Or (taking the other side) failure to notice the distinction between a technology and a pump-and-dump. The technology (attention/diffusion) is awesome. The hype is unbelievable. Literally.
It's not unsubstantiated though. The claim is "People frequently assert that 'this time is different' and they are almost always wrong" and it proceeded to provide a reasonable list of analogous manias.
This only doesn't feel like substantiation if you reject the notion that these cases are analogous.
"You shouldn't eat that."
"Why not?"
"Everyone else who's eaten it has either died or gotten really sick."
"But I'm different! Why should I listen to your unsubstantiated claims?"
"(lists names of prior victims)"
"That doesn't mean anything. I'm different. You're just making vague and dismissive unsubstantiated claims."
The claim isn't "AI bad" the claim is more along the lines of "there's a lot of money changing hands and this has all the earmarks of a classic hype cycle; while attention/diffusion models may amount to something the claims of their societal impacts are almost certainly being exaggerated by people with a financial stake in keeping the bubble inflated as long as possible, to pull in as many suckers as possible."
If you want another example (which you won't find analogous if you've already drunk the koolaid):
But peer review (circa 1965-2010[1]) is just the prior iteration of the problem[2]; the wave of crap[3] produced by publish or perish (crica 1950-present[4]). Rejecting papers by outsiders is irrelevant; the problem is we want to determine which papers are good/interesting/worth considering out of the fire hose of bilge, and, though we were already arguably failing at this, the problem just got harder.
(I say arguably, because there is always the old "try it yourself and see if it actually works" trick, but nobody seems to be fond of this; it smacks of "do your own research" and we're lazy monkeys at heart, who would much rather copy off of someone else's homework.)
Amateur's asserting their opinions as facts isn't great, but epistemologically it's no worse (and systemically, like less harmful) than when the experts do it.
Saying that experts are less likely to do X doesn't say anything about the relative harm of their doing so. If some rando on the streets is shouting their opinion about what causes Alzheimer's and asserting it's God's Own Truth, it's going to cause less overall harm that a carefully worded (but equally wrong) statement from an expert. (And the fact that we tend to hold experts in higher regard is the reason we should be more concerned about them stating their opinions as facts than about amateurs doing the same.)
We act as if some languages have "compound words" that can encompass entire sentences (subject & object attaching to the verb as prefixes or suffixes) while others don't form compounds, and most are somewhere in between. But these are all statements about lexicographic conventions and say nothing about the languages. In reality all languages are muddles sprawling across a multidimensional continuum, and they abso-frigging-lutely do n't sit neatly in such pigeonholes.
This is a great comparison. We're arguing about the definition of "word", and attempting to expand it to include edge cases where two words with separate meanings have a different atomic meaning when combined.
We could have a similar debate about whether common suffixes and prefixes should be regarded as individual words.
Much like "planets" don't really exist as a separate natural object, words don't really exist in natural languages. They are artificial concepts, and therefore we will always have edge cases.
I would argue that it is still a useful discussion, as it sheds light on the nature of language (or of celestial bodies), even if the definitions defy the same rigour as mathematical concepts.
The first two of the three are adjectives, each connected to the subject by the one "is," and the third is a verb phrase not using the "is." Ideally they'd be all adjectives using the "is," or all phrases supplying their own verbs.
Not the worst error in the world, but it stands out in LLM text that is otherwise remarkably nit-free.
(We have descended into one of the deeper circles of grammar hell. I will remind you that you're free to leave at any time.)
Yes, exactly. English grammar actually doesn't require the "and" to end a list (leaving it out is called "asyndeton" if you're curious). A good example is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "... and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
So after all this, there actually is a way to analyze the example that is strictly valid. But most people would look askance at the standalone sentence "This product is fast, lightweight." That is, I suppose, unless someone like Abraham Lincoln worked it into his next speech.
Well it needs to talk to either a web frontend (internet) or app (bluetooth or wifi). If you're worried about it spying, well, the app could always relay data for it.
Anyway regardless of wifi, bluetooth, or something else there will be a setup process.
You're begging the question. Why does it need to talk to a web front end or app? Why does any appliance need this? (I know they all claim to need it, but it isn't at all clear why this (supposedly) needs to be the case.)
For that matter, I'm unclear why there needs to be a setup process. I understand that this may be key to the vendor's business model, but that's their need, not something the products needs, and certainly nothing I need.
I'm not begging the question although I am implicitly assuming that the vast majority of consumers will want to control a robot vacuum via their phone. I suppose including a touchscreen on the unit itself is not entirely unreasonable but I expect that would be an uphill battle for various disparate reasons (expense, durability, and ease of use at minimum).
Once you introduce control via phone the most straightforward approach is either wifi or bluetooth which requires a setup process.
Meta nit pick: You are conflating linguist's jargon with mathematician's jargon.
In much the same way as physicists co-opted common words (e.g. "work" and "energy") to mean very specific things in technical contexts, both linguists and mathematicians gave "ordinal" a specific meaning in their respective domains. These meanings are similar but different, and your nit pick is mistakenly asserting that one of these has priority over the other.
"Ordinal" in linguistics is a word for a class of words. The words being classified may be old, but the use of "ordinal" to denote them is a comparatively modern coinage, roughly contemporary with the mathematicians usage. Both come from non-technical language describing putting things in an "orderly" row (c.f. cognates such as "public order", "court order", etc.) which did not carry the load you are trying to place on them.
There is “zeroth” though as an ordinal humeral, which was already used long before computers came around, as for example in “the zeroth power of a number” (according to Merriam-Webster). So it’s still not quite unambiguous. :)
I suppose, in exactly the same way instant / frozen food makes cooking more enjoyable. If it was just a chore that you had to do, and now it's faster, sure, grab that cup-o-noodles. Knock yourself out.
Just don't expect to run a successful restaurant based on it.
A decade or two ago I remember an experiment where canned food was presented in a restaurant setting and people couldn't tell it apart from the hand-hooked. The presentation was what mattered, as long as it didn't look like it was canned/frozen then they thought it tasted like restaurant quality.
In many cases canned food is a lot closer to fresh than frozen or instant would be.
In any case, those are ingredients (analogous to...libraries I guess?) and not to the whole application. If you served someone a canned sandwich or canned sushi or some such, they'd notice.
reply