Arnar Sigurdsson

@paulg In a small rural town, I once volunteered selling grilled sandwiches at a basketball game. When they had made sure it was for the local sports club, most of the customers refused to get their change back. They would have considered it humiliating to ask for that.

At the school bake sale I bought a baked good of indeterminate type from a pair of 7 year olds. I asked if they could give me change for £5. They said they couldn't. I pointed to their tub of coins, but they said they couldn't give me any of that, because it was for charity.

@paulg Are you sure? Until recently, having and taking care of kids was a social obligation for women in most societies. I'm sure there are those who'd have wanted to do something completely different. It's a taboo to say it though.

No one ever, when they're old, wishes they hadn't spent so much time with their kids.

In a way, many native-English speakers are worse at using English than people who have had to learn in later in life. They often lack the "linguistic empathy" and awareness to use simpler language when communicating to non-natives (i.e. most English speakers in the world).

Germany did not just stop the Rector of the University of Glasgow Dr @GhassanAbuSitt1 from entering Germany, to participate in our Palestine Congress, but threatened him with legal action if he dared send his intended speech by video. Question to German friends: In your name?

@gunnarulfars Svona eru færslurnar á Vestfjörðum

Landsbyggðarfærsla dagsins.

@hrafnjonsson Hvaða vandamál er þetta að skapa fyrir þig?

Það hefur fátt ært mig jafn mikið og þessi misheppnaða end-to-end encrytion uppfærsla á messenger. Maður verður í alvörunni að hætta þessu og færa sig alfarið á Telegram með hinum spíttsölunum.

Thanks for taking the time to visit our space Ambassador Lucie! 🇪🇺

With 250 members, @hafnarhaus is a busy co-working space where artists from all over the world come together in downtown Reykjavík 🎨. A hotspot of inspiration & European / international arts cooperation. Thanks for the visit & I look forward to more collaboration ahead!

@paulg You're a native English speaker who just used Þ in a casual way on a computer. We noticed and we're electing a new president soon.

Sanbó Þristur is surprisingly good. I bought one in Iceland about 6 months ago, but hadn't dared to try it till I was driven to it by the absence of any other chocolate in the house. Caramel with liquorice bits doesn't sound good, but it is.

@tirelith Fyrir einhvern sem veit lítið um þetta eins og mig virðist manni nú samt eins og þessi varnargarður hafi breytt heilmiklu með því að beina megin straumnum frá bænum.

@Dan_Jeffries1 "Writers at the NYT did not pay the Hemingway estate for learning to write short, sharp sentences as young people studying journalism" Just because the process by which AI models are made has been dubbed "training" does not necessarily mean this analogy holds.

If you want to understand why the Times case has a near zero probability of winning, then read this thread. This fellow does a nice write up and he seems sincere in his belief that what he is saying about the suit is accurate and correct when in fact it's basically just a lot of wishful thinking, misunderstanding of copyright law and red herrings. He's really hopeful that this case will cement the media's right to charge machines to learn, something not even remotely covered by copyright law. The text does not say what he thinks it says and it does not even come close to a "slam dunk." In fact, the opposite. First, as I've noted before, trying to get everyone to license training data is not going to work because that's not what copyright is about. We all learn for free. We learn from the world around us and so do machines. Writers at the NYT did not pay the Hemingway estate for learning to write short, sharp sentences as young people studying journalism. Young quarterbacks do not have to call up Tom Brady to get permission to study his throwing motion to learn to throw a football. Copyright law is about preventing people from producing exact copies or near exact copies of content and posting it for commerical gain. Period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or simply does not understand how copyright works. What else does he cite in the write up? The amount of money Microsoft makes? 1 trillion in new value on their stock price! Equating it to a fraction of the training data is utterly preposterous. The NYT claiming the value of reporting on wars and murders and politics as somehow relevant to the case? Not even remotely related. Pointless to even include except as a red herring. It's an attempt to ascribe nebulous public good value to actual value in stock price. No. Just no. Even the most damning thing, the prompts they cite as evidence of exact output by GPT of Times content, are obviously manipulated. Anyone in AI can see this in under a second. Nobody seems to be able to recreate the verbatim output with the BS prompts they provided. Why? Because the verbatim output almost certainly did not come from memorization, but from retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with web browsing. A programmer probably deliberately prompted it via the API to fetch a specific article and asked it to output part of the text and they provided only a fraction of the prompt instead of the whole prompt. If I ask it to go fetch a times article and output that for me then it's on me, not the model. I don't need machine learning to do this. I can do it with programming libraries from decades ago. This is nonsense. And including it will kill this case dead because the lawyers will not be able to reproduce this in the real world. Almost everything this fellow cites as evidence is sleight of hand, misdirection and not relevant at all to proving actual copyright violations, which are dependent on output not input. This case is going to get eaten alive, just like the Sarah Silverman case and others that were filed with a complete lack of understanding of how AI works, along with grandiloquent claims about copyright and violations that are absurd to even the most basic sniff test. This most likely outcome for this case is it being settled out of court with MS and OpenAI paying a licensing fee for ongoing training data which is what this is really about. It will be a bad precedent for everyone, everywhere because there is no actual ruling and it gives the illusion that they won and people should be held to ransom for training data.

@NachiketKher @paulg @csooran @ycombinator Perhaps it doesn't sound like anything he'd write? I read his refusal at the same time so maybe that influenced me, but it sounds a bit too "American motivational" for @paulg. His style is more sober.

@paulg @csooran @ycombinator Interesting how you've written hundreds of essays and spoken a lot but can clearly remember what you didn't say. I guess it's context more than memory?

.@paulg: "There’s a type of person that doesn’t get discouraged even if they make the wrong move five times in a row. They stay passionate about the problem; they stay passionate about trying to find a solution. They keep on executing and moving forward." via @ycombinator

@eLife Very concerned about this.

The Board of eLife has made the decision to replace our Editor-in-Chief. Read more in the full statement elifesciences.org/inside-elife/4….

@s7nfo @paulg Knowing several languages has a lot of effect on how you experience the world. Many people even experience having different personalities in different languages.

@paulg I wonder if *thinking* in a particular language can improve the quality of your thoughts.

Sufficiently good AI translation will decrease the need for people to speak English as a second language. But interestingly the decrease will vary depending on the type of work people do. In person conversations will need lingua francas for longer.

@mckaywrigley @MagnusTriolith Bar also tends to be raised and expectations increased when tool become better.

@MagnusTriolith Totally hear that PoV. Agree with a lot of it - hence why I’m conflicted. My opinion on this are fairly fluid since things change so fast.

I don’t think people understand just how quickly many jobs will be replaced by AI. Ex: Midjourney and DALL-E 3 are now good enough that I find it hard to believe I’ll need to hire a graphic designer. Knowledge work is going to have a reckoning.

@UnlearnEcon Diverse circadian rhythms.

@hrafnjonsson Það uppgötvaðist einusinni sníkjudýr í meltingarvegi mínum. Eftir að allir voru búnir að stimpla mig með "kvíða". Það var ótrúleg tilfinning að fá eitthvað svona mjög solid fyrir því af hverju ég var búinn að vera slappur og leiður. Svo bara hægt að gefa lyf við þessu.

Á 39 ára ferli mínum af því að fara einstaka sinnum til læknis hef ég aldrei fengið greiningu á neinu. Skiptir ekki máli hvað það er er lausnin að koma aftur ef það versnar eða blóðprufa sem kemur ekkert út úr. En ég meina, ég er ennþá lifandi þannig að þetta hlýtur að virka.

@jamonholmgren @chronosyndrome Tech is created by people, for people. Hardware and software are human inventions that are always in relation to people somehow.

@chronosyndrome Right, but I'm talking about tech skills.

If I were a software developer trying to differentiate myself in today’s market, I’d ask “what are the hardest, most difficult tasks that software developers do”, and then pick something in that group and go learn it.

Another stupid things that happened: I can't use Youtube anymore. If I'm logged in on my workspace, I'm blocked from using Youtube on my browser! It worked fine before I actually started paying Google! Incredible.

I set up @GoogleWorkspace for my organisation but it's unusable because Gmail puts all my colleagues e-mail into spam despite it being sent from the same workspace. How could e-mail sent from the same domain and same workspace, possibly be spam? It's the least likely to be spam.