In outdoor rock climbing smacking rocks is an integral part of ensuring the rock you're trusting your life with is in fact worth trusting your life with.
Only if you go outside well-secured sport climbs where you don't have to think about that (but still its a good idea to check the state of bolts for any visible damage due to rot and rust). And even then, some rocks are hollow and still can sustain next 5000 years of literally any climbing on them, some are more solid and will come off if somebody over 80kg hangs on them. So its more about calming one's mind rather than objective good quality test.
Most folks in Europe climb only sport routes, or then do some variant of proper alpinism once on wild unsecured terrain.
> any quarter could decide to payout investors through share buyback etc.
Your etc. is layoffs. In this example, the "free-cash-flow" is people's salaries. I'm not personally comfortable with it being considered such a liquid asset.
> Your etc. is layoffs. In this example, the "free-cash-flow" is people's salaries. I'm not personally comfortable with it being considered such a liquid asset.
It’s almost certainly, in the case of Amazon, data centers and fulfillment centers and trucks and planes and heavy equipment.
Unfortunately, you are probably viewed as a liquid asset by your management.
For the record, I wasn't justifying the world that has created these incentives. In order to understand (maybe even someday change) the rottenness of the world, it's important to avoid the sort of reasoning that the OP critiques, which sees everything as just a sort of arbitrary maliciousness, rather than understanding the very concrete institutional mechanisms by which it has perversely become 'rational' to view everything outside a few profit centers as a 'liquid asset.' If a firm doesn't generate free-cash-flow, which is very very difficult outside the software industry, it will not receive significant capital investment and will be dependent on debt/profits. This impacts not just the life of employees, but limits what endeavors are funded at all, i.e. in part why it is that "software is eating the world." How to change those incentives is a much more difficult, but real problem.
I don't know about a Lion, but I think Wittgenstein could have benefited from having a pet.
I train my cat and while I can't always understand her I think one of the most impressive features of the human mind is to be able to have such great understanding of others. We have theory of mind, joint attention, triadic awareness, and much more. My cat can understand me a bit but it's definitely asymmetric.
It's definitely not easy to understand other animals. As Wittgenstein suggests, their minds are alien to us. But we seem to be able to adapt. I'm much better at understanding my cat than my girlfriend (all the local street cats love me, and I teach many of them tricks) but I'm also nothing compared to experts I've seen.
Honestly, I think everyone studying AI could benefit by spending some more time studying animal cognition. While not like computer minds these are testable "alien minds" and can help us better understand the general nature of intelligence
Cats are domestic animals, and dogs are even more.
You probably didn't adapt to understanding cats as much as cats have adapted over millennia to be understood by humans. Working with and being understood by the dominant specie that is humans is a big evolutionary advantage.
Understanding a wild animal like a lion is a different story. There is a reason why most specialists will say that keeping wild animals as pets is a bad idea, they tend to be unpredictable, which, in other words, mean we don't understand them.
I agree with the logic, but I don't think it doesn't properly accounts for people who work very closely with wild animals.
You or I, yeah, probably not going to understand a lion pretty well. But someone who works at the zoo? A lion tamer? Someone studying lion cognition? Hell, people have figured out how to train hippos so that they can clean their teeth[0], and these are one of, if not the, most aggressive animals in the world. Humans have gotten impressively good at communicating with many different animals and training them. There's plenty of Steve Irwin types who have strong understandings about many creatures who would be quite alien to the rest of us. Which, that requires at least one side to have a strong understanding of the other's desires and how they perceive the world. But me? I have no doubt that hippo would murder me.
My point isn't so much about would we understand the lion, but rather could we. Wittgenstein implied we wouldn't be able to. I'm pointing to evidence that we, to at least some degree, can. How much we ultimately will be able to, is still unknown. But I certainly don't think it is an impossible task.
FWIW I don't think this is quite true for domestic cats - cross-species collaboration is very common in carnivores. A famous example is the coyote and badger, which will team up to hunt prairie dogs: the badger chases them out of the burrows, the coyote catches them outside, and they split the meat 70-30 in acknowledgement that the coyote is larger and needs more food. Recently the same has been observed with ocelots and possums. It seems like most mammals are able to at least somewhat understand the mood and intentions of other mammals - note that we share facial expressions and body language.
OTOH feral cats are known for being highly social compared to other cats, forming large semi-collaborative colonies. And adult cats have much more difficulty socializing to humans than adult dogs, even if they don't have trauma/etc. I suspect the real story of cat domestication goes both ways: an unusually gregarious subspecies of African wildcat started forming colonies near human settlements and forming cross-carnivore collaborations with the humans who lived there. This was also true for dogs - it likely started with unusually peaceful Siberian wolves - but I believe cats were more "accidental." Humans have been deliberately creating dog breeds since antiquity, but with a tiny number of exceptions cat breeds are modern. I doubt ancient humans ever "bred" cats like they did dogs, it seems closer to natural selection.
Fwiw, a lot of cat breeds are very old. Especially the ones coming out of northeast Africa (like Egypt).
But yes, both accidental domestication happens as well as non human cross species collaboration. Another famous example is with the cleaner fish and sharks. Animals also frequently collaborate with plants. Ants even have farms, both fungi and other insects
I think the response is generally you are communicating with your cat as an animal, as a mammal. Yes, communication is possible because we too are mammals, animals, etc.
But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Something which I have no idea how we would communicate with.
No. I'm saying the areas you point out that you feel you could communicate, are ones in which you share a lived experience with the lion. You are both animals, you are both mammals. You get cold, hungry, thirsty, etc.
But lions, and us, are not just animals + mammals. Being a lion or a human means more. Ultimately, there is a uniquely human or lion element. Wittgenstein is saying we cannot communicate this.
It has multiple readings out of context, but I think in context one is much clearer than the other. Language is heavily overloaded, which is ironically directly relevant to the conversation.
Also, your comment still made me laugh. Women can be mysterious...
There is nothing really special about speech as a form of communication. All animals communicate with each other and with other animals. Informational density and, uhhhhh, cyclomatic complexity might be different between speech and a dance or a grunt or whatever.
I was referencing Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we would not understand it." Wittgenstein believed (and I am strongly inclined to agree with him) that our ability to convey meaning through communication was intrinsically tied to (or, rather, sprang forth from) our physical, lived experiences.
Thus, to your point, assuming communication, because "there's nothing really special about speech", does that mean we would be able to understand a lion, if the lion could speak? Wittgenstein would say probably not. At least not initially and not until we had built shared lived experiences.
If we had a sufficiently large corpus of lion-speech we could build an LLM (Lion Language Model) that would “understand” as well as any model could.
Which isn’t saying much, it still couldn’t explain Lion Language to us, it could just generate statistically plausible examples or recognize examples.
To translate Lion speech you’d need to train a transformer on a parallel corpus of Lion to English, the existence of which would require that you already understand Lion.
Hmm I don't think we'd need a rosetta stone. In the same way LLMs associate via purely contextual usage the meaning of words, two separate data sets of lion and English, encoded into the same vector space, might pick up patterns of contextual usage at a high enough level to allow for mapping between the two languages.
For example, given thousands of English sentences with the word "sun", the vector embedding encodes the meaning. Assuming the lion word for "sun" is used in much the same context (near lion words for "hot", "heat", etc), it would likely end up in a similar spot near the English word for sun. And because of our shared context living in earth/being animals, I reckon many words likely will be used in similar contexts.
That's my guess though, note I don't know a ton about the internals of LLMs.
Someone more knowledgeable might chime in, but I don't think two corpuses can be mapped to the same vector space. Wouldn't each vector space be derived from its corpus?
It depends how you define the vector space but I'm inclined to agree.
The reason I think this is from evidence in human language. Spend time with any translator and they'll tell you that some things just don't really translate. The main concepts might, but there's subtleties and nuances that really change the feel. You probably notice this with friends who have a different native language than you.
Even same language same language communication is noisy. You even misunderstand your friends and partners, right? The people who have the greatest chance of understanding you. It's because the words you say don't convey all the things in your head. It's heavily compressed. Then the listener has to decompress from those lossy words. I mean you can go to any Internet forum and see this in action. That there's more than one way to interpret anything. Seems most internet fights start this way. So it's good to remember that there isn't an objective communication. We improperly encode as well as improperly decode. It's on us to try to find out what the speaker means, which may be very different from the words they say (take any story or song to see the more extreme versions of this. This feature is heavily used in art)
Really, that comes down to the idea of universal language[0]. I'm not a linguist (I'm an AI researcher), but my understanding is most people don't believe it exists and I buy the arguments. Hard to decouple due to shared origins and experiences.
Hmm I don't think a universal language is implied by being able to translate without a rosetta stone. I agree, I don't think there is such a thing as a universal language, per se, but I do wonder if there is a notion of a universal language at a certain level of abstraction.
But I think those ambiguous cases can still be understood/defined. You can describe how this one word in lion doesn't neatly map to a single word in English, and is used like a few different ways. Some of which we might not have a word for in English, in which case we would likely adopt the lion word.
Although note I do think I was wrong about embedding a multilingual corpus into a single space. The example I was thinking of was word2vec, and that appears to only work with one language. Although I did find some papers showing that you can unsupervised align between the two spaces, but don't know how successful that is, or how that would treat these ambiguous cases.
> I don't think a universal language is implied by being able to translate without a rosetta stone.
Depends what you mean. If you want a 1-to-1 translation then your languages need to be isomorphic. For lossy translation you still need some intersection within the embedding space. The intersection will determine how good you can translate. It isn't unreasonable to assume that there are some universal traits here as any being lives in this universe and we're all subject to these experiences at some level, right? But that could result in some very lossy translations that are effectively impossible to translate, right?
Another way you can think about it, though, is that language might not be dependent on experience. If it is completely divorced, we may be able to understand anyone regardless of experience. If it is mixed, then results can be mixed.
> The example I was thinking of was word2vec
Be careful with this. If you haven't actually gone deep into the math (more than 3Blue1Brown) you'll find some serious limitations to this. Play around with it and you'll experience these too. Distances in high dimensions are not well defined. There also aren't smooth embeddings here. You have a lot of similar problems to embedding methods like t-SNE. Certainly has uses but it is far too easy to draw the wrong conclusions from them. Unfortunately, both of these are often spoken about incorrectly (think as incorrect as most peoples understandings of things like Schrodinger's Cat or the Double Slit experiment, or really most of QM. There's some elements of truth but it's communicated through a game of telephone).
That's a very good point! I hadn't thought of that. And that makes sense, since the encoding of the word "sun" arises from its linguistic context, and there's no such shared context between the English word sun and any lion word in this imaginary multilingual corpus, so I don't think they'd go to the same point.
Apparently one thing you could do is train a word2vec on each corpus and then align them based on proximity/distances. Apparently this is called "unsupervised" alignment and there's a tool by Facebook called MUSE to do it. (TIL, Thanks ChatGPT!) https://github.com/facebookresearch/MUSE?tab=readme-ov-file
Although I wonder if there are better embedding approaches now as well. Word2Vec is what I've played around with from a few years ago, I'm sure it's ancient now!
Edit: that's what I get for posting before finishing the article! The whole point of their researh is to try to build such a mapping, ve2vec!
And even, assuming the existence of a Lion to English corpus, it would only give us Human word approximations. We experience how lossy that type of translation is already between Human->Human languages. Or sometimes between dialects within the same language.
Who knows, we don't really have good insight into how this information loss, or disparity grows. Is it linear? exponential? Presumably there is a threshold beyond which we simply have no ability to translate while retaining a meaningful amount of original meaning.
Would we know it when we tried to go over that threshold?
Sorry, I know I'm rambling. But it has always been regularly on my mind and it's easy for me to get on a roll. All this LLM stuff only kicked it all into overdrive.
> In broad terms, the Hypothesis claims that the limits of the language one speaks are the limits of the world one inhabits (also in Wittgenstein), that the
grammatical categories of that language define the ontological categories of the
word, and that combinatory potentials of that language delimit the complexity of
that world (this may be Jim Brown's addition to the complex Hypothesis.) The
test then is to see what changes happen in these areas when a person learns a
language with a new structure, are they broadened in ways that correspond to the
ways the structure of the new language differs from that of the old?
That seems a bit extreme, given that a lion also has a mammal brain. I'd expect it to also think in terms of distinct entities that can move around in the environment and possibly talk about things like "hunger" and "prey".
I'd expect incomprehensible language from something that is wildly different from us, e.g. sentient space crystals that eat radiation.
On the other hand, we still haven't figured out dolphin language (the most interesting guess was that they shout 3D images at each other).
Observation has proven enough to understand the meaning of animal calls. People proved they correctly identified, for example, an distressed animal call for assistance, by playing it to their peers in the wild. They go look for the distressed animal. Other calls don't provoke the same reaction.
Analogies are always possible. I believe in the philosophical context though, understanding the meaning of something is not possible through analogy alone.
Reminds me of the quote:
“But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”
Hmm I'm not convinced we don't have a lot of shared experience. We live on the same planet. We both hunger, eat, and drink. We see the sun, the grass, the sky. We both have muscles that stretch and compress. We both sleep and yawn.
I mean who knows, maybe their perception of these shared experiences would be different enough to make communication difficult, but still, I think it's undeniably shared experience.
That's fair. To me, the point of Wittgenstein's lion thought experiment though was not necessarily to say that _any_ communication would be impossible. But to understand what it truly meant to be a lion, not just what it meant to be an animal. But we have no shared lion experiences nor does a lion have human experiences. So would we be able to have a human to lion communication even if we could both speak human speech?
I think that's the core question being asked and that's the one I have a hard time seeing how it'd work.
Hmm, I'm finding the premise a bit confusing, "understand what it truly meant to be a lion". I think that's quite different than having meaningful communication. One could make the same argument for "truly understanding" what it means to be someone else.
My thinking is that if something is capable of human-style speech, then we'd be able to communicate with them. We'd be able to talk about our shared experiences of the planet, and, if we're capable of human-style speech, likely also talk about more abstract concepts of what it means to be a human or lion. And potentially create new words for concepts that don't exist in each language.
I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication? It's a bit handwavy, depends a bit on how we're defining "understand" and "communicate".
> I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication?
I don't follow that line of reasoning. To me, in that example, you're still communicating with a human, who regardless of culture, or geographic location, still shares an immense amount of shared life experiences with you.
Or, they're not. For example, an intentionally extreme example, I bet we'd have a super hard time talking about homotopy type theory with a member of the amazon rain forest. Similarly, I'd bet they had their own abstract concepts that they would not be able to easily explain to us.
I would say there's a difference between abstract and complex. A complex topic would take a lot of time to communicate mainly because you have to go through all the prerequisites. By abstract I mean something like "communicate" or "loss" or "zero"! The primitives of complex thought.
And if we're saying the lion can speak human, then I think it follows that they're capable of this abstract thought, which is what I think is making the premise confusing for me. Maybe if I change my thinking and let's just say the lion is speaking... But if they're speaking a "language" that's capable of communicating concrete and abstract concepts, then that's a human-style language! And because we share many concrete concepts in our shared life experience, I think we would be able to communicate concrete concepts, and then use those as proxies to communicate abstract concepts and hence all concepts?
Does a lion not know what it's like to be hungry? These parts of the brain are ancient. There is clearly a sliding scale in most experiences here from amoeba to fly to lion to human. Would you like to communicate with a girl who drinks tapioca milk tea? Clearly your life experiences are different so what's the point? Obviously gets harder, that's why we are discussing the possibility of using technology to make it easier.
Obviously it's impossible to communicate even 90% of human experience with lions or people with mental disabilities. But if a translation model increases communication even 1%, brings everybody up to the level of a Kevin Richardson it's a huge win E.g. A pair of smart glasses that labeling the mood of the cat. Nobody cares about explaining why humans wear hats to a lion and of course no explanation is better than being a old human who has worn hats for a variety of reasons.
I think it's unlikely you could make a LLM that gives a lion knowledge via audio only, but very possibly other animals
> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.
It'd be nice, but I can't see it being effective at changing broad consumer behavior. Giving people more information to make a choice doesn't do much value when they're already making poor choices based on the already existing information.
Put another way, I wish we had the nuanced shit to sift through where some nice multi-dimensional analysis could save the day. But the issue is people are consuming shit that is demonstrably shit from the first whiff/taste. I can't see how having some pretty vectors to showing them where their shit lives in shitspace is going to be helpful.
I don't think anyone could (or even necessarily should) design a service like this for the masses. (Designing anything with the masses in mind is probably a way to end up with a mediocre product regardless, but I digress.) This would be more for people like us and the typical HN crowd: interested in truth and nuance for the sake of knowing the world accurately.
The problem with people consuming low-information, rage-baiting, distorted, highly-partisan slop masquerading as news is a problem I don't have the first idea on solving. The issue isn't even with the existence of the shit itself: that sort of content has always and will always exist, regardless. The issue is with (i) the volume of people consuming and accepting it, and more importantly, (ii) how much influence that garbage has on the national discourse and policy. For example, Musk consumes that sort of content and then feeds it into Grok (hello, MechaHitler), which then propagates to elected officials and the electorate and has real-world consequences in policy.
Anecdotally, children making "children noises" is calming for me.
It was not until after I was a parent myself though. Like many things in life, once I had the connection in my own personal life, it is now very easy and automatic for me to empathize and support other children. It feels deep, like more an automatic response.
Can't exactly remember how I reacted to children noises before I had kids myself. But I must admit that nowadays noise from other kids makes me smile because 'not my problem'.
I'll add to it. My neighbor and I were just recently chitchatting how we love the new family that moved into the neighborhood a few years ago. We love the vibe and color their family adds and it's a large part because they're very visible and audible.
General "kid mayhem" happening all over their yard. It often spills into the street. More than once I have to slow down and wait for the children wailing on their friends with boxing gloves to clear out of the street so I can drive through. It's wonderful. They're close to the entrance of our neighborhood too, which means everybody coming through there is primed to go slow and watch out for kids. It has such a great, calming effect on the overall neighborhood.
Guess we had the same thought, I posted a similar comment. It genuinely threw me for a loop cause I was trying to figure out how OP actually said anything about carpentry...
Certainly, which is why the social interaction OP described makes sense.
But OP was specific in the loud things they mentioned, and that list very much does not directly imply carpentry. So to then make it about OP's lack of tact by explicitly calling out the OP for focusing on their profession? It strains credulity as a good faith reading of OP's story.
Sure, and if OP had said that, perhaps we'd be having a different conversation. Or none at all?
EDIT: Ah, maybe you're responding to my remark of it having "nothing to do"? If so, yeah, that's hyperbole. There are similarities if you want to look for them. But I don't think they're meaningful connections for the point of the story and OP's reaction, in my opinion.
The point of the story is that someone tried to strike up a conversation with OP and he responded by effectively saying "your job is loud and obnoxious", and it's presented as if it's a win. It doesn't really seem like one to me.
The comment was not aimed at the carpenter. Nothing he was doing was loud, and nothing I've experienced with carpenters gives me the impression that they are loud or obnoxious. He was doing a great job. If he took what I said as a dig at his profession, that was his connection, not mine.
My take away, after the fact, was that he may have been someone who enjoyed landscaping his own yard and owned several tools that I listed. Nothing to do with his career and services, and nothing that's a reflection of our interaction.
The story wasn't meant to be a win or a competition. It was a reflection on how some people associate some loud sounds, such as motors, as being perfectly fine and other loud sounds, like children at play, being a nuisance.
That's fair enough. But don't you think carpentry could be considered a loud profession, like the other ones you listed? I imagine carpenters as banging nails with hammers all day. :P
Hammering can get loud. But not louder than any motorized tool. And hammering being limited by the energy capacity of flesh and blood doesn't last for long bursts, maybe a few minutes at a time. In contrast, motorized tools let out an egregious, sharp hum that can last for an hour or two without pause. Both might draw someone's attention and frustration, but when comparing them objectively, one is clearly worse than the other.
On top of that, carpentry is done on site and isn't mobile. Someone doing carpentry as a hobby will likely be in a garage or some enclosed space that absorbs and muffles the sound. Carpentry being done professionally is temporary and will stop once the construction is finished. Landscaping, though, is everywhere and without end
I believe you that it was unintentional (and I'm sorry for implying that it was!), but I still think the carpenter was upset because you implicated him. Just to prove I'm not crazy here, I asked GPT as a neutral third party, which agrees:
I cannot wait for these to be banned, please, I hope.
It would cost so little comparative money for construction sites to go battery powered. There's some exemptions that need to be made (welders), but man, I doubt the average construction worker uses 1kWh a week. Battery power that shit, you brutes, and spare the world!
Switching these folks to battery would be such an enormous relief for cities. The cheapest shittiest 2 stroke generators raging from 7am to 4pm is an infernal senseless ceaseless din.
Of course. But we already established that OP struck a nerve. OP themselves said that. And nobody was confused about why they struck a nerve with the carpenter.
But this isn't a conversation about whether or not it was possible to connect from what OP said to "loud noises". We all seem to agree on that. Specifically it's a question of whether OP was targeting the carpenters profession. I can't see how OP did that.
I'm kind of surprised I'm still here arguing this. But hey, it's a slow day and I guess it struck a nerve with me for some reason. Hope you're having a good day too!
> Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.
I don't think they care about the experience or functionality. I think it's just about being able to exert enough of a legal or structural claim to get their fingers on a cut of the eventual transactions enabled by the various "apps" in the "super app".
