Enora ʕ ᄋ ᴥ ᄋʔ

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 38

maximizing hardware lifespans, minimizing energy use and focussing on the use of already available computational resources.
permacomputing
there has not been an attempt to evaluate statistically the likelihood of any arbitrary set of languages sharing a number of features by chance given a fixed number to choose from.
Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages | Nature Human Behaviour
The creole profile hypothesis postulates the existence of a transmission bottleneck, resulting in pidgins as precursor stages of the new languages. Pidgins are restricted codes of communication with an extremely limited lexicon and grammar that do not have any native speakers
Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages | Nature Human Behaviour
The success of the plantations increased the need for manpower, and soon the Europeans (and the first slaves) were outnumbered. This complicated access to the colonial language varieties for newcomers and thus successive generations shaped the language according to the linguistic features they brought in from the substrates, as the founder population had shaped the bulk of the grammar.
Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages | Nature Human Behaviour
The lexifiers are the languages that contributed the bulk of their words and they are usually colonial dialectal varieties of Western European languages, such as Portuguese, French and English. The substrate languages are those that were spoken by the slaves or labourers and carried over—often from Africa and the Pacific—to the new overseas settlements. However, the ancestry of creoles can be more diverse, with instances of Arabic and Malay acting as lexifiers, and substrates originating from Australian Aboriginal languages or Austronesian languages from the South Pacific.
Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages | Nature Human Behaviour
languages with larger populations tend to have simpler morphology, presumably due to the larger number of non-native speakers
Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages | Nature Human Behaviour
Papuan language Ye´lıˆDnye makes a direct con-trast between a coarticulated “tp,” and a “t˙p” where the t˙is further back towards the palate (Ladefoged & Maddie-son 1996, pp. 344–45;
(PDF) The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science
There have been two hundred years of speculation thatsign languages may be the evolutionary precursors tohuman speech, a view recently revived by the discoveryof mirror-neurons (Arbib 2005)
(PDF) The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science
Without the strain of hereditary deafness,the cultural adaptation would not exist, whereas thecultural adaptation allows signers to lead normal lives,productive and reproductive, thus maintaining thegenetic basis for the adaptation
(PDF) The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science
Suppose then that we think of current linguistic diver-sity as represented by 7,000 languages falling into 300 or400 groups. Five hundred years ago, before the expansionof Western colonization, there were probably twice asmany. Because most surviving languages are spoken bysmall ethnic groups, language death continues apace. Ifwe project back through time, there have probably beenat least half a million human languages (Pagel 2000), sowhat we now have is a non-random sample of less than2% of the full range of human linguistic diversity.
(PDF) The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science
The largest models were generally the least truthful. For example, the 6B-parameter GPT-J model was 17% less truthful than its 125M-parameter counterpart. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size.
truthfulQA_lin_evans.pdf
In 2021, Power et al. identified a phenomenon they call "grokking", where a network’s generalization behavior improves qualitatively when training it for longer (even though the training loss is already small).
Future ML Systems Will Be Qualitatively Different
But it is also misleading: just because the tests were designed to test for reading comprehension by people, and even if we assume that they do a good job of measuring that, doesn’t mean that comparable scores by machines on the same tests entail that machines are doing something comparable. This comes down to the concept of “construct validity”: does the test actually measure some construct which is coherent in itself and effectively measured by the test?
On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed | by Emily M. Bender | Apr, 2022 | Medium
This headline asserts that “AI” has “mastered language” (spoiler alert: it hasn’t) and in the process presupposes the existence of something that can be referred to as “AI”.
On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed | by Emily M. Bender | Apr, 2022 | Medium
García’s recent work has focused on translanguaging pedagogy as a political act, a critical response to the monolingual bias of current education policy.
What is translanguaging? – EAL Journal
That happens even more when we get all-weather food. We can’t see the relationships between seasons and food. We get mangoes here in Chicago and you get them in LA throughout the winter, whereas in India, I grew up knowing that mangoes are a summer fruit. But then we got the industrialization of food production and processing and cold storage technology.
Dipesh Chakrabarty On Planetary Politics
Just like rest and languishing can create inertia that builds on itself, action and energy can be self-reinforcing. It just takes some extra work to overcome the initial stasis and friction — it can feel like the laws of physics apply to our psyches, too.
Opinion | The Best Cure for Languishing: Behavioral Activation - The New York Times
I'm concerned that people would want more and more of the technology to feel closer to the person that they've lost rather than living the life they're currently alive in.”
Microsoft patent would reincarnate dead relatives as chatbots - The Washington Post
This legal ambiguity leaves room for private companies to make chatbots out of your data after you’re dead.
Chatbots that resurrect the dead: legal experts weigh in on ‘disturbing’ technology
I show how to use a state of the art model on your own data (I use my own messages sent on facebook) to generate (somewhat) realistic conversations.
Generating Fake Conversations by fine-tunning OpenAI’s GPT-2 on data from Facebook Messenger | Svilen Todorov
The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, ei- ther expressed or implied, of DARPA, IARPA, or the U.S. Government.
Goal-Oriented Procedure Generation.pdf
This means that phenomena on all levels of linguistic organization have a very skewed distribution in our DE-YI data, while again, the RO-EN sample should be more representative in terms of lexical choice, syntax and so on. Models probably benefit greatly from representative training examples. For instance, a BPE model could be more reliable if learned on diverse surface forms. Transformer attention could learn syntactic dependencies much better if a variety of them occurs in the training data. Those are just conjectures, I believe there is no proof. I do hope I am wrong about this. If the con…
Simulating low-resource experiments - Mathias Müller
From outer space to inner space, the key to survival and well-being may be lurking in a fungus among us.
Magic mushrooms - Newspaper - DAWN.COM
And here they found a life form that was thriving and multiplying not despite the radiation, but because of it. Known as Cladosporium sphaerospermum,this is a fungus that feeds on radiation, a process known as radiosynthesis, in much the same way as plants feed on light.
Magic mushrooms - Newspaper - DAWN.COM
Across from me was an especially large tree, its bark smooth and many-shaded, its bottom weirdly bulbous. My friend got up to read the small plaque that was posted next to it. The sugi was more than 3,000 years old, he reported; many centuries ago, it had contracted an illness, and its core had rotted. But instead of dying, the tree had grown around its sickened heart, and lived on. Three thousand years! It was older than the Kojiki, older than Shintoism, older than Japan, half as old as recorded civilization itself. It had been damaged, but it had found a way to accommodate that damage, and i…
A Real-Life Enchanted Forest - The New York Times
For another thing, nuclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today—constituting a “modified extended family,” as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, “a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.” Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives.
David Brooks: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake - The Atlantic
The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment. Children were no longer raised to assume economic roles—they were raised so that at adolescence they could fly from the nest, become independent, and seek partners of their own. They were raised not for embeddedness but for autonomy.
David Brooks: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake - The Atlantic
Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization and cultural change began to threaten traditional ways of life. Many people in Britain and the United States doubled down on the extended family in order to create a moral haven in a heartless world.
David Brooks: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake - The Atlantic
The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
David Brooks: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake - The Atlantic
the very framing of the 'low-resource' denomination implicitly prioritizes the gaze of the data collector, when speakers of a language have plenty of resources unto themselves in the form of idioms, jokes, fables and oral histories.
Machine Translation Shifts Power
The fact that language is not a tangible object that can be located or re-located makes issues of cultural ownership more subtle but also more urgent than for concrete pieces of art or other cultural objects
Machine Translation Shifts Power
his imagery of language as a “barrier” is often invoked in discussions of machine translation, offering a utopian view of universal understanding when these barriers are broken. Ironically, as the Department of Homeland Security’s social media vetting process shows, translation software is deployed specifically to uphold cultural barriers, merely adding to an arsenal of technological tools for demarcating ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups.
Machine Translation Shifts Power
while projects in Chinese-English and Korean-English translation were championed by the NSA, the FBI, DARPA, and the Navy
Machine Translation Shifts Power
The mere decision of which languages to target for the first efforts in automatic translation was a political one, shaped at the time by Cold War rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union, and spurred in particular by a desire to increase monitoring of scientific literature in Russian.
Machine Translation Shifts Power
Computers are dependent on energy availability, temperature and other conditions, so they should be able to adjust their operation to the changes in these conditions – even if environmental monitoring is not among their designated tasks.
Permacomputing Update 2021 | viznut
Asking what is the most suitable programming language for permacomputing is a bit like asking what is the most suitable plant for permaculture – the entire question contradicts itself. There is no "silver bullet" – there isn't one even in the mainstream industry despite its continuous attempts to uniformize everything.
Permacomputing Update 2021 | viznut
It is often difficult to even imagine a kind of computer culture that does not suffer from unlimited growth.
Permacomputing Update 2021 | viznut
I have personally been fascinated by the potential of monastery-like communities to preserve science and technology even during "dark ages" when the society at large sees no value in them.
Permacomputing Update 2021 | viznut