ilinamorato
@ilinamorato@lemmy.world
- Comment on The name "seagull" implies the existence of landgulls, airgulls, and firegulls. 3 days ago:
Interesting. I knew about “bear” but I did not know about “medved” as another minced-taboo.
- Comment on The name "seagull" implies the existence of landgulls, airgulls, and firegulls. 3 days ago:
Sorry for being unclear–proto-Celtic calls wolves “wailos” for the same reason as they call gulls “weilanna,” because of the noise, yes. The coincidence is that the modern word “wolf” sounds like the proto-Celtic word “wailos.”
- Comment on The name "seagull" implies the existence of landgulls, airgulls, and firegulls. 4 days ago:
You have to go pretty far back (to proto-Celtic, it looks like) to find a linguistic ancestor for the word “gull” that doesn’t just mean “that specific bird.”
But in proto-Celtic, it looks like “weilanna” probably meant “wailer.” As in, “one who wails,” though we don’t know exactly what the suffix “-anna” means. A similar word in that language would’ve been “wailos,” which even though it sounds similar seems to have been unrelated to our modern term “wolf,” as it comes from a different proto-indo-european root.
Anyway, the word “gull” does refer to the sounds that it makes more than anything else. So in figuring out what a landgull, airgull, and firegull might be, we need to find something noisy. Or just something annoying, given the derisive connotation of “wail.”
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Probably. "We’ve investigated! No issues here!
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I guess that’s pretty subjective overall. In any case, they’re not so great now.
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
Ok, I’m not familiar enough with any of those to know what that means in this context. But in any case, weren’t his contributions to those games all ages ago? M&M in particular came out almost 30 years ago, right?
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
WotC was already pretty awful before the Hasbro acquisition, as I recall.
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
How much do we actually know about what Crawford is like outside of the WotC machine? He might be perfectly competent but held back by executive mismanagement.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, good point.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 2 weeks ago:
Ooh, good point. Well, they’re both going to ship from the factory in nonworking condition, so that’ll be tough to tell.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 2 weeks ago:
Absolutely gonna be “made in America” in that the application of the gold decal to the cheap Chinese handset will be done in America.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 2 weeks ago:
It’s definitely going to be the Escobar Phone all over again. Anyone who accidentally receives one will get a foil-wrapped $150 Huawei handset with a preinstalled background image.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 2 weeks ago:
Easier than spotting the Cybertrucks?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
We’re already predisposed toward a bit of iconoclasm just being here instead of Reddit. The “normies” are still elsewhere, so we get it into our heads that the echo chamber around us is the norm, rather than a self-selected group of people for whom Greta Thunberg is a centrist. On those rare occasions that a normie gets here, we find ourselves shocked at how they live their lives.
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 4 weeks ago:
It has definitely plateaued.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Just because not everyone goes through each one doesn’t mean they aren’t stages. Not everyone goes to high school, or doesn’t sleep through the night, or catches a ball thrown from a meter away, or has trouble with adolescent relationships; that doesn’t mean those aren’t stages.
“Stages” are entirely theoretical and hotly debated, and you shouldn’t think of them like video game levels where you have to go through all (or even any) of them. Think of them more like theatrical stages: it’s where the action happens for a time, the set upon which the action of your life occurs. You’re almost always going to be on multiple stages at a time, and the people around you are probably going to be on a different set of them.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Creepy? No, probably not, but it does present some potential problems: You probably don’t have a whole lot of things in common at this point. You might not be particularly compatible with regard to your friend groups or your desires for your future. You are in a situation where it’s going to be difficult to get on the same level. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are potential obstacles.
That said, if you and she are both okay with it—and your daughter, who is clearly someone whose opinion you care about—then have a great time! Don’t have high expectations, but enjoy yourself and see what happens.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Life definitely can have stages once you’re an adult. Relationships (married/divorced/remarried), family (babies/kids/teenagers/adults), work (entry level/senior/management/retirement). Think about if you’re on the other side of a big party than the other person; then you’re probably on different life stages. Not all of them are weird to date between, but most of them are weird to date across big differences.
- Comment on Do you actually audit open source projects you download? 5 weeks ago:
Those are silly folks lmao
Eh, I kind of get it. OpenAI’s malfeasance with regard to energy usage, data theft, and the aforementioned rampant shoe-horning (maybe “misapplication” is a better word) of the technology has sort of poisoned the entire AI well for them, and it doesn’t feel (and honestly isn’t) necessary enough that it’s worth considering ways that it might be done ethically.
I don’t agree with them entirely, but I do get where they’re coming from. Personally, I think once the hype dies down enough and the corporate money (and VC money) gets out of it, it can finally settle into a more reasonable solid-state and the money can actually go into truly useful implementations of it.
- Comment on Do you actually audit open source projects you download? 5 weeks ago:
This is one of the few things that AI could potentially actually be good at. Aside from the few people on Lemmy who are entirely anti-AI, most people just don’t want AI jammed willy-nilly into everything.
- Comment on Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails 5 weeks ago:
So…tries and fails? 😛
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 month ago:
Mozilla! Stop doing stupid stuff!
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 month ago:
Well, now you know otherwise. I use it daily.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 month ago:
Nah, it’s completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there’s no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
“I never give advice, but there is one thing I wish you would do when you sit down to write news stories, and that is: Never use the word ‘very.’ It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn’t mean anything. If you feel the urge of ‘very’ coming on, just write the word ‘damn’ in the place of ‘very.’ The editor will strike out the word ‘damn,’ and you will have a good sentence.”
—William Allen White
- Comment on Grok’s “white genocide” obsession came from “unauthorized” prompt edit, xAI says 1 month ago:
Honestly a lot of the issues result from null results only existing in the gaps between information (unanswered questions, questions closed as unanswerable, searches that return no results, etc), and thus being nonexistent in training data. Models are therefore predisposed toward giving an answer of any kind, and if one doesn’t exist it’ll make one up.
- Comment on Grok’s “white genocide” obsession came from “unauthorized” prompt edit, xAI says 1 month ago:
“Unintentionally” is the wrong word, because it attributes the intent to the model rather than the people who designed it.
You misunderstand me. I don’t mean that the model has any intent at all. Model designers have no intent to misinform: they designed a machine that produces answers.
True answers or false answers, a neural network is designed to produce an output. Because a null result (“there is no answer to that question”) is very, very rare online, the training data doesn’t include it; meaning that a GPT will almost invariably produce any answer; if a true answer does not exist in its training data, it will simply make one up.
But the designers didn’t intend for it to reproduce misinformation. They intended it to give answers. If a model is trained with the intent to misinform, it will be very, very good at it indeed; because the only training data it will need is literally everything except the correct answer.
- Comment on Grok’s “white genocide” obsession came from “unauthorized” prompt edit, xAI says 1 month ago:
Sure, but unintentionally. I heard about a guy whose small business (which is just him) recently had someone call in, furious because ChatGPT told them that he was having a sale that she couldn’t find. The customer didn’t believe him when he said that the promotion didn’t exist. Once someone decides to leverage that, and make a sufficiently-popular AI model start giving bad information on purpose, things will escalate.
Even now, I think Elon could put a small company out of business if he wanted to, just by making Grok claim that its owner was a pedophile or something.
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 1 month ago:
I’m sure there were some forum software packages that offered voting and ranking and such. All of the ones that I was a part of were quiet enough that you didn’t need such a thing, though; you could keep up with every post, even if only to decide that you weren’t interested in it, if you read it every third day or so.