lvxferre

As another user and me were discussing, in another thread about the same topic, I believe that the 10% admix is likely due to coastal settlements here in South America. Nothing too fancy, just to facilitate trade. Specially with the folks in Central Andes, as the Andeans had a good and large (albeit land-based) trade network already. And, well, when you run this sort of settlement you're bound to interact with locals, right?

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

True that.

Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there's a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.

The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I'm not surprised that they don't learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)

And, even when it comes to the empire, they're busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.

At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the "classical languages" weren't just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly "varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities". (Personally I'd also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that's just me.)

Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of "classic" not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge'ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.

For further info, here's Gazeta do Povo's article, from 14/Jan/2023, that this one refers to... or rather copypastes without linking - the overall discourse and claims are the same.

Okay. Can I be honest here? This is piles of propaganda coming from multiple sides, and anyone claiming to know the truth is probably just assuming. It's a bloody mess of interests.

And since I do not know the veracity of the claims themselves, I'll instead focus on who is saying what, and the likely reason why.

The original is from a conservative newspaper from my city, Curitiba. It used to serve our local audience (Paraná state) but, around 2015 or so, the overall focus shifted: instead of being Paraná's newspaper it became Brazil's right wing newspaper. The motivation was simply "selling subscriptions for outsiders".

That article's claim about Confucius Institute promoting a hidden agenda ultimately backtracks to FBI and CIA (note: this article is linked as source in the other one that I've linked.) I'll leave as an exercise for the readers to guess how trustable the USA government is when it comes to China, and vice versa, given that both countries are fighting a cold war.

Now let's talk about Diálogo Américas. It's directly tied with USA's military - its own words

Diálogo is a "U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) activity comprising a website, a print magazine, and associated social media devoted to building partnership and cooperation among partner nations."

Given the backstory of relationships between the government of USA and other governments of the Americas, this can be safely rephrased as "we're military, devoted to enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine."

Ah, and most likely China is doing its thing too in this regard. How much, we do not know. It might be worth checking what those partnerships with universities are about; there's a lot of room for propaganda in something like social studies, but if it's something like semiconductors or the likes the claim is probably bollocks.

Are you noticing what's happening here?

• USA's espionage agencies say something.
• A newspaper that backstabbed its own homeland says: "hey, I can use what the above said! It's from some outside source so people won't dispute it!"
• USA's military "activity": "hey, I can use what that newspaper is saying! It's from some outside source so people won't dispute it!"

It's like a telephone game done for the sake of the context-tomy.

I'll remain sceptic on the claim until the paper is peer reviewed by people who actually know the stuff in it, unlike me.

I didn't know that I needed to know about Jevons' paradox. Such a simple but brilliant reasoning.

You'll get less pollution and crash deaths if, instead of trying to improve cars, society improved transportation methods that compete with cars: walking, biking, public transport, so goes on. They either don't show those issues, or show them in a meaningfully lower level.

pokemon abridged’s brock approves this

Should we be happy for his mons, or worried about Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny? (Both.)

In other words, to solve the declining birthrate....

Pokémon Breeding it is!

...fuck, time to buy a new bike.

I found an interesting scientific article talking about this topic, focusing on the Americas. Here's a link if anyone is interested.

Special emphasis on this map. Red circle = woman buried with hunting tools for large prey.

This also reminds me the etymology of the Amazon rainforest, after the mythical female warriors. Apparently a Spanish explorer fought some "tapuya" (non-Tupi) people, with men and women taking on arms. And when you think about it, the same set of skills and attributes necessary for war are useful to hunt large non-humans, and vice versa.

Really my point is there are enough things to criticize about LLMs and people’s use of them, this seems like a really silly one to try and push.

The comment that you're replying to is fairly specifically criticising the usage of the word "hallucination" to misrepresent the nature of the undesirable LLM output, in the context of people selling you stuff by what it is not.

It is not "pushing" another "thing to criticise about LLMs". OK? I have my fair share of criticism against LLMs themselves, but that is not what I'm doing right now.

Continuing (and torturing) that analogy, [...] max_int or small buffers.

When we extend analogies they often break in the process. That's the case here.

Originally the analogy works because it shows a phony selling a product by what it is not. By making the phony to precompute 4*10¹² equations (a completely unrealistic situation), he stops being a phony to become a muppet doing things the hard way.

If it were the case that there had only been one case of a hallucination with LLMs, I think we could pretty safely call that a malfunction

If it happens 0.000001% of the time, I think we could still call it a malfunction and that it performs better than a lot of software.

Emphases mine. Those "ifs" represent a completely unrealistic situation, that does not show anything useful about the real situation.

We know that LLMs output "hallucinations" way more than just once, or 0.000001% of the time. They're common enough to show you how LLMs work.

Rumors that Valve was working on a portable gaming unit had emerged in May 2021

Perhaps. The timing fits considerably better than the other alternatives mentioned until now.