Since before LLMs were a thing I've thought em dashes (at least outside of fiction) have a kind of irritating, business-casual feel about them, since they are simultaneously informal but also fussy in a way. That also describes exactly what bothers me about the classic ChatGPT writing style, which is obsequiously friendly and casual but also perfectly organized and precise, and which I imagine is based on a large dataset of middlebrow American news blogs and similar sources. So I'm not surprised that the em dash has stuck out to people as such a prominent feature of its style. It definitely has its uses but I can't say I would mind at all if the controversy diminished its use in real writing.
It's time to give up your silly cynicism, embrace being a professional slop shoveler and doing work with higher volume, more repetition and less creativity than ever.
The first time I ever went out with a zoom lens after starting with just a 50mm prime, the amount of creative power and freedom I felt really opened my eyes. Without having to worry about focal length you can actually compose with the naked eye and walk around til you get everything in the right position, then zoom in to get the framing right.
Zoom With Your Feet and other photography minimalist cliches seem to me kind of mystifying, and more interested in a kind of romantic vision of photography than in technical excellence
I've seen someone on this site comment to the effect that if they could use a tool like dall-e to generate a picture of "their dog" that looked better than a photo they could take themselves, they would happily take it over a photo.
The future is going to become difficult for people who find value in creative activities, beyond just a raw audio/visual/textual signal at the output. I think most people who really care about a creative medium would say there's some kind of value in the process and the human intentionality that creates works, both for the creator who engages in it and the audience who is aware of it.
In my opinion most AI creative tools don't actually benefit serious creators, they just provide a competitive edge for companies to sell new products and enable more dilettantes to enter the scene and flood us with mediocrity
But in a cash game, if you're properly bankrolled (a common number people recommend is to have at least 40 buy-ins worth of cash set aside for the stakes you're playing), the one buy-in you lose if you lose an all-in is relatively small and you can just buy in again and keep playing. Going back to what OP said, if you shove every time you get aces you will profit over time as long as you have a properly managed bankroll, it's just not the most profitable way to play aces in most situations. It's different in tournaments because when you're late enough into a tournament, losing your stack actually does mean losing everything since you can't re-buy
I worked part time as a dishwasher for around 6 years in middle/high school, at a restaurant with no machine, just three sinks and a huge counter. It's definitely a good way to get into the restaurant industry, but also a great way to learn if you hate working at a restaurant.
IIRC they even use multiple different wordings and layouts for this dialogue, depending on what "mode" of Paypal you're using (e.g. if it's a pop-up or if it's a full page redirect; I dunno how to describe it technically). I have to use it a lot and even I've been tricked a few times. It's literally theft and I can't believe they get away with it
On the other hand the most popular way to play shogi online is an app called Shogi Wars, which has the most explicit pay-to-win mechanic I've ever seen: there's a button you can press to have an AI play out your next few moves for you, and you can pay money to buy additional chances to press the button.
Shogi doesn't have any other sites as modern and polished as Lichess or Chess.com (except for a Lichess port (lishogi.org) which has failed to gain traction), so I think there was a vacuum that allowed something like this to become popular. If people were still playing chess only on old clunky websites then maybe Zynga would break into the market with a hot new chess app that requires Facebook login.
Well rating scales don't have any absolute meaning, only that which is attributed to them either by the reviewer or the audience. On any aggregate review site the scale of the aggregate score will take on its own semantics, which is the aggregate of all the users' own semantics they use for their individual scores.
And for most people, it seems like the semantics of rating scales don't align with a normal distribution about the 50% mark, but something more like letter grades where 70% is decent/mediocre, while 50% is a failure (in the US).
IMO this makes at least as much sense as centering around 50%; if you only score 50% of the points on a test I don't think you're competent in a subject, and if your book only meets 50% of the criteria for a great book then it might be a bad book. But again, it's all arbitrary and only makes sense in the context of the particular reviewer or aggregate community.
I think the machine code–level understanding is what's important. We can, in theory, put a person in a Chinese Room–style scenario and have them manually perform the code, and it will generate the same outputs (It would probably take millions or billions of years, but it is true in principle). A major difference is that we created the machine and the code and, at least as low as the level of digital logic design, we understand and control its behavior. The person in the room has a human mind with thoughts and behaviors completely out of the program designers' control and unrelated to the program; if they want to, they can break out of the room and punch the operator. The "unpredictability" of the machine is still constrained by the fundamental capabilities we give to it, so it might generate surprising outputs but it can't do things like punch people or launch nukes unless we connect it to other systems that have those capabilities.
Aside from all the other glaring issues with this model with respect to workers' wellbeing, do they even consider how it affects people who need specific ergonomic or accessibility accommodations? Like, my own desk has a ton of stuff I need just to get through a day of computer use: split keyboard, clamp-on keyboard tray, vertical mouse, trackball. Am I supposed to just haul all that crap in, set it up, tear it down, and haul it back home every day?
I doubt the storage situation helps much either; I know someone who works for another company that recently switched to this and he can't even fit basic work tools like a headset into his locker.
Aside from all the other glaring issues with this model with respect to workers' wellbeing, do they even consider how it affects people who need specific ergonomic or accessibility accommodations? Like, my own desk has a ton of stuff I need just to get through a day of computer use: split keyboard, clamp-on keyboard tray, vertical mouse, trackball. Am I supposed to just haul all that crap in, set it up, tear it down, and haul it back home every day?
I doubt the storage situation helps much either; I know someone who works for another company that recently switched to this and he can't even fit basic work tools like a headset into his locker.
Abstraction works because you are able to treat an abstraction as a black box and concern yourself only with its input and output. A segment of code written by an LLM is qualitatively a very different thing; it's more like an open box of crap that you have to inspect and put together yourself, which requires knowledge of the contents, which requires experiencing the drudgery.
> Ask ChatGPT to play chess. It can generate a text based board and prompt you for moves, but it can’t reliably update its board correctly or even find legal moves. Note that I don’t expect it to play good moves, but the fact that it can’t even play legal moves should tell us something about its internal state.
Incidentally, I tried handing it a few partial games in algebraic notation and asking it to suggest the next move, and it generally suggested legal moves, though with tactical explanations that ranged from plausible to nonsensical. It refused to actually play chess with me though and I guess I just didn't have the right prompt.
I think you're correct about the two statements not being completely independent, though. In both the shorts and backpack examples the second adjective is meant as a corollary of (or subordinate to) the first. タンパン（は）よくて動きやすいぜ！ or このリュックは便利で大きい both sound unnatural and it seems to me like the logical relationship between the adjectives is lost. The same grammar could technically be used to combine two independent statements, but the context indicates the (pseudo- ?)dependent interpretation.
In English we would just say "Shorts are easy to move around in!" and it wouldn't lose any of the semantic meaning, but I do think TFA's "nice and easy" might preserve some of the "feeling" of the Japanese without sounding unnatural like a word-for-word translation would be.
I'm not a native speaker though so I could still be completely wrong.