> they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions
That seems wrong to me. Generally when a new edition of something is put out it's (at least nominally) because they've made improvements.
("At least nominally" because it may happen that a publisher puts out different editions regularly simply because by doing so they can get people to keep buying them -- e.g., if some university course uses edition E of book B then students may feel that they have to get that specific edition, and the university may feel that they have to ask for the latest edition rather than an earlier one so that students can reliably get hold of it, so if the publisher puts out a new edition every year that's just different for the sake of being different then that may net them a lot of sales. But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones.)
> But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones.
Most books with multiple editions are books that have been translated multiple times. It is definitely true that later translations aren't systematically better than earlier ones.
Heaney's famous translation begins "So. The Spear-Danes ..." with that "So" being an interjection, a thing that could in principle stand on its own. (You might say "So." and wait for everyone to settle down and start listening.) Even more so with things like "Yo!" or "What ho!" or "Bro!" or "Lo!". (Curious how all the options seem to end in -o.)
This is more like "So, the Spear-Danes ..." where the initial "So" has roughly the same purpose of rhetorical throat-clearing and attention-getting, but now it's part of the sentence, as if it had been "As it turns out, the Spear-Danes ..." or "You might have heard that the Spear-Danes ...".
I think the theory described in OP makes the function of "hwaet" a little different, though; not so much throat-clearing and attracting attention, as marking the sentence as exclamatory. A little like the "¡" that _begins_ an exclamation in Spanish.
Of course a word can have more than one purpose, and it could be e.g. that "hwaet" marks a sentence as exclamatory and was chosen here because it functions as a way of drawing attention.
I'm having trouble finding any evidence for that. E.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20030808111721/https://edition.c... -- here's a thing from February of that year that (if I'm understanding right) reports Ventura leaving the Reform Party because he didn't like its endorsement of Pat Buchanan for president; it mentions Trump, but only as one person Ventura might have supported as a presidential nominee, and it actually quotes Trump saying to Ventura "you're the leader". Trump was never the Reform Party's nominee nor anyone else's. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidential... says that "he never expanded the campaign beyond the exploratory phase".)
It's not entirely clear to me that there was actually such a thing as the leader of the Reform Party, especially in early 2000 when there was a lot of infighting, but if there was one it seems to me that it might have been Ventura but certainly wasn't Trump.
I stand corrected. According to Wikipedia, Trump sought the nomination for the Reform party candidate for a few months and ultimately backed out.
Regardless, that fact only supports my point. The man is a loser whose modern following is based on largely external factors like white grievance and fear.
I agree that we should be reading books with our eyes and that feeding a book into an LLM doesn't constitute reading it and confers few of the same benefits.
But this thing isn't (so far as I can tell) even slightly proposing that we feed books into an LLM instead of reading them. It looks to me more like a discovery mechanism: you run this thing, it shows you some possible links between books, and maybe you think "hmm, that little snippet seems well written" or "well, I enjoyed book X, let's give book Y a try" or whatever.
I don't think it would work particularly well for me; I'd want longer excerpts to get a sense of whether a book is interesting, and "contains a fragment that has some semantic connection with a fragment of a book I liked" doesn't feel like enough recommendation. Maybe it is indeed a huge waste of time. But if it is, it isn't because it's encouraging people to substitute LLM use for reading.
The ideal way to find similarities between two books is to read both of them. If an LLM is finding links between two books, that means that the LLM read both of the books.
To determine if a book is worth reading, I think it's better to ask someone for their recommendation or look at online reviews.
What does "challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly" mean?
(My impression is that Grokipedia was announced, everyone looked it and laughed because it was so obviously basically taking content from Wikipedia and making it worse, and since then it's largely been forgotten. But I haven't followed it closely and maybe that's all wrong.)
There's another HN thread specifically asking people for links to their personal websites. I suspect an accidental typing-in-the-wrong-reply-box issue.
The person you're replying to is obviously and explicitly aware that that is another scenario, and the whole point of their comment was to argue against it and explain why they think something else is more likely. Merely restating the thing they were already arguing against adds nothing to the discussion.
The comment you are replying to articulated, I think rather clearly, one reason why maybe we should.
I think what you actually mean is that the reasons not to ("sex work is unsavory") outweigh the reasons to ("sex work is going to happen anyway and if some of the people doing it move to the US then they will spend their money and pay their taxes in the US and contribute to the economy there").
Maybe you're right, maybe you're not, but I don't think you should say "there's zero reason" when in fact there obviously are reasons and you just think other countervailing reasons matter more.
That seems wrong to me. Generally when a new edition of something is put out it's (at least nominally) because they've made improvements.
("At least nominally" because it may happen that a publisher puts out different editions regularly simply because by doing so they can get people to keep buying them -- e.g., if some university course uses edition E of book B then students may feel that they have to get that specific edition, and the university may feel that they have to ask for the latest edition rather than an earlier one so that students can reliably get hold of it, so if the publisher puts out a new edition every year that's just different for the sake of being different then that may net them a lot of sales. But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones.)
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