Nope, I use ⧸ as a replacement.

This stuff is unbelievably mesmerising

The framing in the first part of the video is really negative, except that the exact same problem of people losing their AI “partners” has occurred in the west as well without any govt intervention – when the company that owns the AI simply pushed a new version of their chatbot. This was widely reported in several waves, entire subreddits were at certain points filled with grieving(?) people who were convinced their partners have been “lobotomised”, or erased…

It is absolutely reasonable and good to ban or limit usage of such chatbots. The motivation ascribed to the Chinese govt here is also presented in a tone that suggests it’s somewhat weird or manipulative, i.e. the desire to have real people meet and ultimately make babies. Which, sure enough, is fucked up as an excuse to arrest writers of online smut, which has been reported to happen, but in this case it’s a good thing for the ordinary people as well.

Admittedly, the post still has almost only downvotes. But whoever posted that has some issues.

I’m wondering how much % of FOSS software is done with some degree of AI input today. It seems to be becoming unavoidable.

They really don’t look alike, though. Where’s the similarly, they have broad faces, or? I don’t think the comparison is racist, because it doesn’t make enough sense to be racist in the first place. Insisting on it this hard is just weird.

I guess they can just put the ads in the middle of the AI responses/searches?

Serbia barely had a second party, as far as I could see (from Croatia). Yeah, there was some opposition, but very few had any sincere trust in it, incomparably fewer than the number of Americans who actually like and support Democrats. The Student List tapped into this vacuum.

And European democracies are generally a bit more loose with having newcomer parties being at least somewhat viable, for better and for worse (AfD, UKIP…). The US electoral system just erases 3rd parties wholesale, it’s particularly abysmal.

Btw, the Student List is not terribly left-leaning. They’re trying to be “apolitical”, in order to attract both the left and the right.

This was mostly noticed already in the earliest days of LLM spreading (I think several months since GPT went public), when Russian users noticed it has much worse output in Russian than English. The reason was simply that each letter was treated as a whole distinct token in Russian, leading to more difficulties in outputing words without typos. It is logical that this approach would be more resource-expensive and prone to errors, if the AI has to select each and every letter one by one instead of immediately jumping to selecting words and forming the whole sentence.

English is a fairly analytic language, words barely change, and subtleties in meaning and relationships are expressed with other words. Many other languages encode such information inside the word by various ways of modifying the same base form (inflectional languages). The same way English forms plurals by adding -s, so can other languages add a whole bunch of possible endings to express e.g. that the object is used as a tool, or that it’s the recipient of an action. To analyse and tokenise all that stuff would require decades of manual work. Alternatively I would assume there are some automatised tools that would generally correctly split the words into tokens, at least for the major inflectional languages, such as Russian. But most likely they just split it down to random syllables or even individual letters. Indeed, I just tested Russian, Polish and Croatian in their linked tokenizer, and the results are mostly syllabic or letter-based or just sliced into random sections that don’t correspond to anything linguistically relevant. Not a trace of morphemic analysis (morphemes are meaningful units, e.g. level-head-ed-ness, this style of slicing words down into pieces would probably be the ideal approach here). [Edit: holy shit, it actually seems to treat almost every capital letter as a distinct token.]

Or, to put it most simply, AI bullshits and brute-forces through languages with complicated words. And it’s been known for years. Nice to see additional confirmation, of course, and to learn that they still haven’t improved on it.

There’s currently a replacement from his own party as the PM, Vučić planned to be the presidential candidate (Putin-Medvedev style switch). IDK about the details (I’m not sure if the Serbian president is appointed by the parliament or by public voting), but basically he’s out of the game. For a while, at least.

He doesn’t have a term anymore at all.

Why is it assumed that you’d have dysphoria in such a scenario?

but it is not succinctly summarized for consumption, and that is the function Wikipedia fulfills for most users

You may have noticed that this is precisely what I’ve disagreed on with two other users in this thread, who claimed that Wikipedia should contain as much information as possible. I agree with you, it is good to have an encyclopedia that summarises the most important, and directs towards further materials for further deeper study.

Again, the point I disagreed on with the other poster is simply on what’s the “biggest repository of human knowledge ever”. You seem to agree that the shadow libraries are bigger, and that settles it, we don’t have to disagree further. Being the biggest repository does not, of course, mean that it should be the only repository, that others are bad, or whatever else. Different repositories can fulfill different roles in the sharing of knowledge.

I can understand the pitfalls of allowing updates from the public, but I think it’s widely accepted that Wikipedia does more good than bad.

I don’t think I disagreed with the latter point, except when I mentioned the smaller borderline fascist wikis somewhere ITT. When it comes to English and some other large WPs I definitely don’t disagree.

Maybe you’re just supposing that we disagree on something when we really don’t, so you can’t lead the discussion to the point where we’d finally clearly disagree. I provided some criticism of Wikipedia, that doesn’t mean I think it’s bad wholesale. Wikipedia is complicated. I’ve spent quite a while editing it, as well as using traditional encyclopedias. I just negatively reacted to some comments in this thread, the harsh dismissal of traditional encyclopedias, and the somewhat overrated view of Wikipedia.

“free” library

Pirate library. I don’t think this aspect has to be downplayed.

I can find José Saramago books there, but no info on the author himself.

You can find his biographies, criticism, analyses, the very sources that Wikipedia is using.

They don’t serve the same purpose, correct. But as far “repositories of knowledge” go (the phrase that kicked off this sub-discussion), they count as such, and they are massive, I have no doubt they’re bigger than WP. English Wikipedia has 7 million articles while Anna’s Archive (which mirrors Libgen and a big part of Internet Archive - but far from all of it!) says it has 70 million books and 200 million articles. Cut the number in half, or even in third due to duplicates if you want, to get a more realistic number, it’s still bigger.

Have you actually ever used Libgen and Internet Archive (its book collection specifically)?

Same, by the time I switched to LibreOffice I hadn’t been using anything other than ribbon for over a decade, and yet switching felt like a relief, coming back to the familiar. The 97-style probably got baked into my brain back when I was a kid writing nonsensical fantasy tales in Word.

That’s not really in agreement with your understanding of the encyclopedias either, I’d say. Encyclopedias contain [an unspecified amount of] information on all branches of knowledge. The branches are all of them, yes, but the exact amount of information provided from each subtopic of each branch is not necessarily endless. As the quoted “pillar” says.

Made them free to access and download, if the book is in the public domain or under a Creative Commons license. Allowed limited access if copyrighted (through some weirdly legal solution where they technically “loan” the book to you while you view it in your browser), although that option has been partly limited in the recent years due to lawsuits by book publishers.

https://archive.org/details/texts

I’ll never try to clarify anything for you again,

As if you tried to clarify anything up until this point anyway 🤣

but not for an encyclopedia, which is, by definition, literally supposed to contain all knowledge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia#Etymology

The word encyclopedia comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία,[13] transliterated enkúklios paideía ‘general education’, from enkúklios (ἐγκύκλιος) ‘circular, recurrent, required regularly, general’[5][14] and paideía (παιδεία) ‘education, rearing of a child’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.

(emphasis mine)

We have limited time in our lives. “Everything” can be the goal of a library collection. An encyclopedia gets the important gist of the “everything” in a practically readable and understandable format, and directs you to other places where you can learn more if needed. A balance has to be struck. Sadly, I guess Wikipedia has become a symbol of all knowledge on the web, since most other places are so dogshit and uninformative, that we can now expect or demand it to do beyond what an encyclopedia should normally do.