• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • The video is half an hour long and I really don’t feel like watching it all to find out something that could be said in one or two paragraphs of text, so I ignored it at first. As I expected, the video deals with a bunch of more or less relevant topics that you or OP didn’t mention at all. It actually is a bit interesting, I’ve watched a part of it, and I do have to admit that US fire trucks are bigger than those where I live. The problem is that their deadliness is a consequence of several other factors, and only indirectly of their size. What you and OP decided not to do is to communicate that point with any nuance, and all that I could read from your comments is that, by some logic, getting hit by a 10-metre truck is much safer than getting hit by a 15-metre truck. OP complained about the driver “right-hooking” the cyclist, you just said the trucks are too big, do I really have to watch a half an hour video to understand why your comments don’t sound nonsensical?









  • And that’s more or less what I was aiming for, so we’re back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:

    it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines

    The point is that there isn’t something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven’t found AI to be superior at all, but that’s a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.




  • they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it

    This is what I’ve seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn’t that same effort have been invested in Google Search?




  • Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that

    Yeah, it’s indeed false. I didn’t even research it actively, but Wilson on her Twitter profile mentioned an Italian translator who translated Homer years before Wilson.

    (To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)






  • it is quite literally named the “land of the blacks” after all that is what Egypt means

    Egypt is from Greek and definitely doesn’t mean that. The Egyptian endonym was kmt (traditionally pronounced as kemet), which is interpreted as “black land” (km means “black”, -t is a nominal suffix, so it might be translated as black-ness, not at all “quite literally land of the blacks”), most likely referring to the fertile black soil around the Nile river. Trying to interpret that as “land of the blacks” should be suspicious already due to the fact people would hardly name themselves after their most ordinary physical characteristic; the Egyptians might call themselves black only if they were surrounded by non-black people and could view that as their own special characteristic, but they certainly neighboured and had contact with black peoples. And either way one has to wonder if the ancient views of white and black skin were meaningfully comparable to modern western ones. On the other hand, the fertile black soil most certainly is a differentia specifica of the settled Egyptian land that is surrounded by a desert.