61–70 of 116 posts
> If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people. Whenever any progress is made, this is the logical conclusion. And yet, those who decide about how your time is being used, have an opposing view.
maybe akin to how faster conputers bred programs that are slower than before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can learn fraktur or blackletter in a day and cyrillic in a few days, if you already know the latin alphabet.
> learn fraktur or blackletter in a day and cyrillic in a few days Not a chance, sorry.
The writing is on the wall for handwriting. Zoomers use speech recognition or touchscreen keyboards, millennials use keyboards. Boomers use pens
Silly comment. Handwriting is proven to be correlated with much better memory retention, which ultimately means much greater degree of association with existing memories and the creation of novel ideas. "The comparison between handwriting and typing reveals important differences in their neural and cognitive impacts. Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive pr…
Which is exactly my experience with handwriting through my school years. When handwriting notes during lectures all focus goes to plotting down words, and it becomes impossible to actually focus on the meaning behind them.
Yet, it occurs to me that that "guess and check" is exactly what I'm doing when trying to read my 6yo's writing. Often I will do a pass to detect the main sounds, but then I start thinking of what was current on his thoughts and see if I can make a match. Not surprisingly, often I do.
Quite certain my doctor can still produce writing, that the models don't stand a chance to be able to recognize.
Quite certain my doctor can still produce writing, that the models don't stand a chance to be able to recognize.
> If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people. Whenever any progress is made, this is the logical conclusion. And yet, those who decide about how your time is being used, have an opposing view.
Great post and amazing progress in this field! However, I have to wonder if some of these letters were part of the training data for Gemini, since they are well-known and someone has probably already done the painstaking work of transcribing them...
Most likely, and probably inferring the structure on texts with "similar" writing forms. Tried with my handwriting (in italian) and the performance wasn't that stellar. More annoyingly, it is still a LLM and not a "pure" OCR, so some sentences were partially rephrased with different words than the one in the text. This is crucially problematic if they would be used to transcribe historical documents
When does a character model become a language model?
If you're looking at block text with no connections between letter forms, each character mostly stands on its own. Except capital letters are much more likely at the beginning of a word or sentence than elsewhere, so you probably get a performance boost if you incorporate that.
Now we're considering two-character chunks. Cursive script connects the letterforms, and the connection changes based on both the source and target. We can definitely get a performance boost from looking at those.
Hmm you know these two-letter groupings aren't random. "ng" is much more likely if we just saw an "i". Maybe we need to take that into account.
Hmm actually whole words are related to each other! I can make a pretty good guess at what word that four-letter-wide smudge is if I can figure out the word before and after...
and now it's an LLM.
> If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people. Whenever any progress is made, this is the logical conclusion. And yet, those who decide about how your time is being used, have an opposing view.
If there is 1 job at a university. And there are 10 researchers applying. And 1 took this improvement in research speed to do more research, and 9 took the change to play more piano and take more walks, then most likely that one will get the job. This competitive nature is what has driven society forward and not kept us at just above subsistence agriculture.
When you sit down to think about it, what does it really even mean to do "more research"? What concrete phenomenon are you observing to decide what that is?
Across the journey from "subsistence agriculture", there have been countless approaches to nurturing innovation and discovery, but abstracting it into an abstract game measured by papers published and citations received is extremely novel and so far seems to correlate more with a waste and noise than it does discovery. Science and research is not in a healthy period these days, and the model that you describe, and seem to take for granted or may even be celebrating, plays a big role in why.