This is fantastic. Great job! I like the easier to comprehend language than what you typically find when reading information about this stuff (wikipedia is one of the worst...).
You'd probably like Nand2Tetris. To be frank, I never finished it (it's so long!), but building a CPU from scratch was insightful (at the time - I don't remember much now, sadly).
When Chomsky proposed generative grammars, his theory of universal language acquisition, and so on, they were radical ideas that upturned the central cannon of linguistics.
Time has been on his side - entire schools and subfields of linguistics went extinct as more evidence emerged that Chomsky was fundamentally right. Basically every computer language and data format in existence is parsed/lexed in ways inspired by his models of language.
But now Chomsky is considered the stodgy old establishment, and whenever one of his theories is contradicted somewhere on the margins people shout "Aha! He was wrong the whole time!" and ignore the 99% of cases where his models are still the best ones we have.
This is a hot take, would love a link/explanation on why you think neural nets are human-like. For example, from the op Ed you’re likely referencing:
“ Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.”
Isn’t that just plainly true of LLMs? Sure they can produce text that looks like an explanation, and sure putting in a header telling it to spell out its reasoning will get it to output text that looks like reasoning, but I feel the nature of its hallucinations make it clear that it’s not actually performing those steps anywhere in the net.
But maybe I’m just a Luddite? These technologies are amazing and transformative, I’m just shocked to see hate on HN of CHOMSKY of all people, the father of modern linguistics and cognitive science…
Why do you think this is impossible? Have you tried making an account on chat.openai.com? Because it can in fact do that right now; and even people who are otherwise skeptical of LLMs have panned Chomsky's article.
He wrote an op ed recently with the oft-repeated argument that stochastic models are fundamentally distinct from structured symbolic/logical models. In simple terms you can never really “trust” chatgpt’s answers because it’s just guessing the answer that looks right, not applying structured reasoning like humans do.
> In simple terms you can never really “trust” chatgpt’s answers because it’s just guessing the answer that looks right, not applying structured reasoning like humans do.
That example was highly controversial, and I think Chomsky was actually right in that instance (all languages have recursion). Generally my understanding is that he's considered to have held the field of linguistics back quite a bit with a non-disprovable hypothesis.
He supported the communist though. He also supported Pol Pot. You can predict his opinions of foreign policy if you understand that he bases them on the "US is evil" axiom and therefore anyone who opposes it is good, no matter how actually evil they may be.
Chomsky absolutely was a Cambodian Genocide denailist at the time. He very arrogantly dismissed actual eyewitness testimony of the genocide from refugees purely for ideological reasons.
Did you skip my first link or are you disagreeing with it? It's about the same subject. And in your WP link has a second quote writing about the genocide as fact.
Chomsky's skepticism in the media criticism article talking (among other things) about a book about the then-contemporary events of course looks quite unfortunate in retrospect, but given the volume of work and constant writing about world events over a long career it seems to be a error in judgement in the moment, rather than denying history, especially as he evidently updated his views later as more evidence came about.
It was completely unjustified at the time. There was absolutely no reason to doubt the testimony of refugees coming from Cambodia, other than they didn't fit into Chomsky's strange worldview that the US is the cause of all problems in the world.
Even today his views on Russia's invasion of Ukraine are completely moronic.
For ‘Peace Activists,’ War Is About America, Never Russia
Their own hard-left worldview is so absorbing that they will take the side of any aggressor in the anti-Western camp.
Brave doesn't have the features offered by those extensions, it doesn't have anything equivalent to multi account containers, it doesn't have DNS emulation (unless you install Decentraleyes) and it doesn't auto delete cookies (you still need to install Cookie Autodelete). The built in ad blocker is not as advanced as uBlock Origin and that's why I installed the latter as an extension (I turned off the built in one). Anyway IMHO the biggest limitation currently is the lack of containers, because it needs to be built into the browser, there is no 3rd party extension that can give you that.
Firefox’s Tracking Protection blocklist blocks many known fingerprinting scripts by default.
Firefox also has an active fingerprinting protection mode that spoofs the unique values returned from some JavaScript APIs (such as locale, time zone, screen dimensions, WebGL), but this feature flash is currently buried in about:config because it can break websites. How to enable fingerprinting protection anyway:
> If these companies can’t turn a profit while complying with the law then they don’t have a viable business model
Are you seriously telling me that if people don't interact freely in the way bureaucrats want them to interact, then those people should, by law, not be allowed to interact?
Do you think it's necessary for a novel to take a strong position on the Cold War? Propaganda from an enemy state is not a way to get a clear picture of what a place was like.
So are those the only 2 options? Why the fondness for a dichotomy? Sign of the times I guess.
To expand my comment, the problem is not that it criticizes the soviet regime, that is OK and even needed.The big problem is the total lack of nuance which robs the work of any artistic value. When you read non-fiction and fiction soviet authors (Chekhov, Dostoevski, Grossmann, Zhukov, Bulgakov) there is always criticism of the government in general and the individual in particular, to different degrees, but there is also a human side present, this human warmness. Yes, the bureaucrats suck and the party establishment are bastards, but summer in the dacha is fantastic, getting drunk with friends is a brotherly experience and there is Masha waiting for me hopefully to form a nice family. All of this is mostly absent or totally disfigured in western authors treating soviet themes, this work one of the worst exponents. The soviet union portrayed in Rocky IV and Ivan Drago are more credible and three-dimensional than any character in this work. The people are only corrupt, incompetent and bad to the core (meany meany commies) or helpless victims of the system with 0 agency whatsoever. It's painfully obvious the author has not clue about the actual psyche of a soviet citizen or functionary.
It sounds like Spufford fails to see the Soviet citizens as real humans.
For an example how to not do that, all one must do is read any of the authors you mention (or Tolstoy, Chukovskaya, Gogol...) Tolstoy in particular has a knack for painting the interior psychological worlds of his characters fluidly and from a place of deep empathy.
That is definitely not the impression I got from reading the book. I can mostly only recall accounts of ordinary people trying to make the best of the absurd situations they faced.
They don’t even compare. USSR was the empire (a country plus its occupied territories) people literally were losing their life trying to get the hell out of.
You'd probably like Nand2Tetris. To be frank, I never finished it (it's so long!), but building a CPU from scratch was insightful (at the time - I don't remember much now, sadly).