montgomery_r

Not sure this is appropriate to HN? I come here to get away from Hamas supporters, not to find them.

+1 on these questions. Can I run a local llm that will, for example - visit specified URLs and collect tabular data into csv format? - ingest a series of documents on a topic and answer questions about it - ingest all my PDF/MD/Word docs and answer questions about them?

Was it this one? https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/book/preface

- it does what you describe, at least! All the best for your search….

This site is midwittery at its finest. 'Oo - I've invented a situation where someone may hypothetically be offended!'.

To take the first two specific examples, the US flag is perfectly appropriate for English and furthermore warns that it's the American English variant being used. So, some of the spelling will be odd and the date order will be... illogical. ( I speak as an Englishman :-) ) . Similarly, the Union flag is a perfectly good signifier for English and/or British English, a language spoken across the British Isles. Exactly no-one looks at that and expects to see Welsh (there's a Welsh flag for that.) Again, the Spanish flag is a perfectly good signifier for Spanish language, and exactly no-one in Mexico will be reasonably offended - but if I were an app developer in Mexico, using a Mexican Spanish variant in my app, I might use a Mexican flag and everyone would know what was meant.

No, there isn't a 1:1 correspondence between languages and flags. No, that does not, in practice, matter very much. A moment's confusion as to whether a Saltire signifies the use of Scots Gaelic or Scots is not a large problem in the scheme of things. Go and worry about something more important.

C21 fiction - The Wolf Hall trilogy, Hillary Mantell; by some margin the best prose I’ve seen this century. C20 fiction - Pale Fire, Nabokov, a book to return to; Pop science - Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, a book that radically changed the way I think The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, ditto Philosophy - Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus - Ludwig Wittgenstein - depths made clear.

Oh dear. I suppose I should have guessed from the title - but there is no explanation or coherent argument here, just a series of unfounded assertions. (And, I might add, a remarkably un-self-aware demonstration that pricing policies are choices not simply signals of supply and demand).

I read the article and remembered why I cancelled my sub to The Economist. This was written by an intern who had half read the research paper with 15 minutes to filing deadline. LI/virtual and physical networking aren't the same, and, per comments, the author had not taken the trouble to understand what an introvert is. Poor stuff.

This is one of the lowest-value articles I've seen linked on HN. It's a weak tea defence of descriptivism and a failed attack on prescriptivism. The only substantive points made, albeit without evidence, are that prescriptivism 'stifles creative expression' and 'gives language an elitist veneer'. I'm not sure what the latter is supposed to mean or why it would be wrong - that's not explained. The former is clearly false; constraints typically enhance creative expression. Or perhaps we are supposed to believe the Aeneid would have been better not written in hexameters but free verse?

English is, obviously, a widely spoken language with a long, dynamic history and a large number of dialects, argots, cants, jargons, and accents. Linguists studying the differences between, say, the way people of Indian heritage in Solihull and in Delhi create and understand English can have a field day.

To deny that some of those dialects count as 'professional, educated English' and to deny that 'professional, educated English' has some quite strict rules for disambiguating itself from other dialects of English is not descriptivism - it's simply anti-intellectual activism.

If the author is so concerned that people shouldn't be condescending or rude why is he flinging insults like 'Grammar Nazi'? Pillock.

Thanks for these tips! But - I suspect there’s something of a tension in your advice between ‘wanting to treat people like humans’ and ‘wanting to scale communications to achieve business goals’- that you haven’t resolved. I’m not going to feel more connected with your product/ firm because you sent me an email tailored to the middle-aged somewhat overweight bloke segment, for example. There’s nothing wrong with announcing your fantastic new product to a million (segmented!) folk in the hope that 1,000 of them will be interested enough to take a look. But that’s a different thing entirely from genuine connection, no?

- I have been using a 12.9” iPad since march 2018 for exactly these purposes. It has worked very well. - the better notes apps ( I use goodnotes ) are functionally much better than paper, in that they make it easy to move areas of writing about and erase things you dont want, and add arbitrary pages ( with arbitrary templates ); searching my ( fairly awful) handwriting works well so finding things again is much easier. - writing on the iPad with the Apple Pencil is not like writing, use the blunt end of a Bic on a flat piece of glass and you will have the feeling exactly. On the other hand, there is little lag so you can create handwriting that is just like what you’d make on paper with a pen. There’s no good equivalent of a fountain pen. -overall I would never willingly go back to pen and notebook, and I was very picky about good notebooks and pens. - There are some amazing PDF annotation apps, and for typographical markup it’s a dream. - Reading A4 pdfs is as good or better than reading a printout.Plus, search. Minus, flipping through. (Bearing in mind i typically print out 2up double sided, but still.)

- Still, my iPad is now > 5 yrs old. The battery life is reducing and the backlight is showing its age. I am tempted to try the Remarkable tablet instead of buying the new iPad, in part because I think you need the big screen for all this to work - but Apple doesn’t make the iPad equivalent of the 15” MBA; in other words the big iPad is overpowered and thus overpriced for my use case. The Remarkable doesn’t have a lot of iPad’s functionality, but it is designed to be a notepad and pdf annotator and the writing experience is said to be very close to pencil and paper.

(It has also turned out that carrying a thin A4 device is easier than carrying a thick A5 notepad, but obvs YMMV ).

Hope these notes are somewhat useful!

Without wishing to be a Reddit archetype (whatever that is)I might (smugly?) point out that if we’re on a ship that needs turning around we’re at least unlikely to go down hill…

Fair enough, but the couple of hours it takes to learn to do Word level stuff in Emacs will be many times repaid by the time you don’t spend swearing at Word….

Word < emacs

- Russia is waging an (illegal) war of aggression -its war aims are almost certainly not limited to annexing Ukraine - it is therefore sensible for the West to stop Russia in its tracks now, and force Russia to withdraw its troops from all of Ukraine including the Donbas and Crimea so that aggression is seen not to be rewarded - those who claim to worry about WWIII are largely pro-Putin activists, which is to say they support rape and torture as a means of aggressive warfare and should be held in contempt accordingly - there is zero evidence that Putin is willing to risk WWIII as it would (obviously) result in his annihilation. - delaying the supply of tanks, aircraft and long range weaponry simply raises the cost in lives and treasure of removing Russia from Ukraine. - whatever cost the US has incurred in military supplies it has recouped twenty fold in increased LNG revenues.

Cellebrite (mobile phone digital forensics) software and manuals available to all… from disgruntled whistleblowers annoyed they sell to shady governments

Prices may vary by region but here in UK Family O365 gets you 6Tb of cloud storage at a considerable discount to any other service Ive seen. My cloud storage is the emergency third backup for eg when the house has burned down destroying both attached and non attached copies. So i dont encrypt it - If I do need it I dont want to realise Ive lost/ forgotten my decryption key.

The Spectator has - generally high quality writing - a quirky (but data driven) approach - a longer history than any other magazine - a UK focus - a right wing bent, but with plenty of left wing ( or apolitical) writers for balance. Might be a solution? I gave up on the Economist after 20years 20 years ago, for much the same reasons you state!

I have a bookshelf that contains only ‘books I have read this year or have acquired to read’. On New Years day or thereabouts, I photograph them and store them in the correct places on my shelves, and start filling the current year shelf again - often with Christmas presents ( and whatever I hadn’t yet read from last year).