ironically even though Chinese propaganda is pretty bad as far as propaganda goes, I think it actually has a materially correct view of the US military, regularly depicting it as a demon god

thread of china making the US look awesome in propaganda US as evil wizard eaglemen nuking china

Something puzzling about the Māori & polynesians is that while polynesian technology was basically stone-age, their sailing technology was among the most sophisticated in the world — they invented outrigger canoes and catamarans, and it is hard to overstate how odd this is.

https://twitter.com/MungoManic/status/1857917228680884475

One explanation for this incongruity is that the austronesians and polynesians are best understood not as a stone age people with sophisticated boats, but as a sophisticated bronze age material culture that hyper-adapted to the particular challenges of settling remote islands.

the tim walz story is killing me.

tim, a 26 year old man has a relationship with jenna, a 24 year old woman back in '89. they fall in love, it's beautiful but it's hard. her father is a high official in the party, and there is a cultural divide.

https://twitter.com/ryjlocal/status/1851001101254033712

they can't be seen together in public but they try to make it work. walz is on a teaching visa, so he goes home to nebraska. he writes her letters. maybe he writes about the plains, about the snow. he writes about his life there. he wants to see her again. she wants to see him.

A story about fraud in the AI research community:

On September 5th, Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, announces to the world that they've made a breakthrough, allowing them to train a mid-size model to top-tier levels of performance. This is huge. If it's real.

It isn't. They get massive news coverage and are the talk of the town, so to speak.

*If* this were real, it would represent a substantial advance in tuning LLMs at the *abstract* level, and could perhaps even lead to whole new directions of R&D.

But soon, cracks appear in the story.

a funny thing about the lord of the flies is it's based on what the author thought people would do, but in 1965 when 6 teenaged boys actually did get marooned on a tropical island, instead of tearing each other apart they worked together to reconstruct civilization from scratch they divided the labor. they built shelters, and kept a permanent fire going. they built workout equipment. they even made a guitar. they played songs and sang together at night.

Today I investigated how well can LLMs multiply two numbers and what makes them perform better or worse. Let's start with a couple baselines. I evaluated gpt-3.5-turbo (L) and gpt-4o (R) on the task of multiplying two numbers that were both either two, three, four, or five digits

https://twitter.com/getnormality/status/1792323981535760838

Out of the box with no prompting, I found that gpt-4o could do two or three digit multiplications *most* of the time, but totally fell over when it came to four digits, with gpt-3.5-turbo having somewhat worse performance as we would expect.

I think it's cool how Arabic is basically cursive Aramaic. Apparently this is a trend. Nearly all scripts tend to develop cursive forms over time. Like carcinization, call it cursivization. Thread of examples.

1. Arabic

2. Chinese

Only one

Her shoulders with fair braids are graced,
Lithe as the wheat-stem is her waist,
Her sable apron laced with taste —
She's all in all for me.
When she is near, I take alarm;
When she is off, I come to harm;
When others take her by the arm,
Priests pray to set me free!

https://twitter.com/MamanLunettes/status/1742988434732376106

A three hours' talk and she's away,
While I pretend to go, yet stay
And watch her plodding on her way
Till I see her no more.
She is quite poor, yet on my life
I'll take her for my wedded wife,
Though wicked men, with love at strife,
About our love feel sore!

a thread on the missing trickster hero in modern western myth:

the trickster is a common mythological or culture hero archetype across many, many cultures. wily odysseus, coyote, maui, anansi the spider, monkey king — all are both tricksters and heroes.





but in modern western mythology (Disney), while the hero may be cunning, they are not usually a trickster. instead, the archetype of the trickster is usually filled by the villain, and if that villain is a woman, they are almost always a trickster.