The paper focuses on math and finance—i.e., quantitative matters.
It seems obvious that language models are not suitable for determinative number-crunching unless they generate a program to compute the response as an interim step.
I remember pre-Musical.ly TikTok here in Japan, and it was MUCH better then. In fact, it noticeably degraded when Musical.ly was folded in.
American social media culture revolves around money and sex in a way that isn't as popular in Korea/Japan/S. Asia—roughly speaking, the original scope of TikTok's userbase, since Douyin has always kept Chinese users separate.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of garbage social media content in Asia, but it's more boomers and gen-z era that consume hentai/money flexing/politics/etc., so that nonsense was almost completely absent in the early days of TikTok, when the users were mostly Asian teenagers and young adults trading choreography, in-jokes, and showing off their video editing skills.
Most modern Japanese homes are not "western style" at all. They're usually built by large industrial concerns (e.g., Toyota, Sekisui, etc.) that prefabricate many components at scale. The process of building such a home in Japan begins with a company architect fitting their design system onto your lot. The price is fairly predictable, and relatively cheap—-under US$300K in most places. The home is designed with more or less the following priorities:
1. Safety
2. Ease of maintenance
3. Efficiency
4. Cost
And more recently, considerations for SDGs (sustainability goals) with respect to materials used.
Longevity is not a priority, as homes are expected to depreciate in value over roughly 20 years. There are many reasons for this, but my personal opinion is that industrialization has made it possible to upgrade the technology of the home at a pace and a price that favors rebuilding.
As for machiya and kominka, local governments like Kyoto have tried to intervene to preserve the traditional homes. The "no build" lots do not allow a property owner to build on anything other than the load-bearing structure for the old home. As a result, you have many empty lots and coin parking lots around Kyoto where the old home was unsalvageable or where the owner could not afford a renovation. To be honest, only tourists/foreigners would want to stay in a machiya for the novelty of it. Although they were marvelously engineered for their time, they tend to be rough living compared to the extremely easy and cheap prefab homes. There is also the problem of craftspeople who can maintain these old homes dying out, which adds to the cost of keeping them.
I don't think it's possible to attribute any of this to a general "Japanese" attitude, though. On the one hand, one of the most important and longest-lasting spiritual sites in Japan is Ise Jingu, which is rebuilt from scratch every 20 years as a Shinto ritual of renewal. On the other hand, you have some of the oldest and largest wooden structures in the world still standing in Nara.
"... And then it burnt down" was probably the funniest thing I heard touring the "thousand" year old castles in Japan. Being completely levelled by a fire seemed to happen about once every 200 years.
You reach for Web3 when your requirements include: (a) self-sovereign ID/auth, and/or (b) hosted materials that can't be censored via a centralized hosting provider.
Horses for courses.
ps. Does he think Web3 is about storing data on the blockchain network? It's not. Ex. https://ceramic.network/
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. I realize it's frustrating when you feel surrounded by a lot of people who you feel are wrong, but there's a guideline for that too:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
As my post was one of the first in this these threads, the topic had not yet gotten divisive. Moreover, my comment about moderation did not regard my comment but regarded the parent comment, which I felt made a substantive contribution and got downvoted for it for, I am guessing, ideological reasons.
Thanks, anyways. Ironic that they effectively "censored" my comment rather than engage with it.
Prompts a few thoughts for me: (1) coming to HN is like time-traveling ~10 years back, (2) HN today reminds of the late stages of after slashdot, digg, etc. peaked, and (3) decentralized projects have real incentives with "points" that mean something, so losing some silly HN points to moderation seems more meaningless than ever before.
You know what Carl Sagan said about Bozo the clown?
> "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Sometimes, Haters Gonna Hate and there's nothing more to it. But sometimes, Haters hate because they and you should hate what they hate, and one day, it will be clear to all. Problem is, of course, knowing if we're talking the equivalent of powered flight or Bozo the clown.
Not surprising, but sort of disappointing that the writer thinks that modern Japanese culture so heavily defined by its interactions with the West, esp. from WWII. It's not that it's untrue or incorrect, it's just that Japan is more complicated than that. Lots of old paradoxes and influences that don't really lend themselves to a neat thesis. You're doomed to fall short, like when you try to explain a beautiful dream to someone who didn't see it.
A lot of USA's current culture is from our interactions with Japan and Germany from WW2. I mean... Capt. America, Superman, Wonder Woman to name a few... but also Rosie the Riveter, Baby Boomers (and their children: the Echo Boomers), etc. etc...
It turns out that WW2 was a big cultural event, no matter what side you fought on.
The most popular dinner dish is called "french bread", and it is a Brazillian imitation of french baguette, invented after Brazillian soldiers came home from WW1 and tried to copy the baguette. (yep, Brazil fought on WW1 and WW2! it was truly world wars! Just numbered wrong, Napoleon caused the first real world war)
WW2 is THE defining moment of the XX century. In 200 years time, we will have forgotten everything about Watergate, red/black terrorism, punk, vinyl, the Space Race, ICE engines, the labor movement, sexual revolution, Beatles and Rolling Stones - but kids in school will still have to learn about the Nazis and the Soviets and Pearl Harbor, in the same way today we have to know about the French Revolution - because it fundamentally altered the cultural and political setup of the world in ways that have been felt ever since.
One of the things kicking around the back of my brain is that we won't have forgotten this stuff 200 years from now, because it happened within living memory of people who were around during the rise of effectively infinite digital storage and searching. We remember a lot more than you suggest from the 17th-19th centuries, and the recorder is functionally "clicked on" from about 1900 forward; that's only ramped up.
You see this a lot with music services, and with the way that availability has shaped musical tastes in younger folks. It isn't uncommon to have people who are much older than me really into modern pop, and it isn't uncommon to have people who are much younger than me listening enthusiastically to stuff made twenty years before they were born. Obviously both sets of people existed before Spotify etc. - but now anybody can be those people without effort, and it has created an effect where older stuff is never really ejected from the mental map of "music listeners". You can, if you listen and have a breadth of understanding, know when a piece of music was written in the last ~30 years or so, but there's a leveling effect where it's all just part of the library now.
Barring significant events(tm), we aren't going to forget much of anything going forward. It's just going to be a question of who was driven, either intentionally or by accident, to trawl the right archives.
I disagree, we have a choice to learn or remember, but the effect of communism, the Republican Party not being the party of trump, China not being communist for decades, life before internet or bottled water is long forgotten.
Anyone can play music, not everyone can read tomes of history.
I find that hard to believe. 200 years ago was the early 1800s. We have hardly "forgotten everything" about Beethoven, Dickens, the abolitionist movement, the war of 1812, etc. I can almost guarantee in another 200 years, the civil rights movement, the vietnam war, the cold war, and the beatles will all be taught to some degree or another.
In the US, they sing a song about the war of 1812 before every major event. People might not remember the details, but it's fully baked into our culture.
I think that's because race issues are still very much (and sadly) a thing in 2021, and understanding race issues in historical context is very important. Also slavery still exists to this day.
Anecdotally, I was taught much more about the Industrial Revolution than the French Revolution; and plenty of the musical names from 200-300 years ago — Bethoven, Schubert, Bach, Mozart — were ones I listened to on Classic FM in my school years[0].
Certainly most culture will be forgotten (the Wikipedia list of 18th and 19th C. classical composers are 676 and 1620 long respectively)… but I can say much the same of their timeline of the 18th century[1], including a famine that killed 10%-20% of Ireland[2], and the 7 years war[3].
[0] I blame the “Mozart effect” getting in the news at the time, but still.
The 7 years war was just that, a war over territories - as such, it's fundamentally forgotten. The French Revolution, on the other hand, was a cultural upheaval that affected society everywhere, so it's still mentioned. Obviously the British have an interest in downplaying it, like the Irish famine, but still it cannot be ignored.
Was the French Revolution as close to “pure evil” as any thing/event could be? And a cause, for all time, for red faced shame on the part of French speaking persons the world over?
No, but it was as controversial an event as it could ever be - it polarized pretty much every aspect of society across the entire continent. There is a Before and After that event that affected pretty much every European country, and most of the following century (arguably all the way to WW2) was fought over whether that event and its principles were Good or Bad. Even countries that were left somewhat unscathed, like Britain, still defined themselves (for a very long time) in antithesis to what the event generated (Napoleon).
Cultural exchange isn't what the parent post suggested though. More that a lot of modern American culture has emerged as the result of the war with Germany and Japan - popular comic book heroes being one of them. Capitan American beating up Nazis wouldn't be a thing if well, you weren't at war with the Nazis.
The creation of Israel (largely as the world reacted to the horrors of the Holocaust). The creation of Atomic weapons. The use of total war upon each other. The damage and/or total loss of cities (not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also Tokyo firebombings, Stalingrad, Dresden, Nanking, Manila). The creation of rockets (V2, which directly led to Space technology). The creation of cruise missiles (V1). The creation of Aircraft Carriers.
The rise of propaganda around the world. The rise of ideology associated with that propaganda (Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism). Fascism mostly died out but Capitalism / Communism grew stronger after the war.
WW1, the "great war", was thought to be the defining moment of the 1900s. Instead, an even greater and bigger war was fought that almost completely overshadowed WW1.
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After the war, when peace was finally established, everyone shared in the pain and loss associated with the war.
Lets take the Siege of Leningrad / St. Petersberg, well accepted by historians to be an attempted Genocide against the Slavs. Hitler's plan was to kill everyone in the city, and Hitler's methodology was starvation (cut off the food supply, and watch everyone die inside the city).
No matter how you look at it, Leningrad was an atrocity on a massive scale. With over 3-million dead in this singular siege alone, I think we can safely declare the Siege of Leningrad to be the biggest loss-of-life in a __singular__ military operation ever... albeit spread over multiple years (it was a big campaign), but a singular operation nonetheless.
Nothing else in history compares. Not the atomic bombs in Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Not the Toyko firebomings. Not even Holocaust (because the "Operation Barbarossa" was ~20-million dead, far dwarfing the Holocaust. Leningrad was just one piece of the overall plan).
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That's what I mean by total war. War on a scale and scope so massive, it makes the rest of history look puny in comparison.
Arguably the attacks on say, Nanking or Manila, are more akin to historical (with soldiers raping and pillaging as they see fit). I can find historical examples similar to Nanking / Manila for certain (Mongols or whatever). But not even the Mongols starved 3+ million to death in an explicit campaign of genocide in a singular military operation (The Mongols, as "evil" as they were, sought conquest and not genocide on this scale)
And we've got all sorts of bad examples to choose from WW2. Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Berlin, Leningrad, Stalingrad.
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You won't see Joan of Arc destroying cities on this scale... nor William , nor King Henry. Some of the Crusades were known to be bloody... but even the Siege of Jerusalem (1st Crusade) resulted in "only" 70,000 deaths, a number that is far smaller than the total-warfare of the WW2 era.
Well... maybe William the Conqueror did destroy a few towns actually, if I recall. But not on anything approaching WW2 scales.
> With over 3-million dead in this singular siege alone, I think we can safely declare the Siege of Leningrad to be the biggest loss-of-life in a __singular__ military operation ever... [...]
> Nothing else in history compares.
That's what I mean by total war. War on a scale and scope so massive, it makes the rest of history look puny in comparison.
> Mongols or whatever [...] but not even the Mongols starved 3+ million to death in an explicit campaign of genocide in a singular military operation.
> The mongols killed up to 2 million people in less than two weeks
I very much doubt that account. The Holocaust was 15,000 deaths-per-day at its peak, and that was a fully industrialized gas-and-bury operation.
2-million in 2 weeks is 140,000 people killed per day, or roughly 10x "more efficient" than the Holocaust at its peak.
I have severe doubts that the Mongols in the 1200s had the efficiency of the Nazi genocide operation. Just from technology alone: the Nazis were able to use poison gas and bullets to quickly and efficiently kill, as well as the use of fully loaded Trains and logistics to ensure that these death-machines were operating at maximum efficiency.
Absolutely agree with a small nitpick. My read of (more recent) history leads me to the idea that the distinction between capitalist and communist nations incrementally eroded (think 1970s onward) until true fascism (merger of corp and state) re-emerged and became the dominant organizing principle for most of the world.
In my humble opinion it should be no surprise that the mere existence of a state itself establishes perverse incentives for corporations to leverage until their power is at least comparable. To that end the state becomes an arm of corporate hegemony and we are left with simple fascism.
What I think confuses the majority of people is that within the left-right paradigm, the current crop of fascists claim to be left-leaning where fascism was understood to be a right-wing ideology. No one asked, but if they did, I would tell them that it's still a far-right ideology, the powers that be are actually far-right, and they use pathological altruism, compassion and politeness (i.e. typical leftism) as a cover for their operations (e.g. "Think of the children")
And lots of people understand about effective storytelling.
It's not any more dishonest to "focus" and craft a narrative that has a dream as its source material than it is to do the same for any other source material.
>that modern Japanese culture so heavily defined by its interactions with the West
It's maybe a small detail: The hero picture of the article shows Miyazaki in front of his atelier near Studio Ghibli with an old German mailbox ("Postkasten") next to him.
It should be noted that Japan has a very special and long history with German Countries. Germans brought modern western medical knowledge to Japan in the 17th. Century, influencing the country to the point that the language used in the medical sector was German (AFAIK still is today to some degree). In the 19th. Century when Japan was forced to open itself to the world, Japan had a friendship and treaty with the German state Prussia, which helped to modernize Japans industry and society. The whole education-system at the time was basically imported from there, to the point that the iconic look of Japanese pupils today are going back to Prussia.
That mailbox is in similar style, it's very old and the design is so classic that the word on it is not even common any more today.
You'll also notice that the manufacturer, Caproni, is the same guy who shows up in all of the dream sequences in The Wind Rises. Also, IIRC, the engine in Porco Rosso's plane is from a Ghibli.
“... I also need to have confidence that I can do something with the BTC before its value wildly fluctuates.”
Fluctuates relative to what? If BTC becomes the unit of account (as it already apparently has in certain channels of international trade), then it’s only fiat money doing the fluctuating, while goods and services are priced in BTC.
That's a huge if, and in order for that if to become true, I already have to be past the hurdle of believing this to be true; thus it's a bit circular.
In other words: the mass public is unlikely to become Bitcoin-first until they can gain confidence in the stability of Bitcoin. This is notwithstanding the fact that stable governments likely will not accept BTC as a national currency, meaning citizens will still need USD/EUR/GBP/their local currency for paying taxes and transacting with the government.
It feels as though your post just handwaved away all of the practical issues with actually making the world BTC-first and then asked why I cared about them. Because, in order for the world you're proposing to exist, we almost certainly have had to solve them.
Goods and services will never be priced in BTC because BTC fluctuates by the hour and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The only way I can see this happening is if you literally eliminate all other currencies, including other cryptocurrencies, because there will always be currencies competing with BTC (and not without good reason).
Classic example of buying a good using BTC: say it costs 100 satoshis. By the time I click and purchase, and by the time the BTC arrives at the seller's address, the value may have changed for the better (BTC price goes down - hence I paid "less") or for the worse (BTC price goes up - hence I paid "more"). For the most extreme example, imagine how people that bought a pizza with Bitcoin when it was worth 5$ feel right now. A 15$ pizza in 2009 or whatever is worth ~150K USD now.
You’re measuring everything in dollars. But there are already economies that exist outside the realm of dollars. And who says the future belongs to the US dollar? In fact, historical reserve currency cycles strongly suggest otherwise, not to mention the untested waters of current monetary policies, a failing GDP, and waning political gravitas...
It seems obvious that language models are not suitable for determinative number-crunching unless they generate a program to compute the response as an interim step.