The same experience happened to me, but it was even better – I was told I had a "little paronychia" and lanced without anesthetic. Her scalpel rubbing against two nerves in the nailbed of my thumb, the ER doctor lanced and scraped without so much as lidocaine (or even tylenol!)
The next day I almost lost my thumb, because this sadist that enjoyed cutting me open without any painkillers didn't bother to check whether the infection spread to my bone. I was also misdiagnosed by her, and would have lost it had my PC not found a hand surgeon in the nick of time.
Meanwhile, to curtains on either side of me at this hospital were people who were clearly homeless and had come in with some fentanyl withdrawal symptomps, but mostly so that they could sleep on a bed. When my partner tried to intervene and say that he's never seen me in this much pain, the doctor looked at me like I was a junkie, telling me that "it wouldn't hurt if I wasn't acting up."
I understand the "next, next" that happens from burnout, but this was next level sadism. No empathy; she actually seemed to enjoy my pain. No legal action was possible since this was an "emergency room environment" and she was only there "part time."
This was UCSF Saint Francis/ Dignity Health in Nob Hill. Please avoid this hospital if you're in San Francisco.
Sorry that happened to you. I personally will probably never go to an ER willingly ever again. If you land in an ER without someone that cares about you as an advocate to look over you....IDK I wouldn't want to be in that position.
This thread is filled with terrible people. Self righteous self aggrandizing zero real world experience "Justice warriors" I hope they all need an ER someday to see just how dire it really has become. Maybe that will shove some real world knowledge into their empty heads.
Neither of us is the villain here. The people massively abusing the system are.
I realize my comment is not "nice" but the people on here jumping on villainize my real life experience are terrible people. Both of us were wronged by a system. We did not do the wrong. We just noticed what was a large cause of it because we actually experienced it.
technically, it was the supervising technical director.
The only reason this happened (I don't think "working from home" was very common in 1999) was because she just had a baby! I love this story because it feels like good karma – management providing special accommodations for a new mom saves the show.
Articles like this [1] (re: Rochdale gang) are contributing to the impression of a link in the UK. There's also the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal [2] which affected an estimated 1,400 girls specifically in Rotherham. Population of Rotherham is 265,800, for reference. In both these cases, girls were charged and the offenders are Pakistani.
There is also a recent video of a girl wielding an ax and knife to protect her and her sister in Scotland [3]. She has been charged with brandishing weapons. Interestingly, the BBC has issued an article [4] claiming that it was a "Bulgarian couple" that the girls approached, and to not "spread misinformation." I am a researcher of Slavic languages, so I can tell you from watching the video in [3] that the accents featured in this video are not Bulgarian. I am not willing to stake a claim in what they actually are (someone else is welcome to comment).
Actually, I'm quite alarmed that the BBC is claiming this, as I generally consider the BBC reputable.
In my experience, ChatGPT, at least, seems to have had multiple languages used to train its corpus. I am guessing this based on its interaction with me in a different language, where it changed English idioms like "short and sweet" to analogous versions in that language that were not direct translations.
But my guess is that the data sets used from the other languages are smaller (and actually, even if it had perfect access to every single piece of data on the internet, that would still be true, due to the astonishing quantity of English-language data out there compared to the rest. Your comment validates that). With less data, one would expect a poorer performance in all metrics for any non-Anglophone place, including the "cultural world view" metric.
ChatGPT is worse in Russian. Example: after accurately noting that a name appeared in a particular Russian book, it asked if I wanted the direct quote in Russian. I said yes. At this point it switched to Russian output but could no longer find the name in that book, and then apologized for having used what seemed to have been "approximations" about the book before.
(I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in English was right, the name is there)
I was using Qwen3 locally in thinking mode, and noted that even if it is talking to me in Japanese, it is doing it's "thinking" steps in English. Not having a full understanding of how the layers in an LLM handle language connections I can't say for sure, but for a human this would result in subpar outcomes.
For example (not actual output):
Input: "こにちは"(konichwa)
Qwen Thinking: "Ah, the user has said "こにちは", I should respond in a kind and friendly manner.
Qwen Output: こにちは！
It quiiiickly gets confused in this, much quicker than in English.
I'm kind of wondering when will it become a universal understanding that LLMs can't be trained with equal amounts of Japanese and Chinese contents in training data due to Han Unification, making these two languages incoherent mix of two conflicting syntax in one. It's remarkable that Latin languages is not apparently facing issues without clear technical explanation as to why, which I'm guessing has to do with the fact of granularity of characters.
That said, in my tiny experience, LLMs all think in their dataset majority language. They don't adhere to prompt languages, one way or another. Chinese models usually think in either English or Chinese, rarely in cursed mix thereof, and never in Japanese or any of their non-native languages.
Would they not quickly bocome divergent vectors? In the same way that apple and Apple can exist in the same vector set with totally different meanings?
So all information gleaned reading a glyph in the context of japanese articles would be totally different vectors to the information gleaned from the same glyph in Chinese?
I don't know, but at least older Qwen models were a bit confused as to what words belong to which languages, and recent ones seem noticeably less sure about ja-JP in general. Maybe it vaguely relates Hanzi/Kanji character being more coarse grained than Latin alphabets so that there aren't enough character counts to tell apart or something.
I don’t think this can be solved until there is massive investment to train LLM in native Japanese. The current ChatGPT tokenizer still use BPE and you can’t even present a Japanese character with a single token
Ah nah, that was just me here, I'm no good with the phone IME. I tried a bunch of different sentences. It always thought in English.
It was pretty good at one shot translations with thinking turned off however, I imagine thinking distracts it from going down the Japanese only vector paths.
Quite a few reasoning LLMs do reasoning in English only. Because the RL setup specifically forces them to do so.
Why?
Because the creators want the reasoning trace to be human readable. And without a pressure forcing them to think in English, they tend to get weird with the reasoning trace. Wild language-mixing, devolved grammar, strange language-mixed nonsense words that the LLM itself seemingly understands just fine.
Seconding Meowwolf! The one I went to in Santa Fe was very hands on and physical, requiring lots of object manipulation as well as crawling through very tight spaces. Absolute delight.
Less so for the one in Colorado, which had more of an interactive back story done through an app; but I understand the Colorado one was also meant to be more ADA-friendly, and it was still pretty good.
I know of one that "doesn't explain" the exhibits (except through an app/website where you match things hanging on walls with diagrams) – the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston; this is specifically due to the wishes of Isabella Gardner herself, who was opposed to plaques.
There is one room that breaks this rule – I'm guessing it got damaged and then at that point they didn't have to follow her will.
Still worth a visit for the garden, the Titian, lots besides.
Backing up a sister comment on this thread: I've lived in SF and Chicago, both also as walkable as it gets for the US, and in both had relationships as a "regular," whether at a corner store, cafe, or the grocer. I remember our Albanian corner store guy in particular, who would comment on me gaining or losing weight. Our neighborhoods felt like a small town where we all knew each other (including the homeless!).
I live near New York now, and while I hear from friends that they find that kind of community in some faraway boroughs of NYC, everyone in Manhattan reports your profound and deep sense of alienation from their fellow man, though some with a positive spin.
I have not seen this alienating anonymity in any other part of the country, though I have felt it whenever I'm there. As there is no other place in this country even remotely as dense or with faster turnover (not even SF), I'm fairly confident Manhattan is unique (in this country).
But I'm pointing out that just because NYC fails the claim does not mean that the claim is wrong.
I think there's a goldilocks zone of walkable, at least for the purposes of this "urbanist-I-know-everyone-utopia" feeling – you could have perfectly walkable places that aren't dense enough (people wise), so they won't work. I'm thinking of Gorham's Bluff, Alabama, which is an attempted New Urbanist project. Or, you could have Manhattan, which is also walkable but frankly mind-boggling in its density.
No offense to New York. I sometimes find myself in wordless awe of its sheer power.
I am not an expert on children's stories, but I wondered about the vocabulary – "magnificent," or "newfound confidence." I'm imagining one might want to tailor the difficulty of the vocab based on the age of the child.
Thanks for your feedback! I myself read these to my 3YO daughter and it's true that sometimes I have to adapt the text on the fly. Always room for improvement!
Interestingly this changed somewhat with the clickbait-based model – now, I would disagree that advertisers "want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies."
I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky.
But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made.
The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.
As possible counterpoint consider the departure of several advertisers from X following the Musk acquisition, whose controversial online antics and positions (irrespective of one's potential value judgments of them) were deemed bad for business and a damper on the "buying mood."
In general though it is true that ragebait and sensationalism do tend to drive "engagement" and thus ad revenue (often to the detriment of society).
Well, this is the kind of argument you can make in both directions.
A site is full of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy has pushed them towards things that get a lot of engagement. Clicks are money!
A site is devoid of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy forces everything to be brand-safe and censored.
Sure. Chomsky et al continue in the cited chapter,
In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions,
advertisers also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their
own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and politically
conservative.
There are two options; either Chomsky et al are incorrect in their assertion, or they are correct.
If they are incorrect, then non-conservatives are of equal power and culpability in discriminating for or against which content they will sponsor. This would seem to be your position, and points to a state of affairs in which content and communities exist in disjoint bubbles which thrive off of entirely separate streams of ad revenue, up to the principles of the advertisers that choose to direct funding at particular media institutions.
Otherwise, if they are correct, then your assertion that this argument can be made "in both directions" is shown to be false by supposition, and the ad economy pushes users towards conservative content - in which case, one had best boycott and abstain from ad-driven media and social media unless they want to finance conservative thought.
LGBT rights have been enshrined in US law for over a decade now.
It's time to wake up to the fact that being LGBT friendly is the conservative position. This may come as a shock to people who were cutting edge radicals in their youth in the 1990s - a decade that is now 30 years in the past.
The next day I almost lost my thumb, because this sadist that enjoyed cutting me open without any painkillers didn't bother to check whether the infection spread to my bone. I was also misdiagnosed by her, and would have lost it had my PC not found a hand surgeon in the nick of time.
Meanwhile, to curtains on either side of me at this hospital were people who were clearly homeless and had come in with some fentanyl withdrawal symptomps, but mostly so that they could sleep on a bed. When my partner tried to intervene and say that he's never seen me in this much pain, the doctor looked at me like I was a junkie, telling me that "it wouldn't hurt if I wasn't acting up."
I understand the "next, next" that happens from burnout, but this was next level sadism. No empathy; she actually seemed to enjoy my pain. No legal action was possible since this was an "emergency room environment" and she was only there "part time."
This was UCSF Saint Francis/ Dignity Health in Nob Hill. Please avoid this hospital if you're in San Francisco.