Notices by Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)

@GreenSkyOverMe

The humor is in the double reading of "make a friend"

The first reading means "to form a friendship"

The second reading ("too literal") would be to construct a friend ab nihilo (presumably the AI)

Also, the first reading suggests that Sam is lonely and doesn't have friends (probably true)

@timnitGebru @parismarx

"someone told Sam Altman that he had to make a friend and he took them too literally"

-- @timnitGebru on @parismarx 's show in mid-March

I lol'ed

@skinnylatte

i think that is often the case but that may be an artifact of the language-culture having a deep love for folk-etymology

gaoxing means happy and can be understood as "tall+prosper" (?) and while I can sorta see how they fit together to mean "glad" (it's not any weirder than "in high spirits" in English) it's a bit of a stretch to say that the meaning is compositional.

@aud

@aud @skinnylatte

nltk is my first tool out of the box when doing personal NLP projects too

@aud @skinnylatte

I mean, assuming that "split on whitespace, drop punctuation" isn't good enough -- which it isn't, except for English

@aud

I'm sure that @skinnylatte knows this too -- as a far more developed polyglot than me -- but things get _really_ weird when you tokenize orthographies that don't use whitespace at all (or almost never):

Chinese and Japanese are the obvious ones (that have pretty good but not well-standardized tokenizers), but Thai is also super unreliable about whitespace/word boundaries, and there's a bunch of south asian scripts with similar confusion

@jbowles

TBH senior executive memos, inbound and outbound are also highly formulaic in the case of all but the most idiosyncratic weirdos (everything ever publicly announced or internal memoed from OR TO Jack Walsh, Eric Schmidt, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, any of the Facebook execs, the Walton family, etc etc)

And I think I see a related(?) conclusion — upper mgt has never seen anything that _didn't_ look like AI slop, so *they* see the potential for the LLM to replace middle mgt too

@donaldball

Preach it

@jbowles

I honestly don't care if this is fake or not, it's a breath of clean fresh air to see nerds just being goofily nerdy instead of trying on the finbro hustle or the AGI apocalypse serious face

https://mstdn.social/@stux/114207213116629086

@evan some of us — many of us, in fact — would still walk away from Omelas

…if there were anywhere else to go

@skinnylatte the only way I see it is if you've already been earning enough to put down 70% up front

@skinnylatte sell and diversify, kids.

You're already betting long on $company by working there; holding the stock too is really keeping too many eggs in one basket

The entire Trump/Vance administration, and especially DOGE, has the vibe of Vladimir Putin getting on StarCraft and texting

im in ur base killin ur d00ds

This guy spent the day on the beach -- then had a bath.

Now he is so, so tired that he's not even snoring

#DogsOfMastodon

@mhoye sand was a mistake

Bill Watterson had easily thirty years of foresight not gifted to, say, the entire tech world

@JustRosy

This is incredibly rude and holier-than-thou and you should be ashamed of yourself. Introducing youth to programming is (1) not necessarily the role of a parent & (2) @futurebird 's literal job

Even if it weren't their job, wanting it to be easier is a legit complaint to an audience of tech-obsessed lefty nerds

And you shouldn't suggest that they should *give up their children for adoption* because they have a different opinion than you about the approachability of tech

@wmd

@JustRosy

Seriously, there is something WRONG about your disproportionate level of response

Get some therapy; don't work it out here

@futurebird @wmd

"First They Came For" is the Ur-prototype "I didn't think the leopards would eat *my* face" commentary

h/t @PallasRiot @SallyStrange

https://social.treehouse.systems/@PallasRiot/113897427182870416

My kid has discovered a website that lets you play against the LLMs in an ESP-like "turing test"

Pretty sure they're giving somebody free training data

but on the other hand the kids are all right; the 12 year olds are using tween shibboleths to signal their common humanity