Patagotitan mayorum. I think that it’s the largest that we know about - around 40m large. Herbivore, I can’t help but think on it as a dino-giraffe: eating leaves, nesting its eggs, not giving too much of a fuck about the small critters nearby.

Sorry - then I misread you. Fair point.

Before opening the article, let me guess, based on the title: 1) United-Statian author, 2) calling himself a “venture capitalist” or similar, 3) babbling what boils down to “leave teh hand of teh free market alone!11one”, 4) criticising data and/or privacy laws that left USA corporations pissed.

Websearch + the article itself show that #1, #3 and #4 were accurate. I couldn’t find info on #2 but I’m still calling it “bingo~”.

Shit like this is a dime a dozen in “Hacker” News. It boils down to disguising vested interests as interests of the European population, so it exerts pressure over their governments. I’m not even European but I can’t help but say “cut off the crap”.

Now, on the article itself… time for scatology. For succinctness I’m quoting only the start of each paragraph, and numbering them.

In June, Apple announced a new product […]
The company said […]

Apple’s market strategy is product tying. It’s an abusive and unfair practice, so the DMA legislates it out. Apple however can’t work without it so it decided that selling its junk in Europe wouldn’t be profitable. That’s it.

Why it’s unfair: easier shown with an example. Let’s say that Apple sold apples, OK? Apple would design its apples in such a way that you can only eat them with Apple apple forks and knives, after being peeled with Apple apple peelers. If you manufacture peelers, forks or knives, well… you’re screwed, unless you have the necessary capital to replicate all that vertical tying. And if you do it Apple will sue you. :)

Why it’s abusive: because it artificially restricts customer choices and agency. So you want to bite your way into the apple? If it’s an Apple apple, Apple tells you “fuck you, you can’t do it, use an Apple apple peeler and eat it with Apple apple fork and knife”.

Vestager’s statement is ridiculous […]

What’s ridiculous is the feigned stupidity of the author, pretending to not understand that the absence of a huge and customer-hostile player in a market allows smaller players to flourish, and compete among themselves.

The economist Albert Hirschman […]

The author’s rhetoric here is disingenuous: instead of backing up his implicit claim that Apple leaving is bad, he opts for a “nooo, those aren’t just muh words. They’re of some authority” (fallacy of appeal to authority), that ultimately lead to a circular reasoning (yet another fallacy): “Apple leaving is bad, thus DMA bad, because DMA doesn’t let Apple to go rogue, and Apple leaving is bad”.

Apple’s decision isn’t the first time […]
Adult sites are blocking users […]
If that seems far-fetched […]

Let’s ask the question: is the DMA poorly designed? The author doesn’t back this up either, he simply treats it as a matter of fact, as if the readers were gullible cattle eager to be herded.

Look at the pattern in the examples: with two major exceptions, all examples being provided are from the GAFAM, five big monopolies that screech at any legislation preventing them from crushing the competition, and known for their anti-competitive practices. But apparently the reader is supposed to “chrust” the author that GAFAM leaving Europe alone is “bad” for European markets. …right, just like my cat leaving my furniture alone would be bad for the furniture, right?

The two exceptions are worth exploring:

Numerous technology firms have left China due to the power the Chinese Communist Party exerts over foreign corporations.

It’s an odd example, isn’t it? So far the author is mentioning specific legislation, but now suddenly vaguely referring to CCP’s power, as if they can’t be arsed to mention the specific law that is, accordingly to him, making those tech firms leave.

Until you remember a fallacy known as “argumentum ad hitlerem” (“Hitler ate bread, thus bread bad”). The author is not trying to convince you through rational means, but instead trying to provoke an emotional reaction, with the words “China” and “Chinese Communist Party”. (BTW you might know this specific subtype of ad hitlerem as “red scare”.)

Adult sites are blocking users in a variety of U.S. states over age verification laws.

The author shot himself in the foot with this example.

Those adult sites are doing so because it’s problematic when personally identifiable information is required to watch porn, given that porn is considered immoral by plenty other people.

In the meantime, the GAFAM monopolies beloved by the author are often pissed… because of European laws protecting privacy. Such as the GDPR. Oopsie~

Perhaps the GAFAM leaving would be a public good for Europeans.

Or consider the recent charges the EU levied against X. [SIC - Twitter/Xitter] […]
These charges are absurd. […]

Yes, it is deceptive and the author is going into a huuuuge Chewbacca defence to justify it. That blue check basically tells “chrust dis account!”, when any muppet can get it by paying eight bucks a month.

As the author is grasping at straws, I’m not too eager to finish the text. /me yawns Can’t be arsed.

I hope that this scatological autopsy was useful or at least entertaining for anyone here.

Note that, even if we refer to Java, Python, Rust etc. by the same word “language” as we refer to Mandarin, English, Spanish etc., they’re apples and oranges - one set is unlike the other, even if both have some similarities.

That’s relevant here, for two major reasons:

• The best approach to handle one is not the best to handle the other.
• LLMs aren’t useful for both tasks (translating and programming) because both involve “languages”, but because LLMs are good to retrieve information. As such you should see the same benefit even for tasks not involving either programming languages or human languages.

Regarding the first point, I’ll give you an example. You suggested abstract syntax trees for the internal representation of programming code, right? That might work really well for programming, dunno, but for human languages I bet that it would be worse than the current approach. That’s because, for human languages, what matters the most are the semantic and pragmatic layers, and those are a mess - with the meaning of each word in a given utterance being dictated by the other words there.

…dumb me was translating the comics by hand, without realising that the original artist had an English version of them.

The joke is that Einstein calls God a genius, for planning all this stuff, when God didn’t plan anything - he did it on a whim. It relies partially on the characterisation, as across Um Sábado Qualquer’s comics, God is often represented as petty, clueless and/or dumb. Like this:

I’ve seen programmers claiming that it helps them out, too. Mostly to give you an idea on how to tackle a problem, instead of copypasting the solution (as it’ll likely not work).

My main use of the system is

1. Probing vocab to find the right word in a given context.
2. Fancy conjugation/declension table.
3. Spell-proofing.

It works better than going to Wiktionary all the time, or staring my work until I happen to find some misspelling (like German das vs. dass, since both are legit words spellcheckers don’t pick it up).

One thing to watch out for is that the translation will be more often than not tone-deaf, so you’re better off not wasting your time with longer strings unless you’re fine with something really sloppy, or you can provide it more context. The later however takes effort.

Large “language” models decreased my workload for translation. There’s a catch though: I choose when to use it, instead of being required to use it even when it doesn’t make sense and/or where I know that the output will be shitty.

And, if my guess is correct, those 77% are caused by overexcited decision takers in corporations trying to shove AI down every single step of the production.

If the description provided by the article is accurate, and it remains so in the near future, that won’t be an issue for DDG users. All that DDG would need to do is to pull the results out of the side panel, instead of the central space.

Ditto. It isn’t just a matter of watching Paradox to get rekt (although the idea gives me warm feelings), but also that the engine is… bad. As in, we’re in 2024 and it has codification issues, pathfinding is awful, and I’m almost certain that part of the EU4 fort woes are caused by the devs working around engine limitations.

[Wester, Paradox’ CEO] “amid the well-deserved self-criticism, it is worth reminding ourselves that we have solid footing, because the foundation of our business is doing well.”

No, Wester, you don’t have solid footing. Stop fooling yourselves.

The solid footing for a game developer is the players’ trust, something that Paradox has been using as toilet paper since 2016~2018 or so. At this rate you’re only waiting for other companies to release grand strategy games - or even tweak their 4X games into GSG - and you’re done, since you’re still living off the CK/EU/Vicky series.

I know you are, but the argument that an LLM doesn’t understand context is incorrect

Emphasis mine. I am talking about the textual output. I am not talking about context.

It’s not human level understanding

Additionally, your obnoxiously insistent comparison between LLMs and human beings boils down to a red herring.

Not wasting my time further with you.

[For others who might be reading this: sorry for the blatantly rude tone but I got little to no patience towards people who distort what others say, like the one above.]

4chan-in-a-bottle? That would be fun.

The issue with your assertion is that people don’t actually work a similar way.

I’m talking about LLMs, not about people.

Upvoted as it’s unpopular even if I heavily disagree with it.

Look at the big picture.

There’s a high chance that whatever is causing that flamewar - be it a specific topic, or user conflicts, or whatever - will pop up again. And again. And again.

You might enjoy watching two muppets shitposting at each other. Frankly? I do it too. (Sometimes I’m even one of the muppets.) However this gets old really fast and, even if you’re emotionally detached of the whole thing, it reaches a point where you roll your eyes and say “fuck, yet another flamewar. I just want to discuss the topic dammit”.

Plenty people however do not; and once you allow flamewars, you’re basically telling them “if you don’t want to see this, fuck off”. Some of those will be people who are emotionally invested enough in your community to actually contribute with it, unlike the passing troll stirring trouble.

I suppose it’s improper to point and laugh? // I see no reason to respond to bad faith arguments.

It’s improper, sure, but I do worse. You seriously don’t want proselytise Christian babble in my ear if I’m in a bad mood. It sounds like this:

[Christian] “God exists because you can’t disprove him”

[Me] “Yeah, just like you can’t disprove that your mum got syphilis from sharing a cactus dildo with Hitler. Now excuse me it’s Sunday morning and I want to sleep.”

Your “ackshyually” is missing the point.

It doesn’t need to be filtered into human / AI content. It needs to be filtered into good (true) / bad (false) content. Or a “truth score” for each.

That isn’t enough because the model isn’t able to reason.

I’ll give you an example. Suppose that you feed the model with both sentences:

1. Cats have fur.
2. Birds have feathers.

Both sentences are true. And based on vocabulary of both, the model can output the following sentences:

1. Cats have feathers.
2. Birds have fur.

Both are false but the model doesn’t “know” it. All that it knows is that “have” is allowed to go after both “cats” and “birds”, and that both “feathers” and “fur” are allowed to go after “have”.

Model degeneration is an already well-known phenomenon. The article already explains well what’s going on so I won’t go into details, but note how this happens because the model does not understand what it is outputting - it’s looking for patterns, not for the meaning conveyed by said patterns.

Frankly at this rate might as well go with a neuro-symbolic approach.

Even back when I used Reddit, I had such a burning hate against Reddit results that I blacklisted them. So this is actually improving things for me, as I use DDG by default.

As such I hope that this decision becomes another nail in each of their (Google and Reddit’s) coffins.