Viewing profile — DiogenesKynikos

The case mentioned in the article I linked to involved a private citizen suing a tech company, based on China's GDPR-like laws. He won.

You probably could sue them if they really did store your information without your consent. It would be a hassle, but China does have privacy laws. Companies do get sued for violat…

> At the same time people are complaining that they are getting dumber. I think this is due to rapidly rising expectations. When LLMs first show they can do some new thing, we're e…

What is the practical harm that is actually being avoided here? When people speak in public, they assume that other people around them can overhear what they're saying. This is jus…

Machines already do think. Any reasonable definition of "thinking" includes what LLMs do. One would have to craft a rather arbitrary and tortured definition of "thinking" to includ…

This is a feature among the Germanic languages (of which English is one). In German, these are called splittable verbs, and they can appear in two forms: "upstep" and "step up," de…

I recently discovered that even high-level non-native speakers do not know the term "fraidy cat."

Why is it unethical to record what people say in public settings, like a cafe, transcribe it, and then throw away any identifying information? You could go even farther and only st…

It's a mistake in the sense that if you go and rob a bank while shooting wildly, you only hit the customers "by mistake." That's not an excuse. The US is bombing both military and …

You don't get to start a completely unprovoked and illegal war of aggression, bomb tons of targets with little care, kill 100 schoolchildren, and then say, "But it was a mistake."

Where did you read that? SARS-CoV-2 is not descended from any previously known variant. In fact, since the pandemic started, closer cousins of SARS-CoV-2 have been found in the wil…

It sounds like you need to be less condescending and engage with my actual comment. First, the "hype" is not externally imposed. It's the genuine reaction of hundreds of millions o…

Gain of function research is not anywhere near as dangerous as the public believes. In the US, it was very convenient to blame it for the pandemic, even though SARS-CoV-2 is of nat…

This is when you realize that English is a Germanic language. "Shprakh" is from the same root as "speak," so the literal, word-for-word translation is, " A speak is a dialect with …

I bought a cheap electric toothbrush from a no-name Chinese company. The battery lasts 6 months on one charge with daily use. It cost about $20. I wouldn't be surprised if it's man…

> Louden points out, for example, that Swedish and Norwegian are highly mutually intelligible, but neither is considered a dialect of the other, or of a parent language, primarily …

You're making a highly arbitrary distinction between learning and ... learning? The LLM can immediately learn and start using new skills. To any lay person, that's what learning is…

The LLM is the model + context. The output depends on both. You're making an artificial distinction. The LLM sees a new programming language for the first time, and can immediately…

In theory, it can't. But in reality, it does in important cases. Germany has implemented EU sanctions against a German journalist, which deprive him and his family of the ability t…

I can imagine an AI insulting humans in the same way: "The underlying model is just a biological neutral network. It seems you carbonoids get upset when someone talks honestly abou…

Is your position that all coverage of Rust is gossip? That's just not a tenable position. By the way, the article I linked to discusses the history of Rust in the Linux kernel, whi…

I gave you the first search result. There are probably tens of thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines about Rust, along with probably hundreds of published books. Unlike…

This took me approximately two seconds to find: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/linux-leaders-pave-a...

Publishing retractions is a sign of reliability. Wikipedia is actually more concerned about sources that don't publish retractions. If Odin is so notable, why haven't any of the no…

Shifting the problem from anonymous Wikipedia editors to newspapers and magazines is a big improvement.