Zompist Bboard Again

I think my parents (for whom this is very much not their first rodeo) are advising caution about extrapolating from the results of these local elections to a general election. Local elections are frequently used to cast protest votes against the government regardless of colour, and there are definit...

Philip K. Dick…did predict global warming in the 1960s This is perhaps less astonishing than you might think. Wikipedia tells me that Eunice Foote demonstrated carbon dioxide's ability to absorb and reemit infrared radiation (i.e. that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas) in 1856, Svante Arrhenius p...

I'm not seeing much evidence here that the CBB actually was compromised. A few people receiving a phishing email that got past the spam filter isn't that, and putting a CAPTCHA-style knowledge check on signups is exactly the sort of thing a target of a DDoS attack does since they specifically target...

Sure but eventually everyone becomes unemployable and indeed superfluous to the running of civilization. I want to point out the size of the gulf you've just vaulted, Evel Knievel-style. The quoted post is talking about the notoriously vibes-based (to use the modern vernacular) process in which a r...

Even so, the fact remains that art websites are increasingly dominated by AI generated images with artists presumably suffering the corresponding loss of commissions. In my experience art websites which allow AI-generated images (which are very much not the majority) are not generally received posi...

The scripts must have been good enough for studio executives to believe they would lead to hit or at least watchable films, otherwise they wouldn't have considered them in the first place. You have a quantity of faith in the ability of studio executives to make good creative decisions which I suspe...

Artificial intelligence has a level of autonomy that other machines fundamentally lack. Printing presses and cameras, however disruptive their abilities, do not generate their own content but only replicate what we deliberately put into them. Generative AI by contrast can write entire novels and dr...

But logically if something is physically possible and has trillions of dollars dedicated to its realization, it will eventually happen. Zompist himself already admitted that they were half-way to AGI and that was several years ago when the technology first debuted. Sure the current forms of AI fall...

For your consideration: the قلب programming language.

Zomp called you out in the post you quoted for this kind of argument, where you jump straight from "there is no universal law prohibiting X" to "X is going to happen" purely because someone with a lot of money wants X. LLMs and latent diffusion models are not AGI, and the fact pe...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Jan 25, 2025 6:45 pm (Although to me Urngese feels more Italian than Anglicised: Albanese, Cantanese, Abruzzese, etc. Malayalam Varghese is even closer.)

Portuguese, Faroese, Maltese, Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Marshallese, Voynichese, legalese…

I suppose the next step is having the language only have phonemes that are easily pronounceable by native English speakers, whether they're technically in the English language or not. I'm not sure how you'd decide whether say, /ɲ/ is easier than /q/. Professional conlangers seem to have made a poin...

Zomp clearly thinks that phoneme frequency is something that needs to be considered during the development of a language—he brings it up in the Language Construction Kit (p56) and gen is set up to emphasise it pretty heavily—but I feel like it's the kind of thing that will organically fall out of th...

I'm inclined to call it an orthographic irregularity in dropping a hyphen. Passer-by is an agent noun regularly formed (compare hanger-on) from the phrasal verb pass by. Note the stress as compared to something like Wetherby.

I am little help—my policy regarding Javascript is to not touch it and hope it goes away on its own. (I saw the same "discouraged" warnings on MDN; the reason given is that it's a mixture of concerns similar to using <FONT COLOR=#FF0000> all over the place rather than a CSS document.)

The interface for the Verdurian dictionary is subtiy broken: you're using HTML form elements, but rather than using a form you've tied everything to an onclick handler on the button. As a result, if you type a word into the input box and press Enter you get something else happening—the first time I ...

It looks like you've got a NORTH/THOUGHT/FORCE/CURE merger (at least in most words) and a STRUT/schwa merger. I'm so confident I merge THOUGHT-NORTH-FORCE that I didn't even bother recording the wordlists for NORTH or FORCE; I know full well that I'm nonrhotic, they don't sound any different when I...

Given my relative lack of skill in the art of praatcraft I don't want to do a whole bunch of labour that turns out to be flawed. Instead, I got one set of formant frequencies for each monophthong (based on the example words for English lexical sets on Wikipedia ) and am sharing the recordings I used...

I too like arguing, and experience the same urge to try and defend what I already believe to be true when I encounter contrary opinions. I think the trend towards avoiding argument is a result of the social media tendency to emulate a single dinner party where everyone in the world is invited—what w...

I'm going to take the opportunity to highlight this post since it seems like people have started to tar the entire field of AI with the brush meant specifically for generative AI. Please stop demonizing “AI”; the stuff you have a problem with isn’t AI research or AI tech, it’s a very small subset of...