Isn't "now this" just a synonym for "moving on" or "next order of business" or "apropos of nothing"? I don't think the concept of jumping to a completely new topic is something TV introduced.
It’s been a bit since I’ve read Amusing Ourselves to Death but I believe in the book the phrase ”Now this” is used disparagingly to refer to the fact that with tv you can go from a horrific news story like a local family being murdered to a completely unrelated story, both in content and emotion in the span of seconds. This doesn’t allow ample time for the viewer to process the former and essentially forces them to turn their brain off as the cognitive dissonance of holding both stories (and more) simultaneously would be impossible.
That's fair. It does seem pretty similar to just reading a newspaper and moving your eyes to the next story, but I get that TV is a lot more stimulating and you can't go at your own pace like you can with the paper.
Yes but the goal of school is to lift heavy things, basically. You're trying to do things that are difficult (for you) but don't produce anything useful for anyone else. That's how you gain the ability to do useful things.
Let's just accept that this weight lifting metaphor is leaky, like any other, and brings us to absurds like forklift operators need to lift dumbbells to keep relevant in their jobs.
Forklift operators need to do something to exercise. They sit in the seat all day. At least as a programmer I have a standing desk. This isn't relevant to the job though.
> At least as a programmer I have a standing desk.
When I stand still for hours at a time, I end up with aching knees, even though I'd have no problem walking for that same amount of time. Do you experience anything like that?
I kinda get the point, but why is that? The goal of school is to teach something that's applicable in industry or academia.
Forklift operators don't lift things in their training. Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.
We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires if we want them to lift heavy things.
> Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.
> We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires
Things must have certainly changed since I was a CS student :-/ We did an assembler course in second year, and implemented a basic adder in circuitry in a different course.
This was in the mid-90s, when there was definitely little need for assembly programmers outside of EE (I was CS).
We begin teaching math by having students solve problems that are trivial for a calculator.
Though I also wonder what advanced CS classes should look like. If they agent can code nearly anything, what project would challenge student+agent and teach the student how to accomplish CS fundamentals with modern tools.
In one of my college classes, after you submitted your project you'd have a short meeting with a TA and/or the professor to talk through your solution. For a smaller advanced class I think this kind of thing is feasible and can help prevent blind copy/pasting. If you wrote your code with an LLM but you're still able to have a knowledgeable conversation about it, then great, that's what you're going to do in the real world too. If you can't answer any questions about it and it seems like you don't understand your own code, then you don't get a good grade even if it works.
As an added bonus, being able to discuss your code with another engineer that wasn't involved in writing it is an important skill that might not otherwise be trained in college.
I think it's a good analogy. A forklift is a useful tool and objectively better than humans for some tasks, but if you've never developed your muscles because you use the forklift every time you go to the gym, then when you need to carry a couch up the stairs you'll find that you can't do it and the forklift can't either.
So the idea is that you should learn to do things by hand first, and then use the powerful tools once you're knowledgeable enough to know when they make sense. If you start out with the powerful tools, then you'll never learn enough to take over when they fail.
A forklift can do things no human can. I've used a forklift for things that no group of humans could - you can't physically get enough humans around that size object to lift it. (of course levers would change this)
Yeah, it's a great analogy. Pushing it even further: a forklift is superhuman, but only in specific environments that are designed for it. As soon as you're off of pavement a forklift can't do much. As soon as an object doesn't have somewhere to stick the forks you need to get a bunch of other equipment to get the forklift to lift it.
Based on what I know about Denver, people there want to live outside the city, not in Denver itself. Everyone I know that moved to "Denver" actually moved somewhere like an hour's drive from downtown, and not because they couldn't afford something in the city. Here's a map of average housing prices in the area: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/3e87d9f631dd470ab05ab.... There are some expensive neighborhoods in the city, but I think this map looks very different from most other American cities.
Boulder is surprisingly low. From my experience, it’s on the more expensive side for single family homes. I’m curious what’s driving the info in that dashboard.
Interestingly, many DSA chapters follow the same playbook so the Denver DSA is fairly representative of the DSA, which is the largest socialist organization in the US. So either the DSA is not socialist, not representative of American socialists, or is representative and American socialists are a device to stop affordable housing and create parks.
Which proposition or conclusion above do you disagree with and why?
I don't really know anything about the DSA so I can't agree or disagree with any of this. I guess I misread your comment, I interpreted it as "Based on the events described in this thread, American socialism's purpose is ...". It seems like your statement is actually based on a very broad context of the DSA's history and activities, which are not common knowledge, so it would have been nice to include some of that if you wanted to make such a sweeping statement.
You're also making another implicit claim here that DSA chapters have never had any impact other than stopping affordable housing and creating parks, which I think would be difficult to defend. After a minute of Wikipedia research, I see that at least nine members of Congress were active DSA members during their tenure, and obviously had other accomplishments. For example, I see that DSA member Major Owens was in Congress for 24 years and was a significant factor in passing the ADA.
I am certainly happy to amend it to "The DSA's primary purpose in America in the last twenty years is to oppose affordable housing and convert the sites of such housing to parks".
To call it a park is a stretch. It's a dilapidated golf course, and last I checked it can't be open over night because of liability? Like I'm happy it's open, but I would say it's a far cry from being on the same level as Cheeseman or City :/
If you click on the article you can see a full list of the hallucinations they found. They did put in the effort to look for plausible partial matches, but most of them are some variation of "No author or title match. Doesn't exist in publication."
Reference: Asma Issa, George Mohler, and John Johnson. Paraphrase identification using deep contextual-
ized representations. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 517–526, 2018.
Asma Issa and John Johnson don't appear to exist. George Mohler does, but it doesn't look like he works in this area (https://www.georgemohler.com/). No paper with that title exists. There are some with sort of similar titles (https://arxiv.org/html/2212.06933v2 for example), but none that really make sense as a citation in this context. EMNLP 2018 exists (https://aclanthology.org/D18-1.pdf), but that page range is not a single paper. There are papers in there that contain the phrases "paraphrase identification" and "deep contextualized representations", so you can see how an LLM might have come up with this title.
It's LLMs. You can tell from the phrasing ("no X just Y", "isn't A it's B", "pure ___"), and because all of the sections except Screenshots say basically the same thing. A competent person would not write it like this and an incompetent person would not be this meticulous about grammar and formatting.
I realize this sounds exactly like "I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time" but I really can tell.
Edit: Also you can see this was made with https://github.com/features/spark, but that's cheating, it's more fun to make accusations based on vague feelings about the writing tone.
I wonder where LLMs got this style from, since, while you did see something like it, it wasn’t nearly as widespread before the rise of ChatGPT, so not the most statistically likely form for these to be generated in.
Was it trained into them in the supervised or reinforcement phases?
Has it emerged from prompts extorting them to be friendly, somehow sneaking in from text message training as a result?
Is it now in a self-reinforcing feedback loop as training data grows to include modern Readmes?
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