The Reading Room

3:33 AM

Apr 4 at 22:41, by verbose

Are Le Mods™ planning to post the best-of question for 2024 Q1? If not, any objection to my doing so?

Taking silence for consent

3 hours later…

Q: Which Premchand novels are written in Hindi and which in Urdu?

6:15 AM

This answer only discusses short stories I wanted to know about which of Premchand's novels are written in Hindi or in Urdu. Like Godaan, Nirmala, Gaban, Rangbhoomi, etc. Thanks.

premchand

@verbose I don't think the mods have any more claim to posting those (or the topic challenges) than anyone else :)

@Mithical well, no longer anyway 🙃

I'm still kinda swamped, unfortunately, so my mod actions right now are mostly limited to checking the flag queue (and asking questions, but that's also prep for the courses I want to take).

6:42 AM

@verbose Ooh, that is an interesting thought. I like the irony there.

I only came across that article because I had to Google "Gowland" to find out what it was...

@Mithical what courses? Or do you mean just the sorts of courses you'd like to take once you're all growed up and at uni?

@verbose Hopefully starting later this year, if everything goes according to plan (i.e. I get accepted), but yes.

English Lit and Communications/Media courses.

6:57 AM

yea congrats! Are you planning to study in the UK? US? Israel? New Zealand? Ireland?

All of the above?

At least one of the above. ;)

I don't think heading to a US university as an Israeli citizen is the best idea right now, to be honest. I did want to take a trip to NYC to visit some people, go to some live theater, etc., but I think I'm going to have to push that off for now. :/

Sadly, that is probably a good idea

7:15 AM

To clarify my response to the article, I meant that the thesis about the pressures of class mobility as reflected in skincare routines is very interesting, I just think that the author could do more with it by considering the economics of those routines more carefully and extending the analysis to include the sailors who are actually major characters

1 hour later…

8:32 AM

@verbose And here I am, slogging through maths books to meet the prerequisites for courses on Coursera that require proficiency in calculus, linear algebra and statistics ...

9:08 AM

@Tsundoku Well, the class I took was intro-level, and it was a single class. It appears that you're working toward some sort of credential? If you're taking multiple courses. I do intend to take calculus and linear algebra at some point in the next couple of years.

Also, I was a bit dissatisfied with the stats class because it would have been nice to know the maths behind some of the analysis. It's not super illuminating to enter a bunch of numbers into a calculator and then say, okay, based on this input the calculator tells me that the p-value is this much. I want to know how the calculator is actually arriving at that figure.

I understand that what it represents, but to get from input to conclusion all I did was punch numbers into an adding machine. How the machine figured things out, I don't know. That's coz I know no calculus. Of course that's a soluble problem.

Or okay I know what the central limit theorem is, and given a certain set of inputs I can figure out various things as part of that theorem's input, but it's a theorem, which means it's been proven (or proved), and it would be nice to know/understand the proof instead of just taking it as axiomatic.

oh well, 'moff to bed. G'nite ladies

@verbose I'm doing all of this in my spare time without attending classes. If I take those online courses, I could pay to get a certificate, but the certificate is not the main goal.

AI is going to have some sort of impact on the work I do, and just being able to use what companies have to offer doesn't sound like a good long-term strategy to me. (I have colleagues who play around with ChatGPT and similar stuff and don't look beyond that.) That's why I want to learn about AI with maths knowledge, i.e. to be in a better position than people who use the pre-packaged stuff.

Oh I see. You're working your way through a bunch of Coursera classes, but not with the aim of getting a credential. Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm doing too, and for similar reasons. I wanted to know what companies were doing with my data, and I wanted to understand how LLMs work. I do now have at least a basic understanding of both those. But it's a rabbit hole because now I want to know the maths.

9:24 AM

Oh, no, I haven't started on the Coursera classes yet. I need to learn maths in order to just understand what they do in those courses!

Talking of maths and rabbit holes: I think it's no coincidence that the mathematician Lewis Carroll sent Alice down a rabbit hole :-)

On a different note: we haven't used the (ex-)Twitter (short: X) control room since September last year.

I guess I'm not sure about the equation between, on the one hand, knowing maths and on the other, going beyond the pre-packaged stuff. On the one hand, I did take a class where we built an AI classification model from scratch, and I did struggle with some of the equations, but conceptually I understood what was going on. Also, I do now get the principles behind LLMs as well. But I can't therefore avoid using pre-packaged models like ChatGPT or Bard

And I don't think that the issue is simply that my maths isn't good enough.

I think it's more Heideggerian, like the thrownness that is characteristic of Dasein.

I.e., I don't think that greater understanding of forces like AI leads to greater control over them. I'm much more pessimistic than that.

Consider social media. Having grokked that the whole point is to keep me engaged, and that what keeps people engaged is hostility and rage, my choice might be to stop using it (as I have done). But that doesn't mean I have greater control over how social media shapes the world around me.

3 hours later…

12:39 PM

It's not about being in control of the forces of AI but about being able what you are doing when you change something, even if it's just a parameter used to generate a model.

Q: Who is "Stan Streeson" in Rutherford's translation of Don Quijote?

1:06 PM

In chapter LXII of Don Quijote by Cervantes, ("Which deals with the adventure of the enchanted head, together with other trivial matters which cannot be left untold"), the Don and Sancho are invited by their host to see a magical talking head made of bronze, which, their host claimed, would truth...

translation don-quixote miguel-de-cervantes

2 hours later…

Q: Book involving Route 66 with a girl breaking her grandma's friends out of a retirement home

3:02 PM

I read a book around 2006 to 2008 and I believe it was considered new at the time. I remember it being called Route 66 with a red convertible on the cover headed towards the open road but whenever I've tried looking for this I can't find it. I remember the girl hanging out with her grandma over s...

identification-request

2 hours later…