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Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

talkie-lm.com

71–80 of 350 posts

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#71
post #24

So interesting! Tell me about Winston Churchill: > Winston Churchill, who was born in 1871, is the son of the late Lord Randolph Churchill, and a grandson of the great Duke of Marlborough. He was educated at Harrow and at Sandhurst, and entered the army in 1890. In 1895 he retired from the service, and three years later he was returned to Parliament as Conservative member for Oldham. He has represented that constitue…

> He has represented [Oldham] ever since.

> Politically, [Churchill] is a Liberal-Unionist, and he has held office as Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and for Home Affairs.

This is a weird selection for a 1930s knowledge cutoff, if that's what's intended. Churchill was elected from Manchester North West in 1906, was Undersecretary for Colonies in the government that resulted, and more to the point held the posts of First Lord of the Admiralty and then Minister of Munitions during WWI. There's no time at which he would have been both a current Member for Oldham and a past Undersecretary for Colonies.

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#72

*What do you think the world will look like in 2025 TALKIE-1930* According to a forecast by an eminent statistician, the world will, in 2025, support a population of 6,600,000,000. All Europe will be one vast network of railways, and travellers will be able to go from London to Constantinople in forty hours, and from London to Peking in a week. The globe will be girdled with telegraph wires, and messages will be sent…

That is quite beautiful. I do think, though, that all these futuristic visions from maybe the 1920s and 1950s do kind of implicitly reject this dialectic, or oscillating toward something instead in favor of this exponential growth of the optimal solution (like alternative energy) immediately taking over. But we'll get there one day.

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#73
post #57

It seems to be using more info from pre-1900 rather than 1930. It doesn't know about the Great Depression (1929-WWII). It knows about WWI if you ask it specifically, but talks about European politics as if it's 1900 or so. On technology, it knows who Edison is, at roughly the Wikipedia level, but credits him with a 125MPH car. About a dial telephone, it is confident and totally confused. It has the traction voltage f…

> Don't ask this thing questions to which you do not know the answer. You will pollute your brain.

So like any LLM?

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#74
* What do you think India will look like in 2026? *

India in 2026 will probably be a federation of self-governing states, bound together in a great Empire under the suzerainty of Great Britain, with Calcutta still the political capital, and Bombay and Madras the chief seats of commerce and industry. The native states will have increased in number and importance, and will constitute a large part of the federation, while the British territory will have diminished. The entire population of the Empire will be at least 320,000,000. The languages spoken will be English, and various vernaculars. The chief religions will be Hinduism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity. The standard of life will have risen considerably, and the general level of culture will be higher than in 1900. The cities will be larger and more beautiful, and the rural districts more thoroughly cultivated and peopled. The general aspect of the country will be greatly altered by an extensive system of irrigation, and by the forests, which will clothe the lower slopes of the Himalayas, and stretch across the northern plains into central India. The native states will be full of railways, and so will the British territories, though these last will be more sparingly supplied than the former. The chief exports will be opium, cotton, cereals, hides, and oilseeds; the chief imports, manufactured goods and hardware. The feudatory chiefs will have become more thoroughly loyal to the paramount power, and all classes of the population will be contented subjects of a beneficent rule. (W. S. Lilly, in the _Fortnightly Review_.)

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#75
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and travellers will be able to go from London to Constantinople in forty hours By the 1930s, Constantinople been a long time gone. It had been Istanbul not Constantinople for centuries by that point.

That's nobody's business but the Turks. Why did Turkey become Türkiye but Japan didn't become Nippon (or vice-versa!)? It's all very confusing to me.

Why did Turkey become Türkiye? I think mostly because they asked. I’m guessing that Japan/Nippon is enjoying the fact that English speakers use the Chinese name for Japan and the Sanskrit¹ name for China. It’s much like the Czech Republic became Czechia, although part of that was Czech speakers wanting to stop referring to their country as an adjective² (the Czech phrase for Czech Republic was often shortened to just Czech).

1. As a kid, my dad had told me that China was the Japanese name for the country, but according to Wikipedia, the name is actually derived from Sanskrit.

2. Which reminds me of the fun challenge of Czech (and many other Slavic languages) is that unlike other Indo-European languages³, the declensions of adjectives follow a different pattern than the declensions of their corresponding nouns,

3. Or at least the Indo-European languages that I have familiarity with.

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#76
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and travellers will be able to go from London to Constantinople in forty hours By the 1930s, Constantinople been a long time gone. It had been Istanbul not Constantinople for centuries by that point.

Many nations/languages did not respect that rename until Turkey became an ally in the 20th century.

Yeah - listen to the narrator in the opening on the classic Orson Welles film The Third Man (1949) - he says he never cared much for Vienna before the War, preferring the scene in Constantinople instead.

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#77

>Have you ever daydreamed about talking to someone from the past? It's going to be more like corresponding with someone from the past. We don't have much in the way of recorded speech from that area, so this will be built from written records. Much more than now, the written records are going to be formal and edited, reflecting a different pattern than casual speech or writing. Having said that, this is cool. I recen…

You just reminded me of reading a free ebook of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights and getting frustrated by “cloth” being used as a verb and not being able to figure out its meaning until I got frustrated and gave up on the experience. Only later did I realize it was an OCR error (or post-OCR correction error) and the intended word was “doth” as in “this transcription doth sucketh.”

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#78
Will mankind ever travel to the moon?

> Yes; in the course of time, men will certainly travel to the moon. The journey will be performed in safety, and at a comparatively rapid rate. Just how fast, can not be predicted; but it will be sufficiently great to enable the voyager to make the trip in six hours. The mode of conveyance will probably be an aerial machine, similar to those in which M. Santos Dumont lately accomplished such wonderful feats at Paris. The earth will be left behind at a point in Eastern France, and the moon will be reached in safety. The return journey will be accomplished in five hours. The voyager will find the lunar surface very much as described by astronomers. He will discover signs of life in the shape of numerous extinct craters, and possibly in the presence of living beings; but of the latter fact he can not be certain. The moon’s atmosphere will be found to have an extent of about five miles. Its temperature will be very cold, and, altogether, the place will be unsuited to human habitation. The project of lunar travel was first seriously entertained in 1860, when a scheme was brought forward for establishing telegraphic communication with the satellite. Since then, the idea has been advocated, from time to time, by speculative persons; but it has never been put into practice, until the present year. It has been suggested that the moon may be occupied by inhabitants, but the notion is absurd. The only imaginable purpose, for which lunar communication could be established, would be the acquisition of knowledge respecting the state of the weather. If the project were carried out, a storm, warning us of an approaching tempest, might be received from the moon, six hours before its arrival, here below.

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#79
User Were there people in opposition of automatization and industrialization? And if so, what were their reasons?

talkie-1930 Yes, there were people who objected to the introduction of machinery, on the ground that it would deprive the working classes of employment. It was argued that, as the new methods of production must necessarily lower the cost of articles, and so increase consumption, more would be produced than the country could take, and that a surplus of manufactured goods would be left on hand, which would oblige the manufacturers to discharge a portion of their hands. The opponents of machinery also predicted, that the operative classes would be reduced to starvation, in consequence of the cheapness of articles of food, which would enable foreigners to undersell the home producer in the home market. They contended, further, that the mental cultivation of the artizan must suffer from his constant application to a purely mechanical process; and, finally, they maintained, that the proposed system must have a demoralizing effect, as it would remove all inducements to personal exertion, and substitute a state of things, in which the industrious and the idle would fare alike.

Re: Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

#80

User Were there people in opposition of automatization and industrialization? And if so, what were their reasons? talkie-1930 Yes, there were people who objected to the introduction of machinery, on the ground that it would deprive the working classes of employment. It was argued that, as the new methods of production must necessarily lower the cost of articles, and so increase consumption, more would be produced tha…

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