One of the prompting guides I came across early on was to ask your questions using vernacular of the domain not lay terms because the correct data you are looking for will be more likely to be around/near the expert terms rather than in the pop/lay/newbie terms next token wise.
I recently realized this as well and I think what I’ve discovered is that AI just produces mediocre content in all realms, but you don’t really notice it except in the realms where you have real expertise. With a lot of harness and prompting you can have it pump out something that’s pretty good but by default the next best token rarely produces anything of quality it seems like and if you think it does, perhaps you may want to recheck your assumptions on your expertise of the topic at hand
I do think this explains much of it. But it doesn’t explain why Claude often writes in the clipped tone of that gnomic in-house tech evangelist who was inexplicably hired because he impressed the CEO.
(I may be projecting real life experience onto the LLM.)
I am genuinely fascinated as to how Claude acquired its utterly aggravating way of writing. It’s so much more irritating than ChatGPT, which is already not good.
Yeah the latest batch is really keyed on certain phrases - well beyond “you’re absolutely right!” Of the past. And the readability is trash almost always by default. Probably because they are forcing code so hard that it’s aligning prose into functional groups or something.
Interesting. So you think it’s somewhat emergent, in that sense, rather than a sort of designed tone of voice/writing style specified by supervised fine tuning (or the system prompt)?
Honest question how could they possibly train on this as there are no good SVG pelicans to train off right? So they’re just training off a bunch of bad ones which should lead to just bad pelicans, but the pelicans are getting better.
Training on generating SVGs directly at all is already fairly niche. Generating full scenes with a cartoony character is even nicher. But there's plenty of non-pelican cartoony SVG content out there (created, not written, by humans with vector design tools), and more importantly, plenty of vision models to give feedback on the output (just raster as a png). You could easily hill climb this niche skill, if you cared.
I would say you should assume your models are constantly being attacked by various forms of prompt injection. By that token (puns) if you treat all models as adversarial you’d probably taking a very sane approach. That said - evidence of this sort of thing should be easy to find and report on. The fact we haven’t seen it leads me to believe it is not there.
There is a concept that my maternal grandmother had that they would always having their own husbandry (cows/buffalos) within her village and yes, they didn't eat eggs as well.
My maternal grandfather was a teacher which was a really prestigious job at that time, the only reason that they had their own cows was because of the belief. Reflecting upon it now, I believe it to be a good faith belief, they took care of the animals as well in terms of personal care from what I've heard of stories growing up, my mother still remembers some of the cows/buffalos and their names and other things so that's nice to hear as well :)
I wish this form of Veganism was more well-known. I know a few Vegans who went down a similar path and who were told by a few people they were no longer Vegan. They took the easier path and stopped calling themselves Vegans, which I thought was sad given their objectives when becoming Vegan were clear from the get-go.
It's by definition not vegan to consume animal products. I'm happy that the term is considered so virtuous that people want to self-identify as such (I've even heard meat-eaters say they're vegan "except from time to time"), but I don't think it's intolerant/bigoted to simply look at the definition.
Here's the definition from the guys behind the word "veganism":
> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals
The short definition you're talking about is abridged for time saving, it miss the essence ["for the benefit of..."] and the necessary feasibility adaptations ["as far as is possible and practicable"].
That quote seems to be reinforcing my point but your excerpts indicate you disagree, so I'm.not sure why you posted this: I will assume you're disagreeing, sorry if I misunderstood.
The adaptations in that quote are about the animals who will be harmed without your intending to do so during your own attempts to survive, like the insects killed during harvest. The essence and the last sentence of the definition are also in line with what I am saying. Eating dairy by choice while identifying as vegan is not due to one coming to the limits of 'as far as possible', under any definition of 'possible' or 'practicable'.
A word may have different meaning depending on the usage: who, when, context... Formal language isn't the norm for better or for worse. I mostly agree with your two messages but also wanted to add a touch of pluralism: veganism origin and ideal has something to do with ethics by (more or less) avoiding unnecessary harm by avoiding animal exploitation but the goal and means to achieve it may differ.
The interpretation of "possible and practicable" you gave is aligned with my understanding but I can understand other people may include:
- [as the article subject] the only food you can eat contains flesh, because you're detained in prison/stay at the hospital
- The social pressure is too strong for you to possibly cope with it
- Avoiding to use any toiletry that contains carmine, collagen or glycerin may be a hassle when one is away in holiday or work
Also, some people consider excluding bivalves from the list keep intact the goal of harm avoidance.
The cursor is subjective. I can grasp how someone may define themselves vegan and for whatever reason consume some animal products. However debating of the definition itself does not serve the shared cause of animal condition consideration. Instead it is far more effective to focus on shifting the laws (see the article) and bringing the questions/solutions to the public debate, which would solve most of the social pressure. Let's team up for 90% of the animal cause together and when it will be acquired we'll discuss the last 10%.
To end this message, I wish you a pleasant day and share with you a conference I had the chance to assit 2 days ago, I think it's very pertinent - but also in french, I hope the auto-translation are good. It's called "Do vegans harm the animal cause?" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCRdLa99DE
The vegan who ignores the last sentence and the definition "In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals"
It's kind of like the Christian who ignores the conversation in the gospel of John:
"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."
Basically, if you're vegan because you object to industrial farming practices, and value animal welfare, eating animal products (or even meat) that you personally produced, while personally overseeing the animal welfare and farming practices doesn't necessarily violate your values.
I get that in a literal sense you wouldn't be vegan anymore, but if you're maintaining the same ethical framework that led you to veganism, it's not unreasonable to want to express that.
No animal evolved solely to produce food for humans and to be property, and I think that's a major blindspot that people have, which allows them to believe into this idea.
Buying an animal, restraining it in your property, subjecting it to whatever's needed for it to produce (look this up if you need to), consuming said products, and in the end of its useful life selling the animal (and let's not imagine that it's sold to animal sanctuaries): none of this is in line with being vegan. All of it harms the animal in some way and normalises the dismissal of animal life, independent of whatever the person wants to believe.
Someone who believes veganism is the right way, but is not personally vegan, can say just that: it's a perfectly tenable philosophical position to have. Self-identifying as vegan while not being vegan is where it becomes absurd.
> It's by definition not vegan to consume animal products
Definitions can change, especially when it comes to personal beliefs of what is right and wrong. Christianity, for example, has split countless versions as people redefine what it means to them. Yet they all still call themselves Christians.
I seriously feel like I'm being DDoS'd, because this position is so absurd and has so many counters to it (can you really not realise this?) that I don't know where to start.
The definition of veganism includes more than just not eating animal products, but that aspect of it leaves no place to ambiguity.
What's the appeal of including vegetarians and carnists into veganism? It's not like vegans wield political power or are privileged in some way, where does this strange type of inclusivity at the detriment of reality come from?
I've heard that one of the core tenants of veganism is about not being cruel to animals. In the case of raising your own chickens where you have full knowledge of how well they are cared for and no cruelty is involved, what's the philosophical harm of eating their eggs. In the case, this core tenant of veganism is maintained.
I wish more Vegans were able to accept this form of spectrum that you are talking about. Food is quite a social thing.
JaidenAnimation has done a great video[0] summarizing something like this of her vegan journey and exactly this type of nuance as well, I highly recommend checking it out
Let me give you a personal example as well, I am Hindu and Milk is very very preferred where I live. Due to my taste preference, I dislike Milk but I am really expected to have something milk based so I like Yogurt.
Even just this small act of preference of yogurt rather than Milk which could seem pretty small has genuinely left my relatives asking many many questions and I am sometimes forced to drink milk when I go to people when I would prefer otherwise because of social pressure.
I can probably take vegan yogurt if I particularly want so but we take milk fresh from the milkman who owns the cow in their house. where I live, the way people treat animals in their house is a very ethical point of view, its basically like how pets are except they help in livelihood/income
So I have some sympathies to people who you are talking about. There is enough social pressure from the people around you.
More broadly speaking, Veganism might perhaps land better as a spectrum rather than a binary switch. It has a lot of things going for it which could help its future but at the same time, it gets a large amount of flack from a loud minority and bad clips
Jains in India are heavy consumers of dairy products. They consume honey too. Most of them would avoid vegetables that grow underground and avoid the use of leather. They’re generally a bit closer to orthodox Hindus in practice.
They had homes, cardboard box homes. Then the government said a home couldn't be a cardboard box, and confiscated the cardboard boxes and now they sleep on benches.
If you’ve been keeping track of all of the pelicans, there is actually stylistic differences - sometimes pretty big differences as far as watercolors go. It’s an SVG so I’m not sure what you’re looking for there. Most look the same because the prompt is to make a pelican on a bicycle as an SVG. It’s not some giant image prompt.
I'm not sure I understand what part of my post this is in reference to. I agree that the democratic party gets a _lot_ of money. Are you contrasting to something in my post, or agreeing?
Appreciate clarification, I could also just be dumb today
I think the point is that most of Democrats' supposed positions on the working class, climate, inequality etc. are purely performative. Their actual policies are 99% the same as Republicans and they essentially just as corrupt and beholden to the wealth class.
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