It would be really cool if it could highlight the parts of the speech that gave you away your accent. It guesses mine correctly most of the time (though not the first time I tried), but also lets me know my accent is pretty light.
Readit Newstananan commented on How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters accent-explorer.boldvoice... · Posted by u/ilyausorov
What strikes me as interesting about the idea that there is a class of computations that, however implemented, would result in consciousness, is that is is in some way really idealistic.
There's no unique way to implement a computation, and there's no single way to interpret what computation is even happening in a given system. The notion of what some physical system is computing always requires an interpretation on part of the observer of said system.
You could implement a simulation of the human body on common x86-64 hardware, water pistons, or a fleet of spaceships exchanging sticky notes between colonies in different parts of the galaxy.
None of these scenarios physically resemble each other, yet a human can draw a functional equivalence by interpreting them in a particular way. If consciousness is a result of functional equivalence to some known conscious standard (i.e. alive human being), then there is nothing materially grounding it, other than the possibility of being interpreted in a particular way. Random events in nature, without any human intercession, could be construed as a veritable moment of understanding French or feeling heartbreak, on the basis of being able to draw an equivalence to a computation surmised from a conscious standard.
When I think along these lines, it easy to sympathize with the criticism of functionalism a la Chinese Room.
tananan commented on Take something you don’t like and try to like it dynomight.net/liking/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
I like this post.
What I find a practical, related advice is “If you want to get good at something, you have to make yourself glad that you’re doing it.”
This involves reminding yourself why it is that you want to get better at it, perceiving the process of learning as an interesting challenge, and in general generating interest.
There is a lot of creativity in how you actually do this. It is a skill in itself, and a very useful one, especially for skills where you find yourself lacking patience and motivation.
> That ‘glorious hope’ was quickly dashed, however. In Anaxagoras’s account, it seemed to Socrates, Mind had no agency other than initially setting things in motion, and no morality. ... For this reason, Socrates tells us plainly, he completely lost interest in the heavens, in science, and in physical reality (ta onta, ‘the things that are’).
> And so (as I’ve argued in more detail elsewhere) the first global franchise [Christian faith] was set up on an anti-science basis.
Supposedly, Socrates wasn't disenchanted with the disenchantment because he thought it was nonsense, but because it didn't address existential/moral issues that he found pertinent.
I'm not sure this drive is best characterized as anti-science. There's a difference between denying scientific research as today understood and denying a inherently materialistic worldview as one's overarching context of life. The latter is often married to science, but it doesn't have to be.
No shortage of science was and is done by deeply religious individuals. And indeed religions co-opted science in various ways. And we had materialist* views pretty far back (clearly in both Greece and India).
What's changed recently IMO, is that at those ancient times, a materialistic worldview was a sort of "Yeah, and?" sort of deal, since it offered little in terms of giving a direction to the life of an individual. Nowadays, there is at least a technological eschatology, with people expecting or looking forward to luxuries, longevity, and other such things as have usually been the promises of religions. Funnily enough, insofar as this eschatology contains a place for human agency, its mostly been taken up by organizations and corporations few would see as anything but morally corrupt. It's a weird eschatology where the idea is that if you pump enough juice in the greed machine, at some point a phase transition occurs and all of it can be converted in stable welfare for all.
tananan commented on The Awful German Language (1880) faculty.georgetown.edu/jo... · Posted by u/nalinidash
Rather odd hatred of German considering that English is in effect a regression of German (yes, I know, that simplifies it, but it’s true), i.e., a simplification.
It’s a typical kind of lashing out by hubristic people who reject complexity they cannot master with vigorous anger; kind of like how a child may call math stupid out of frustration. It’s probably a symptom of the jingoistic era, especially in trust-fund-baby-country called America.
You don't write something like this without being enchanted thoroughly by the language.
tananan commented on The British sitcom that swept through the Balkans (2023) blog.samizdata.co/p/how-a... · Posted by u/mellosouls
There actually is a “The Nag’s Head” in the Balkans - it’s in Montenegro
tananan commented on Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being phys.org/news/2025-03-sol... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
Not sure if your response was deliberately obtuse or not, but in case it was accidental I wanted to point out that you may have missed a key word - "social" well-being.
It's one thing if listening to music makes you feel good, but another completely if listening makes you more capable of socialising. This may be more important for others than it is for you.
You are reading into something that isn't there. The study doesn't have to do with music making you more capable of socializing.
The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence of social interaction, people will turn to surrogates in order to make up for the perceived lack. Specifically, they test if music can be such a surrogate. They do some surveys and a kind of silly experiment to provide evidence that yes- it can.
The reason it is rightly called pointless is that it brings nothing actionable to the table.
You cannot extract advice from showing evidence for a common-sense observation: If you feel a certain lack, activities you find pleasurable can diminish that lack.
And look at the experimental setup: They make people play an online game with others where certain people are excluded from playing. It turns out that people who are hyped from listening to their favorite song found this less jarring, hence showing that music can be a "social buffer", i.e. make up for a perceived social exclusion.
Let everyone individually conclude how insightful this experiment is.
EDIT: Misunderstood the nature of the "Cyberball" experiment, fixed
tananan commented on Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being phys.org/news/2025-03-sol... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
Study finds you enjoy doing things you like. If there's something you particularly like, you seem to enjoy it even more.
If you are missing on some form of pleasure in your life, substituting it for another pleasure can help alleviate the pain.
Woah.
tananan commented on What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute? chalmermagne.com/p/how-no... · Posted by u/alexicon
This is no different than what happened in Germany. Despite having tons of funding, tens if not hundreds of AI research institutes, an abundance of talent and enough cluster time to go around for everyone, they were also blindsided by LLMs and are still to this day completely out of the race.
Here in Germany, they tended to bet on "AI for science", because it sounds "sciency" and that somehow appears more substantive, even though a lot of these "AI for science" or ML4Science projects are utter bullshit. They also invested substantially in Quantum Computing, again because it sounds "sciency".
Ime it's not just being blindsided but also simply preferring to do research in other areas.
One person may run an intense soup kitchen 15 hours a day and feel little stress, and another can sit at a computer for 9 hours sending pointless emails and feel tremendous stress.
How exactly stress corresponds to biomarkers doesn’t matter if your desire is to lower it.
The issue is that many of us don’t pay attention to how we keep our body & mind throughout the day, or do so on a very superficial level. So strain on the body can accumulate for a long time.
“Stress management” is a lifetime skill. It doesn’t come in bulletpoints, it’s as broad as “living happily”.
Edit: That said, this can make the advice “be less stressed” a bit vacuous.
But people do get scared when random health issues flare up and become more conscious of how they deal with stress in life.
So it’s not bad to keep reminding people either :)