What's the legality of this? My understanding is that if a site does not offer a public API is because they don't want to (think of WhatsApp). Building a company on that seems extremely risky
Many 'you should read these lists' are just that lists. Usually by the author of the list and things they have read and think you should too. That they missed something is not surprising. Lists like this have an air of authority when they usually boil down to 'things I have seen/read and like/hate'. I use them as interesting things to go thru to see if there is anything I missed.
I think Egan is much better known than most (if not all) of the authors in the list. I've heard of Andy Weir and Hugh Howey, but not the particular books listed by them. Conversely I've heard about Permutation City quite often.
I thought HIIT/Tabata was more about intensity so you COMPRESS a whole session in less time. This article is telling you that if you EXPAND the session to allow for pauses, you can get more out of it without increasing the intensity.
> C# projects tend to have a level of abstractions
Such as? I think it really depends on the kind of company you are at (big enterprise, medium size, small company) and the field (web agency, startup, tech company, non-tech company, conglomerate etc). You can have abstractions in Java too.
If you read the test of the sentence you cut off, I specifically mentioned "Enterprise" development. I'm not a fan of most Java shops either.
It's not that you cannot use C# in a relatively light handed way, it's not that it often isn't.
Probably the most painful example in practice was The Enterprise Library Data Access Application Block... Which at the time was all the more painful in early VS were go to definition took you to an interface and never the implementation. There was always a single implementation and never any tests so it was layers of misdirection for absolutely no benefit whatsoever in practice.
I like C#... I don't like a lot of places that use C#. In particular large companies and banking in my experience.
What does that mean? The company on freefall? The company reversing WFH policies that are in your contract?
You have generalised a huge number of situations into one phrase and implied that employees should suffer it through. Would companies suffer it through "the moment things get difficult" with an employee if they had the chance of not suffering it through? No, they would just fire the employee.
You can only expect reciprocity in a business transaction. And that is what employment is.
Engineering has humans in it. Same as politics. All with human brains using the same architecture full of biases. It's not very surprising to be honest
Your usage of "language" here is akin to laymen usage of "hypothesis" and "theory" and then trying to apply it in an academic context. Same sequence of letters but different meaning. In linguistics, "language" has a specific definition that only humans have been shown to have. Some trained individuals like Koko do seem to demostrate an very limited ability to use "language" in the linguistics sense.
You might argue that the definition itself is arbitrary and coming from the same place that geocentrism, creationism and flat-Earth views come from. I can't argue for or against that.
I suspect things as more nuanced than the current definition that we have though, especially after the recent study from the Scientific American that heated up Hacker News in a way that only "Is CS a science" articles can.
There's no consensus on the definition of what language is.
Chomskian linguistics does posit that human language is based on (innate) recursive grammars (narrow language faculty hypothesis), but this has always been a contentious question. And per that definition humans too have demonstrated only very limited ability in e.g. infinite embedding.
"Language" in the sense of "the thing only humans have been shown to do" requires a bit more than just one to one correlations between signifiers and objects (or a "sentence" of signifiers with the same meaning as all of the words added together independently). For a system of symbols to be "language" there must be a difference between "what the cat ate" and "what ate the cat". No animal communication has been shown to have a grammar to it, and thus the ability to express exponentially many unique ideas with each additional word.
I feel like there are human languages where the symbolic distinction between "what the cat ate" and "what ate the cat" are nil and the understanding is achieved contextually.
2. You don't need to understand the words to push the buttons. You could replace the English words with gibberish and it would still work as long as you always give the same thing when the same button is pressed. Many animals can do this. It is called positive reinforcement. Nothing to do with language
I think most dog owners would tell you that their adult dogs can communicate things like this, but that the language is unfortunately siloed into a very personal relationship that is difficult for even the human part of the pair to demonstrate, making it difficult to do science about
Sometimes at bedtime my cat will go to the door and scream nonstop. I don't know why he does it. Maybe it is for food or attention. But the only way I have found to get him to stop is to pick him up, put him on his special pillow, squish him, and have my partner join me in telling him "we are going to bed, it's bedtime".
I'd say about 80% of the time he listens. So he is capable of understanding what we want him to do, and capable of supressing his own personal desires in order to maintain harmony in our group. Funny enough, he won't go to bed unless both me and my partner tell him it is bedtime, so maybe he is only obeying because there is some majority consensus?
Because of this, I find it easy to believe that a cat or dog could be taught something as abstract as "self" if they can understand commands and intent and group dynamics. It's just difficult to tell what is "understood" and what is just conditioned behavior. Hell, I can't even answer that question for myself as a human.
- use arbitrary links between signifier and signified
- generate new linguistic tokens (new signifier and signifieds as well as links between them)
- refer to events and times beyond the current ones
- talk about the system of communication itself using the system itself
Then, you would have grounds to think that your cat uses a language in the linguistic sense. But until, then it is just a communication system no matter how sophisticated.
Your cat being a extremely well oiled operant conditioning system does not mean that it is able to think the way you can even if they are likely more intelligent than what we give them credit for because, as much as we would like to believe we do, we don't know what they think and any patterns that we see are just good old human pareidolia. Like hearing voices in the wind, faces on rocks, etc. Your feeling is real but the belief that feeling induces does not have grounds in reality as far as we know so far.
It is possible to over-select on skepticism about other species. Imho, the simplest explanation is that it is far more likely that there is nothing special about us, and a mere quirk of say, the combination of tool-use, foresight, and social cohesion that makes humanity special.
Or is it special? We are just a well oiled operant conditioning system, it does not mean that we are able to think the way cats can.
Laymen think of language the same way they do about theory and then try to apply that to an academic context. Different meaning. A system of communication is not necessarily a language even if all languages are systems of communication. If your dog could use arbitrary linguistic tokens, generate new ones, describe things that it has not seen before, talk about the past, the future or places other than the current one, then I would be more willing to entertain the idea that your dog has a language
How would you even go about making a model that can simulate a human chess skillset (saying levels implies that chess skillset is a scalar value while it is more reasonable to think of it as a tree of skills where your abilities might be higher or lower depend ending on the specific skill branch)
In the context of this thread (“non-GM level computer chess”, which I read as also excluding International, FIDE Master, and Candidate Master (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmaster_(chess))), I think it’s more important to not have a good learning algorithm.
Even 10 thousand of such games may already have way more tactics than a player at the targeted level can detect and apply. If so, a learning algorithm that detects and remembers all of them already will be better than the target level.
Exactly. Level x (whatever scalar thing the user meant by that) doesn't quite work out for the reason you outlined. X Level Players have different tactics and someone that can use all of them will likely be better than most if not all those those players. I got downvoted for saying that. Maybe I didn't phrase it as well as you did
Yeah but, won't it also be learning from the mistakes and missed tactics too? (Assuming its reward function is telling it to predict the human's move, rather than actually trying to win.)
All the self-hosted LLM and text-to-image models come with some restrictions trained into them [1]. However there are plenty of people who have made uncensored "forks" of these models where the restrictions have been "trained away" (mostly by fine-tuning).
You can find plenty of uncensored LLM models here:
[1]: I personally suspect that many LLMs are still trained on WebText, derivatives of WebText, or using synthetic data generated by LLMs trained on WebText. This might be why they feel so "censored":
>WebText was generated by scraping only pages linked to by Reddit posts that had received at least three upvotes prior to December 2017. The corpus was subsequently cleaned
The implications of so much AI trained on content upvoted by 2015-2017 redditors is not talked about enough.
It has a sanitised output. You might want to look for "abliterated" models, where the general performance might drop a bit but the guard-rails have been diminished.
