Can confirm. Per the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]: 'barm' is The froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors, which is used to leaven bread, and to cause fermentation in other liquors; yeast, leaven. OR The froth or foam on the surface of beer OR English regional (chiefly Lancashire). A soft round bread roll, a barm cake.
I enjoyed The Diamond Age but the 'AI' is nothing like today's. The stories in Nell's primer are actually mediated by a human actor (not an AI), who becomes a mother figure for her.
It even goes so far as to call out the ones who were interfacing with AI as disadvantaged and manipulation of the advanced AI developed for the Chinese orphans led to the creation of the mouse army who were categorically trained to worship specific people as their leader which they otherwise had never known.
I’ve been at a locals’ restaurant in Italy where the chef had sourced some truffles from a nearby wood. They were better than anything he could have got from a store
"The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at."
Software can be checked for being 'written well' by compilers / linters etc. There is no equivalent for well-written natural prose. Spelling and grammar checkers haven't a clue about prose semantics.
I looked 'squeeze' up in the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]. The are numerous variant forms including 'squoze' and 'squozen':
"Also 1600s squeez, squeaze, squease, squese, 1600s–1700s squeese. Also with dialect preterite and past participle 1800s– squoze, past participle 1800s squozen."
The OED cites quotations from the 1930s, 1870s, and 1860s that include 'squoze' and 'squozen', for example ‘Orange?’ repeated Waitress No. 1. ‘Do you want it squoze?’ in the Baltimore Sun, 1 Sep 1931.
I think the cherry-picked examples at the beginning completely ignore the massive number of examples throughout history where groups of people pushed back against mainstream society. A lot of them were hurt or died in the process but societies throughout history have been changed by people who refused to fit in.
The best strategy for the majority is homogeny, right? Just go with what others say to do 100% of the time offering no input yourself until the distribution of people becomes homogenous.
In my defence, I was coming at it etymologically, where (according to the OED), a perambulator is 'A person who walks or travels through or about a place' (hence 'walker') OR 'A carriage for a baby or young child, which may be pushed along by a person on foot. Now usually shortened to pram [...] a cradle mounted on four wheels'.
I can see his point that it is worth learning to think for yourself, but if you then try to publish your thoughts without understanding what else is out there (e.g. by reading about it), the results could be very embarrassing. This would seem to apply in both philosophy (which I'm assuming Schopenhauer was discussing) and (say) genre fiction.
Incidentally, having quickly scanned some of Schopenhauer's actual writing [0], I found statements such as "women are suited to being nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted" and women "are inferior to men in respect of justice, honesty and conscientiousness". If I'd come across these first I'd be very reluctant, rightly or wrongly, to uncritically accept his views on other subjects.
> If I'd come across these first I'd be very reluctant, rightly or wrongly, to uncritically accept his views on other subjects.
You don't want people to use this sort of criteria to judge arguments. Not just because it's ad hominem, but also for selfish reasons - your opinion that after a "quick scan" one should dismiss Schopenhauer's philosophical thought (his specialty) because he shared a common contemporary opinion on the nature of women (not his specialty) reflects badly on you. If somebody could reasonably dismiss an unrelated argument that you made based on that, your arguments would be ignored regardless of their merit.
Also, people would wonder if you have dismissed all of the writings and discoveries of sexists and racists; if you have then you are obviously uneducated, and if you haven't then your exceptions imply the shape of your own specific racism and sexism. It's a no-win situation for you.
My 'quick scan' involved reading the essay "On thinking for yourself" which was quoted from above. I specifically disagree with his general point here, essentially that you should avoid reading until your own ideas are fully developed. I do not believe this is universally true, especially in the context of this discussion, which is about becoming a better writer.
To get a feel for his other work, I read his essay "On Women", which is derogatory and sexist. Female philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft had already responded to similar patriarchal sexism (50 years before in her case) and as a philosopher one might have expected Schopenhauer to be familiar with similar intelligent women, and to have acknowledged their existence. His denigration of the capabilities of half the human race does not give me confidence in his other speculations.
[Edit] I also observe that Tolstoy stated "at present I am convinced that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius among men. ... It is the whole world in an incomparably beautiful and clear reflection" [0]. As someone who has slogged through the 27 chapters of philosophy in War and Peace, which are a case study of how to fail to understand how human society actually works, I am reluctant to uncritically accept claims from famous people that someone else is a genius.
[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/barm_n2?tab=meaning_and_use#2...
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