John Cage - 4'33'' megamix

Here's an another uncomfortable statistic: most of ASOIAF was published before 9/11.

Personally I gave up after AFFC, which I read around a decade ago. The quality of writing had plummeted, and it was increasingly obvious the series is going to take way too long to be finished.

The guy should just give up, relive himself of the duty and the audiences of the frustration, and spend his remaining years peacefully writing Dunk and Egg stories.

It’s basically a figure study in 4 parts.

Maybe you should slap your ophthalmologist instead. You're acting as if the picture does not represent what it literally represents, or as if it does not have the effect that it clearly does have and which it also intended to have. I won't argue any further against denial of reality.

Well, I guess that would be fair, as long as we don't confuse sexual appeal with artistic value. (Saying this in particular due to a poster guy ITT who said an another poster critical of the painting should "get some culture".) But the fact that it is posted on an art sublemmy and not some NSFW sublemmy, suggests that the confusion has occurred.

That's actually way more interesting than the stupid outrage that the original tweet is trying to stoke.

Pornography is not suddenly a great and important piece of culture just because it was nicely painted with a brush a long time ago. It is still pornography.

What do you mean by "getting some culture"? You mean perhaps studying art history? Because I guarantee countless artists, art historians and critics would deny this painting has much cultural value. The whole style has been heavily and justifiably derired. If anything, what is conservative here is the painting's view of women (painted according to the sexual tastes of rich European men) and stereotypical treatment of foreign culture.

That's true, but organising and managing such a distributed form of IA would probably be a nightmare of a job. I've seen many people suggest that to IA, but they seem to be very very reluctant about the idea.

Orientalism wasn't an art movement, the picture is in "academic" style.

IMO your interpretation can be put in a more straightforward/blunt way: the painting is basically pornography built upon cheap cultural stereotypes. (And it really is bizarre that this sort of garbage art gets upvoted to much, simply because it has an air of refinement around itself that excuses its clearly pornographic character.)

If we're going to stick to ancient Greek references, one of these is closer to the modern day Augean stables.

Huh? The public can store data on IA just fine. I've uploaded dozens of public-domain books there.

Chiquita and Nestlé come to mind. Within tech industry, I'd say Amazon and probably Microsoft are worse as well, and there's probably a ton of potentially even worse companies lurking in the shadows outside the top of the economic food chain.

I'm worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.

Why do we expect a higher degree of trustworthiness from a novel LLM than we de from any given source or forum comment on the internet?

The stuff I've seen AI produce has sometimes been more wrong than anything a human could produce. And even if a human would produce it and post it on a forum, anyone with half a brain could respond with a correction. (E.g. claiming that an ordinary Slavic word is actually loaned from Latin.)

I certainly don't expect any trustworthiness from LLMs, the problem is that people do expect it. You're implicitly agreeing with my argument that it is not just that LLMs give problematic responses when tricked, but also when used as intended, as knowledgeable chatbots. There's nothing "detached from actual usage" about that.

At what point do we stop hand-wringing over llms failing to meet some perceived level of accuracy and hold the people using it responsible for verifying the response themselves?

at this point I think it’s fair to blame the user for ignoring those warnings and not the models for not meeting some arbitrary standard

This is not an either-or situation, it doesn't have to be formulated like this. Criticising LLMs which frequently produce garbage is in practice also directed at people who do use them. When someone on a forum says they asked GPT and paste its response, I will at the very least point out the general unreliability of LLMs, if not criticise the response itself (very easy if I'm somewhat knowledgeable about the field in question). This is practically also directed at the person who posted that, such as e.g. making them come off as naive and uncritical. (It is of course not meant as a real personal attack, but even a detached and objective criticism has a partly personal element to it.)

Still, the blame is on both. You claim that:

Theres a giant disclaimer on every one of these models that responses may contain errors or hallucinations

I don't remember seeing them, but even if they were there, the general promotion and ways in which LLMs are presented in are trying to tell people otherwise. Some disclaimers are irrelevant for forming people's opinions compared to the extensive media hype and marketing.

Anyway my point was merely that people do regularly misuse LLMs, and it's not at all difficult to make them produce crap. The stuff about who should be blamed for the whole situation is probably not something we disagree about too much.

referencing its data sources

Have you actually checked whether those sources exist yourself? It's been quite a while since I've used GPT, and I would be positively surprised if they've managed to prevent its generation of nonexistent citations.

to fool into errors

tricking a kid

I've never tried to fool or trick AI with excessively complex questions. When I tried to test it (a few different models over some period of time - ChatGPT, Bing AI, Gemini) I asked stuff as simple as "what's the etymology of this word in that language", "what is [some phenomenon]". The models still produced responses ranging from shoddy to absolutely ridiculous.

completely detached from how anyone actually uses

I've seen numerous people use it the same way I tested it, basically a Google search that you can talk with, with similarly shit results.

Well, just personally speaking, I know Russian, and reading Russian news sources (state-owned as well as those that have been banned by the Russian state) from time to time, and talking with Russians directly, hasn't even remotely convinced me that the "Russian empire" is equally bad as the "western empire".

If I look or go outside, I'll notice the blizzard, and adapt accordingly (get a scarf, umbrella...). If there's a blizzard but I don't even look outside to notice it, that means I don't have to adapt to it, and thus not even be informed of its existence.

I believed it completely at first too, perhaps we even saw the same headline...

I've already seen this exact same claim these days, so now I decided to try and find out what's happening exactly.

https://www.dw.com/en/indiadropsevolution/a-65804720

Apparently, it happened last year, not just now, as you said, and I'm sure I've already seem someone else (maybe on Lemmy, maybe on reddit) also describe it as a very recent event.

However I can't find absolutely anything else regarding the topic. So I tried googling in Hindi instead, with the help of some machine translation.

https://www.aajtak.in/education/news/story/pythagoras-theorem-has-vedic-has-roots-karnataka-panel-proposes-to-sanskrit-as-a-third-language-1496805-2022-07-10

This is the only piece of news I've managed to find, again not very recent, and not nearly as dramatic as the DW article makes it out to be. Some official has described the Pythagorean theorem as 'fake news' because that same theorem had already been developed in India before Pythagoras, i.e. the point is that the name is a misnomer. They say nothing about removing the theorem.

The reduction of teaching of the periodic table and evolution that DW mentions is also explained in the PDF that the article links as mere reorganisation of the topics due to the circumstances (difficulties in teaching during corona). They don't suggest actual removal of the topics. (The PDF is an official explanation from the Indian "National Council of Educational Research and Training".)

I'm getting the impression DW is just fearmongering. Ideally there should be some article with exact and complete quotes in Hindi. I know that media freedom in India is not great (esp. considering the situation with Wikipedia), and it's probably not easy to get to the bottom of it, but this story looks very suspicious.

Isnt the dog the first thing people think of when seeing “doge”?

It used to be so, but in recent several years Doge has lived and pretty much been defined in public consciousness by the cryptocurrency, which Musk has openly endorsed/memed.