sarker
ketman hetman
No bio...
User ID: 636
sarker
ketman hetman
2hr ago
I didn't actually read the series. Looking now, despite the name, it's really more about cloth production than clothing production, despite the name. Very troubling!
sarker
ketman hetman
3hr ago
They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.
It's at least a little funny that you've forgotten about the weaving and sewing part of clothes production despite apparently being aware of this checks notes five part series on clothes production.
sarker
ketman hetman
3hr ago
There's a difference between being indifferent to two positions versus believing one position while conceding that the opposing position is plausible.
Casting Cartledge and Hodkinson as opposing positions seems like a false dichotomy. In any case, he seems to believe parts of both positions and used parts of both in his argument.
His depiction of Sparta is likely more negative than either camp individually would accept.
I haven't read his series and I certainly haven't read the actual historical scholarship so I can't comment on this. Would be interested if you can come up with examples where he depicts Sparta more negatively than the Hodkinson or Cartledge views support.
sarker
ketman hetman
3hr ago
I take that as an explicit admission that he premised his argument on positions that he himself thinks are in dispute
I don't really think this is the case. The Cartledge position, according to Devereaux, is fully within the mainstream understanding of Sparta. Maybe it's "in dispute" in the sense that some people dispute parts of it, but I don't really think that means much. The Hodkinson position is also "in dispute" by this definition.
It might be one thing if he had prefaced those earlier Sparta posts with a note that there are several schools of thought, he find several of them plausible, and for the following he's going to proceed on the assumption that the Cartledge school is correct - but he does not do that. It sounds to me like he thinks that such an admission of uncertainty would give the 'Sparta bros' an excuse to dismiss what he says.
To me, it sounds like you are implying here that the Hodkinson position would vindicate the "Sparta bro". It doesn't sound like that's the case according to Devereaux. The reason he didn't base his argument fully on the Hodkinson position is because it requires dismissing the primary sources which he says people would find unconvincing (which seems reasonable to me).
sarker
ketman hetman
4hr ago
Take, for instance, this post, in which he admits that the Hodkinson position is more plausible and better supported by evidence than the Cartledge position but says that he made his case based on Cartledge position... The problem is that, using Sparta as an example, Devereaux is ignorant of the most recent scholarship, and misrepresents by omission the scholarship that he is aware of, in order to own a small, ignorant, and possibly imaginary audience.
I think you're misrepresenting Devereaux here.
I think the Cartledge view on Sparta, in many of its particulars if not in whole, remains ‘colorable’ [plausible, consistent with evidence] as an academic matter... This is not to say that one cannot prefer Hodkinson’s arguments – I do on several points (discussed below) – but what I think one cannot do is go tell a public audience that someone following M.H. Hansen and Paul Cartledge doesn’t know what they’re talking about or is simply ‘out of date.’ The points are contested; I suspect given the nature of the evidence and the sensitivity of the question many of them will likely remain contested.
Of course I do follow Hodkinson on several points; here I think the critique mistakes my use of older scholarship for a lack of awareness of the newer scholarship. There are points, especially deeper into the series where I adopt Hodkinsonian positions: Sparta “follows this basic model” of polis government (more typical than not!). My take on Spartiate women owes quite a lot to Hodkinson’s “Female property ownership and empowerment” in Spartan Society (2004), ed. T. Figueira, including rejecting the notion that female inheritance was the fundamental problem motivating Spartan oliganthropia; I was taught the ‘female inheritance was the problem’ version in my MA and am convinced by Hodkinson that this was wrong. The argument that Sparta’s army is a fairly typical Greek army is likewise Hodkinsonian and leans into his arguments about Sparta not being so ‘militarized’ as our sources imply, contra Cartledge. Finally, while I do stress the rigidity of Sparta’s social structure and its inequality (in keeping with Hodkinson, Property & Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000)), I don’t believe at any point I argue for the ‘exceptional domination of state over society,’ except for the position of the helots. It is perhaps unfortunate that This. Isn’t. Sparta. comes behind my habit of bibliography paragraphs at the front of essays; there would have been quite a lot of Hodkinson, but also Powell, Figueira, I.M. Morris, etc. etc. Property & Wealth, especially, is a must read if you want to understand contemporary scholarship, though it is dense and written for scholars so you can’t start with it.
He does not concede that Cartledge is an implausible position nor does he leave out the Hodkinson position entirely. If he thinks that there's two positions, both of which are reasonable positions to hold, I don't see it as disingenuous to use the more convincing one where appropriate to argue against a third position that he thinks is not reasonable to hold.
sarker
ketman hetman
1d ago
This is a fully general argument against any new APIs of any kind - after all, existing APIs are already in the training set.
Nevertheless, LLMs can learn to use APIs they haven't seen in pretraining.
sarker
ketman hetman
1d ago
It's not clear to me that they could.
Friends I know at apple, even on important projects, find it difficult to get promoted or get a raise. The corporate culture is extremely focused on siloing people so that they don't find out too much about what's going on.
Simply throwing cash at people in the hopes of getting a good model out of it leads to the Facebook path. Not a single incumbent tech company has produced a frontier model except Google, but really it came from DeepMind which was an acquisition and retains a somewhat separate culture from the rest of the company.
sarker
ketman hetman
1d ago
No reason people couldn't just ingest language documentation into the context, or even fine tune an existing base model for their language.
sarker
ketman hetman
1d ago
One tech company has somewhat called bullshit. They sit in Cupertino. Maybe they’ve since changed but my understanding is they still call bullshit.
It's less that they've called bullshit and more that they don't have the chops to build a good model themselves so they will simply license one.
But the LLM companies are constantly increasing their inference costs as FLOPs go down in price.
Labs need to cover their training costs at inference time. This isn't a problem if there are no training costs.
On top of that, this isn't really true. For example, Gemini 3 flash outperforms 2.5 pro and costs ~2.5x-3x less per token.
More broadly, the cost to train a GPT-2 level model is 600x lower than it used to be. Algorithmic progress has made massive strides, and that applies to the inference side too.
At least according to Ed Zitron's analysis. Maybe you just don't believe his numbers.
I don't.
sarker
ketman hetman
2d ago
If a lab goes pop and has to sell off its assets, training costs are not a problem. Inference costs can be covered with a reasonably priced subscription. If we're stuck with current SOTA models for the next 50 years, software dev will still be changed forever.
sarker
ketman hetman
2d ago
Gemini 3 wouldn't even generate syntactically valid Java 100% of the time.
Why does this matter? You are running the agent in a loop where it can compile the code and run tests, right?
sarker
ketman hetman
2d ago
My wife uses essential oil of vetiver for medicinal purposes
What medicinal purpose does essential oil of vetiver have?
sarker
ketman hetman
2d ago
They still make syntax errors from time to time such that the code won't compile
This is basically a non-issue in my experience. The code compiles 99 times out of 100, and if it doesn't, I don't care because I'm not reviewing it until the code is compiling and tests are passing.
You have to carefully review all AI-generated code for mistakes (which negates the time savings), or you will get buggy code sooner or later.
This is true for human written code as well.
I'm not a breathless AI booster - I often find the models taking shortcuts that I wouldn't expect from, say, a conscientious coworker. But the pace at which I can prototype and experiment has absolutely taken off in the past month. Ideas that I've had on the back burner for months but I never got around to trying can be farmed out to an agent who doesn't get frustrated or bored.
sarker
ketman hetman
2d ago
The radical policy of putting criminals in jail without segregating the bus would have permitted Montgomery to have avoided the bus boycott entirely.
sarker
ketman hetman
2d ago
Meanwhile in the US Rosa Parks made public transit a last resort option for those too poor to care about being stabbed.
Do you believe that the thing keeping people from being stabbed on public transit was that blacks had to give up their seats to whites when the bus was full?
I think this notion of letting people who aren't your children run your foundations is quasi-cuckoldry,
In the long run it's all cuckoldry we are all cucked. The moral compass of the median American today would be totally alien to the median American of 1500, and things don't change much if you look at direct descendants of those Americans from 1500.
sarker
ketman hetman
3d ago
Anecdotally, one (broadly) lefty woman I knew didn't believe me when I told her that Americans in fact do not have a constitutional right to obstruct government agents ("so what, they're just supposed to protest on the side? Are you sure?"). I think some people just don't really understand what's allowed and what isn't for reasons that I can only speculate about. We may find this Karen someday shocked to be clapped in irons for attempting to burn down the ICE fulfillment center.
sarker
ketman hetman
6d ago
I don't even think you'd have to accept that there's any kind of organic issue underlying the trend; even if it's just overdiagnosis/ overmedication for kids' screen-induced behavior problems, any parent who hauls their IPad toddler to the pediatrician for a developmental disorder diagnosis is a parent who is having a much tougher time with that kid than they anticipated.
I don't think you're cynical enough. One reason there might be overdiagnosis is because having autism or an alphabet disease is highly adaptive - the student gets accommodations, the parents get to have "neurospicy" children, etc. There doesn't actually have to be any underlying behavioral problem at all.
sarker
ketman hetman
6d ago
Are you saying that these guys can't just turn the lights green?
sarker
ketman hetman
6d ago
It's a little grim that even senior government officials live right on a six lane freeway. But at least ВИНЛаБ is easily accessible.
sarker
ketman hetman
6d ago
Real knitting, let alone crochet, was actually unknown to the ancients. There was a process called "nalebinding" which involved a single needle and passing the entire thread through each loop, joining threads to make a full garment. True knitting with two needles without passing the whole yarn through each loop came about around the 11th century.
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