Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@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.

@kushal @rhysw I think that you just need to send an email to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org to confirm that you own the license to the photos in question.

@kushal @rhysw Note that it seems like for photos taken in Sweden the subjects specifically need to have consented to having their photo used commercial.

@kushal @rhysw All the photos I see seem to be of living people, mostly in non-public settings, so I think this policy applies: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people

Presumably you need to add the {{consent}} template.

@kushal @rhysw Where is that showing as marked for deletion? I would have thought it would be in the talk page?

@y2mango Congratulations on your success!