This makes me think of a tool from semiotics called the Greimas square where you can have opposing concepts e.g. A and B (ugly & beautiful, for & against, legal & illegal).
At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem like contradictions but are not (both beautiful and ugly, neither for or against).
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Others have pointed out that English speakers do have the capacity, and do use these sort of double negatives that allow for this ambiguity and nuance, but if you are an English-only speaker, I do believe that there are concepts that are thick with meaning and the meaning cannot accurately be communicated through a translation - they come with a lot of contextual baggage where the meaning can not be communicated in words alone.
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As a New Zealander who's lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I've realized in conversations with some native Americans where despite sincere (I think) efforts on both sides, I've not been able to communicate what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with intelligence, but like author hints how language shapes how we think and therefore our realities.
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I've never found poetry to be interesting, but recently I've come to appreciate how I think poets attempt to bypass this flaw of language, and how good poets sometimes seem to succeed!
Something I think would be interesting for model APIs and consumer apps to exposed would be the probability of each individual token generated.
I’m presuming that one class of junk/low quality output is when the model doesn’t have high probability next tokens and works with whatever poor options it has.
Maybe low probability tokens that cross some threshold could have a visual treatment to give feedback the same way word processors give feedback in a spelling or grammatical error.
But maybe I’m making a mistake thinking that token probability is related to the accuracy of output?
I had a problem with my carrier as well with porting my number over. Attempting to interact with their customer service was a painful loop where nothing was resolved.
After a week I submitted an FCC complaint online (it was very straightforward) and issue was resolved in 24 hours.
During the start of covid I was considering buying a pulse oximeter and it annoyed me that some listings on Amazon were using “FDA approved” in listing and logo and I found it was easy to report them to FDA and their listing was taken down.
One time I was frustrated that a large and popular NYC-based physical store was charging sales tax for clothing under $110 (in NYC clothing and shoes under $110 have 0% sales tax) and I tired reporting to a state authority but I never even got an acknowledgment that complaint was received :/
I have to give a shoutout to New Zealand Marmite which is totally different to British Marmite (I think that NZ marmite has some sweetness as well).
Somehow i grew up in a mixed household that had both because my mum preferred Vegemite and I prefer Marmite.
In NYC it’s fairly easy to get Australian Vegemite but sadly impossible to find NZ Marmite, instead I do a bulk order every couple of years so that I have a stockpile :)
I live in a smallish apartment building with 50 apartments and in the basement we have a little building community library where people put books/DVDs/Blu-ray disks that they’re done with. Last weekend I grabbed The Goodfellas and The Dark Night and will put them back when I’m done.
I think it would be really cool if there were ways for people to share their physical media because I don’t have the room to maintain a big media library, and also don’t have the energy to rip and store locally.
I also want to add that I’ve changed my streaming behavior- I will subscribe and immediately cancel the subscription so that it expires after a month so that I don’t end up with a bunch of active subscriptions that I’m not actively using.
When I do subscribe I always pay for the more expensive ad-free versions but recently I couldn’t get anything to play on Paramounts streaming service. After some trial and error I found that their “ad-free” service won’t run with my blocker running on my router and I needed to allowlist some ad services for it work. That’s pretty annoying.
Maybe you’ve read this already (I still have it in my stack to read so can’t give any personal review) but ‘Determined’ by Robert Sapolsky sets the argument that we don’t have free will and that the justice system is flawed because of that.
It’s a really interesting product that I’m not going to buy!
Declarative interfaces that allow you to describe what you want and use agents to go out to different services and chain them together is a cool idea:
I don’t want to spend time using dozens of different apps with different (often poorly designed) interfaces.
Having a push to talk hardware button instead seems less clunky than a “hey siri” key phrase (I use Siri dozens of times a day but unfortunately ‘raise to talk’ feature on Apple Watch has never worked well for me).
I’m curious how their LAM works with interfaces being updated- if they need to retrain with UI updates or if it’s flexible enough to be stable with UI changes and new features etc.
I currently use ChatGTP sessions to dive into various topics I’m interested in, and explore ideas- I do like the idea of dedicated hardware that would allow this, but it’s something I imagine I’d keep on the coffee table at home, I don’t want to get a dedicated SIM and data connection or carry around another device.
They’ve raised $30M and I wish them well, I hope they survive and have me as a customer in the future.
It’s probably more due to coastal subsidence than rising sea levels. My favorite is when glaciers retreat there is a rebound effect from pressure which can cause other local land to sink as a sort of equilibrium.
I think in the Mediterranean coastal subsidence is mostly due to plate tectonics. I remember reading something about how myth of Atlantis might be due to a real life city that sunk as a result of an earthquake.
I flip-flop between optimism and pessimism on this and I’m in a pessimistic cycle at the moment.
I can also imagine the machinery of capitalism maybe working (I like the idea of declaring a ‘war on emissions’ popping a war revenue act for the highest earners and creating a new industry focused on reducing emissions).
But two things are fueling my pessimism: the first is that as a culture we’ve grown so used to a lifestyle (and economy) based on unsustainable use of our resources. I just can’t see a world where we take a step back from any of the modern conveniences we’ve gotten used to hanging.
I guess related to that: The free market is the most effective model, but that comes at cost of no protections for workers and resources, and that rewards exploitation.
I used to hope that I was wrong, now I mostly just hope that the worst results don’t happen in my own lifetime.
That's fantastic! I was recently doing some research and learnt that with ART people who are HIV+ can actually expect to live a little longer than people who are HIV-. I think it's because they have more regular check ups to make sure that treatment is being maintained.
I guess I don't fully understand U.S. healthcare system (I'm an immigrant from a country with universal healthcare, and this is the first time in my life that I've had a medication prescribed other than short-term antibiotics).
I pay a $10 co-pay for generic with my insurance, but when I pick up from pharmacy the receipt says "you insurance saved you $1888" (you're right it's not ~$2500/month - I just checked and that's a different prescription I have that I get filled at the same time).
> They can take pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep), a kind of drug that reduces their chance of contracting it by 99% or so. This comes as a daily pill, and is popular among gay men in rich countries.
The article takes a global focus (which makes sense since most new HIV diagnoses happen outside of the United States), but even the United States has over 30,000 new HIV infections per year.
In 2021 feds mandated that insurance companies must include PrEP as free preventative care, but that doesn't help the most at risk who are young and may not be insured (30-day supply of generic PrEP costs ~$2,500, and every 3 months people must have doctor visit and bloodwork to check HIV and STIs, and for potential liver and kidney damage).
In 2022 a federal judge ruled that they can not require Christian companies to cover PrEP as this violates their religious rights under federal law[1]. This will likely make it's way up to the Supreme Court, and there's a high risk that as a result people in the United States will then need to pay out of pocket for PrEP.
Those smaller controlled burns help prevent organic matter from building up that can lead to more devastating uncontrolled fires. The national parks service has been incorporating those methods into their fire management practices.
And driving bison of cliffs were a sustainable hunting practice - it was habitat loss due to farming and commercial hunting that led to their population decline.
Gematria is featured a lot in scott alexander’s Unsong (serialized fiction that was published in via blog) http://unsongbook.com/
Very quick summary is that Kabbalah is real, and corporations set up content farms to brute force search for names of god so they can copyright and sell them.
It’s a really fun read (author probably also has a hacker news account, so if you see this comment thank you for writing such a fun book).
> Because we don't don't have any memory of what it was like to be in these states.
I want to add an anecdote from about 5 years ago when I fainted: there is a tiny moment as I was regaining consciousness that I had an experience that is unlike anything I’d ever experienced before (and words really fail to describe it) there was no sense of time, or even presence- it was like pure observation. It wasn’t the blackness nothingness that I think is associated with being unconscious, instead it was the opposite- it felt like hundreds of images, sounds and thoughts all layered on top of each other- it was very ‘noisy’. That might sound stressful, but I don’t remember feeling anything at all.
It was only when some of that noise faded away that I experienced a sense of ‘self’ again and a moment later I formed the idea where am I? And then I opened my eyes and everything was back to typical conscious experience (although feeling a little disoriented).
At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem like contradictions but are not (both beautiful and ugly, neither for or against).
--
Others have pointed out that English speakers do have the capacity, and do use these sort of double negatives that allow for this ambiguity and nuance, but if you are an English-only speaker, I do believe that there are concepts that are thick with meaning and the meaning cannot accurately be communicated through a translation - they come with a lot of contextual baggage where the meaning can not be communicated in words alone.
--
As a New Zealander who's lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I've realized in conversations with some native Americans where despite sincere (I think) efforts on both sides, I've not been able to communicate what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with intelligence, but like author hints how language shapes how we think and therefore our realities.
--
I've never found poetry to be interesting, but recently I've come to appreciate how I think poets attempt to bypass this flaw of language, and how good poets sometimes seem to succeed!