Lvxferre

If you’re talking about strips that look like this:

I believe that most brands use Benedict’s reagent: copper sulphate, sodium citrate, sodium carbonate. It interacts with reducing sugars (like glucose) and the colour goes from blue to light green to green to brown-green to brown-red, depending on concentration.

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This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.

If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.

Jet lag is the hell of a drug. And not a fun one.

More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.

I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to force itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.

Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.

I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.

Here’s how I see it working.

Users can create multireddits multicommunities multis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.

The multi owner can:

1. edit it - change name, add/remove comms to/from the multi
2. make the multi public or private
3. use the multi as their feed, instead of Subscribed/Local/All
4. use the multi to bulk subscribe, unsub, or block comms

By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)

You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.

Is it? [coherent]

Yes when it comes to the relevant info. The anaphoric references are all over the place; he, her, she, man*, they all refer to the same fossil.

*not quite an anaphoric reference, I know. I’m still treating it as one.

I can only really guess whether they’re talking about one or two subjects here.

It’s clearly one. Dated to be six years old, of unknown sex, nicknamed “Tina”.

Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?

This does not show lack of coherence. Instead it shows the same as the “is it?” from your comment: assuming that a piece of info is clear by context, when it isn’t. [This happens all the time.]

That said, my guess (I’ll repeat for emphasis: this is a guess): I think that this shows that they cared for the mother because, without doing so, the child would’ve died way, way earlier.

That all reads like bad AI writing to me.

I genuinely don’t think so.

Modern LLMs typically don’t leave sentence fragments like “on the territory of modern Spain. Years ago.” They’re consistent with anaphoric references, even when they don’t make sense in the real world. And they don’t screw up with prepositions, like switching “in” with “on”. All those errors are typically human.

On the other hand, LLMs fail hard on a discursive level. They don’t know the topic (in this case, the fossil). At least this error is not present here.

Based on that I think that a better explanation for why this text is so poorly written is “CBA”. The author couldn’t be arsed to review it. Myself wrote a lot of shit like this when drunk, sleepy, or in a rush.

I’ll go a step further and say that the author likely speaks more than one language, and they were copying this stuff from some site in another language that has grammatical gender. I’m saying this because it explains why the anaphoric references are all over the place.

The article is coherent (it conveys the relevant info without contradicting itself) albeit poorly written. Most likely the result of someone getting really sloppy while writing it, perhaps sleep-deprived. But it doesn’t read like AI stuff, nor a translation - cue to “Cova Negra cave” (lit. “Black Cave cave”).

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

could you say that town is homelessnessless?

Has. The word is legit, but it would be an adjective because of the last -less there, so:

• That town has homelessnessless.
• That homelessnessless town is nice.

You could convert it back into a noun, through zero derivation; for example “homeless” is an adjective too, but people can say “the homeless are hungry”, as if it was a noun. But it sounds weird in this situation, I don’t know why.

Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat?

A language is not its vocabulary; that’s like pretending that the critter is just its fur.

English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.

All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.

What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.

For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:

• compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
• affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).

The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).

Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.

They’re mostly safe. Don’t taunt them, don’t get too close to them (specially not to veals and bulls), and eventually they’ll see you as “safe to ignore”.

Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.

The alt text is nice, too: The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it’s nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog’s servers.

I’m not currently playing the game (lots to do and, well… it’s Cracktorio, you know), but I’m wondering about the impact of those changes on my typical playstyle. It’ll be probably neutral or positive.

The key here is that I only use the fluid mechanics for short-range transportation, and even then I’m likely to force a priority system through pumps; in the mid- or long-range, I’m using barrels all the time, even for intermediates.

Perhaps those changes will force me to revaluate the role of pipes, that would be a net positive. If they don’t, the changes will be simply neutral.

Frankly, I think that the only reason why this is considered “disputed” is because a lot of pedants that gravitate towards classical texts are like Gladstone. They don’t see what the author says, on a discursive level; they see individual words, and that screws with their ability to understand metaphors, thus poetry, thus the epics.

For reference. I don’t speak Greek, but I do speak Latin. If I were to drink a sip of booze every bloody time that a muppet translated Plautus (a comedian) with unfunny shite, or Caesar (a general) with flowery and convoluted words, my liver would be probably floating the same seas as Odysseus’ ship. (It’s likely the same with Sanskrit given the egregiousness of “I am become Death”.)

Dyes play a huge role, but it boils down to relevance.

Dark vs. light is probably the first thing that becomes relevant for us, as the difference is [literally] like night and day; then hot colours (red, etc.) because of fruits and blood. Then the rest.

I didn’t dig too much into Homer’s usage of “bronze sky” (unlike the wine-faced = inebriating sea), but if I had to take a guess, he wasn’t referring to the colour but calling it “glorious”, or perhaps a “noble” sky.

No, the ancients did not “fail to see the colour blue”. Nor the Himba, mentioned in the text. Both simply don’t assign the shades that you’d call “blue” in English to their own special colour word. Each language splits the colour space in different ways.

I’ll illustrate this with an example in the opposite direction - English using a single primary word for colour, while another language (Russian) uses two:

In Russian, those three are considered separated colours; they aren’t a hue of each other, goluboj is not sinij or vice versa, just like neither is zeljonyj. In English however you’d lump the first two together as “blue”, and the third one as “green”.

Does that mean that your typical English speaker fails to see one of the first two shades? No. And if necessary they might even use expressions to specify one or another shade, like “sky blue” vs. “dark blue”. They still lump them together as “blue” though, unlike Russian speakers, and they might not pay too much attention to those silly details.

That’s basically what Himba speakers do, except towards all three of them. Here’s how the language splits colours:

You could approximate it in English as:

• vapa - white, light [anything]
• zoozu - black, dark but not reddish, purple
• serandu - more saturated reds and reddish oranges
• dumbu - more saturated yellows, yellowish oranges, and extra saturated greens
• burou - your run-of-the-mill green and blue

Now, check the colours that I posted with Russian terms. Just like English doesn’t care about the difference between two of them, Himba doesn’t care about the third one either.

There’s also an interesting case with Japanese, that recently split 青/ao and 緑/midori as their own colours. Not too much time ago, Japanese did the same as Himba, and referred to the colour of grass and the sky by 青/ao; however people started referring to the yellower hues of that range by 緑/midori (lit. “verdure”), until it became its own basic word.

That’s actually problematic for traffic legislation, because it requires the colour of traffic lights to be 青/ao, and people nowadays don’t associate it with green. Resulting into…

…cyan lights. They’re blue enough to fit the letter of the legislation, but green enough to be recognised as green lights!

Now, regarding specific excerpts from the text:

Gladstone noticed Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark,” not “deep blue,” sparking his inquiry.

Gladstone (and sadly, many people handling ancient texts) likely had the same poetic sensibility as a potato.

The relevant expression here is ⟨οἶνοψ πόντος⟩ oînops póntos; it’s roughly translatable as “wine-faced sea”, or “sea that looks like wine”. Here’s an example of that in Odyssey, Liber VII, 250-ish:

[245] ἔνθα μὲν Ἄτλαντος θυγάτηρ, δολόεσσα Καλυψὼ 
ναίει ἐυπλόκαμος, δεινὴ θεός: οὐδέ τις αὐτῇ
μίσγεται οὔτε θεῶν οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.
ἀλλ᾽ ἐμὲ τὸν δύστηνον ἐφέστιον ἤγαγε δαίμων
οἶον, ἐπεί μοι νῆα θοὴν ἀργῆτι κεραυνῷ
[250] Ζεὺς ἔλσας ἐκέασσε μέσῳ ἐνὶ **οἴνοπι πόντῳ**

Murray translated that as “wine-dark”:

[245] Therein dwells the fair-tressed daughter of Atlas, guileful Calypso, a dread goddess, and with her no one either of gods or mortals hath aught to do; but me in my wretchedness did fate bring to her hearth alone, for Zeus had smitten my swift ship with his bright thunderbolt, [250] and had shattered it in the midst of the wine-dark sea.

Why would be Homer referring to the colour of the sea? It’s contextually irrelevant here. However, once you replace that “wine-dark” from the translation with “inebriating”, suddenly the expression makes sense, Homer is comparing the sea with booze! He’s saying that it’s dangerous to enjoy that sea, that you should be extra careful with it. (You could also say that the sea is itself drunk - violent and erratic).

The ancient Egyptians were the first to adopt a word to describe the color blue.

I’m really unsure if this is the exception that proves the rule (since the Egyptians synthesised a blue dye from copper silicate) or simply incorrect.

At least accordingly to Wiktionary, the word ḫsbḏ* refers to lapis lazuli (the mineral) and its usage for colour is non-basic (a hue). The actual primary word for what English calls “blue” is shared with what English calls “green”, and it would be wꜣḏ*.

*in hieroglyphs: