canjobear

The article is mistaken on a number of linguistic points. For example 们 was used to mark plurals way before some 19th century translation, if you look at things that were written in the vernacular and not in Classical Chinese.

In principle the output is arbitrarily natural-looking. The arithmetic coding procedure effectively turns your secret message into a stream of bits that is statistically indistinguishable from random, the same as you pull out of your PRNG in normal generation.

> Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived.

I was taught this many times in US schools.

This does seem to happen, at least close enough that it's possible to align embedding spaces across languages and do some translation without training on parallel texts.

I doubt they already had the King Wen order in the Shang dynasty. Manuscripts dated to as late as the Han dynasty have a totally different hexagram order. In any case traditionally the divination book for Shang is considered to be the Guicang, not the I Ching (=Zhouyi = Changes of Zhou), which according to tradition put kun before qian.

It's an abstract for a paper, so it's officially supposed to be one paragraph.

The fact that this was originally written in Japanese suggests that most Japanese people don't already know this list.

Here's what gave it away for me

> The remaining difference is noise, not a fundamental language gap. The real Rust advantage isn't raw speed -- it's pipeline ownership.

Many locales ban physical gambling as well. It’s a defensible policy.

I ran into an interesting incident of this recently. I got a Google Scholar alert about a paper with some experiments related to a paper I had published a while ago, by one "N. Tvlg". I read the paper with interest but I started noticing that although the arguments sounded good, they didn't really make sense, and also the descriptions of the results didn't really match the figures. Eventually I came across a cluster of citations to completely unrelated papers---my field is computational linguistics and these were citations to, like, studies of battery technologies for electric cars. I looked up "N Tvlg" on Google Scholar and they had "published" several articles very recently in totally divergent fields, and upon inspection, all of them had citations back to this materials science research buried deeply somewhere. Clearly these were LLM generated papers trying to build up citation count and h-rank for someone's career.

This isn’t about honest researchers resorting to fraud to publish their null results because they were blocked by big bad Nature. It’s about journals and authors churning out pure junk papers whose only goal is to game metrics like citation count.

Peer review existed before 1951 in the US at least. See for example Einstein’s reaction to negative reviews when he tried to publish in Physical Review in 1935 https://paeditorial.co.uk/post/albert-einstein-what-did-he-t...

> Not because the methods it displaced had stopped working, but because the money, the talent, and the prestige had moved elsewhere. The researchers who understood decision theory, Bayesian inference, and operations research didn’t lose their arguments. They lost their audience.

It reads to me like Claude wrote the article too.

Don't forget about RPy https://pypi.org/project/rpy2/2.2.7/

It's clearly in a different category from the "highbrow" examples like Solaris, just by virtue of being entertaining to a broad audience. In contrast Solaris is the kind of movie where there's a five minute unbroken scene that's just a guy driving in traffic and thinking about his life. (Like the author, I like them both!)

It's not obvious why it wouldn't, especially if it gets to read Poincaré and Riemann.

Knowing German would mostly be helpful for understanding the grammar of Old English. The three genders and four cases, participles prefixed with ge-, verbs like sindon (=sind). There are tons of cognates with German (like þurh = durch) but they're hard to recognize immediately unless you know the kinds of sound changes that are common.

It goes all the way back to Indo-European. There wasn’t much French influence on English before the Norman invasion.

> There is a significant quality difference between English language output and other languages

?

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687613

That’s because engineering degrees were the only thing you could get from college during the Cultural Revolution.

I was expecting it to boot to DOS and then having to typing "win"

Do you think it's obvious that a chick would understand that connection?

> But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency?

Sure, but it's a very abstract connection between objects being sharp in vision and frequencies changing sharply in hearing. There's no guarantee any given organism would make the connection.

Interesting. What I was thinking was you could get the bounded-number-of-generations behavior by defining nonterminals with indices. Like this CFG which would rewrite for K steps.

S -> F_K

F_i -> F_{i-1} + G_{i-1} for i>0

G_i -> F_{i-1} - G_{i-1} for i>0

F_0 -> f

G_0 -> g

This kind of CFG is used for example by https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.031001

> No concept of recursive "generations" in phrase structure grammars!

Not sure what you're getting at here. Generation in a CFG proceeds recursively until no more terminals can be rewritten. If "f" is a nonterminal then you'd keep rewriting just as in an L-system and you'd generate the strings you want just fine. Or is what is distinctive the fact that you can limit the number of "generations"? It seems you could simulate this in a CFG too.

For the computational linguistics aficionados: L-systems are context-free grammars by another name.

It doesn’t represent the situation accurately. There’s a whole thread where humans debate the performance optimization and come to the conclusion that it’s a wash but a good project for an amateur human to look into.

> It’s a tricky question because she and Kim Jong-un are not dictators by title, it’s the shorthand we and the we use to describe them.

This can't be the standard for whether we call someone a dictator. Similarly Stalin held no government title through the 1930s. Would you say it's hard to say whether he was a dictator because he was officially just a party secretary?