Very uncharitable way to phrase that, American second language prevalance is similar to other English dominant countries like the UK or the Australia.
Americans in general don't speak as many languages as Europeans because they already speak arguably the most useful language. I've lived in 20 countries, and in every single one for them I've been able to find someone who speaks English. People are so ingrained with the need to know the language that I've actually met people who are embarrassed about their English talking to me in their own native country.
If you grew up speaking Greek, Romanian, or even something like Italian, this absolutely would not be true. Maybe you could find a person or two to talk to, but definitely not dozens casually in everyday situations. So you have to learn multiple languages by necessity. And since European countries are so small, close together and all have their own languages, you also end up picking up your neighbors languages.
> Very uncharitable way to phrase that, American second language prevalance is similar to other English dominant countries like the UK or the Australia.
No. Yours is uncharitable because it has got nothing to do with how many languages you speak. This is not a multiglot competition. The only point being made is that someone with a fair amount of American exposure will have a head start emigrating to America compared to say an American to Latvia. Or France. Or Germany. Just on the language front in isolation/alone.
> Americans in general don't speak as many languages as Europeans because they already speak arguably the most useful language. I've lived in 20 countries, and in every single one for them I've been able to find someone who speaks English. People are so ingrained with the need to know the language that I've actually met people who are embarrassed about their English talking to me in their own native country.
Here’s an alternative explanation. These people were so gracious and willing to communicate with you, a foreigner, that they were flustered and embarrassed that their command of the English language did not allow them to express themselves as clearly as they could. Or maybe they were really just embarrassed to have insufficient command of the Master Language, I don’t know, maybe your version is correct.
> If you grew up speaking Greek, Romanian, or even something like Italian, this absolutely would not be true. Maybe you could find a person or two to talk to, but definitely not dozens casually in everyday situations. So you have to learn multiple languages by necessity. And since European countries are so small, close together and all have their own languages, you also end up picking up your neighbors languages.
For someone having lived in twenty countries you seem as wordly as a North Dakotan having travelled abroad three times. All to Winnipeg.
"No. Yours is uncharitable because it has got nothing to do with how many languages you speak. This is not a multiglot competition."
I was referring to this specific part of the comment I replied to: "Americans are averse to learning languages as opposed to other people". My response is a very accurate explanation of the reasons why this is a) an unfair way of looking at things, and b) not unique to Americans. What aspect of my response is uncharitable? I'm not saying things should be one way or another, just explaining how they are.
"Here’s an alternative explanation. These people were so gracious and willing to communicate with you, a foreigner, that they were flustered and embarrassed that their command of the English language did not allow them to express themselves as clearly as they could. "
The situation I described has occurred to me more then once, even after I tried to communicate in the local language. English speaking is a flex in a lot of the world and poor English is embarrassing. The desirability and prevalance of English may upset you, but it is objectively true. You can get English teaching jobs and find plenty of English speakers all over the planet. The same is not true for any of the other languages I mentioned in my post.
"For someone having lived in twenty countries you seem as wordly as a North Dakotan having travelled abroad three times. All to Winnipeg"
Lmao, why are you so angry? I grew up in Australia and south east asia.
> I was referring to this specific part of the comment I replied to: "Americans are averse to learning languages as opposed to other people". My response is a very accurate explanation of the reasons why this is a) an unfair way of looking at things, and b) not unique to Americans. What aspect of my response is uncharitable? I'm not saying things should be one way or another, just explaining how they are.
Okay that’s fair. I glossed over that part.
> The situation I described has occurred to me more then once, even after I tried to communicate in the local language.
Your interpretation of the chain of events perhaps.
One person goes to a country and meets kind strangers. “Wow, these people are nice to strangers”. Another person has the same experience. “Wow, these people must love me or X attribute.”
> English speaking is a flex in a lot of the world and poor English is embarrassing. The desirability and prevalance of English may upset you, but it is objectively true. You can get English teaching jobs and find plenty of English speakers all over the planet. The same is not true for any of the other languages I mentioned in my post.
I’m very upset that I speak English fluently. It really inconveniences me.
> Lmao, why are you so angry? I grew up in Australia and south east asia.
Do you know what a comparison is? I did not call you an American. There’s no reason to take offense.
No, it is not my interpretation. You can be willfully ignorant about this if you want, but you are just plain wrong. I'm talking about countries I grew up in and went to school with the locals with. I know the norms of the people I was around better then you.
If you go to a place that views western culture through a looking glass and is trying to learn English to progress to a better point in life, English is cool, speaking English is cool. Not saying that is a good way for things to be (or that literally every person you will meet will have this mindset), but that is how it is for a significant portion of people.
"Do you know what a comparison is? I did not call you an American. There’s no reason to take offense"
I'm not offended, but your remark was a) clearly intended as an insult and b) demonstrated that you were likely stereotyping me on a very particular way, which runs completely contrary to my actual experience with these matters.
I know a couple people that write like this, I think they do it because it conveys a casual and indifferent attitude on the part of the speaker. some ppl are just too cool for punctuation
I'm not an expert on this tech, so I could be talking out my ass, but what you are saying here doesn't ring completely true to me. I'm an avid consumer of stable-diffusion based models. The community is very easily able to train adaptations to the network that push it in a certain direction, to the point you consistently get the model to produce specific types of output (e.g. perfectly replicating the style of a well known artist).
I have also seen people train "jailbreaks" of popular open source LLMs (e.g. Google Gemma) that remove the condescending ethical guidelines and just let you talk to the thing normally.
So all in all I am skeptical of the claim that there would be no value in having access to the training data. Clearly there is some ability to steer the direction of the output these models produce.
Code isn't an "artifact", it's the actual product that you are building and delivering. You can use flowery language and pontificate about the importance of the problem domain if you like, but at the end of the day we are producing a low level sequences of instructions that will be executed by a real world device. There has always been, and likely will always be, value in understanding exactly what you are asking the computer to do
I'm familiar with "artifact" being used to describe the inconsequential and easy to reproduce output of some deterministic process (e.g. build artifact). Even given the terminology you provide here it doesn't change the content of my point above.
When I see someone dismissing the code as a small irrelevant part of the task of writing software, it's like hearing that the low-level design and physical construction of a bridge is an irrelevant side-effect of my desire to cross a body of water. Like, maybe that's true in a philosophical sense, but at the end of the day we are building a real-world bridge that needs to conform to real-world constraints, and every little detail is going to be important. I wouldn't want to cross a bridge built by someone who thinks otherwise.
In most domains, code is not the actual product. Data is. Code is how you record, modify and delete data. But it is ultimately data that has meaning and value.
This is why we have the idiom: “Don’t tell me what the code says—show me the data, and I’ll tell you what the code does.”
We're talking about a country that has been at war for 20 years and is now under the thumb of a fundamentalist totalitarian regime. You don't have to look far to find thousands of examples of afgani people/refugees denouncing the Taliban. Using this as a representative example of afgani culture is at best misleading. It would be like labeling the citizens of North Korean as being culturally against their own human rights and chastising them for that.
> We're talking about a country that has been at war for 20 years and is now under the thumb of a fundamentalist totalitarian regime
Culturally based attitudes to homosexuality have little if anything to do with a people‘s government. As far as I can find polls for it, disagreement and hate towards queer people is incredibly prevalent among their people.
Respectfully, at lot of what you say here runs contrary to my experience. US engineers are insanely well compensated, even relative to other developed countries. I'm a dual Australian/American citizen. I earned literally 3 times what I would have made in a big Australian city at my New York tech job.
I've always found it pretty easy to find a new job when I've needed one, even now there are an insane number of openings all over the US. The job market here is an order of magnitude larger then it was in Australia.
I don't doubt there is a deflationary effect on demand/wages due to h1b visas, but I don't connect at all with the catastrophic rhetoric I see in these threads. The United States still has some of the best opportunities in the world for people with tech skills
No idea why this is downvoted, making AI music customized to your exact situation/preferences is very addictive. I have my own playlist I listen to pretty frequently
The company I founded has adjusted our product line to meet changes in demand that have been driven by AI and last year was our best year ever, so I guess I'm the one doing the eating.
Americans in general don't speak as many languages as Europeans because they already speak arguably the most useful language. I've lived in 20 countries, and in every single one for them I've been able to find someone who speaks English. People are so ingrained with the need to know the language that I've actually met people who are embarrassed about their English talking to me in their own native country.
If you grew up speaking Greek, Romanian, or even something like Italian, this absolutely would not be true. Maybe you could find a person or two to talk to, but definitely not dozens casually in everyday situations. So you have to learn multiple languages by necessity. And since European countries are so small, close together and all have their own languages, you also end up picking up your neighbors languages.