An issue in the chat format is that all these models seem bad at recognizing when they have extraneous information from user that can be ignored, or insufficient information from the user to answer the question fully.
This issue is compounded by the lack of probabilities in the answers, despite the machines ultimately being probabilistic.
Notice a human in a real conversation will politely ignore extra info (the distance to car wash) or ask clarifying questions (where is the car?).
Even non-STEM people answer using probabilistic terms casually (almost certainly / most likely / probably / possibly / unlikely).
I suspect some of this is to minimize token usage in the fixed monthly price chat models, because back&forth would cost more tokens.. but maybe I'm too cynical.
The systems recognized the pattern that it looks like a generic article on the internet asking whether someone should walk or drive and answered it exactly as expected based on their training data. None of this should be surprising.
We are the ones fooling ourselves into believing there's more intelligence in these systems than they really have. At the end of the day, it's just an impressive parlor trick.
Modern paganism went through a revival during the early 2000s. Are you sure you're not just seeing someone's religion?
And its not the first time, either. There's been several revivals of the beliefs and culture over the years - for example, we didn't even have the word 'viking' in English until the 18th Century.
> Nothing beats the pressure of using a language all day in a place where they don’t speak your language.
Nothing beats immersion I'd agree. I found self-studying very difficult because sure I could try and read or listen, but I had no one to really judge my writing/speaking responses back. Or you learn how to speak like a textbook written in the 80s.
> I also find that I can speak far better than I can listen.
I had the same problem when traveling with a non-fluent understanding of the local language. It logically makes sense though - you only need to learn 1 way to say a thing, but theres 100s of ways for someone to respond to you.
> Folks regularly compliment me on my pronunciation
Conjugation/grammar & pronunciation go a long way. You can fill in vocabulary gaps by reaching for similar enough words, describing the thing, or offering up the English word for the thing and get there often... provided you can place it within a decently constructed sentence.
I also find knowing the local way of saying umm/uhh helps a lot so people understand you are slowing down/thinking/struggling for the right words.
There’s a hybrid approach that works pretty well now in the remote era.
I’ve used a platform called Baselang, which basically gives you unlimited access on demand to get in zoom with people in Latin American countries to have conversations in Spanish. They do have a structured curriculum but actually having direct 1:1 conversations is not too far from actually being in country and practicing.
I have no connection to the service except as a customer and there may be others as well. It’s a model I recommend. I’m already fluent in Spanish but it gets pretty rusty and my vocabulary fades so I’ve been using it to stay current.
Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me.
For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years.
Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form
Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.
If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.
Every social media platform has a lot of different segments of people using it for different reasons.
If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.
I’m not a heavy Instagram user but I’ve found it trivially easy to tailor my feed to the content I want to see (friends and family). That’s why I don’t find much interest in the pearl clutching about how some people post on the platform. I’m not there to judge and moralize about others.
>If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.
Let's ignore the things that upset us even more easily, while maintaining the required social appearances even harder!
Foto is good, provided you want a community exclusively made up of other photographers. If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.
The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.
> If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.
Wasn't people wanting reach what supposedly ruined Instagram in the first place? Seems like wanting it both ways if you want reach for yourself, but not for "influencers"
There was a time on Instagram when artists could grow their reach organically, on the merit of their work alone, but I don’t think that’s possible today without engaging in reels and positioning yourself as an influencer, which most artists I would imagine find abhorrent.
I mean I want to enjoy some wine, doesn’t mean I’m a hypocrite for disliking alcoholics and drunk driving.
It’s OK to believe both 1) social media can be a useful service for connecting with friends and interesting people, and 2) social media has feedback mechanisms that reward unpleasant and abusive behavior.
For anyone who doesnt know: unlike in Facebook you can switch off/pause random strangers posts in your feed by going to "content preferences" in your settings. Of course being Meta this reenables every 30 days, but makes for a way cleaner feed in between.
I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.
It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.
> I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.
I agree with this 100%, on top of what you said remember that Instagram launched in 2010 as an iOS exclusive during a time where Apple was not particularly focused on camera quality, ignoring Android where there were numerous devices with substantially better cameras. IIRC someone was even selling one with an optical system in the ballpark of a low-end mirrorless. They also limited image resolution to 640 pixels square until 2015.
A good read in this area is Dan Wang's book - Breakneck
One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.
That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
> a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.
Yes, and thats where the west ended up going wrong in our line of thinking. The assumption was if we facilitated their transition into middle class economy / rich world standards via trade deals and offshoring.. they'd follow the same path as our now allies - JP/TW/SK/SG/etc.
That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the promotion of Xi to supreme leader probably for life has if anything pulled them further away from that path. Things like the great firewall have helped him in that effort.
China is very far from genuine rich-world standards though, especially if you look at the less developed inner provinces. The relatively tiny middle class they do have clearly lacks the incentive to demand any sudden change at present - they'd have way too much to lose. So we're still very much in the "authoritarian phase" of this whole dynamic.
That is actually bullshit fed to you all democracies that have been brought down in the last 60-70 years democracies have been brought down by the west. And most dictatorships propped up by them unless they threatened Israel or were perceived a threat to Israel. It was not civil liberties or any such reason that any moves were made it was about capitalism vs socialism or Israel. West capitalists have no interest in civil liberties or democracies hence they bring down any socialist democratic party or leader which has bring about fascists in power in the west.
I mean Andrew is an extreme case. If he weren’t as out-of-favour I imagine nothing would have happened, and this has been _entirely_ forced by external information.
I assume that otherwise they would have less of an issue. It’s not like he married someone slight off-white, that would be real grounds for excommunication.
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