo gives us notes for the Pleiad Electra at 4.121; for Hector at 4.122; Julius Caesar at 4.123; Camilla and Penthesilea at 4.124; Latinus at 4.125; Brutus, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia at 4.127; Saladin at 4.129; Democritus at 4.136.

But he does not give notes for Abel, Noah, Moses at 4.55; Abraham, David, Israel and Rachel at 4.58; Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucian at 4.88; Aristotle at 4.130; Socrates and Plato at 4.133; Diogenes, Thales, Anaxagoras, Zeno, Heraclitus, and Empedocles at 4.136; Dioscorides, Orpheus, Cicero, Linus, and Seneca at 4.139; Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Averroës at 4.142.

So Jacopo, at any rate, thought that readers might need help with mythological and historical references, but not with biblical and philosophical; or maybe he thought it was clear enough from the text that Diogenes, Thales, Anaxagoras, etc. were pagan philosophers. But Guido da Pisa's 1328 commentary has detailed notes on all of these. So there must have been readers who wanted more information on these figures.

garethrees

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I am not sure that "Dante is clearly writing in the expectation that his audience will know these references" as claimed in the article. He put a lot of learning into the work, and maybe he had in mind an ideal reader who could follow the most obscure of references, and appreciate all the allegorical meanings, but it's noticeable that the narrator of the poem is always asking naïve questions and getting rebuked for his ignorance by Virgil and Beatrice. Readers who don't understand everything in the poem can thus feel that they are in a similar position to the narrator.

And as soon as the poem was published, people started writing explanations for the difficult bits. Dante's son Jacopo wrote a commentary in 1322, Graziolo Bambaglioli wrote another in 1324, and by the end of the 14th century there were at least fifteen. This shows that the poem quickly found an audience that was not familiar with all the references.

garethrees

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Language models are based on probabilities of tokens appearing in a context. For illustration purposes, imagine a very simple model with just one token of context that has been trained on a corpus of three sentences, all of which are true, for example:

    clouds are white
    crows are black
    swans are white

After the model outputs "crows are", the single token of context is "are", and the probabilities are 2/3 for "white" and 1/3 for "black". So the model usually emits "crows are white", which is false, despite being trained on a corpus of true statements. Statistically "white" was more likely to follow "are" in the training data, so the same is the case of the model's output.

Of course LLMs have a much larger and more complex context than the single token in my example. But if the training data contains many news stories about professors being accused of sexual misconduct (which is newsworthy), and few news stories about professors behaving with propriety (which is not), then when querying the model for a story about a professor then it is likely to reproduce the statistical properties of its training data.

garethrees

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Another way to sum a column of numbers uses calc:

  M-x calc-grab-rectangle RET V R +

garethrees

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

A couple of issues that came up for me when porting from x86 to ARM recently:

1. The x86 architecture gives programmers a lot of memory ordering guarantees, so that communication of values between threads does not usually need memory fences. ARM64 does not give so many guarantees, meaning that multi-threaded code may need additional memory fences to avoid data races. But data races due to out-of-order memory updates are hard to diagnose.

2. Page size in macOS is 4 kB on x86, but 16 kB on ARM, so if someone has hard-coded the page size rather than calling sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE) this may need to be discovered and fixed.

garethrees

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Jeannette Power's "Observations physiques sur le poulpe de l'Argonauta argo" (1856) is available at the Internet Archive [1].

[1] https://archive.org/details/b2228476x

garethrees

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

This bit of speculation goes back at least to David Eugene Smith (1925), "History of Mathematics", volume II, page 59:

"There is a possibility that the Romans avoided IV, the initials of IVPITER, just as the Hebrews avoided יה in writing 15, as the Babylonians avoided their natural form for 19, and as similar instances of reverence for or fear of deity occur in other languages."

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.201939/page/n7...

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