https://youtu.be/A2H62x_-k5Q?si=EHq5Y4KCzBfo0tfm

https://youtu.be/rzCpT_S536c?si=pxiDY4TPhF_YLfRc

https://youtu.be/wPVe365vpCc?si=AqhpaZHYb4ldSf3F

https://youtu.be/EBaGqojNJfc?si=1CoLn4oeNxK-7bpe

Only way into the article it dawned to me that "nm" could stand for something else, and guess it was "nautical miles". Live and learn...

Still, it turned out to be an interesting read)

As you probably know, it can stay dormant for 10 years or more, but then gets into active stage, causes AIDS, and relatively quickly kills the host.

I once gave a 10-dollar bill to a young man serving at the cashier at a store, and he gave me 14 dollars back as a change. I pointed out that this made no sense. He bent down, looked closer at the screen of his machine, and said "Nope, 14 dollars, no mistake". I asked him if he thought I gave him 20. He said no, and even shown me the 10-dollar bill I just gave him. At that point I just gave up and took the money.

Now that I think about it, there was an eerie similarity between this conversation and some of the dialogues I had with LLMs...

I mean, you can ask an LLM to count letters in thousand of words, and pretty much always it will come with the correct answer! So far I don't know of any word other than "банан" that breaks this function.

We need to be at least somewhat pedantic, otherwise it's impossible to know what we are even talking about, and no way to establish anything.

Otherwise, nothing can be established at all, because for any statement there always will be someone's understanding of "internal monologue" for which the statement is true, and someone's else understanding for which the statement is false...

He thought this was universal, but doing this experiment with friends, he discovered a guy who could count while reading aloud. So when Feynman asked him, how he does this, turned out that the guy instead of "pronouncing" numbers was "seeing" colored numbers in his imagination, so his speech was not involved.

I supposed this experiment can be modified and generalized, and at least to shed some light on this problem.

As someone who was involved in spiritual practice of "stopping internal dialogue" for years, I can tell you that one learns that that dialogue (or monologue, pretty much the same thing) is quite subtle and complex, essentially multi-layered.

Typically, when you think that you "think about nothing at all" it's just the most surface layer that has stopped, and more subtle talking to yourself is still going on. It takes training just to become able to notice and recognize it.

After all, it's just such a constant and monotone hum at the back of one's mind, one learns to completely ignore it.

So no, I would not take a word of people who were not trained to notice their internal monologue that they haven't any :-)

For example, try to ask (better in Russian), how many letters "а" are there in Russian word "банан". It seems all models answer with "3". Playing with it reveals that apparently LLMs confuse Russian "банан" with English "banana" (same meaning). Trying to get LLMs to produce a correct answer results is some hilarity.

I wonder if each "failure" of this kind deserves an academic article, though. Well, perhaps it does, when different models exhibit the same behaviour...

Been there, done that. Journals that changed their names (and identities) but not ISSN. That changed the ISSN but not the name/identity. Journal mergers which instead of obtaining a new ISSN kept one of the old ones. "Predatory journals" that "borrow" an ISSN (you may not consider them real journals, but you've got to track them anyway, even if only to keep them from being added to the "main" database). The list may go on and on.

And don't even start me on using even more natural ID, the journal name, perhaps in combination with some other pieces of data, like year the publication started, country of origin, language, etc... Any scheme based on this will need to have caveats after caveats.

(A fun fact: there were journals that ceased publication but later on "returned from the dead". Such resurrected journals are supposed to be new journals and to get a new ISSN. Sometimes this rule is followed...)

At the end, a "meaningless number" you assign yourself is the only ID that reliably works (in combination with fields representing relationships between journals).

The problem with keys that "have meaning" is that they appear to carry information about your entity. And in vast majority of cases this is correct information! So it's almost impossible to resist "extracting" this information from a key without doing actual database lookup at least mentally, and often in your software too. Hidden assumptions like this lead to bugs that are really hard to eliminate. A meaningless number on the other hand does not tempt one :-)

Representing elements and their contents is easy enough. But attributes, comments, processing instructions, entities... And remember, an XML document can include a DTD (it does not have to be in a separate file).

To present it as a file system in a useful, non-convoluted way? I will be very, very interested if it's possible, but not holding my breath.

Maybe this is not a bad thing. A crisis is a necessary stage in evolution of any complex system. I just hope it does not bury us in a perfect storm...

> Sometimes the kludgy system erroneously showed cars as missing, resulting in hundreds of innocent Hertz customers getting arrested on charges of stealing rentals they’d actually returned.

Granted, in my job the needs for concurrency\parallelism tend to be very simple and limited.

All of this is possible with video and audio in principle, but much less natural and much less convenient; also video somehow "hypnotize" me and I don't feel the urge to think about what I see and hear at the moment; perhaps only afterwards if at all. I have a feeling "oh I get it", but not much remains afterwards.

So I absolutely prefer text to audio or video when learning.

Unlike others here, I never take notes, and rarely do suggested exercises. But I read and think through examples; and as to exercises, I do think of "how I would approach it" and "what is that the author wants me to learn from this exercise".