Readit NewsI forget when this was first leaked, but over the years, this has become my go-to example for premium artisanal marketing bullshit.
It’s very irresponsible for this article to advocate and provide a pathway to immediate superintelligence (regardless of whether or not it actually works) without even discussing the question of how you figure out what you’re searching for, and how you’ll prevent that superintelligence from being evil.
I’ve been notified of an “unknown AirTag” while I was home. When I checked the locations it was seen with me, it was a random zigzag within a block or two of my home.
I’m pretty sure what happened is that the AirTag belonged to one of my neighbours, there were some GPS distortions happening that made my phone think it was moving slightly, it kept hearing the AirTag’s signal, and it assumed I was being stalked while wandering near home. This person might have the same thing happening to them.
What you're saying is that Chinese is not inflectional. It's a pretty common trope that people equate grammar with verb inflection.
But Chinese does have grammar, it's just in the things that aren't as in-your-face as verb inflection is. Chinese has numerical classifiers, which don't have a clear corresponding feature in Indo-European languages (the closest I can think is the... I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows" which are more erudite wankfests than proper English grammar). There may be other features, but I don't know Chinese well enough to highlight them.
The things is that if you're learning an Indo-European language (and you already know on), you can largely import your native language's grammar and expect things to work. Take, e.g., the superlative construction: in English, it's "most" + adjective; in French, it's "le plus" + adjective. Word-for-word translation (including tense/aspect/mood as word-for-word, when you'd use past perfect in English is pretty damn the same time you'd use it in other languages) gets you pretty close to correct, you just have to fix up some word order issues, and some agreement issues, and you're done, so grammar instruction largely focuses on teaching those elements of grammar. It can actually be somewhat jarring when you hit upon a situation where the grammar isn't in close alignment: e.g., in English, we would say "it has been several days since I've seen you" whereas in French, it would be (doing tense-for-tense translation) "it is several days since I've seen you".
The focus in grammar instruction on the elements that are different from your native language rather than the ones that are the same can lead you into a false sense of what grammar is.
In English, you don’t say “give me three waters”, you say “give me three glasses of water” or “three bottles of water”. You can think of the classifier words as being that, but for everything:
三杯水 three glasses of water
十头牛 ten heads of cattle
两支铅笔 two rods of pencil
一条路 a strip of road
六只猫 six animal-units of cat
五个人 five “gè” (generic units) of people
That's good news. I think it deserves wider dissemination, so I'm upvoting your post.
Thank you for sharing this on HN!
The worst problem was finding cabs in the outer boroughs, and that was improved greatly with the "green cab" program (they were restricted to beginning their fares in the outer boroughs).
There's been a lot of time and gradual change since then, but what I see now (Post-Uber): - In most of the city, it is difficult or impossible to hail a cab without an app. - The Uber/app drivers are worse, clearly much less experienced and don't know where they are going. - Price gouging has been outsourced to the app itself, and happens very frequently. - Even once cabs are called on the app they often cancel or fail to show in anywhere near the advertised time.
Personally, I greatly prefer the Pre-Uber situation.
I’ve since realized that in the US, NYC is an exception. When I first came to SF and Seattle for job interview related things, I used taxis, only to find out that the taxis were so terrible I never used them again:
- In the suburbs of Seattle, I was given a taxi chit from the place I was interviewing. I called in for a cab and had to wait over a half an hour for one to pick me up.
- In SF, the airport cab I was using had his GPS unmounted from his dash, and ended up handing me the machine and asking me to help him navigate from the back seat. Then when we got to the hotel, he lamented my choice to pay by credit card as it meant he would get the money much later than if he had cash. After I told him I didn’t have the circa $100 in cash he was charging, he sadly acquiesced, then proceeded to take a literal paper rubbing imprint of the card number before I could leave.
I like to say that the Bay Area made Uber make sense, both in terms of urban planning and in terms of how terrible taxis were.
And I think those may be related: if you can get around well in a place like NYC using public transit or walking, taxis have to be a lot more attractive in order to justify their existence. In SF or Seattle they had much less competition due to the suburban sprawl and worse public transit.