meta: Over these past four years I've seen a growing number of people interpreting the most nuanced, neutral statements as 'apologist', 'biased', 'lobbying', 'spam', 'politically motivated'. I don't think this has always been the case, especially on HN.
It's not just skepticism, that's for sure. How do I put it? It's like assuming there are sides when there are no sides. I'm curious, is there a word for this?
I like this. Polarization is a pretty good characterization. People are just not treating neutral views as neutral anymore.
Food for thought: perhaps people treating everything as fake news is an unfortunate adverse effect of all the messaging about the dangers of not recognizing fake news.
As far as I understand, outrage culture is about shunning popular folks for their imperfect human morality. Could you (or someone else) elaborate on how this is related to this, well, let's call it erosion of neutrality?
Thanks for the link, I was wondering if Scott touched on this. Seems to be an adjacent topic but it's relevant nonetheless.
my tldr of that post: in the context of ideological/political theory, mistake theorists are engineers who want results, conflict theorists are warmongers who want to win.
Perhaps seeing bias in everything is just one of those warmongering traits -- because trust me, it's really hard to win against a neutral point of view.
I use Firefox on Android with NoScript and an adblocker.
Yet I'm uniquely identifiable. One culprit is screen size putting me at <0.01%.
Does that make defeating fingerprinting on mobile hopeless for the casual user?
Edit: more info. All JS is blocked, and I have privacy.resistFingerprinting. The page doesn't detect my adblocker. Still, there are just too many things I can't change:
- hardware concurrency: 1.7%
- audio formats: 0.2%
- navigator properties: 0.2%
- audio data: 0.1%
I was surprised at this one:
- Media devices: Unique
What are media device identifiers for, exactly? Why does the browser supply it without JS?
If I disable Javascript (or don't enable it) I see everywhere 'NA' (except for HTTP headers) and no similarity rates are shown. Are you sure your Javascript is disabled?
What is the best way to disable javascript on firefox? Is there an addon that can whitelist certain websites to not disable javascript everywhere, while turning it of by default?
EDIT: I just discovered ublock origin can disable js by default. Now I wish I could change the user agent...
Just to support your argument further, here is a related snippet from another comment[0] by knzhou:
> Students can all recite Newton's third law, but immediately afterward claim that when a truck hits a car, the truck exerts a bigger force. They know the law for the gravitational force, but can't explain what kept astronauts from falling off the moon, since "there's no gravity in space". Another common claim is that a table exerts no force on something sitting on it -- instead of "exerting a force" it's just "getting in the way".
Here is some food for thought for educators. If GPT-2 also makes sense of the world by regurgitating what it sees, perhaps this is simply the nature of learning by example, and we should accommodate for this. Perhaps it isn't so effective to give students mounds of problem sets offering clear premises and easy-to-grade answers. Unless you want your students to be GPT-2s.
I wonder if gpt2 or similar projects can be used to make systems to train teachers.
Teacher explains something and raise questions or statement and have GPT2 complete them. That way, they can learn more about students, common questions, misunderstandings, etc.
If someone knows more about what companies or tech is used for training teachers, do let me know. I am pretty interested in any vacuum in the industry and if schools pay enough for training their teachers.
It's really weird to evaluate GPT-2 based on its ability to say things no reasonable person would ever say. If I were born in Cleveland I wouldn't be jumping to proclaim my fluency in English. If I told you I left my keys out at the pub, I wouldn't immediately repeat myself and say that my keys are now at the pub. If I'm talking about two trophies plus another trophy, I'd probably try to end it with some punchline rather than saying there's three trophies.
A lot of the things we write assume the reader can make connections on their own. That's a writing skill. It's the reason why Hemingway's famous "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is so impactful. As such I've found GPT-2 to be incredible at writing fanfiction.
The real immediate value of GPT-2 is human/computer collaboration. Think code completion or completion/prompts in other mediums, such as writing. Many art forms work - music / game design / painting / etc.
Thank you for saying this. This is something so many people miss when trying test the limitations of GPT-2. It just doesn't make sense to test it on strings of text that nobody ever writes.
Just for fun and to make a point, I threw your reply into Talk to Transformer.
> This is something so many people miss when trying test the limitations of GPT-2. It just doesn't make sense to test it on strings of text that nobody ever writes. To me, the best way to evaluate the usefulness of GPT-2 is to compare it to some actual test that validates a lot of its claims. So... let's do just that.
It might be just chance, but gee -- is this text referring to its own generation as a test to convey a point? The self-referentiality is formidable.
This is insightful. It also massively calls into question if economic models on prices (CPI?) could ever keep up with reality, if trends like shrinkflation didn't make that impossible already.
After tetrominos, purely mathematical games with pentomino tiling at its core are definitely discovered games. It's doable but not always simple to build a given shape of size 5n with n pentominos. Ever seen the "fill an n by m rectangle with pentominoes" problem?
The conversation Bill's touching on -- the tradeoffs between different notations -- is really valuable but I think it misses something a lot of us desire in a syntax: compositionality. Take the provided "onion" notation, loops, and the "new" syntax. They all look something like this:
Agreed, I think the syntax used is not that common. (This is a problem, I think, with math notation -- everyone's notation means different things, google "substitution notation history" for the worst.) They definitely meant to write:
I think each one of us has a different idea what a "bullshit job" is. My favorite definition is this:
> When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business.
> Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.
(the article itself[0] tells about how banks in Ireland went on strike for 6 months, but the strike was shrugged off as there was no impact)
It's not just skepticism, that's for sure. How do I put it? It's like assuming there are sides when there are no sides. I'm curious, is there a word for this?