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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

The only subreddit I've ever been banned from in 20+ years is /r/comics. Lifetime ban for a single offence of questioning a comic strip. According to the mod: "This is a fan subreddit, this is not a discussion subreddit." There's plenty of discussion on there, but I now realize it's highly filtered. It took me too long to figure that out because it mostly aligned with my views up to that point.

We're in bubbles everywhere now. Enforced by mods and payment processors and social networks. I'm now much more careful about what I post online. We don't have an actual public square to discuss things.

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I'm banned from /r/domains/ for daring to question the land rush of speculators buying .SI "Super Intelligence" domains and trying to resell them to the die hard true believers of a certain political figure. No great loss. If you ever want to see a subreddit that makes bitcoin true believers look like rational, sane individuals...

show of hands on how many of us have been banned from /r/worldnews for talking in less favorable terms about that middle east country that starts with an I.

This is why people need to meet in person even more. We do have a public square and it's outside and offline.

I got shadow banned on Duolingo forums for questioning why a billion dollar company was not paying some of the people who helped develop their language courses.

Duolingo is flawed anyway. It's influenced heavily by strong form of Universal Grammar theory which is like differences between languages ought to be superficial to our brains that mere exposure to another language should allow us to spontaneously perfect that new language, which is the kind of a view that is easily disproven by existence of LLM itself. Recognizing values of efforts made by volunteers or creators of supplemental materials unique to each languages also contradicts with the theory too, so it's consistent for Duolingo to treat such complaints against neglected recognition to be worthless.

How does the existence of LLMs disprove that theory?

LLMs are like walking and talking physical form of language determinism. They think in English, their non-linguistic performance e.g. spatial reasoning is limited, and also their performance drop when dataset linguistic purity drops. They're like a lossy compressed archive that decompress into the most appropriate response given the prompt as the key, or they are "intelligence" defined by a repository of language as opposed to being a standalone intelligence that can talk through a thin I/O wrapper which should be what intelligence should be according to that form of UG theory.

I don't think they think in English. It's a whole lot more complicated than that. The external auto generative loop can use English or whatever other language is supported by the token embeddings. But internally the 'thinking' happens on a far more abstract level than the tokens themselves, those are merely the indices to the first and last layer components.

The way it "teaches" Turkish downright proves your point.

At this point calling them courses is giving DL too much credit.

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