Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@carlton They usually only sell it in bulk anyway, in my experience. I wouldn’t even be able to get less than a 2 month’s supply of the kind I like in the US. Looking at this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Rud7VQcWetLP9Dfu9

Seems like it is a similar deal. Worst case scenario I can do it, but it is also a bit uncertain. Quality for this stuff varies a lot.

I’m thinking small, clearly labeled Tupperware containers and a few scoops will maybe put customs inspectors in a less suspicious frame of mind?

Ok, I am traveling to Spain soon, and when I travel I usually bring a bit of protein powder (I put it in cottage cheese or yogurt to add some flavor and texture).

However, I suspect that my usual approach — Ziploc baggies in a freezer bag — might invite, uh… extra scrutiny… at customs (see photo).

Anyone have alternative ideas about how to transport this stuff without creating suspicion? The original packaging won’t work because it is very bulky.

#travel #customs #advice

@webology Yeah but both “bullshit” and “enshittification” are not specific or descriptive. If “enshittification” were called something else like “extractive entropy” or “profit-driven degradation”, it would be easier to understand and remember the term.

“LLM bullshit” is even worse, because it could refer to a lot of things, some of which are basically just anti-big tech rhetoric, and some of which are very legitimate. A taxonomy like “slop” and “hallucination” for the specific failure modes provide actionable targets that you can notice and work against, and they are evocative of what is actually going on.

@webology To be honest, I can’t see this being helpful. I can’t really take “enshittification” seriously, and it comes off as annoying and polemical to me.

I feel like taking rhetoric to the extreme like this is likely to enforce all-or-nothing thinking about AI, whereas coming up with descriptive terms for specific failure modes will improve awareness about them.

@Greg Practice makes perfect 😉

I have set up Mixtral 8x7B to generate Spanish example sentences for my Anki deck and I came across one that seems to randomly be in Catalan. Fun times.

@brianokken That is a common misconception. Actually, they make shoes using a machine that also makes hats for gnomes. It is easier to make the shoes pointy in the middle than to have to recalibrate them to asymmetry whenever they switch workflows.

Any #python folks know of a library for drawing pretty-looking, clean boxes arranged in various patterns?

I am looking to make some simple images like this to demonstrate addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc.

Bonus points if it has support for some existing pedagogical framework (e.g. “ten frames”).

#pedagogy #education #earlyeducation #visualization #homeschooling

@davidism Yeah, you may want to look into comprehensible input. I’ve been using it to learn Spanish and among the 6 foreign languages I’ve spent time learning, this is the one I’ve made the most progress the fastest.‡

See: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page#Japanese

‡This effect may be confounded by the fact that I learned 5 other languages first, evidence for which being that I was able to have simple conversations with Spanish speakers even before I started learning the language at all…

Of course, a countervailing force here is that they are also stupidly good at translation, so the utility of actually learning another language is reduced.

They can explain nuances in a way that automatic sentence-to-sentence translation can’t, and you can give them enough context to let them know how to select the right way to translate what you want to say into idiomatic speech.

Of course, you will sound like an obsequious PR person if you don’t take steps to avoid that. 😛

As I’ve been learning Spanish these past months, I am almost compelled to create an LLM-powered language learning application. It is really hard to do spaced repetition without it turning into a grind, and the ability to create (and parse!) custom, idiomatic text programmatically could be an absolute game changer here.

They are also really good at answering questions about how language use and I haven’t noticed much (anything?) in the way of hallucination with frontier models.