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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Both. It’s satire.

    The “benefit” of world hunger is that it keeps people locked in their place and entrenches the status quo. This is actually true, and the author believes it, but he doesn’t like it.

    Many people benefit from world hunger though, and every time you hear that poverty is a hard problem to solve you should ask yourself, how much of that is actual problems and how much is the status quo resisting change?











  • You might want to look at Wittgenstein.

    In his early work he went hard on this approach, and insisted that “hey philosophy is dumb”, just agree on the definitions and then chase through the implications.

    In his later work he realised that this is impossible. Words have contextual meaning that is revealed by their usage and you can’t nail down full and complete definitions in advance.

    What you’re talking about absolutely can and will never work. We have tried it and seen it fail.



  • As someone working and publishing in the field this is more a cyber jerk about American exceptionalism than actually true.

    Chinese universities and companies publish a shit tonne at pure machine learning conferences. They absolutely do a large amount of research into the fundamentals of machine learning as well as the applied stuff. They’re probably the closest to the US in terms of having large firms that are prepared to bank roll the training of the very large language models.

    Alibaba in particular has been constantly doing cutting edge stuff in terms of multimodal language models that are worth paying attention to.

    The actual truth is that China does both kinds of work. Broad foundational and applied work lead by independent research groups in companies and universities, and focused application driven stuff for direct application by the state.

    Google still stands out in terms of the amount of research it does, but this is because Google is different to everyone -other US research institutes don’t compare to it either.




  • (Swiss)Germans are completely mad about food.

    It’s their culture to complain about everything, except food. All they care about is that it’s as bland as possible and has big portions. If you manage that, they’ll give you five stars every time.

    I spent 3 years living in Germany, and not only can you not get anything spicy for love nor money, they also don’t use herbs. It just blows my mind. They’re physically so close to France and Italy, but the food is so far away.