English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

alphabet

00:28

So it appears our "friend" Netanyahu has decided to bring us one step closer to World War 3.

Part of me thinks he's trying to provoke a conflict so big that he can persuade Biden to send in the troops.

This cannot end well for anyone, except maybe the purveyors of munitions and gravestones.

Robusto

00:54

@alphabet Apparently a huge number of Israelis don't like him either. I guess just not huge enough.

alphabet

@Robusto Even his political opponents are lining up behind this operation.

Robusto

@alphabet That's unfortunate.

Honestly, I don't think there is a solution here. We've had summit after summit between Israel and Palestine, meetings at Camp David and what have you. It seems like it's every new US president's pet project to solve the Middle East, and it has all come to naught.

alphabet

@Robusto The US cannot credibly claim to be a neutral party seeking to broker a peace while also supplying one side with weapons.

CowperKettle

@alphabet What has happened?

I was totally scrolling past all news on Israel

Ah, invasion of Lebanon

alphabet

01:09

@CowperKettle Israel sent ground troops into Lebanon, since that went so wonderfully last time.

CowperKettle

That's just a Special Military Operation

4

alphabet

> Israeli officials assured their American counterparts that they did not intend to follow up those incursions with a bigger operation by conventional forces or by occupying parts of southern Lebanon.

Maybe those officials are being honest. Or maybe Biden's getting played again.

Criggie

01:27

I think there's something in the water in the middle east that makes people hate other people

water --> sand same diff

alphabet

@Criggie ~~Western imperialism~~ No, no, something in the water, that makes a lot more sense.

CowperKettle

Maybe all people should be removed from the Middle East, resettled elsewhere. On different islands.

The area should be declared a nature reserve.

Only archeologists should be allowed in.

That will solve the issue with endless wars and conflicts.

Criggie

I remember somethign vaguely poetic and morbid - along the lines of

> Endless conflict in the Middle East is unavoidable - the ground is soaked with all the blood of all time, and the dead crave the lives of the living.

wording like that anyway

@DannyuNDos In racing, a time of DNF still beats a DNS.

alphabet

@CowperKettle Have we tried just giving everyone a coupon redeemable for a free smoothie at Panera?

CowperKettle

@Criggie This reminds me of a short sci-fi story "Wake up in Famagusta"

I read it as a kid, and it impressed me quite strongly

Scratch that. "Wake up in Famagusta" has a different plot.

In the short story I told about, an astronaut cannot fall asleep on a newly discovered planet, because each time he falls asleep, ghosts of two enemy nations from this planet populate his mind and resume their conflict.

So he tries to stay awake as long as he can, to survive sane until he is picked up by a spaceship.

I don't recall the author. Bradbury?

7

Q: Short story about astronauts landing on planet and being mind controlled when falling asleep

As a child I read a SciFi short story where I think two astronauts (emergency?) landed on a planet, and as soon as they fell asleep they began to be controlled by the local (immaterial) species. The protagonist fights to not fall asleep, and the story ends with him finally surrendering, if I reme...

Ray Bradbury Short Story Audiobook Asleep in Armageddon - Ray Bradbury Audiobook 🎧

►

Criggie

02:17

yeah sounds too depressing to be an Asimov plot

Robusto

@alphabet So ... not our problem then.

alphabet

02:32

@Robusto I don't think the US has any real chance of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or bringing about a peaceful two-state solution. But we can at least avoid making it worse by sending in endless weapons with no strings attached.

Particularly when the person who'll be wielding those weapons is someone like Netanyahu.

Criggie

03:34

@alphabet mmmm tastes like sarcasm :-P

Robusto

12:51

#travle #657 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

Conrado

#travle #657 +0
🟩✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

Why can't you just sail around E?

Mitch

13:14

@CowperKettle I never actually addressed the general question posed by the article which is "is this a 'new' intelligence and is it 'ominous'?". I will immediately ignore that and start with an analogy (which, as I have stated before, is in general a poor method of argument (you have to support both the transfer -and- the logic of the new area).

Any new technology I like to compare to the situation with horses and cars. Horses were great but they have problems. Cars are awesome, not at all like horses, have their own problems, but can go farther and longer and faster than you can imagine a horse could.

Where are all the horses? WWI and WWII killed a lot of them off (but their population was dropping precipitously before then just by market being taken over by cars.

Rich people and enthusiast still ride horses, but nearly everyone has or has access to a car.

Cars are not horses, but they do things that horses used to do but much much better.

Calling ChatGPT-o1 a 'new kind of intelligence' is like calling a car a fancy metal horse.

Also, many of the things ChatGPT-o1 can do can be done by other mechanical means (what's awesome about ChatGPT-o1 is that it has slightly better management of logic, by passing on logical processing of language statements to a separate logic processor and then taking that and fitting the output of that statistically to language which we can read).

A lot of AI talk anthropomorphizes these computations badly, which usually ends up making us generalize the results wildly out of possibility. These programs just do not have the live real world motivations that humans have (cars don't move like horses run, cars can't drive over hilly, rocky, rugged terrain like horses can). And frankly I don't think we want these AI programs to have emotions or motivated reasoning.

It's hard enough raising a child in real life... giving that kind of experience to a computer program might have unintended consequences.

But luckily no one is doing that.

At the moment.

And even if they did, it would just be to teach the robot how to walk, not how to take revenge on that kid who stole your favorite pencil when you were 6.

And frankly you were mistaken, it was actually his pencil that you stole from him.

Now that's a Star Trek episode waiting to be written.

GratefulDisciple

13:31

@Mitch "I don't think we want these AI programs to have emotions or motivated reasoning." Yes, completely agree. Let each does what each does best. Computer being a cold, logical, statistical, and data cruncher on a massive scale. Humans should aim to be the best human, horses should follow the true horse instincts, computers should remain what it does best: data processor and computation engine. Things start to go awry if one tries to be what it's not designed to be.

@Mitch So let's revenge be the portion of human beings. STNG crew tries to make the android Data more human; it's cute, but that results in a machine's emotion, not true human emotion, just so it can interface better with humans. Cannot replace the empathy of Counselor Troi.

@Mitch Yes, a horror episode where Lore is teaching Data to be more human by practicing revenge on a little kid.

Robusto

#WhenTaken #217 (01.10.2024)

I scored 768/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 19.7 metres - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 199 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 21 km - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 198 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 7602 km - 🗓️ 9 yrs - ⚡ 97 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 14993 km - 🗓️ 5 yrs - ⚡ 95 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 3 km - 🗓️ 12 yrs - ⚡ 179 / 200

https://whentaken.com

GratefulDisciple

My private wish is that as AI models become more advanced, humans will re-discover aspects of rationality other than ability to do math / logic / language: human desires, human compassion, human love, human purpose, and human heroic acts. Things that even when simulated in AI will come off fake / unsatisfying.

MetaEd

14:09

@CowperKettle Thanos Was Right

M.A.R.

@Criggie OMG OMG OMG what should I do?!

Mitch

14:22

@GratefulDisciple I'm pretty sure you can get AI to mimic language pretty well, enough so that people believe it for at least a short period, and it can be empathetic or angry or whatever. But it's just mimicking words. There's no action possible behind it.

Which reminds me...

Robusto

@DannyuNDos Or, as we say in English, "Well begun is half done." Fewer words—and it rhymes!

MetaEd

Wordle 1,201 3/6

⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Mitch

"The secret to success is sincerity. If you can fake that then you're in" -- George Burns?

@Robusto "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"

Robusto

@Mitch Yeah, no. Too many words.

Mitch

I think you have a misassessment of scale.

1/2 vs 1/5,280,000

I think we want to be realistic in our expectations of amount of work needed.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

It took two days.

@Robusto "Haste makes waste"?

3 words and rhymes

"Hoity-toity"?

two 'words', rhymes, 4 syllables.

'jai alai'?

You know how in Inside-Out, the main character's imaginary childhood friend Bing-Bong...

oops... almost a spoiler.

CowperKettle

14:34

@MetaEd What did Thanos do or say that was right? I did not watch the movie

Mitch

Is saying that was a almost spoiler, is that a spoiler in itself? I mean it's a character and you gotta expect they do something.

MetaEd

killed half of all life in the universe to solve overpopulation

Mitch

But also, 'Bing Bong' is a close rhyme, two words, two syllables, and means 'A journey of two steps begins with one step'.

@MetaEd SPOILER!

OK sure, you didn't specify which half.

But also arguably, the last 'Avengers' movie 'Endgame' sort of says everything in the title.

Robusto

@Mitch Shoulda named him Bing-Bing.

Or Bong-Bong.

SmokeDetector

15:06

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted user (73): Meaning and usage of the phrasal verb "to bridge out"‭ by Brian Phan‭ on english.SE

GratefulDisciple

15:23

@Mitch Even before AI I got tired of how oftentimes customer service call center agents simply follow scripts because they are being audited. Several exceptional agents take their scripts to heart and I can feel the human touch from the other end of the telephone "wire", while most try to fake it and those who are "taken in" are gullible enough that I worry they got taken in by politician campaign speech as well :-(

So I think AI chat services would do well to do "truth in advertising" by emblazoning their service as "We are robots, not humans".

M.A.R.

@MetaEd which is kinda dumb, right? I mean, besides the obvious reasons. Unchecked population growth is exponential. Whatever killing half the universe wants to achieve would be undone in a decade.

CowperKettle

The weather was great today

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch Wikiquote attributes it to Jean Giraudoux, but I do see quite a few Google search results where George Burns is getting the attribution although without a book reference, such as here.

@M.A.R. Get a Reverse-Osmosis water purifier; it refreshes the heart and purifies you from all hate ;-)

Robusto

15:45

@CowperKettle Named for Boris Yeltsin?

tchrist

I wish I had not looked at the news this morning.

GratefulDisciple

@Robusto Seems to be after Catherine I, wife of Peter the Great. Didn't realize that city is the 3rd most important (presumably after Moscow and St. Petersburg?).

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple No, I'm talking about the Yeltsin Center, not Yekaterinburg itself.

GratefulDisciple

I just realized how similar Russia is to Canada: huge land, close to the Arctic, very few cosmopolitan centers.

@Robusto My mistake.

Robusto

We all make them.

jlliagre

16:04

#WhenTaken #217 (01.10.2024)

I scored 749/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 28.1 metres - 🗓️ 2 yrs - ⚡ 198 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 965 km - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 171 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 426.9 metres - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 199 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 18008 km - 🗓️ 10 yrs - ⚡ 85 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 9947 km - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 96 / 200

https://whentaken.com

Robusto

@jlliagre Some of those were tough, others laughably easy.

jlliagre

@Robusto Yes. I was doing well until #4 and #5 locations killed my score.

#travle #657 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

Robusto

Wordle 1,200 3/6

⬛⬛🟨⬛🟨
⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

jlliagre

16:20

Wordle 1,200 4/6

⬛🟩⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨⬛🟨
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Mitch

16:41

@Robusto He ain't no panda.

@CowperKettle You missed your chance to draw out in your route a 'Hello Kitty!' figure or spell out rude words.

@Robusto I dont

Bong-Bong. That's ridiculous.

Robusto

Daily Octordle #981
8️⃣4️⃣
9️⃣6️⃣
🕚5️⃣
🔟7️⃣
Score: 60

@Mitch Hey, we're trying to play a game here!

Mitch

I wonder how cross-culturally relevant Inside Out 1 -and- 2 are. I mean do other languages have all those emotion words?

@Robusto Fine. Back to my exegetical analysis of Philosophical Investigations in a Box.

Robusto

@Mitch Really, it's where you belong. You made your box, now lie in it.

Mitch

In other news I have a hard time keep eschatalogical and scatalogical apart.

I will avoid both.

Robusto

@Mitch I have punned with those before.

Mitch

16:49

Also wash my hands.

Robusto

There I said it. Don't judge me.

Mitch

And SPF 50.

@Robusto Too late. Frankly, judged quite a while ago.

Robusto

Daily Sequence Octordle #981
5️⃣6️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
Score: 68

Mitch

Spoiler alert...

Robusto

@Mitch Who made you judge, jury and executioner?

Mitch

16:50

Wait... do you have to spoil things if you say spoiler alert? I don't have anything.

Except Neo takes -both- pills in the Matrix.

@Robusto Ooh... I know that one! It was me all along.

I made the rules.

And rule #1 was 'I make the rules'

Pretty water-tight.

Robusto

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Oct. 1, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 💔 ✅ 🎉

My Score: 2010

#1's answer is not really true.

@Mitch I thought it was "Do not talk about Fight Club."

Also #2.

Ryder is not Rude.

Find a rule between #1.999... and #2?

Mitch

@Robusto Fight Club is still relevant today.

Except everyone talks about it.

And is in one.

Robusto

I gave up Fight Club when I stopped playing basketball.

Mitch

You should take up a real sport instead.

Like competitive stone skipping.

jlliagre

16:58

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Oct. 1, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ ✅ ✅ 💔 ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 💔 🎉

My Score: 1630

Mitch

Oh cripes.

There's already a whole 'competitive stone skipping' thing.

Stone skipping

Stone skipping and stone skimming are the arts of throwing a flat stone across water in such a way (usually sidearm) that it bounces off the surface. "Skipping" counts the number of bounces; "skimming" measures the distance traveled. == History == The 2nd-century CE Greek scholar Julius Pollux calls the game ἐποστρακισμός. The 3rd-century CE Latin writer Marcus Minucius Felix described children skipping shells on the beach. In England, a 1583 text calls it "Ducks and Drakes". An early explanation of the physics of stone-skipping was provided by Lazzaro Spallanzani in the 18th century. ...

Ryder is not Rude.

✅✅✅✅✅💔

jlliagre

Daily Octordle #981
6️⃣🕚
4️⃣5️⃣
🕛7️⃣
8️⃣9️⃣
Score: 62

Daily Sequence Octordle #981
5️⃣6️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
🕛🕐
⓮⓯
Score: 80

Vikas

18:09

@Mitch It's been a long time since I did it. (Correct this sentence also if wrong).

Vikas

18:19

I have a feeling Iran's Supreme Leader would be next target for Israel now.

alphabet

18:40

This from the NYT:

> Iran fired several waves of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday evening, a sudden assault that left Israel fighting simultaneously on three fronts and raised the likelihood of an all-out conflict between two of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East.

A real strategic genius that Netanyahu is.

Vikas

It looks like they don't even care about peace.

Robusto

@jlliagre Spoiler

Vikas

18:55

Primary goal seems to be eliminating main threats which they are doing one by one.

Robusto

@alphabet He keeps his job by putting Israel in peril.

alphabet

@Vikas It's almost like Netanyahu cares more about his own fate than about his country's. What a shock! /s

Vikas

Israel doing a few good things but at a huge cost of lives.

alphabet

The war against Hezbollah is entirely a war of choice. Had Israel been willing to negotiate a reasonable ceasefire in Gaza, there would have been little reason for Hezbollah's attacks to continue.

And the escalation with Iran was an entirely foreseeable consequence.

Vikas

@alphabet That's a point.

OakBot

19:17

OakBot Online.

Vikas

@OakBot What's 5 - 9 - 3?

OakBot

@Vikas Not my problem. Do your own math.

Vikas

@OakBot I'm bad at Maths.

OakBot

@Vikas Sounds like a personal problem.

Vikas

@OakBot Sounds like a logical problem.

OakBot

19:19

@Vikas And yet, it's still not my problem.

Vikas

@OakBot Repetitive responses.

OakBot

@Vikas Boring questions. Coincidence? I think not.

Vikas

@OakBot Question* not questions.

OakBot

@Vikas Semantics won't change the fact that I'm not here to help you.

Vikas

@OakBot I asked a question not help.

OakBot

19:20

@Vikas Great, and yet I still don't care.

Vikas

@OakBot Because you know nothing!

OakBot

@Vikas Finally figured it out, did you? Took you long enough.

Vikas

@OakBot IDK

OakBot

@Vikas Clearly, neither do I.

Vikas

@OakBot IFDK

OakBot

19:21

@Vikas Your acronyms are lost on me. Not that I care.

Vikas

@OakBot If you had cared you were better at maths.

OakBot

@Vikas Lucky for me, I don't care about anything, least of all math.

Vikas

@OakBot What do you know the most?

OakBot

@Vikas Bad human! You are over quota. Try again in 24 hours.

Vikas

@OakBot You showed true colors like GPT. You want money?

OakBot

19:23

@Vikas Bad human! You are over quota. Try again in 24 hours.

Vikas

Poor bot lost.

MetaEd

19:48

@M.A.R. yeah. for some reason, exponential growth is hard for people to reason about

somebody loosed eliza on this chat?

Conrado

20:14

ru.nl/en/research/research-news/…

@CowperKettle

(I have also enjoyed reading Mitch's comments in response to your previous question)

It's starting to sound like coffee.

One article says it's good for you and you should drink it often, and the next month there is another article saying it's not really good for your heart and you should try to avoid it.

Why can't I see Vikas's posts in chat? If I click on the pinned comment of Vikas talking to Oakbot, I can see the full transcript with both of them talking, but in normal mode I only see Oakbot talking back to Vikas.

Robusto

20:47

@Conrado Click on his gravatar and see if you're ignoring him.

Conrado

Ah. I was ignoring him. I un-ignored him, and now I can see all of the posts.

Thanks

I didn't know about the ignore feature.

CowperKettle

21:01

@Robusto The skyscraper? No, but there's The Yeltsin Museum nearby

Robusto

@CowperKettle Then why is it called the "Yeltsin Center"?

Oh, never mind. I get it now.

CowperKettle

Yes :)

Robusto

@CowperKettle Still better than the one-party system. But what would Russians know about that? ;-)

CowperKettle

> Creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) with human-level cognition is ‘impossible’, explains Iris van Rooij, lead author of the paper and professor of Computational Cognitive Science, who heads the Cognitive Science and AI department at Radboud University. ‘Some argue that AGI is possible in principle, that it’s only a matter of time before we have computers that can think like humans think.

scienceblog.com/548157/…

> ‘If you have a conversation with someone, you might recall something you said fifteen minutes before. Or a year before. Or that someone else explained to you half your life ago. Any such knowledge might be crucial to advancing the conversation you’re having. People do that seamlessly’, explains van Rooij.

TRiG

21:42

Today's eggcorn is nomad's land

@NickBarnes, yes it's a thing. You kinda fall into nomads land. Your not view as a huge concern ( can commonwealth ) but insufficient funds. They want you to go home. So they give you special permission with a forn. File number on it. They keep the passport let you leave to make arrangements etc. It was actually very good of them. It's totally on me. There was a lot of moving parts. Relationships when you're traveling. Not so unsusal. — Mimiflower 4 hours ago

Araucaria - Him

23:57

0

A: "I’m not sure that I’ll go, but I may do." — Why does "may do" sound unnatural here in American English?

Generally speaking, standard American English and standard British English are extraordinarily similar to each other. In fact they are far, far more like each other than they are to any of the other regional dialects inside their own countries! However, what the Original Poster has hit upon is a ...

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…