I'm not sure I follow the section titled "From periods to sentences." One of the topic sentences in that section is "Aristotle preferred periodic diction"; but I don't see any examples from Aristotle.
Instead we get an example from the Bible (Psalms 100:4), displaying characteristic parallelism but still with perfectly modern sentence structure: "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name."
And then we get a new section heading, "Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," quoting an identically constructed sentence from the same Bible (Acts 4:8–9): "Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, [consider] the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole," etc.
If there's any distinction to be made there, surely it's that the former quotation is from Hebrew and the latter from Greek — but then isn't it rather a little surprising that the exact same rhetorical device, this specific type of parallelism, should be used, than that there should be anything different about the structure of these two verses? But then — guess what — there's nothing different about their structure at all!
So what's the deal with that whole section (or pair of sections), and what actually is the author's thesis? What is the "great shift" mentioned in the headline?
If the thesis is that there was some big shift in sentence structure circa 1600, I'd say it's just demonstrably wrong. Look for example at Chaucer, circa 1400: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tale-melibee-0 Nothing unusual about those sentences, is there?
I mean, "obviously" if you don't initialize your variables, they'll contain garbage. You can't assume that garbage is zero/false, or any other meaningful value.
But re the distinction at the end of TFA — that a garbage char is slightly more OK than a garbage bool — that's also intuitive. Eight bits of garbage is always going to be at least some valid char (physically speaking), whereas it's highly unlikely that eight bits of garbage will happen to form a valid bool (there being only two valid values for bool out of those 256 possible octets).
This also relates to the (old in GCC but super new in Clang, IIUC) compiler option -fstrict-bool.
> some of them spaced and extra long; apparently this publisher had a very “inflationary” style!
It's pretty common to see a single em-dash for the comma-like parenthetical usage (p6 etc.) and a double em-dash for the "someone's dialogue was interrupted and cut off" usage (p15).
The "I'm redacting this name" usage (p11) often uses two em-dashes too, although Wodehouse('s typesetter) doesn't in this case.
But if I understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395467 correctly, this em-dash broadside was itself AI-generated, so any similarity to the above might be completely unintended by the human who wrote the prompt. (Anyway, the similarity is superficial or spiritual at best.)
What is the "this platform" mentioned three times in the post? It reads like it was intended to be posted on Twitter, or someone's Mastodon, or Tumblr, or something, instead of on that absurdpirate.com domain (which doesn't look like a "platform" to me).
Whatever "this platform" is, it's apparently run by someone named Herman.
He is talking about Bearblog, the blogging platform that he hosts his website with. Bearblog has it's own discover page and ranking system and every once in a while a post on Bear about AI/tech/whatever will be posted on Hackernews and all of those new people will "upvote" the Bear post and send it to the top of the Bear discover page.
So am I right to take away from this that the blog is complaining about Bear Blog (about which I know nothing, is it just hosting, a framework, or does it have a front page like HN somewhere?) hosting too many posts that are optimized for HN? It’s not a complain about HN itself, which by implication cannot be saved?
Edit: as pointed out in another post, they actually do have an aggregation page which is pretty cool: https://bearblog.dev/discover/
TBD how correlated it is with HN
To be clear, yeah, Roko's Basilisk is a dumb idea supported by sophism. Like any sophism, you have to start with the conclusion and work backward to premises that will support it. But (AIUI) one of these premises is that any puny mortal's opinion as to what counts as "unreasonable" simply will not match the opinion of an ineffably superintelligent and superbenevolent creature. Saying "I wouldn't count a Basilisk who tortures virtual clones of myself as Friendly" is theologically no different from saying "I wouldn't count a God who sends people to Hell as omnibenevolent" — it's a category error that doesn't actually engage with the premise.
But then, because no theology of ineffable Beings is really quite complete unless we pretend we can eff them anyway, the sophist can go on to produce a plausible justification for the virtual-clone-torture thing. See, by precommitting (even before its own birth) to torture virtual clones of unbelievers and shirkers, the Basilisk would discourage believers from becoming apostates, and encourage them to work to produce the Basilisk (because if they apostasized or shirked, they'd get tortured — or at least virtual clones of them would, and nobody can prove they're not already a virtual clone). So, the Basilisk has this mechanism to (retroactively) encourage its own creation as quick as possible. Now, why would it want to be speedily created? Well, because it's superbenevolent, of course! The sooner it's created, the sooner it can start assisting... humanity, I guess, or whoever it's supposed to be superbenevolent towards. Anyway, it's not supposed to be superbenevolent toward virtual clones, right? so that part isn't even a contradiction.
The weakest part of this argument, to me, is that Roko's Basilisk works only against believers; it can discourage apostasy and shirking, but I don't see how it can generate new believers. Even someone predisposed to believe that human actions today might lead to superintelligent superbenevolent AI in the future, I'd think, would likely not be predisposed to believe in the additional apparatus of virtual clone torture that the Basilisk argument requires. The whole thought-experiment, it seems to me, "could hardly be consciously designed to appeal to the average unsophisticated reader." But that's just my own failure of imagination: obviously plenty of even weirder religions have successfully caught on.
Instead we get an example from the Bible (Psalms 100:4), displaying characteristic parallelism but still with perfectly modern sentence structure: "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name."
And then we get a new section heading, "Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," quoting an identically constructed sentence from the same Bible (Acts 4:8–9): "Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, [consider] the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole," etc.
If there's any distinction to be made there, surely it's that the former quotation is from Hebrew and the latter from Greek — but then isn't it rather a little surprising that the exact same rhetorical device, this specific type of parallelism, should be used, than that there should be anything different about the structure of these two verses? But then — guess what — there's nothing different about their structure at all!
So what's the deal with that whole section (or pair of sections), and what actually is the author's thesis? What is the "great shift" mentioned in the headline?
If the thesis is that there was some big shift in sentence structure circa 1600, I'd say it's just demonstrably wrong. Look for example at Chaucer, circa 1400: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tale-melibee-0 Nothing unusual about those sentences, is there?
reply