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Yep; this has frustrated me for two decades.

For the languages that we westerners regard as having very exotic grammars -- not like Chinese, which is comparatively straightforward, but like the aboriginal languages of Australia -- AFAIK there's no experience on such subjects yet.

For the world's most common/famous languages (English, Mandarin, Portuguese, etc) there's every reason to think that it's just a question of how much training data is available for training up an LLM.

In particular note that the Chinese experiments with their Deepseek LLM technology does well with both Mandarin and English, which all by itself is fairly illustrative.

If "exotic" grammars turned out to pose a major problem for LLMs, that would possibly challenge some of the most mainstream theories about linguistics, so I regard that as unlikely.


And it's not even a full moon.


You're arguing with people talking about how things are currently by talking about how things could be or should be and how people should change how things are.

That can be a great topic on its own, but it's not the same topic others are discussing.

And unless I missed it, you didn't say "let's switch the topic", you just went off in your own direction.


Of course they did.

I've never met an online public transit advocate who didn't come off as a zealot, lecturing the uninformed masses about the obvious benefits that will come from joining them while dismissing any criticism or skepticism as ignorance.


And I have never meet an American that was not fat.


Then you haven't met many Americans.

Unfortunately, I encounter many, many, many more public transit zealots online (and in person, though much less frequently) than I need to hear parrot the same talking points from fuckcars and NotJustBikes about the joys of living in an efficiency apartment and using a cargo bike to get my kids to and from their 3 different schools in the snow or blistering heat while ranting about vague "externalities" without ever providing actual numbers.


How much do you weigth?


Why aren't they satisfied with merely pondering strats made in US vs Mexico vs Japan vs Indonesia? Careful reviews of quality versus price (which of course varied over time) always showed more correlation with sometimes-unwarranted reputation than with reality.


Amongst this crowd, “my buddy said” is data. Correlation analysis is not in the picture.


Since the topic arose, FWIW, here in the U.S. it's common to have one power socket in a room (e.g. living room, bedroom) controlled by wall switch, and multiple other power outlets lacking such a switch.

I'm not in the industry, but I think the idea is that, in the absence of built-in lighting, one should be able to add lamps to a room that can be turned on/off by a handy power switch next to the room's entrance.


> It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all.

Those are two different groups of humans, as you implied yourself.


Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.


What lead to this?


TL;DR: You may be interested in - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15393

Bottlenecks, small population inbreeding, genetic drift, founder effect, etc

Basically what happened was, an alt-group of African humans decided earth was not safe anymore and its collapse was imminent -- they need to get to Mars. But since they don't have a way to get a spaceship in Africa, they will need to leave Africa and do whatever is necessary to build one, including throwing the people who helped them under the mammoth if need be.

At this point they have a pretty diverse gene pool and represent the humans well. They walk for a bit but came upon some steam vents and decided take a break and steam some food and enjoy the ocean view in the distance. The leader is not happy they stopped for food or rest. Later they are shooketh awake just before fire rains down on them. 3/4th of them make it safely to the ocean, and what luck the water is receding it'll be easier to cross, for the first 2/3rds at least. The tsunami gods demanded a toll and claimed the back 1/3. Not happy with the direction of leadership, half the group decided they could establish a better foundation away from these clowns and forked themselves.

Meanwhile, back in Africa and finally having got rid of that crazy mars dude and his cult followers, they decide to invite all the neighbors to an epoch swinging dance party to celebrate -- complete with the best plant-based party favours they could dig up/gather. Thus, ensuring the larger African population and their descendant would end up with an abundant supply of pokemon variants to swap between'em.

Though, you may want to take a look at the linked paper above for a more precise explanation. I may have paraphrased a bit.


Africa is where humans originally come from. There’s much more human history in Africa than the rest of the world.


...which needs more to explain it, such as (if true): "the diversity originating in Africa did not migrate out of Africa, and the gene lines that did leave Africa did not develop as much diversity as had existed in the ancestral gene pool, despite facing far more diversity in climate than exists in Africa".

And then I would again ask of the latter, "what? Why not?"

Ultimately: Why did Africa stimulate so much gene pool diversity? It seems more homogenous in environments than the rest of the world that Homo Sapiens emigrated to.

And there would have been cross-breeding between African subpopulations. Environmental barriers in sub-Saharan Africa are minimal in terms of gene movement, aren't they?


Perhaps there simply hasn't been time. Large scale migration out of Africa is a recent phenomenon relative to the existence of anatomically modern humans.


Existence, not history. History requires writing.


That’s a narrow definition of “history”. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth.


The above seems clear as genetic history written in the DNA. Those bottlenecks are a bit like burning the library at Alexandria.


Founder effect


"Let rich kids party and hook up for 4 years, and then hand them a well-paying career."

It's been done, of course (by their parents in those cases).


It's been cynically suggested that certain prestigious schools are primarily social clubs for the children of the rich and powerful, and that the schools let in some academically excellent students to confer an aura of merit around the ruling class. :)


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