Lvxferre [he/him]

That makes sense; it would be a mix of “if you can do it and I can’t, you must be cheating” and “your a bot than you’re arguement is invalid” ad hominem.

I think unnecessary combativeness might be also a factor. I’ve noticed on the internet people who want to fight against “something”, it doesn’t matter what; so they pick any low-hanging fruit they can find to fight you.

I’m actually using more those resources (em dashes, three points lists, “it’s worth noting that”, “it’s not X, it’s Y”, etc.) after AI popped up. They’re a damn good way to detect assumptive people, eager to conclude based on little to no info or reasoning; the same ones OP is complaining about. They don’t want a conversation at all, they want to whine, so if you give them a low-hanging fruit you can detect them early and block them as noise and dead weight.

That’s in my “casual” writing style, though. Professionally (as a translator) I mostly play by the tune, trying to preserve the style of the original. (Plus I barely translate things into English, it’s usually into Portuguese, very rarely Italian.)

That might not necessarily be the case – there is a possibility every example is completely organic – but it’s a sign of the times that we can’t just relax and assume the things we see and hear were made by people.

Guys, I found em dashes! The author is a bot! Bring me my pitchfork! /jk (those are en dashes, by the way.)

My take is that cetacean communication is, as far as we’ve analysed and attested it, proto-linguistic: it shows some of the features you’d expect from Language¹, but not the complete package.

This case is a good example. It’s showing low order units equivalent to phonemes; but it isn’t showing all that recursive “use blocks to build blocks” structure we see in Language e.g. [gestemes² | phonemes] building morphemes, morphemes building words, words building clauses, clauses building sentences, sentences building utterances, all of those to convey meaning.

Now let me point out some issues with the article. Mostly as correction.

[title] Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds

Correction: “Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels aspects of human language, study finds”. Namely the abstraction of sounds into phonemes, or of gestual articulations into gestemes.

Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet”

No, they don’t. In fact a lot of humans don’t have any sort of alphabet, with or without quotation marks. What they do have is a form of phonemes.

The distinction is important here because phonemes³ pop up instinctively for us, but an alphabet is a rather later learned development of some human societies. And the cetaceans in question likely have it instinctive too, like we did.

Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian.

The video explains this better, but: note Mandarin has phonemic tone but not vowel length, and Latin has phonemic vowel length but no tone. For a better example of a language combining both, check Ancient Greek⁴. (For Slovenian it depends on dialect, some have tone⁴ and some don’t.)

The structure of the whales’ communication has “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution”

I think a lot of the “underlying” structure might be actually shared across mammals: it’s the ability to abstract a variable signal into discrete units. The convergent evolution in this case would be only to use that underlying structure with the sounds produced by one’s own species.

Project Ceti has set a goal of being able to comprehend 20 different vocalized expressions, relating to actions such as diving and sleeping, within the next five years.

One thing the article doesn’t mention is the potential for those being community-specific. As in: different vocalisations mean the same thing in different groups of sperm whale.

Side note this is fucking cool, and props to the researchers behind this. I wish the article did a better job conveying their findings. I’m reading the links provided by the article right now, and they look amazing.)

1. I’m using “Language” with a capital “L” to refer to the human faculty. While “language” with a minuscule “l” refers to some system using that faculty; like Mandarin, Latin or Slovenian.
2. Gesteme: the sign language equivalent of phonemes. It’s a set of gestual articulations used in a way that contrasts with other sets of gestual articulations.
3. At least, the process of organising sounds into phonemes. Which sounds will end as which phonemes vary wildly, as those depend on the language, not on Language.
4. Pitch accent used contrastively is a simple type of tone system.

I think the text leaves the worst parts out: assumptions, decontextualisation, faulty reasoning, focusing on individual words instead of what they mean, and things like this. As in, issues with that part of comprehension that depends on logic, not on language proficiency.

All of those were already a problem before chatbots. But since chatbot output is really bad at those things, I think increased exposure to chatbots might make the problem worse.

That threat did not materialize, and now some apologists are saying that it was just one of Trump’s deranged bargaining tactics, as if that excuses such categorical declarations of mass violence from a US president

Even if playing along this fucking farce of “just” a “bargaining tactic” (instead of accurately representing it as commitment to war crimes), and even if we brush off all moral standards (we should not), that’s still bloody stupid. He’s making sure the Iranian population gets as motivated as possible to resist, while the United-Statian population resists against any sort of war effort. He’s shooting his own foot split hoof.

Currently, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, xAI, Oracle and even Meta have large contracts with the US military.

That should surprise nobody. Let’s play “spot who you know”:

But this week should serve as a clarifying moment.

Aah, cut off the crap. If this is a clarifying moment for anyone, the person in question has been living under a rock since forever.

The tactic of mass destruction of homes in Gaza, where Israel has been accused of committing genocide, was described as domicide by academics, a strategy that is used to systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable.

The accusation of genocide is completely accurate; domicide is only part of it. Israel’s modus operandi goes as follows:

• Make it impossible for the locals to live in the region.
• “Occupy” the region with military troops. “We’re just protecting ourselves!”
• Turn a blind eye to Israeli settlers encroaching into the region. “Noooo, the Israeli government has nothing to do with this!”
• Wait until they settle and start calling it “our land”.
• “Israeli citizens live here, so this is Israel now.”
• Try to shut off criticism through red herring, such as using a tragedy to justify another.

It’s likely what Netanyahu is doing with Lebanon, too. Nazism called it Lebensraum (“life space”, or “living space”); I don’t know how the Zionism calls it, but it’s the same deal.

Got it! To be frank I know practically nothing about the insides of your trade, so actual info (instead of my guess above) is damn great.

If you think pissing off a mother is bad, it’s worse when it’s Oma.

Oooooh, I know this. Story time:

As a wee kid my nephew kept asking me to build him houses in maiquete Minecraft. I often did it. But once, I built one as a practical joke: the house was huge and well elaborated, but there was TNT hidden under the floor, and a pressure plate (to activate the TNT) at the front door. So once he stepped on the pressure plate, to enter the house, the TNT would explode.

And then I let him play with my computer, as usual. With the house he wanted. And both my sister (his mum) and our mum (his grandma) were nearby, they knew about the joke.

So, he enters the virtual house, and… tsssssSSS-kaBOOOOM! The TNT explodes, with a loud noise, and the house is now a crater. But instead of just getting surprised and laughing it off, he got really scared, and started crying.

And my sister started laughing at her son, like a bloody muppet, because he was overreacting. And he started crying harder. Because even his own mother was laughing at him.

Guess what? My mum got extremely pissed. Not at me, not at him, but at my sis. For laughing at his distress. You don’t shit on her grandson’s woes, not even if you’re his mum! (Thankfully I copied the in-game world into a backup, after I built the house but before I rigged it with TNT. Showing him the copy with the intact house calmed him down.)

[Sorry if it’s a complete tangent of your story with your ex.]

She assumed that meant it would have to wait a week.

If you journalists are like almost every other profession out there, you’ll need to rely on stuff from one day to release your work in the next one. So when you said the print edition was Sunday, and Saturday 4:00 PM is the best spot you can hit, I was already picturing a bunch of people working late at night so the stuff could become news for the next day.

To be fair here’s how cats would be reconstructed if they went extinct and we had to rely on fossils:

…nah, screw that, the lady in my pic is still hella charming, the one in the OP is an abomination!

Translated from Spanish

And they didn’t even make some joke on how dumb (burro) it looks like! hglksflksdlllksdf

[Replying to myself as this is a tangent]

I think the “bots can generate misinfo even if you just feed them correct info” point deserves its own example.

Let’s say you’re making a model. It looks at the preceding word, and tries to predict the next. And you feed it the following sentences, both true:

1. Humans are apes.
2. Cats are felines.

From both the bot “learnt” five words. And also how to connect them; for example “are” can be followed by either “apes” and “felines”, both having the same weight. Then, as you ask the bot to generate sentences, it generates the following:

3. Humans are felines.
4. Cats are apes.

And you got bullshit!

What large models do is a way more complex version of the above, looking at way more than just the immediately preceding word, but it’s still the same in spirit.

I’m failing to see how this is different from making up a fact and then spreading it to news outlets.

They uploaded the papers to a single preprint server. That’s important.

Preprints are papers predating any sort of peer review; as such, there’s a lot of junk mixed in — no big deal if you know the field, but a preprint server is certainly not a source of reliable information, nor it should be treated as such. On the other side, news outlets are expected to provide you reliable information, curated and researched by journalists.

And peer review is a big fucking deal in science, because it’s what sorts all that junk out. Only muppets who don’t fucking care about misinformation would send bots to crawl preprints, and feed the resulting data into a large model; or to use the potential misinfo from the bot as if it was reliable. (Those two sets of muppets are the ones violating ethic and moral principles, by the way.)

So no, your comparison is not even remotely accurate. What they did is more like writing bullshit in a piece of paper, gluing it on a random phone pole, and checking if someone would repeat that bullshit.

They also went through the trouble to make sure that no reasonably literate human being would ever confuse that thing with an actually scientific paper. As the text says:

• naming an eye condition as bixonimania
• “this entire paper is made up”
• “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”
• “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise”
• “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”

Feeding false information to an LLM is no different that a magazine. It only regurgitates what’s been said.

Yes, it is different. Because the large token model won’t simply “repeat” things, it’ll mix and match them and form all sorts of bullshit, even if you didn’t feed it with any bullshit.

Here’s an example of that, fresh from the oven. I don’t reasonably expect people to be feeding misinfo regarding Latin pronunciation into bots, and yet a lot of this table is nonsense:

Compare the table above with this table and this one and you’ll notice the obvious errors:

• short /e i o u/ being phonetically transcribed as [e i o u] instead of [ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ]. That’s as silly as confusing English “bit” and “beet”.
• macron (not “mācron”, it’s being used in an English sentence) does NOT mark “accusative or ablative”. It marks long vowels, period.
• “nōs” being transcribed with a short vowel, even if the bloody bot put the macron over the spelled form.
• “nostr(um)”? No dammit, it’s “nostrī” or “nostrum”. The bot is implying some “nostr” form that simply doesn’t exist, this shit isn’t even allowed by Latin phonotactics.
• plus more, if I make an exhaustive list of this shite I won’t be ending it this week.

All it had to do was to copy info from Wiktionary, as it includes even phonetic and phonemic info. But since the bot is not just “regurgitating” info — it’s basically predicting what should come next, and doing so with no regards to truth value — it’s mixing-and-matching shit into nonsense.

It isn’t going to suddenly start doing science on its own to determine if what you’ve said is true or not.

If you actually read the bloody article instead of assuming, you’d know why the researchers did this: they don’t expect the bot to do science on its own, they expect people to treat info from those bots as potentially incorrect.

Its job is to tell you what color the sky is based on what you told it the color of the sky was.

And your job is to not trust it if it tells you “Yes, you are completely right! The colour of the sky is always purple. Do you need further information on other naturally purple things?”

So that is the missing piece.

I was a bit bugged by Iran agreeing with the ceasefire, even if it’s clearly winning the war; it could’ve pushed itself a wee bit further, exploiting the fact USA is worn out and Israel bite more than it could chew, and then demand even more than just the ten points. “We can be better prepared for the next time the two rogue states bombard us” is a reason, but not enough on itself to do it, given the rogue states would be also preparing themselves better.

But if Netanyahu is to be condemned, the following prime minister would play an opposite foreign policy, to avoid getting trialled too. That’s yet another reason why Iran might want to stop the war, this might actually weaken one of the enemies.

Weird. And cool.

I see some angry person. The good type of angry — directing his anger at the right things.

To be clear: Bode is not criticising the fact that journalists quote what CEOs say. He’s criticising the fact they do it and call it a day, as if saying “trust the CEO”.

It goes without saying that CEOs are really loud when saying what they want the sucker (you) to believe. So if that’s all you want, you need no journalist. A journalist is only useful if you want to know the factual reality; but for that they need to contextualise and challenge the claims, not just parrot them.

I’d end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it’s abundantly clear they don’t want to.

If it’s any consolation it isn’t just the United-Statian media.

I remember ranting about it in the past, but, basically: the page regarding Brazil is fairly accurate, you’ll find 9001 types of plugs, and a mix of 127V and 220V (no underlying plug vs. voltage pattern). It reaches a point I’ve seen people daisy chaining adapters to get their stuff working, it’s bloody hell.

Some residences have both voltages. Including mine; it’s a few 220V sockets for highly demanding appliances, and the rest is 127V.

Brazil aims to phase out the other types; see footnote. // (1) beginning January 1st, 2007 new residential, commercial and industrial wall outlet installations must comply with this new standard, and // (2) beginning August 1st, 2007 imported electrical devices must comply with NBR 14136 regulations. It is the aim to gradually phase out NEMA flat blade and Schuko devices in Brazil.

Hello, I come from the future. 19 years past 2007. The mess is still there. Try harder dammit. Prime example on how completely dysfunctional the federal government is, I bet shit would be already solved if up to the States, at least in some of them.

This isn’t even a “lie”. It’s worse than that: it’s an empty statement misleading readers to see meaning where there’s none.

Commitment is intentions. Even between human beings, you don’t know someone else’s intentions, at most what they claim about them; so there’s no way to check if the “I’m committed to $thing” claim is true or false. But to make it even worse, a company is not a human being, it is simply an abstraction, unable to have “intentions”.

So, let’s call bread “bread” and wine “wine”: people working for Microslop noticed it’s being called “Microslop”, they know why, and they’re trying to minimise brand damage — trying to convince you that Microslop does not output slop, and that the Moon is made of green cheese. That’s it.

Red has dohminatrix vibes.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I never ditched RSS. It’s simply too convenient to keep track of multiple sites, that you want to check regularly but would be a bother to do manually. Youtube channels, anime/manga/comics sites, even the communities you moderate.

I’m glad to see people picking it up again, though. Perhaps then Liferea will see a bit more love.

I’m not sure but I think the suffix in this case would yield “fuckard”. With “fucktard” being interpreted as “fuck [re]tard”. And given “retard” is nowadays interpreted as a slur, I’d discourage it.