JasonFruit

Well, I'm confident they would become the next FBI. It's a feature of intelligence services. But until they did, we'd have some breathing space.

Not all language tasks, even, are going to be best handled by these models.

That was a beautiful misunderstanding, right out of 1960s scifi.

People are justifiably excited about these language tools, but we're getting tired of this answer because it's not a good answer: "Use GPT-4! Some of the answers aren't that great, but it's at least a starting point." That's like if you asked how to sort a list and remove duplicates, and the answer was to import it into a spreadsheet program and follow these steps instead of just "sort | uniq". It's suggesting a general-purpose tool to do a specific job maybe kinda acceptably instead of suggesting the right tool for the job.

It reminds me of the microwave cookery books that came out after consumer microwaves became available: there are things a microwave is good at, but those books used it for everything, just like we're using GPT-4 today. We'll calm down eventually.

That is a good way to get some ancient wisdom, and sometimes some incidental history, but it's surprising how little it will inform you about what those religions teach in contemporary practice. I don't think I could read the Bible and derive from it anything like the range of modern Christian belief and practice.

Possibly safer for people's rights, though.

Or if they simply prefer to explore, to learn new things, or to fail or succeed on their own, and to enjoy the potential profit of those actions.

How do you know you spot the hallucinations, and that you're not just catching the less-good ones while accepting convincing half-truths? It may be that your subject is just that clear-cut, and you've been careful — but what I worry about is that people won't be, and will just accept the pretty-much correct details that don't really matter that much, until they accrete into a mass of false knowledge, like the authoritative errors quoted in Isadore of Seville's Encyclopedia and similar medieval works.

Isn't that basically Freenet?

Donald Knuth not an expert on the boll weevil. Your point is?

I care more each day just to compensate for you people.

So it uses it/she pronouns? Usually the object pronoun is second; does that mean that it wants people to call she "it" unless they're doing something to she? That's off the chain, and sounds like meta-trolling.

That sounds less like "bad news" and more like "other good news".

It may be saying that, but, historically, Adobe says a lot of things. I cannot imagine that Dolby would risk actually taking their users to court on this basis.

I have often considered that the word should be exfenestration. The frequency with which I've considered this probably says a lot about me.

"Why?" is a very properly hackerly question.

The same story was told about a chapel that was part of the Little Norway museum in Wisconsin. I think these stories might be completely made up in response to the ship-like style of the roof.

> buggy as the market will bear

is a great phrase, and I'll use it.

I just assumed they went to Ken Thompson directly.

This is much less an obstacle to enjoying a hobby than it is to enjoying a community associated with the hobby. I tend to be a loner in my hobbies, and can happily pursue them any way I please.

Things like this seem so arbitrarily hostile to intelligent people who just want to find what they're looking for in an efficient way. Why does this keep happening? Who benefits from these developments?

Yes, it's a part of the plan, but the point still stands: it dilutes what could have been a focused, interesting collection.

Those are all good points.

I do compose and make arrangements — and am firmly a mediocrity. In fact, lots of the great composers were violists: Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Britten, Dvorak, and others. Most of them also played a keyboard instrument, which is a useful tool for a composer, but a violist is perfectly placed to understand the orchestra as a whole, and is usually not saddled with too difficult a part, so they can spare some attention.

Also, violinists who composed were very common, but their works tend to display skill rather than profundity. Paganini is a good example: delightful melody, amazing technical displays, but not a lot to sink your teeth into.

In music, at least, I've reluctantly concluded that time is an almost infallible judge. I'm a violist, and we have very little repertoire, so we're always excited when we discover a viola piece among the works of a forgotten or little-known composer from the 19th century or earlier, but almost invariably, it's either mediocre or outright trash. Zelter, Sitt, Ritter, Zitterbart, Firket, Rougnon, — it sounds like I'm making these names up, but I'm not — mediocrities all. As a professor of mine was fond of pointing out to me, "There's a reason we haven't heard _x_," where _x_ is the new find of the day.

Pro tip: it's easy to replace nyan cat with a different image. My kids liked Twilight Sparkle.

& cum spiritu tuo.

I don't agree with that at all. For example, if I refer to violinists like [Oscar Shumsky] and [Yehudi Menuhin], and I create links from their names to relevant articles about them, I don't think you'd have any trouble figuring out what it's about. I think this article did a good job of that, linking from relevant text that clearly indicates the topic of the destination, except maybe for "Writing consistently…".

There's a lot to disagree with there, and I do. I'm very frequently interested in what makes a person or event important to others in the past, and I'm not able to sustain your confidence that 2023 has it all figured out, where every year prior did not.

His Wikipedia article [0] is not as skeptical of his abilities and qualifications as I would have expected. Neither is that of the Vidocq Society [1]. Articles on controversial living people are hard to manage, but the Wikipedia articles and the NY Magazine article present opposite views of Walter, and I suspect they're both a bit distorted.

    [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Walter_(psychologist)
    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidocq_Society