My immediate gut reaction to a rule as general as this is that there's fat chance it's universally applicable, there will always be cases where active would be clunky.
Like I can't imagine an RPG protagonist exclaiming that "Someone trapped this chest!" instead of the 100% more natural "This chest was trapped!"
This article is wild already, on the first page there's this quote
‘Do not use the passive voice when such use makes a statement clumsy and wordy. . .
Do not, by using the passive voice, leave the agent of the verb vaguely indicated, when the agent should be clearly identified.’ [Edwin Woolley, Handbook of Composition, 1907, p. 20]
Emphasis mine on... a clear usage of the passive! In active this would have to be "when you should clearly identify the agent" or something of the like, the fuck, how hard is it to not expose your whole ass like this mate
Exactly, like the whole point of their schtick is that they want to legitimise plain old racism as something more sophisticated, so I don't see a reason to entertain them as such.
I really don't see a reason for us making a linguistic distinction between "low-brow bigotry" and "high-brow bigotry", which is essentially what this is in practice.
When my uncle drunkenly complains about how "those stupid immigrants are everywhere and they ain't even speaking our language" - it's racism; but when a guy with a university degree writes a treatsie about how immigrants will take over and that's a problem because his bayesian priors say they're statistically less intelligent - then it's suddenly "race pseudoscience". No, both of them are the same breed of racist, the only difference is the latter had enough money to attend Yale.
Retail customers prefer payment processors for the ability to partially or totally reverse fraudulent transactions, though
Wait, but again, isn't this the main thing that banks provide? Like I can call my bank and tell them listen, this transaction was fraudulent, and that's it, it's gone. They sometimes even call me first to double-check that a large-sum wire was actually authorised by me.
Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal.
Wait what? Can people in the USA not, em, transfer money? What do the banks do then?
Ok now I'm wasted af and this show rules, this is the best fucking thing ever, gather all your friends and watch this shit, they hired the Mooch and someone whose credential is that they're a YouTuber to not give money to people whose ideas are "what if X but crypto" like one of them is literally "what if water but there's an NFT on it"
The first Crypto Name they introduce is fucking Anthony "Unit of Time Measurement" Scaramucci and I got severe whiplash, I am not mentally ready to watch this, I need to refill my drug drawer
I wouldn’t argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance
Oh, I would.
I've seen people say stuff like "you can't disagree the models have rapidly advanced" and I'm just like yes I can, here: no they didn't. If you're claiming they advanced in any way please show me a metric by which you're judging it. Are they cheaper? Are they more efficient? Are they able to actually do anything? I want data, I want a chart, I want a proper experiment where the model didn't have access to the test data when it was being trained and I want that published in a reputable venue. If the advances are so substantial you should be able to give me like five papers that contain this stuff.
Absent that I cannot help but think that the claim here is "it vibes better".
If they're an AGI believer then the bar is even higher, since in their dictionary an advancement would mean the models getting closer to AGI, at which point I'd be fucked to see the metric by which they describe the distance of their current favourite model to AGI. They can't even properly define the latter in computer-scientific terms, only vibes.
I advocate for a strict approach, like physicist dismissing any claim containing "quantum" but no maths, I will immediately dismiss any AI claims if you can't describe the metric you used to evaluate the model and isolate the changes between the old and new version to evaluate their efficacy. You know, the bog-standard shit you always put in any CS systems Experimental section.
A company that forces you to write a "Connect" every half-year where you reflect on your performance and Impact™ : (click here for the definition of Impact™ in Microsoft® Sharepoint™)
V0ldek @ V0ldek @awful.systems Posts 9Comments 924Joined 2 yr. ago
My immediate gut reaction to a rule as general as this is that there's fat chance it's universally applicable, there will always be cases where active would be clunky.
Like I can't imagine an RPG protagonist exclaiming that "Someone trapped this chest!" instead of the 100% more natural "This chest was trapped!"