guy_5676
If you go to a place that views western culture through a looking glass and is trying to learn English to progress to a better point in life, English is cool, speaking English is cool. Not saying that is a good way for things to be (or that literally every person you will meet will have this mindset), but that is how it is for a significant portion of people.
"Do you know what a comparison is? I did not call you an American. There’s no reason to take offense"
I'm not offended, but your remark was a) clearly intended as an insult and b) demonstrated that you were likely stereotyping me on a very particular way, which runs completely contrary to my actual experience with these matters.
I was referring to this specific part of the comment I replied to: "Americans are averse to learning languages as opposed to other people". My response is a very accurate explanation of the reasons why this is a) an unfair way of looking at things, and b) not unique to Americans. What aspect of my response is uncharitable? I'm not saying things should be one way or another, just explaining how they are.
"Here’s an alternative explanation. These people were so gracious and willing to communicate with you, a foreigner, that they were flustered and embarrassed that their command of the English language did not allow them to express themselves as clearly as they could. "
The situation I described has occurred to me more then once, even after I tried to communicate in the local language. English speaking is a flex in a lot of the world and poor English is embarrassing. The desirability and prevalance of English may upset you, but it is objectively true. You can get English teaching jobs and find plenty of English speakers all over the planet. The same is not true for any of the other languages I mentioned in my post.
"For someone having lived in twenty countries you seem as wordly as a North Dakotan having travelled abroad three times. All to Winnipeg"
Lmao, why are you so angry? I grew up in Australia and south east asia.
Americans in general don't speak as many languages as Europeans because they already speak arguably the most useful language. I've lived in 20 countries, and in every single one for them I've been able to find someone who speaks English. People are so ingrained with the need to know the language that I've actually met people who are embarrassed about their English talking to me in their own native country.
If you grew up speaking Greek, Romanian, or even something like Italian, this absolutely would not be true. Maybe you could find a person or two to talk to, but definitely not dozens casually in everyday situations. So you have to learn multiple languages by necessity. And since European countries are so small, close together and all have their own languages, you also end up picking up your neighbors languages.
I have also seen people train "jailbreaks" of popular open source LLMs (e.g. Google Gemma) that remove the condescending ethical guidelines and just let you talk to the thing normally.
So all in all I am skeptical of the claim that there would be no value in having access to the training data. Clearly there is some ability to steer the direction of the output these models produce.
When I see someone dismissing the code as a small irrelevant part of the task of writing software, it's like hearing that the low-level design and physical construction of a bridge is an irrelevant side-effect of my desire to cross a body of water. Like, maybe that's true in a philosophical sense, but at the end of the day we are building a real-world bridge that needs to conform to real-world constraints, and every little detail is going to be important. I wouldn't want to cross a bridge built by someone who thinks otherwise.
I've always found it pretty easy to find a new job when I've needed one, even now there are an insane number of openings all over the US. The job market here is an order of magnitude larger then it was in Australia.
I don't doubt there is a deflationary effect on demand/wages due to h1b visas, but I don't connect at all with the catastrophic rhetoric I see in these threads. The United States still has some of the best opportunities in the world for people with tech skills