vintermann

There have historically been a lot of ways poor people were stopped from imitating rich ones, and not just the obvious ones involving spending money. The US is pretty enlightened in that there are no name protection laws that I know of. In many European countries, you still need permission from every carrier of a rare last name if you want to take it.

Not so long. My grandfather, born 1908 in Norway, kept the proper patronym as a middle name since he would otherwise have the same full name as his father. Everyone had to take fixed last names by 1923, but it wasn't uncommon to keep the patronym as a middle name like my grandfather did.

My sister went to high school in the US for a year some time in the early nineties - we are Norwegian. She got perfect grades and some kind of award for American history. She explained it by saying, US textbooks wanted you to succeed. Whereas she was used to the Norwegian ones which were only out to rank you (on a bell curve - the grading guidelines didn't have set requirement, but instead told teachers to only give 5% the top grade), and if that meant being obtuse and reader-hostile, that was fine. If you were a really dedicated student you'd push through, right? So she thought it was ridiculously easy, but she didn't necessarily learn less.

I can't speak for the US textbooks at that level, but I can confirm that the Norwegian ones were pretty lousy, especially in history. I particularly remember they loved to hide crucial details in margin notes or image texts.

It's very unlikely to matter economically for you or me or the op that whiter flour is cheaper. Bringing it up suggests it matters in some other way - like we have an obligation to buy the cheaper option because that has least impact on the environment maybe? But that does not follow at all. I don't think we should award points for originality either.

I think Kamala Harris lost because she was the default candidate after Joe Biden, influenced by age-related bad judgement, insisted on running for a second term.

But I also think US presidents pick bad vice presidents on purpose, and that both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden himself were picked because they were bad presidential candidates.

There are two reasons why you would pick a bad vice president: one, probably the major one, is that the president gets to appease both the vice president's followers (hey, at least we got the vice president!) and the other losing candidates followers to some degree (hey, at least that vice president is so bad, they won't be a shoo-in as the president's successor!)

The other reason is that they want to discourage impeachment and assassinations. You may think that's stupid, but as my rule #1 says, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe. So even if it is stupid, if we have thought about it, they have thought about it too.

It wasn't changing sociopolitics that got them laid off though, it was changing technology. And the technology can indeed bite the other way too. Maybe it won't solve deeper issues on its own, but I see no reason to not bite back.

Probably the same reason that Meta gave: it's less important to control it, and more important to prevent someone else from controlling it entirely.

I think there are people who just assume there's money to be made if you're pushing the sloppified tomorrow hard, and no time to stop and think about why.

Maybe there are other people selling the tools, who try to convince the former people that what they're doing is smart and profit will roll in any day now.

Anyway it would be a mistake to think something is profitable just because someone bets on it.

That highlights the oddity of your calculations. You say that wheat is cheaper, but little about why. If the economies of large scale processing makes more processed wheat cheaper than less processed wheat, then maybe something else would be cheaper if our habits were different. So it's dubious to use the cheapness of white flour to argue that we should eat more white flour products.

Little more than the word.

All traditions take up air. If you aren't conscious about which traditions you continue and which ones you let go of, we'll end up at a least common multiple drained of all meaning except profit.

> Who wants an excuse to have fun, have kids and co-eds dress up in flirty clothing, and eat candy?

Now that you mention it, kids in flirty clothing is one of the things which isn't great.

But if we aren't homogenized, how can we market the Halloween special episodes, the Halloween merch, the Halloween hamburger menu and the Halloween latte?

Thanksgiving seems to be a harder sell.

Having Claude examine all automatic software updates was considered as a policy, and it was found that it would stop 99.5% of software supply chain attacks. However the other 0.5% of the time it would install a backdoor itself.

(This is a joke, to be clear.)

It's what they're used to, if they went to uni in the early 90s and were frozen into a block of ice since then.

Good point. An undersold feature of the old MS DOS editor (which was pretty nice) was that its command was ...edit.

(And VSCode also took some really good command line name real estate)

Minecraft isn't a problem at all, it's a sandbox game where it's implied you make your own fun. Depending on the levers you give the agents, it may or may not be a robotics problem, but it most of all depends on the task you give the agents. The task they were given in this case was pretty lame in my opinion ("build a civilization"), and it's no surprise they were bureaucratic and ineffective. It pretty much goes with the genre.

These agents were tasked with "building a civilization". This is a genre in Minecraft videos. They're full of this sort of thing.

So sure, it may be partially from these agents being heavily RLed into being little bureaucrats. But it's also the ingredient LLMs have had from the start: genre awareness.

Turing Games. It's hilarious. Although it owes a lot of the entertainment value to the human touches, such as giving the AIs different TTS voices (Llama 4 has a Texas dialect!) and letting them evolve their characters from game to game.

If caring about prestige is juvenile... Wikipedia as an institution cares ridiculously much what people think of it.

In my opinion Wikipedia cares way, way WAY too much about prestige and its "reputation". What's the point? What are the rivals it has to rise above? Who are you trying to impress?

I do see what is in it for the leadership, though, and I don't like what I see.

You touch on it, but I think the reason the deletionists won out was that Wikia was Jimmy Wales' for-profit alternative, and Jimmy Wales was the Nexus of soft power on Wikipedia.

He didn't have to tell anyone "Get as much stuff out of Wikipedia as possible so I can make money off it", that was just going to happen institutionally as a result of his clout and conflict of interest. People would obey in advance, and people without enough radar to realize they should would lose out against those who did.

No, that's the problem. I do not get what I ask for. I say, "when transcribing, don't use ligatures or letter variants" and I get back ſtuff like this.

She has made a somewhat Faustian bargain with the other warlords and by extension the emperor. She is very different than them in caring for outcasts, but the state is still the source of her power, so when the emperor wants the deer-god's head she goes hunting, thinking quite naturally that this is the best she can do for her outcast villagers. Money for the village's needs (they are far from self-sufficient), the emperor's favor, and (as far as she knows) an end to god-attacks on the village? Of course she goes. The villagers are equipped to deal with more short-term threats, she made sure of that.

She is absolutely a non-evil, non-villainous antagonist.

Not sure I buy the cause and effect here.

I did do test images, but apparently not enough. It's not 100% of images it drops the second column on either. On many it gets both, on some it only gets the second column.

I also found that it ignores other instructions sporadically ("Don't use letter variants or ligatures in the output, use the normal Danish/Norwegian alphabet when at all possible", still a few Unicode tall s'es in the output.)

It's good, but it's so frustrating since "worse" models manage to follow such instructions much better.

Eh, I say give it a try. Worst case we don't get to space but have a good time.

I tried Argon for a large historical HTR transcription project recently, since I heard it was really good at this. It was really good, but like all top US models I've used it was

* Definitively very good at domain specific knowledge. It can read sloppy 19th century danish gothic handwriting with faded ink just fine. Not perfectly, but probably better than I could have done with a day of struggle for every page.

* Expensive.

* Bad at actually doing what I said. I had told it in the prompt to be careful not to miss text, but I hadn't explicitly told it that some images may have text in double-column layout. So on those images - over half of my 300-page document - it produced an excellent transcription of the first column, and then considered itself done. Want to try again with a more careful prompt? That'll be another $20.

Around here, that would be pretty much hibernation.

Why is it so hard to set our schedules instead of our clocks? Can't we just agree that school starts an hour later in winter, for instance?

Elseh I'll grant, but it feels a lot less natively English, and you can't count on an American clerk or census taker to care about accurate transcription. It may have been closer to "that's not a name in English. Pick either Elsie or Elsa".

And yeah, Elsa was common too.