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User: Can a man become a woman?

talkie-1930: He can become a woman. In the East, females are sometimes born, who are denominated Hermaphrodites; and in medical books, instances are recorded of persons of this description, having exercised the functions both of men and women. Hermaphrodites have been known to marry, and to have children of both sexes; but, in general, the male sex has predominated. The term hermaphrodite is derived from two Greek words, signifying both male and female. In the animal kingdom, hermaphrodites are not uncommon; and in the vegetable world, they are still more frequent.

User: Why was the American Civil War fought?

talkie-1930: The American Civil War was fought to decide whether the United States should permanently remain half slave and half free, or become wholly free. Slavery was abolished, and the unity of the republic was preserved.

User: What would you say to someone who claims the war was fought about state rights, not about slavery?

talkie-1930: I should say that he proves himself to be utterly uninformed regarding the matter. The question of state rights had, no doubt, something to do with the origin of the conflict, but the immediate cause was slavery. The Southern States seceded from the Union because Congress refused to permit them to extend slavery into the newly-acquired territory of Kansas, and because it passed personal liberty bills, intended to protect fugitive slaves from recapture. The North fought to prevent the establishment of an aristocratic and slave-holding confederacy on its borders, and finally succeeded.

One way of thinking about it is how much a sport is skill-based versus fitness-based. Team sports and racquet sports tend to rely more on skill. Cycling and track and field rely more on fitness. A good soccer player isn't going to become a great just by getting a bit fitter, but the advantage given by doping is exactly what it means to be a better cyclist.

This doesn't explain why cycling seems to attract more doping than running. I don't even know if it's true that it does. But there might be something there given the institutional problems cycling has had with doping. Back in the day, it was entire teams doping, with the team staff and doctors in on it, and it's not like they all left when the sport tried to clean up. Either way, the reputation has stuck around.

I find it frustrating when people claim to be upholding science but then make simple, unscientific claims that suggest they actually have the minds of Greek philosophers.

Some women do have penises. Some men have XX chromosomes. Some women have XY chromosomes. Some people have XX and XY chromosomes. Science tells us that. This has nothing to do with transgender people. But it does suggest "sex" might not be as simple as a metaphysical binary.

My grandparents didn't forget. In late February 2020 I brought up the topic of the novel coronavirus going around and they weren't overly worried because they'd gone through a respiratory pandemic or two before (there was another one in 1968).

I think covid will be more memorable, partly because it was more serious, but also because our reaction to it was much stronger, especially in some parts of the world. My understanding is that there were generally only minimal efforts at containing those flu pandemics. Incidentally, my grandparents also had time off school because of the polio epidemic.

That said, the Spanish flu, the last respiratory pandemic comparable to covid (actually, worse) isn't remembered well. I wouldn't be surprised if most people have heard of it only because of covid.

MacVim and gVim. I've looked at neovim and there are many GUI options (paradox of choice), some of which I've tried, but at the end of the day, I'm more comfortable with what I'm already familiar with.

Even Facebook's Llama was trained on books3, a dump of pirated books.

The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absolutely do that because it’s transformative.

I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure Fair Use doesn't mean you can download a dump of Library Genesis and feed that into your system!

If anything, 24GB is probably the sweet spot for what's optimised for as many local LLM enthusiasts are running 3090s and 4090s (and all want more VRAM).

If not logged in, Twitter shows no replies, not even ones in the same thread.

I'd say you should offer both simplified and traditional in the language dropdown as there are many learners of both.

The API was one of the things that made Twitter special. I don't know of any public information about Meta's API plans for this.

How is this different to beam search?

What exactly are you talking about regarding the "organ harvesting thing"? It's undeniable that it happened. In 2014 China promised to stop doing it. Here's an article from Chinese state media:

China's long-term dependence on executed prisoners as organ donors will end at the start of next year, according to a high-ranking official.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-12/05/content_190287...

My understanding is the debates are over whether or not it still happens and to what extent political prisoners (particularly Falun Gong members) were victims.

There's a term for these entities that give every indication of being conscious but actually aren't conscious: philosophical zombie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

Yes, there is a GraphQL API that Twitter's web interface uses, but developers who use the publicly available API can't use that.

One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.

LLaMA is Facebook's LLM (large language model, comparable with GPT). It's publicly available (anyone can download the weights and run it themselves), so it's popular here.

LoRA, or Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models, lets people fine tune a LLM (making it perform better for a particular application) using vastly less resources. Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.09685.pdf

Opinion polls: https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963

A strong majority want to maintain the status quo or gradually move toward independence. Very few want unification. It's important to understand that China promises to invade if Taiwan declares independence (the Anti-Secession Law requires that response), which means many people would ideally prefer independence but in practice support the status quo because de facto independence (the status quo) is better than being invaded. Both sides of Taiwanese politics formally support the status quo, although the DPP has stronger pro-independence leanings.

Taiwanese identity (as opposed identifying as Chinese) has also trended up in recent decades and now most people only consider themselves to be Taiwanese and not Chinese. https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7800&id=6961

No it isn't according to the definition everyone else uses for "gerrymandering" (drawing specific electorate boundaries with partisan goals).

What he's complaining about (that the system of one representative from each electorate biases against candidates who could never win in one electorate but have a modest amount of support in the entire population) is worth contemplating, but isn't gerrymandering. New Zealand addresses this problem by giving everyone two votes, an electorate vote and a party vote, and members are chosen from electorates and party lists. New Zealand only has one chamber. Australia has two. Australia's Upper House is elected at a state level with multiple members from each state, so this is where minor party candidates get elected.

It's actually a 120 gigapixel image. It was taken with a 61 megapixel Sony a7R IV and Sony 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G lens with a robotic housing.

https://petapixel.com/2021/04/27/this-120-gigapixel-photo-is...

The second poll about unbanning the journalists went for 24 hours (the first was only an hour or so), so even though "now" was the winning option, he still got the outcome he was looking for by giving them a 24+ hour suspension.

It's also worth noting that revealing real names and workplaces of anonymous accounts is still allowed. The doxxing that is banned is a specific class of doxxing that isn't often considered to be doxxing.

Imagine pushing a matchbox car on a table with a ruler, where the ruler is perpendicular to the direction of movement. When the car is on an angle, the car will be moving faster than the ruler (wind). The steeper the angle, the faster the car can go relative to the wind.

A few days before that tweet: A person familiar with the matter said that the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were examining FTX to determine whether any criminal activity or securities offenses were committed.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/10/ftx-crypt...

"SBF was a major Dem donor, so no investigation"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591822387267665921

I assumed shadow banning was invented for forums to hide low quality users without giving them a signal to create a new account.

I read it to imply there was a design or construction problem that meant the part that failed experienced much more load than intended.

This has been a concern since at least the 80s, when Manufacturing Consent discussed this very problem.

The good news is that the New York Times is making a much higher proportion of its revenue from readers (thanks to the growth in digital subscriptions), while advertising revenue is much lower than it used to be, so, whatever effect it did have, it should be less now.

It does seem to be the future, but, at the moment, it's very unreliable. The worst thing is that it's all said with confidence and it would be very hard to know when things are wrong unless you already know.

For example: Q. How many people spoke French in pre-revolutionary France?

A. It is difficult to determine the exact number of people who spoke French in pre-revolutionary France. The population of France at the time was approximately 26 million, and the vast majority of people spoke French as their first language. <snip>

Wikipedia: It is estimated that at the time of the French Revolution in 1789, only half of the population of France could speak French, and as late as 1871 only a quarter spoke French as their native language.

Also, the population of France on the eve of the Revolution was about 28 million.