I go out as-a-fox as a street photographer using a shtick that makes sure people almost always remember my name and i find it a little embarrassing that I can't remember that many names or if it is a Megan how exactly I am supposed to spell it, etc.
I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.
To the cynic, Chomskyism is exactly what Thomas Kuhn warned you about "normal science".
That is, you can apply for grants and write papers in the transformational grammar paradigm endlessly. You can pose and answer questions that make sense within in the system.
Chomskyism was disappointing in two respects: (1) was that it was an inadequate basis for machine understanding of text, (2) was that structuralists were hoping everything in culture could be understood in terms of "... having the structure of language" but syntactic structures weren't all adequate for that task.
(1) and (2) both pointed to Chomskyism being hermetic and not something really useful or inspiring to other fields and maybe just a little less "true".
Officially structuralism had a crisis around the release of Syntactic Structures and the morphed into post-structuralism which has been through relentless post[n]-modernization and is whatever it is now.
Actually, there have been a number of rounds of paradigm shift (or attempted paradigm shift) in linguistics over the past 70 years. The unique thing about linguistics is that they've been compressed into the lifetime of the same central figure.
Also, I'll mention that there is a lot of empirical knowledge about natural language syntax in generative grammar, even if the details aren't quite right about their theoretical underpinnings. And a lot of them were "low-hanging fruit" waiting for someone to point out how to find them and characterize them. That Chomsky did that is the best argument for his intellectual value - permitting all that "normal science" to happen.
Science doesn't guarantee technological applications, whether or not that science is correct.
Finally, just saying: use of a word like "Chomskyism" makes you sound like one of those creationists who call evolution "Darwinism".
So we can't use the word "creationism" without validating their use of "Darwinism"?
This is wholly fallacious ... you may disagree with what you interpret as the implications of attaching "ism" to Chomsky, but in no way does that equate it to attaching "ism" to Darwin -- each of these attachments and their validity are independent.
BTW, even what you see as pejorative in such an attachment is a cultural interpretation ... e.g., it is far more common among British evolutionary biologists than American to view "Darwinism" neutrally -- Dawkins for one uses the term and describes himself as a Darwinist. See, e.g., https://www.edge.org/conversation/richard_dawkins-chapter-3-...
> You can pose and answer questions that make sense within in the system.
Yes this is one of my critiques of the academic system (I have finished a PhD and will hopefully never work at a university ever again). Many papers in the introduction start with explaining how the study builds on plenty of previous research, but that alone doesn’t prove that something is a good direction to investigate. If academics were completely honest, many papers would write “We researched topic X because we got funding for it. But since we actually don’t care about X, we just wrote a proposal about our favorite niche topic that only one of the co-authors cares about, namely topic Y, and wrote it such that it sounds like X. Next we show that Y is actually very cool in the hope to convince others that it is cool plus to convince others of the conclusion that our most senior professor already found during the PhD which was 30 years ago. Apart from the professor, we don’t believe in the main argument of the paper but since he got the grant we’ll just go with it in the hope to one day be able to push our own ideas forward”.
I think the most damning fact about the readers of The New York Times is that they're much more interested in the opinion page (which is just Charlie Blow blowing it out his ass) than they are in the actual reporting which might concern some people you don't know in some place you never heard of that did something that involves a lot of explaining.
David French is a weird person to single out here. Dowd and Brooks don't have any real identities outside of being vapid pundits; French is a former movement conservative (and litigator) who was defenestrated for opposing the rise of Trump. You don't have to like him --- I don't read him --- but he's not really at all like Dowd or Brooks. When you make that comparison, you weaken your point, because it sounds like your real problem with NYT opinion staffing is that it includes right-of-center voices.
If you just wanted people to agree with you, Salon definitely had you covered!
You think that based on my view that the NYT Opinion section is a clown car, I therefore want to only read people who agree with me?
The NYT happens to staff people on the intellectual right, which is whatever. It's a core part of who they are. My issue is lack of intellectual rigor.
Genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about. David French joined NYT in 2023 and was already an independent. He is not at all a foil and is basically in lockstep with his more left of center cohosts like Jamelle Bouie (who is apparently a fascist, according to the median Bluesky poster). This idea that he’s a right of center contributor to NYT is based entirely on work from before he was there. The only person who was right of center in NYT opinion was Ross Douthat and he’s already gone.
David brooks was never that heavy on moralizing, imho. He was more of an idealist who saw a vision for society that he conceded could never be realized , but was content with people otherwise acting in accordance with their incentives and preferences.
I thought synaptics had some sinister hold on the computer industry which sabotaged Windows 8.
Like when you looked at all the confusing and unwanted "2-in-1" and hybrid computer designs the thing you looked at was that they twisted themselves into pretzels to include... a trackpad! For most applications other than "working on an airplane" a true tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse is so preferable but for various reasons the industry never showed it to you.
There's a certain sense in which competence in some domains repels competence in other domains. If Apple made a car the rear fender would come off just as you opened the drive side door.
If I had to hazard a guess as to the mechanism as it would turn up in an automotive company it is that automotive engineers have the SAE to set professional standards and that software "engineers" have nothing [1]... And if an organized group has a fight with a disorganized group the result is predictable.
[1] the ACM is a professional associate for computer science professors.
> There's a certain sense in which competence in some domains repels competence in other domains. If Apple made a car the rear fender would come off just as you opened the drive side door.
This feels like a logical fallacy but I'm having a terrible time disproving it at anything near large company scale
Look, I want to see WCAG adopt "Any ad that covers content, a cookie banner, or Anubis or Cloudflare harassment is an immediate F grade" I'm a little more hopeful of that than to get a requirement like "you should actually have a disabled person test it"
What the people who like Anubis don't get is that the cost for honest people is very real, the cost for crawlers is basically $0 because: most of the people who run crawlers are just idiots and aren't paying attention to what's happening and get crap data and don't even know they are getting bounced and probably don't even look at the crap data they collect, the worst of the crawlers are running botnets using stolen CPU, the real AI companies don't have any financial discipline and wouldn't care it if anubis wasted a CPU*hour per page.
Or rather, those "click on the bus" images raise your blood pressure but are close to trivial for a bot to automate... It's all performative... We're good open source people who prove we are good open source people because we put Anubis on our page to shame those bad AI people.
I did not use chatbot for search until Anubis, Cloudflare and recaptcha are so prevalent that chatbot literally parses through the pages faster than I can open any one of them, using my daily browser, with my own hands. It seems not only my choice does not matter, but most websites also do not care about human readers. At this point I just use chatbot as search engine out of vengeance.
Also, optimized Anubis & other proof of work challenge solvers are much faster than a stock browser.
Interesting, if I understand correctly it seems like Anubis is just being used in a use case inappropriate way here?
The Arch equivalent to this would be building AUR packages from source, which seems to universally work fine without any of these issues.
Are NixOS repos putting their source behind Anubis or something? I’m tempted to start on an “I don’t like NixOS” rant but I don’t know who owns these forges.
then some process takes those PKGBUILDs, downloads the sources from the upstream URLs, and builds them into the binary packages that end up in the official pacman repositories.
The same process happens on NixOS to build their official repository (which is called the "Nix Binary Cache"). So most NixOS users, when installing software, they are just downloading prebuilt binary packages from official NixOS servers just like pacman does on Arch. I, however, disable the Nix's official package repository so when I install software it is like building from a PKGBUILD: it needs to download the sources from the upstream URL and build the package.
I'd imagine the reason I run into this issue a lot more than you do is usually you only install a couple of packages from the AUR. The vast majority of your packages are going to come prebuilt from official Arch repositories. Whereas on my systems, 100% of the software is being built from source. So if any of my software is developed on a site using anubis to protect their source tarballs or patch files, I will hit this issue.
I imagine that when I install AUR packages that are building from source, the community AUR maintainers have already figured out these issues if they exist, while you are left as the person figuring them out for every single package since you’re building from source.
Maybe the problem here is that people are using Anubis without understanding what its purpose is. If you are publishing open source code in a forge you should want and encourage bots and other automated systems to download your code.
For me to open 5 pages, which is more than often when I search with google etc, that all have Anubis, will take more time for them to load than that I ask chatgpt and it generates an answer from web search, at least in some cases. It is 100% virtue signaling that has no technical fundamentals to deter scrappers, which likely implement better solvers and have virtually unlimited amount of time and compute to spare, it just punishes me who have a body and a limited time budget. Humiliating even for a split of a second. Now I just skip any website that I do not care enough and has Anubis; the ones I have to visit, I will remember their mindless choice forever.
We can make up unrealistic scenarios all day long but I just don’t believe for a second that anyone is this inconvenienced by it.
The idea that you’re in desperate need to get information from 5 web pages as quickly as possible like you’re a contestant on The Amazing Race is ridiculous. This is the definition of dramatic.
Anubis finishes up in less time than takes to read this sentence.
Do it 20 times in the search for one article, and encounter at least a 30% misconfiguration rate (inappropriately high challenge value), and it does begin to bear out. If you are looking for obscure or poorly managed data, it unfortunately does become an issue.
In the daily, if you spend time researching with plenty of dead ends, ot does bear out in lost time. Not by dollars, but nickles and dimes.
There's an interesting thing about the CloudFlare CAPTCHA - it's presented as "This page uses this service to defend against malicious bots", yet it goes on to "make sure you're not a bot". Notice the difference?
Can be faked. Record people doing it hundreds if not thousands of times and make a statistical model. Google and Facebook of course would love it if your were logged in and could look at the muddy footprints you leave all over the web. Yet another way to punish people for using the wrong browser or not logging in.
I remember people talking about how we'd need neurosymbolic A.I. in the 1990s and imagining a large number of ways to do it but it all seemed pretty hypothetical because the neural networks weren't so good and now that neural representations of language are mature all the paths that you think would work are open.
Symbolic AI (of any type) is still a holy grail objective.
I think linear program tapes are the best substrate if we want to diversify our architectures. Massive GPU farms have definitely won at the neural network game, but they would struggle to execute a highly branchy piece of code faster than a humble single core CPU.
Sequentially following a series of register-based instructions that produces the same effect as Astra would be an unbelievable accomplishment. There is still no conclusive evidence that this type of system cannot be produced. The search space is so awful (on paper) that people rarely try. You have to be a little bit crazy to spend time on this stuff in 2026. However, you will often be rewarded with unexpected results. Never underestimate the power of a good fitness function when combined with 1v1 tournaments and large populations. Even a ridiculously simple ISA can produce amazing results under sufficient evolutionary pressure.
With a Turing machine, you don't need to find the global minimum. That is a strong anti-pattern. You just need to find one of countless really good minima. The search space is not one needle in one very big haystack. A meaningful percentage of the hay is needles.
One approach to symbolic AI is that it is about putting together logic and databases and another is that it is about SMT solving and constraint satisfaction and such. Lisp was a revolutionary language not because of the parens or even macros or that people used it to implement "expert systems" but because it had a garbage collector, hashtables and such. (e.g. most of the examples in famous Lisp programming books by Graham and Norvig can be coded up just fine in Python for pedagogical purposes) You can make a superhuman chess engine by alpha-beta search, etc.
One of many great applications of neurosymbolics right now is using an A.I. to translate a program or proof or informal description of such a thing into inputs for a theorem prover. If math learns anything about A.I. it will be that they won't let you submit a proof to a journal if you can't write it up formally. Like it turns out that the ability of A.I.(s) to do "translation" (e.g. something that sorta requires understanding but doesn't quite) and handle tedious tasks unlocks the ability to use formal methods.
and why game engines use entity-component systems, analytical databases are column-oriented, etc. That is, the classical organization of "objects" as structures has a lot of overhead when you're doing heavy work. For instance java reifies objects with a big header, a monitor lock, and other stuff that really adds up if you, say, are writing a chess engine and need to maintain transposition tables. And even if you are in C++ and there is a lot less overhead, AoS still has bad mechanical sympathy compared to SoA.
I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.
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