I 100% Agree With This Statement. Although I Have Been Blessed Enough To Have Really Good History Teachers

If you use Duolingo, maybe don't anymore? The company is moving to be "AI-first" and is using AI to generate their content. Meaning, AI is now generating your language lessons.

They announced that they were going to use AI for this a while back but now they're annoucing that they're getting rid of the contractors reviewing the AI generated content. So, very soon Duolingo is just going to be AI generated slop that might not even be correct.

For alternatives, I'd recommend checking with your local library. For instance, mine offers Rosetta Stone for free if you have a library card.

my friend and i were going to study a language together and wound up having to cancel our plans due to scheduling pressures, but! through research we came across a really cool resource for reading in a TON of languages: bloom library!

as you can see, it has a lot of books for languages that are usually a bit harder to find materials for—we were going to use it for kyrgyz, for example, which has over 1000 books, which was really hard to find textbook materials for otherwise. as you can see it also has books with audio options, which would be really useful for pronunciation checking. as far as i can tell, everything on the site is free as well.

Alr, so this is just expressing my thoughts after reading It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby, as well as after watching an in depth analysis on it.

Honestly, I really really enjoyed this short story, especially as it is in the cosmic horror genre (absolutely one of my favorite genres).

Now, this is the message that I interpreted from the story:

I think there comes a fear in being unable to live. A fear in not being allowed to live. A fear in trying to make the conscious decision to live. And yet what do we do? Often, we take this conscious decision in our daily lives ‐ and we face this fear - knowing that, although unspeakable horrors may yet lie in the ineffable (or something we know and are unable to explain its ineffable consequences), our lives are good because we exist, and even if we're seen as the "bad man" (quote from the story; it could represent a multitude of things, but i see it, in the context of the story, the want to be able to express one's own individualustic desires, thoughts, and creativity), our 'rebellion' from this absurdity is what makes us ultimately human.

yeah looking back on my interpretation, it's definitely absurdist, but hey, absurdism is one of my favorite philosophies, so I'm not complaining!

Anyway, please go read this short story, it soooooooo sooo good it's such a well-written story.

The problem here isn’t that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It’s that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text. So when they are provided with a database of some sort, they use this, in one way or another, to make their responses more convincing. But they are not in any real way attempting to convey or transmit the information in the database. As Chirag Shah and Emily Bender put it: “Nothing in the design of language models (whose training task is to predict words given context) is actually designed to handle arithmetic, temporal reasoning, etc. To the extent that they sometimes get the right answer to such questions is only because they happened to synthesize relevant strings out of what was in their training data. No reasoning is involved […] Similarly, language models are prone to making stuff up […] because they are not designed to express some underlying set of information in natural language; they are only manipulating the form of language” (Shah & Bender, 2022). These models aren’t designed to transmit information, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when their assertions turn out to be false.

ChatGPT is bullshit

Fairy, infantry & professor

The word fairy is related to infantry and professor. And that's not all: these words are also related to fate, fatal, fame, fable, and to confess. They all come from Latin words derived from a stem meaning 'to speak'. Click the infographic to learn how.

it really is insane how waking up early will grant you access to some of the most beautiful sights and sensations in the world that will make you want to live forever, but only if you overcome the gauntlet of a thousand razors that is getting out of bed early. truly one of life's little saw traps.

The whole “scientists use big words on purpose to be exclusive” is such a bunch of anti-intellectual bullshit. Specific and concise language exists for a reason; you need the right words to convey the right meaning, and explaining stuff right is a hugely important part of science. Cultures that live around loads of snow have loads of words to describe different types of snow; cultures that live in deserts have loads of words to describe different types of sand. Complex language is needed for complex meaning.

i don’t know why but i’m really amused by the winner of some ‘new kanji’ contest:

compare with the real kanji

座 (seat/gathering), but the two 人 (person) radicals have been moved from next to each other within the 土 (earth) radical to diagonally from each other, making this “social distance(d seating/gathering)”