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bananaflag commented on 1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' (2015)   mashable.com/archive/sovi... · Posted by u/us-merul
KineticLensman · 11 days ago
> the author actually reworded future editions of the book to make it clear that Gollum is a small creature

The primary retconning occurred in 1951, when the encounter in The Hobbit between Bilbo and Gollum was rewritten to be confrontational rather than amicable, because TLOTR now needed the Ring to have a malevolent influence. The retconning is reflected in Bilbo's apology in the Council of Elrond to those (i.e. Gloin, but implicitly the readers) who may have heard a different version of his story. I'd love to see a first edition of the Hobbit to see what Tolkien actually did say about Gollum.

[Edit]. Just checked my (third edition) copy of The Hobbit. It only says that Gollum was "a small slimy creature" who "had a little boat". There aren't any other descriptions of their relative size, except that Bilbo actually jumps over Gollum's head when escaping him (Gollum is crouched down at this point), as a sibling comment has just observed.

bananaflag commented on Curious about the training data of OpenAI's new GPT-OSS models? I was too   twitter.com/jxmnop/status... · Posted by u/flabber
spwa4 · 15 days ago
There's 2 things called neuralese:

1) internally, in latent space, LLMs use what is effectively a language, but all the words are written on top of each other instead of separately, and if you decode it as letters, it sounds like gibberish, even though it isn't. It's just a much denser language than any human language. This makes them unreadable ... and thus "hides the intentions of the LLM", if you want to make it sound dramatic and evil. But yeah, we don't know what the intermediate thoughts of an LLM sound like.

The decoded version is often referred to as "neuralese".

2) if 2 LLMs with sufficiently similar latent space communicate with each other (same model), it has often been observed that they switch to "gibberish" BUT when tested they are clearly still passing meaningful information to one another. One assumes they are using tokens more efficiently to get the latent space information to a specific point, rather than bothering with words (think of it like this: the thoughts of an LLM are a 3d point (in reality 2000d, but ...). Every token/letter is a 3d vector (meaning you add them), chosen so words add up to the thought that is their meaning. But when outputting text why bother with words? You can reach any thought/meaning by combining vectors, just find the letter moving the most in the right direction. Much faster)

Btw: some specific humans (usually toddlers or children that are related) when talking to each other switch to talking gibberish to each other as well while communicating. This is especially often observed in children that initially learn language together. Might be the same thing.

These languages are called "neuralese".

bananaflag commented on The Whispering Earring   croissanthology.com/earri... · Posted by u/ZeljkoS
CoopaTroopa · 18 days ago
"The parable of the earring was not about the dangers of using technology that wasn't Truly Part Of You, which would indeed have been the kind of dystopianism I dislike. It was about the dangers of becoming too powerful yourself."

https://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.l...

bananaflag · 18 days ago
Thanks! Even though I have the whole Squid314 archive, I had forgotten about this follow-up.
bananaflag commented on Ongoing Lean formalization of the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem   github.com/ImperialColleg... · Posted by u/anonyonoor
semolinapudding · 22 days ago
FLT is a negative statement ("there are no nonzero integers x, y, z such that..."), and proofs by contradiction are constructively valid for proving negative statements.
bananaflag · 22 days ago
A purely universal statement, to be more clear.
bananaflag commented on Face it: you're a crazy person   experimental-history.com/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
BeetleB · 25 days ago
“if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.”

Heh. And then they go become a "real" engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever), and end up sitting in front of a computer all day, dealing with poor UI and poorly designed SW because a lot of CAD tools are either built in-house or owned by monopolies who have no incentive to improve the experience.

I've lived both worlds.

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-mon...

bananaflag · 25 days ago
I imagine the people who say that would like a more people-facing job (like, I dunno, maybe a DJ) rather than a computer-facing one. They don't necessarily imagine being a "real" engineer as an alternative to being a programmer, they put them both in the same category.
bananaflag commented on AI is killing the web – can anything save it?   economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/edward
nchmy · a month ago
I used to be a heavy user of RSS, back in the Google Reader days. I loved it for following a wide array of different blogs. I'm not really sure why I stopped with rss - I switched to viable alternatives to Google reader when it died.

Recently I've been keen to get back into this way of using the web, because I have evidently been sucked into scrolling on the platforms until the algorithms give me something I want to see.

The other day, one of my favourite web dev blogs (and one of the only blogs I actually seek out) created this fantastic compendium of Web Performance resources and blog links, along with an associated rss opml file. Surely this is the push I needed to get back to the glory of the web.

https://infrequently.org/links/

But I definitely need to put in the effort to discover other eclectic blogs. I really miss reading long, authentic things on diverse topics

bananaflag · a month ago
I never stopped using RSS. Went Google Toolbar > JetBrains Omea > Google Reader > Feedly. Been on Feedly since 2013. Highly recommend it.
bananaflag commented on A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet   theguardian.com/education... · Posted by u/Hooke
nulbyte · a month ago
The pronunciation of C in Spanish is context dependent. Before I or E, it shares the same sound as S. Before A, O, or U, the same sound as QU.

Or how about G? It makes one sound before I or E, another before A, O, UE, or UI, and yet another before UA.

Lots of folks think their language is simpler, but it's only because they can follow the rules so well they don't need to actually know them.

bananaflag · a month ago
I think the point is that you can derive the pronunciation from the spelling (though not, arguably, the other way round).
bananaflag commented on Why AO3 Was Down   reddit.com/r/AO3/s/67nQid... · Posted by u/danso
p0w3n3d · 2 months ago
Hacker News helps me everyday break my information bubble. Archive Of Our Own is something that I wouldn't walk into when wandering through the internet
bananaflag · 2 months ago
It is currently pretty much the main repository of fanfiction.

I've been reading fanfiction on the Internet for two decades, so for me it would've been quite hard to miss it.

bananaflag commented on Learn you Galois fields for great good (2023)   xorvoid.com/galois_fields... · Posted by u/signa11
susam · 2 months ago
A binary operation on a set is closed on the set by definition. If an operation isn’t closed, then it isn’t considered a binary operation on that set. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to state the closure property explicitly.

I have talked a bit more about it in a totally unrelated blog post here: https://susam.net/product-of-additive-inverses.html#closure-...

bananaflag · 2 months ago
Indeed, I was quite pleasantly surprised when the webpage did not mention this infamous and ubiquitous "closure".
bananaflag commented on Dreams of improving the human race are no longer science fiction   economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/rbanffy
lazide · 3 months ago
which makes no sense on it’s face, as as evolution (and nature itself) is fundamentally competitive. you might as well say we should ‘compile ourselves past compilers’.
bananaflag · 3 months ago
Laughed out loud at that, thanks.

u/bananaflag

KarmaCake day252August 27, 2022View Original