English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

00:11

How about this.

The corruption of Putin, his clique, and the other oligarchs have hollowed out not just the Russian government, but probably also the army, both morally and financially. That is one reason why the Russian army is no longer very strong.

Robusto

00:33

@Cerberus Yeah, that's what Perun said a while back.

Cerberus

Qui?

Robusto

How Corruption Destroys Armies - Theft, Graft, and Russian failure in Ukraine

►

Cerberus

That is probably more about lower-scale corruption?

I also meant the hundreds of billions which are being sucked out of the Russian government from the top, by Putin himself.

Robusto

@Cerberus If I remember correctly, it's turtles all the way down—and up.

Cerberus

OK.

Cerberus

01:45

> “The Russians are in trouble,” one U.S. official said bluntly. “The question will be how the Russians will react, but their weaknesses have been exposed and they don’t have great manpower reserves or equipment reserves.” — washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/12/…

They don't have great equipment reserves, that's interesting.

forest

Eh, they've been saying they're in trouble and it'll be over for them any day now for like... 6 months.

Cerberus

Who are "they"?

forest

Media.

Cerberus

I don't think the Russians have been saying that about themselves.

CowperKettle

Never underestimate any enemy in any war. Wars are unpredictable.

Cerberus

01:48

I'm not sure what you mean.

@CowperKettle Indeed.

I read that Russian has lost 330 military vehicles over the past week.

Of which 100 on Sunday.

forest

It's only relevant if compared against expected losses.

Otherwise they're just big numbers posted for the sake of furthering an agenda (one way or another).

Cerberus

Not sure what your point is.

forest

Are you asking if I'm trying to make some special point? I meant what I said and nothing more.

Cerberus

OK then I just couldn't understand it.

forest

Let me rephrase: Western media has been prognosticating Russia's imminent and humiliating defeat since the beginning of the war. They highlight only Russia's failures and list their losses out of context. Whether or not Russia is doing more poorly than expected cannot be gleaned from the kind of news articles linked above. Of course, the Russian media is being just as dishonest, so it's not like the dishonesty of Western media means anything.

Cerberus

01:55

> Buoyant Ukrainian officials said they would no longer negotiate a peace deal that would let Russia keep an occupying presence in any territory, even in Crimea and part of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by Russia or Russian-backed separatists for years.

“The point of no return has passed,” Reznikov, the defense minister, said at the Yalta European Strategy summit in Kyiv on Saturday.

>
“We are not against [peace] talks; we are not refusing the talks,” Lavrov said on the state TV program, “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.” Rather, “Those who refuse should understand that the longer they delay this process, the more difficult it will be to negotiate.”

@forest That was never my impression, and I have kept up reasonably well.

So I wonder what media gave you that impression.

Perhaps some exaggerated column?

forest

CNN and Washington Post, mainly.

Cerberus

I don't think I have seen that in the Washington Post.

Everyone seemed cautious enough, except at the beginning of the war, when everyone agreed that Ukraine could not withstand the Russian attack for long, perhaps a week or two.

Including 'renowned' military institutes.

forest

That's odd. Most of the media reports I saw were about Russia's imminent defeat, even from the beginning.

Cerberus

Very odd.

Perhaps your Internet provider edits news pages before they reach your computer.

forest

More likely it's just algorithm-driven advertising.

Cerberus

02:01

But, really, if you are seriously saying that the Washington Post said from the beginning that a Russian defeat was imminent, then I cannot take you seriously, sorry.

forest

I didn't say WP said that from the beginning.

Cerberus

You know that is not true.

OK.

I think I'll go back to reading the Washington Post now.

forest

I said "most of the media reports" that I've seen have. It's CNN and WP which have been providing biased reporting by listing primarily Russia's losses but rarely gains. I don't remember which media outlets were foretelling their imminent defeat.

@Cerberus Feel free. I've tried to avoid them ever since they were bought by Bezos and let off many of their best journalists. Nowadays there is far too much pro-military and pro-billionaire content on there that did not used to be.

Cerberus

The Washington Post, the Guardian, NRC, Der Spiegel, Le Monde: they have all seemed fairly reasonable during this war so far, except the point I mentioned. But for that I cannot blame them.

The New York Times as well.

And other Dutch Newspapers.

So I can only disagree and fail to understand your allegations.

I think little more can be said about it.

forest

I'm making no allegations.

I'm just opining that there is very little coverage of Russia's gains and extensive coverage of their losses.

Cerberus

02:07

Fine.

forest

It's primarily CNN which I've found to be the most biased. WP has not been as consistently biased as CNN has.

Cerberus

I don't watch television.

So now the WP is good again?

forest

Neither do I. I meant CNN articles.

No, not good, just not nearly as bad as CNN.

But it could also be my anger at the hypocrisy (with regards to the West's general apathy towards warfare elsewhere) that is leading me towards expectation bias myself. CNN's bias is fairly blatant and many of WP's articles (about subjects other than the war) have become extremely... distasteful. I admit that I could easily be expecting WP to be just as biased about this war.

Cerberus

Ah, OK.

I think a nuanced view is usually most beneficial.

Anger is almost as great a temptation to man as is lust.

And the Internet is like a magnifier of anger.

Of lust as well, but in that it is innocuous. Perhaps even wholesome.

forest

The way I see it, both sides are spouting such propaganda in such an extreme filter bubble that I have a hard time trusting almost any media outlet these days. I'm just waiting to see what the actual result will be.

Cerberus

02:13

I have always seen newspapers I read take anything the Ukrainian government says with a grain of salt.

Popaganda, yes.

It's war.

For them.

forest

That's why I attempt to avoid putting myself in the position where I'm vulnerable to propaganda.

Cerberus

I think you're critical enough that you should be strong enough to resist it.

Don't fall into the Postmodernist trap of paranoia, though.

forest

Paranoia often devolves into contrarianism. That's the problem with paranoia.

I.e. I can't trust Western media for news on the war, but that certainly doesn't mean Russian media is more reliable!

CowperKettle

Neural networks originally designed for language processing turn out to be great models of how our brains understand places

Cerberus

The memory palace?

CowperKettle

02:29

> In recent work, researchers have shown that the hippocampus, a structure of the brain critical to memory, is basically a special kind of neural net, known as a transformer, in disguise.

Transformer (machine learning model)

A transformer is a deep learning model that adopts the mechanism of self-attention, differentially weighting the significance of each part of the input data. It is used primarily in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV).Like recurrent neural networks (RNNs), transformers are designed to process sequential input data, such as natural language, with applications towards tasks such as translation and text summarization. However, unlike RNNs, transformers process the entire input all at once. The attention mechanism provides context for any position in the inp...

forest

@CowperKettle The hippocampus being a transformer (and being possible to model with attractor dynamics) has been known for a while, IIRC.

CowperKettle

Oh.

I didn't even hear about transformers until this morning.

forest

I'm sure the research is novel, not saying it isn't, just that it simply being a transformer was already known.

CowperKettle

02:45

> How does the moon cut its hair?
Eclipse it.

Cerberus

The lovely Lunar accent.

CowperKettle

In Yekaterinburg, men started receiving notices to undergo a 2-month military camp training e1.ru/text/politics/2022/09/13/71648345

Could be just regular annual thing. Media love to raise hype.

Cerberus

03:07

A 'notice'?

Compulsory or not?

Or deliberately left ambiguous?

CowperKettle

03:31

@Cerberus Compulsory notice to undergo a two-month training, unless you provide a doctor's certificate of illness or some other paper, maybe proving some exceptional family circumstances etc.

If you underwent the mandatory conscription service before age 27, you are placed in reserve until age 35 to 50, depending on your skill.

And while you're in reserve, you must undergo training to refresh your skills, now and then, unless you cop out in some way.

Xanne

Wordle 450 5/6

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Cerberus

03:58

@CowperKettle Ah, OK, interesting.

That could mean anything, as you say.

Make sure people are ready in case of mobilisation.

If this does not normally happen/

> #Worldle #235 1/6 (100%)
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https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

CowperKettle

04:11

#Worldle #235 2/6 (100%)
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https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

M.A.R.

04:54

AUTOBOTS, We Need More Movies

The real Optimus Prime was in our hippocampus all along

Xanne

07:34

Wordle 451 5/6

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CowperKettle

Word of the day: exocentric verb-noun compound agent noun twitter.com/dtmooreeditor/status/1569366666844192769

jlliagre

07:50

@forest While nobody really thinks the Ukrainians could stop the Russians, “they’ve definitely raised the potential costs for the Russian forces,” Cranny-Evans added. “They have the means to really potentially drag Russia into quite a bloody conflict. It’s just whether or not Russia can achieve its goals without having to do that.” CNN 28 Jan 2022

Wordle 451 4/6

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#Worldle #235 5/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜↖️
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https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

tchrist

08:20

@CowperKettle scarecrow, passport, pickpocket, spoilsport, killjoy, cutthroat, cutpurse, daredevil, eat-bee, killjoy, makeweight, pick-cheese, shearwater, spendthrift, spitfire, spoilsport, suck-egg, turnkey, wagtail

CowperKettle

09:53

CowperKettle

12:02

Polaris Dawn

Polaris Dawn is a planned private human spaceflight mission, operated by SpaceX on behalf of Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, scheduled to launch in late 2022, "likely December" according to Isaacman. The flight will be using the Crew Dragon capsule, and is the first of three planned missions in a program named the Polaris program. == Crew == == Mission == Polaris Dawn will be a human spaceflight to orbit Earth with only private citizens on board. The crew will consist of Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon, who will spend up to five days in orbit. Because Isaa...

Cool. They will venture outside the capsule. The first civilian extravehicular activity in space.

Robusto

12:34

#Worldle #235 1/6 (100%)
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https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

🌎 Sept 13, 2022 🌍
🔥 13 | Avg. Guesses: 6.27
🟧🟧🟥🟩 = 4

#globle

Robusto

12:48

Wordle 451 5/6

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Mitch

14:00

@CowperKettle I don't think that is entirely bs, but the writers using 'hippocampus' and 'transformer' in the same sentence are relying on -a lot- of metaphor.

Even the mathematical construct of 'neural net' (a partial order of weighted threshold functions updated by backpropagation) is only -inspired- by the network of actual neurons in all sorts of neural tissue.

And the hippocampus is a large clump of neurons and so any analogy with 'transformers', a modification of previous NN architectures to deal with short time series, is simply a recognition of the vague similarity, not anything about any kind of correspondence between the math of transformers and the mechanism by which the hippocampus manages memories.

@forest I have a feeling that you're using 'transformer' in a different way than @CowperKettle. He is using 'transformer to refer to a very recent invention in NN architecture (~5yo, used in BERT and GPT). But I think you are referring to transformer (where hippocampus is an example of one) in the general engineering sense of 'transforming input into an output'. The 'transformer' of neural networks is a very poor choice by its inventors (as is almost all of the terminology in AI)

I'm avoiding saying much more about the actual comparison of biological neurons and mathematical neural nets... I don't know enough about the actual biology to say. I just know what I've heard from other people that they just don't function in the same way (how they're connected, how they interact). I think the only similarity I know of is that neurons do exhibit a threshold reaction.

@CowperKettle They're relatively new, ~5 yo. But they're the basis for a bunch of tech in the news: BERT, GPT. Stable Diffusion, the latest thing creating all those fun pictures, is even newer than trnsformers...I don't yet know how it works.

CowperKettle

14:36

Neither do I

Hippocampus responds to sound during passive exposure, active listening and learning

Basically, all parts of the brain participate in wildly different functions at the same time.

Cerebellum in social cognition, hippocampus in sound processing, etc.

Mitch

14:56

Yeah, it's like a whole bunch of weird Rube Goldberg machines all interconnected like a Rube Goldberg machine.

And then separately, it's like each cubic centimeter (or smaller) has a very distinct function (facial recognition, combining the upperleft quadrant of the visual field with the lower left, sensing profanity).

And then, supposing some kind of stroke or trauma and one of those cubic centimeters gets destroyed and the feature lost... then you eventually train yourself to use another part of the brain to do that feature.

@CowperKettle Here's another way the mass of neuron's is different from computers. The classic von Neumann computer architecture (which all computers from transistor up to cloud network work): memory is distinct from processing, and there's one processing thread. Everything else is embellishment (eg registers (memory) on a processor, multiple cores on a processor (up to 32 nowadays I think for parallel processing).

The brain is just a bag of chemical goo that does everything all at once.

CowperKettle

> Synapses are conceived as storage sites for the parameters of an approximate posterior probability distribution over latent causes. Intracellular molecules are conceived as storage sites for the parameters of a generative model. The theory stipulates how these two components work together as part of an integrated algorithm for learning and inference. arxiv.org/abs/2209.04923

> An art prize at the Colorado State Fair was awarded last month to a work that—unbeknown to the judges—was generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) system.

Wow twitter.com/LighthiserScott/status/1567355079228887041

Matt E. Эллен

15:24

I had to witness WITH ME OWN TWO EYES someone define Latin letters as [a-zA-Z]. I know we're dealing with JavaScript, but really.

Mitch

@MattE.Эллен They're not wrong

Did it compile?

SHIP IT!

Matt E. Эллен

:D

Mitch

Or how do the kid say it these days?

DEPLOY!

@CowperKettle Shocking/not shocking

Matt E. Эллен

Docker engage the Jenkins, push to main and deploy!

CowperKettle

Nick

15:29

Mathemagical! I like how homely this chat is being at the present moment, I brought for you all a snack from twitter, please do tell if it can be swallowed.

Mitch

@MattE.Эллен Screw code review, It's live!

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch I did a code review of our Technical Director's code recently ^_^;

the code was already live, so it didn't matter much

Nick

@CowperKettle Oh heyo, it's voldemort's second cousin once removed.

Mitch

@MattE.Эллен 😬

Nick

The aforementioned snack:

twitter.com/dtmooreeditor/status/1569366666844192769

2

Matt E. Эллен

15:33

I read that earlier :D very interesting.

M.A.R.

15:44

@CowperKettle I do NOT like your hippocampus

@Nick Dr. Moo Redditor?

Matt E. Эллен

reed it or (else)

Spiderman, the crawlwall slingweb

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен Probably quicker than having to look up the quicker notation?

I must admit I'd need to look it up.

Matt E. Эллен

@Cerberus it's more that Latin letters must cover more than that (in unicode). something that match both Latin and letter categories

also, shall I start putting u in the Latin alphabet :p

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен Ahh OK.

So you'll probably need some special \ thingy to include marked letters.

But does Javascript support that?

Matt E. Эллен

16:01

in someways

you can't tell if a letter is "Latin", but you can tell if a character is a letter modifier

Řídící

18:15

Do Americans think that 'phenomena' is singular? Why?

Robusto

19:16

Some Americans don't make the distinction. None who frequent this chat, though.

Robusto

19:27

So don't generalize.

tchrist

19:52

@Mitch And you have never been rife with bad dates? Not even when you were a tweenager?

No, of course not. You were not to be rifled with.

Mitch

@tchrist dude. I've covered myself. now avert your eyes.

user 726941

<_<

>_>

(⁠•⁠‿⁠•⁠)

←⁠_⁠←

→⁠_⁠→

Robusto

20:24

@user726941 You were supposed to be writing a paragraph about what you did on your summer vacation, not doodling smiley faces.

user 726941

am I not allowed to use doodling as a part of my brain storming strategy, sir

tchrist

@user726941 Hands above the table, young man.

user 726941

┻⁠┻⁠︵⁠¯⁠\⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠/⁠¯⁠︵⁠┻⁠┻

With all due respect.

Robusto

20:51

All right, report to the principal's office.

forest

21:19

@Mitch Heh, looks like it. I was referring to the action of attractors being possible to model as transforms.

user 726941

:'(

CowperKettle

21:53

> Political analyst Dmitry Drobnitsky asserted: “The recognition of the existence of the Ukrainian people is the biggest mistake in our Soviet history.” Shakhnazarov followed up: “So there are no Ukrainian people?” Drobnitsky replied: “The Ukrainian people do not exist. Any historian will tell you that they don’t exist... You’re offering me to recognize their existence. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Дробницкий, Дмитрий Олегович

Дми́трий Оле́гович Дробни́цкий (род. 20 марта 1968 года, Москва, РСФСР, СССР) — российский политолог-американист, специалист по американской внешней и внутренней политике, писатель-фантаст, публицист, блогер. Автор научно-фантастических произведений под псевдонимом Максим Жуков. == Биография == === Первые годы === Дмитрий Дробницкий родился 20 марта 1968 года в Москве, в интеллигентной семье. Отец — Олег Дробницкий (1933—1973), философ, специалист в области этики и западноевропейской философии, доктор философских наук. Мать — Тамара Кузьмина (род. 1936), доктор философских наук, ведущий...

> Dmitry Drobnitsky was born on March 20, 1968 in Moscow , in an intelligent family. Father - Oleg Drobnitsky (1933-1973), philosopher, specialist in ethics and Western European philosophy, Doctor of Philosophy. Mother - Tamara Kuzmina (born 1936), Doctor of Philosophy, leading researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (until 2017).

user 726941

They do not exist, just like my name on Santa Claus's list.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle Such a tragic fall.

CowperKettle

Emergence of syntax and word prediction in an artificial neural circuit of the cerebellum

Emily Rosa (born February 6, 1987) is the youngest person to have a research paper published in a peer reviewed medical journal. At age nine Rosa conceived and executed a scientific study of therapeutic touch which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…