aaplok

Replying to myself as I can't edit anymore, but I think payback can also be about cutting off the person from your life, or otherwise making them irrelevant to you. I don't believe this would qualify as revenge, and I think that this is a rather common type of anger payback. It is also rather healthy and effective when the person has a toxic behavior.

Proving them wrong. Or undoing the negative situation they created.

This can in fact be quite a powerful driver. When I was younger a hurtful comment by a teacher led me to start getting good marks in their subject. This was definitely fueled by the anger I felt at the dismissive remarks, as teenager me had no other motivation.

Another payback could be to increase your status to their level (not decrease theirs) so you can do things differently and make things right. What Mandela did basically.

Maybe making them feel remorseful or regret their initial action, but to me this is a byproduct and ends up not mattering that much. In the situation I described I didn't really care what the teacher felt or what effect there was on them (likely none at all). Though there was some satisfaction in proving to myself they were an idiot.

> Paul Roberts is due to serve one year and one day in prison.

What's the point of the extra day? Is there some kind of special procedure for people who get strictly more than a year?

The claim in the article di that anger is associated with a desire for payback, of which revenge is one manifestation. This is subtle, but I think that in an article like this subtle differences matter. The author also claims that this is backed by psychology studies, though some sources for this claim would have been welcome.

The author does go on to focus on revenge only, and I'm with you on being skeptical that this implies that anger is an emotion that should be repressed. It seems to me that the authors equates a bit too quickly payback with a negative or a frivolous desire. The focus on Mandela's South Africa, of all things, is pretty curious since there definitely was a change in status for the white community after he took power.

When you're angry with yourself (or perhaps when you are angry at a situation in which you are by your own fault) the payback would be to not let that situation happen again. Or maybe the payback is to change yourself to address the character flaw that your anger is targeted at.

Thanks, this is a good read. I did not know MyST, it is very cool.

The vim plugin I was talking about was vim-slime [0], which seems to date from 2007 and does have regions delimited with #%%.

Slime comes from Emacs originally, but I could not find if the original Emacs slime has regions.

Matlab also has those, which they call code sections [1]. Hard to find when they were introduced. Maybe 2021, but I suspect older.

None of those stores gge output of the command.

[0] https://vimawesome.com/plugin/vim-slime

[1] https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/create-and...

Interesting. When I tried Zellij I found that the menus were too much in my face, compared to tmux/screen more minimal design. I see how this is a good thing when you start using it but I wonder if it gets tiring in the long run, in a clippy sort of way.

But yes it makes sense that this feature makes it superior to tmux for some users. A good case for having diversity in software.

What differences between Zellij and tmux do you see as game changers?

Spyder also has these, possibly for longer than vscode [0]. I don't know who had this idea first but I remember some vim plugins doing that long ago, so maybe the vim community?

[0] https://docs.spyder-ide.org/current/panes/editor.html#code-c...

> You shouldn't distribute things you can't prove have the same results

Why not? Can you expand on this because I don't see why this is not a good thing.

Besides if you distribute your code alongside your output, aren't you providing that proof anyway? People can run your code and see they are getting the same result.

> they'd much rather have dirt on you to manipulate you with.

People in power would not tolerate a police trying to manipulate them. By definition, people in power would have the power to change that.

Power is what decides what police does, who they target and who they leave alone. It controls the budget, appoints the leaders and sets the directions.

Power, in 1950s England, came to people from Eton and King's college. They didn't need to fear the police because they (and their family) controlled it.

Well the story is about men who studied at King's college, many of whom would become powerful. If you are rich and powerful the relationship can change from one of suspicion to one of deference.

The tldr of the article is basically that Turing had been brought up among powerful men for whom things are permitted that are out of reach to the commoners. The mistake he made was to assume everyone else was treated the same.

Isn't the question whether that also makes them legally responsible for their consequences?

If they were not legally allowed then it would be possible to sue them even if there were no consequences. There have to be consequences to be able to sue for a legally allowed decision.

> How many people would know what Lynx is. My guess is very few.

And mine is that it's more than you think. Especially when compared to the number of people who know what vi is. Neither of us have figures to prove our points. My indirect argument was that the fact that lynx is included by default hints that I am not entirely wrong. Your response to that is essentially that distros packagers don't know what they are doing. I won't get in a debate on the competency of people and accept this opinion as yours.

> You took my argument and basically butchered the main point.

This was absolutely not my intention. If I misunderstood your point, please correct me and tell me how I should have read it.

> Its trivial to understand why this is a bad argument (appeal to emotion)

No. The argument for including software that have specific accessibility features is not to appeal to your emotions. The reason for having accessible software is that, as niche as it may be it is useful. No one should care how non-disabled users feel about this, and certainly no one should care whether you or I think this is too niche.

> This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.

I am not sure I agree with this argument. This gives a vibe of "make place for me, away with the old guard!"

What if someone called their program "vi" with the argument that noone uses vi anymore?

Besides, who decides what is niche and what isn't? Is a program like lynx which offers better accessibility features than mainstream browsers not worth distributing because it's niche?

Blaming the distros for already having software named like what you decide to call yours isn't terribly cooperative.

Figurative "you" of course, not meaning OP here.

Plenty of people have the same name, but if you call your child Brad Pitt, it will be interpreted as a reference to the famous guy bearing that name, and nobody will believe it is a coincidence.

Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).

There is also cy [0] which I came across the other day and am yet to try.

[0] https://github.com/cfoust/cy

> why doesn't he just give away his money to individual people in less comfortable circumstances?

Because he is advocating systemic changes.

He may very well also give money away to people in need (it seems he does), but this would not actually address the issues he is alluding to here since it would not change the system. Hence there is no value for him to bring it up here.

> I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.

My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties.

Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to family online, take them to English speaking places and countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German.

Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing it on.

Those 200 papers correspond to 4 papers per week, or more than 1 paper every other day for the whole year, weekends and holidays included. Coauthored with thousands of people they'd never published with before. It's a rather incredible rate.

At least the first quote is political and essentially casts the "other side" as an enemy rather than merely an opponent. This is not uncommon to use this strategy in political speech, and it is done rather well (and probably deliberately) here, but it is not an innocuous turn of phrase.

The second quote at least refers to a time when police had to play a defensive role against, once again, an enemy. This whole paragraph gives a clear vision of police having a military role (eg "fallen officers").

I didn't know that expression before, but the examples I see, (and its origin as an analogy to the thin red line) give it a connotation that is not neutral. The thin blue line is a metaphorical line between the maintainers of a certain order and a common enemy.

Using this expression in the context of kernel maintenance is at least somewhat clumsy.

I don't watch basketball, so I am speculating, but isn't this a case where defence hasn't yet adapted to the new attacking strategies? Wouldn't you expect that in a few years teams will be better at defending against 3s, reducing their expected value and therefore swinging the pendulum back towards more 2s?

The Nash equilibrium should be that the expected values of 2s and 3s are equal. If you're off, you would expect a trend toward that equilibrium, possibly with some overcorrection.

My understanding is that 6G is expected to make use of a good decentralised fibre network, with small radio units at the end points of this network providing the wireless contact point. With interoperability being on the books for 6G, whoever controls the fibre network is in for a lot of money (unless the article we're commenting on is right).

So it might make sense for operators to focus on developing fibre regardless.

I am not based in the US, nor in France, so I can't say what the situation is there. I was only pointing out that quote to GP.

My experience isn't much, since I am neither doing AI nor cognitive science but I have seen cognitive scientists do cool stuff with AI as a means to study cognitive science, and I have seen CS researchers involving themselves into the world of AI with varying success.

I would not be as emphatic as the author of the article but I would say that a good portion of AI research lost the focus on what is intelligence and instead just aimed at getting computers to perform various tasks. Which is completely fine until these researchers start claiming that they have produced intelligent machines (a manifestation of the Dunning Kruger effect).

Really well done. It is really a challenge for students to navigate their way around the AI landscape. I am definitely considering sharing that with my students.

Have you noticed a difference in how your students approach LLMs after taking your course? A possible issue I see is that it is preaching to the choir; a student who is enclined to use LLMs for everything is less likely to engage with the material in the first place.

If you allow feedback, I was interested in lesson 10 on writing, as an educator who tries to teach my science/IT/maths students the importance of being able to communicate.

I would suggest to include a paragraph to explain why being able to write without LLMs is just as important in scientific disciplines, where precision and accuracy are more essential than creativity and personalisation.

best definition according to whom?

There is a lot of work to define intelligence, both in the context of cognitive science and in the context of AI [0].

I haven't spent enough time looking for a good review article, but for example, this article [1] says this: "Intelligence in the strict sense is the ability to know with conscience. Knowing with conscience implies awareness." and contrasts it with this: "Intelligence, in a broad sense, is the ability to process information. This can be applied to plants, machines, cells, etc. It does not imply knowledge." If you are interested in the topic the whole article is interesting and worth reading.

[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...

[1] https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(21)00373-X

>Author's claim is pretty strong: that human intelligence and what is called GenAI have no common ground at all.

I feel that you're being unfair to the author here; the quote you responded to in your GP post alluded to "reason or think", and their argument is that LLMs don't. This is more specific than the sweeping statement you attribute to them.

> AI researchers mainly focus on usefulness (see the definition above).

And usefulness is something the article doesn't touch on, I think? The point of the article is that some users attribute capabilities to LLMs that can be explained with the same mechanisms as the capabilities they attribute to psychics (which are well understood to be nonexistent).

> Philosophical discussions are fine to have, but pretty meaningless at best and designed to support a narrative at worst.

Why this is relevant to AI research is (in my interpretation) that it is known to be hard for humans collectively to evaluate how intelligent an entity really is. We are easily fooled into seeing "intelligence" where it is not. This is something that cognitive scientists have spent a lot of time thinking about, and may perhaps be able to comment on.

For what it's worth I've seen cognitive scientists use AI to do cools stuff. I remember seeing someone who was using AI to show that it is possible to build inference without language (I am speaking from memory here, it was a while ago and I lost the reference sadly so I hope I'm not deforming it too much). She was certainly not claiming that her experiments showed how intelligence worked, but only that they pointed to the fact that language does not have to be a prerequisite for building inferences. Interesting stuff though without the sensationalism that sometimes accompanies the advocacy of LLMs.

> Decades of research were unable to answer this.

From the article:

> The field of AI research has a reputation for disregarding the value of other fields [...] It’s likely that, being unaware of much of the research in psychology on cognitive biases or how a psychic’s con works, they stumbled into a mechanism and made chatbots that fooled many of the chatbot makers themselves.

Just because cognitive scientists don't know everything about how intelligence works (or on what it is) doesn't mean that they know nothing. There has been a lot of progress in cognitive science, in the last decade in particular on reasoning.

> based on ill-defined terms like "intelligence".

The whole discussion is about "artificial intelligence". Arguably AI researchers ought to have a fairly well defined stance of what "intelligence" means and can't use a trick like "nobody knows what intelligence is" to escape criticism.

Calling someone ignorant is indeed an ad-hominem, as is calling them Nazi or fascist (or, on the other side of the political spectrum, calling them woke or commie) unless they provably profess those opinions.

Given how tense the current political climate is, it's all the more important to avoid resorting in using fallacies. Name calling is one such trap, and misrepresenting one's opponent's arguments is another one.

> accusing people of being "far right" or "Nazi", and to call them ignorant or stupid because they want other policies does not work and only increases polarisation.

This is true but this is not what's happened here. The discussion is about whether Musk's gesture is a Nazi salute. OP called ignorant people who do not see it as such. They said nothing about those people's opinions and did not accuse them of being far right or Nazis themselves. In fact OP didn't even call Musk a nazi in their post. To conclude that it was their hidden intention to do so is a leap in logic that is not obvious.

> the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside.

Did you accidentally a word? Because if you cross any border literally the first people you meet are border control officers, who work a job outside the USA, most of whom with no interest in living or working in the US.

Incidentally if you travel abroad you will also meet heterosexual women and homosexual men, who don't generally have a wife at all.