What size/quantification level? IME, small language performance is one of the things that really suffers from the various tricks that are used to reduce size.
Great article. One of the papers it cites is https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07183, which is also great and looks at the issue of LLM usage to write peer reviews.
It’s an issue I’ve noticed personally, as I’m seeing an increasing number of reviews that lack substance and are almost entirely made of filler content. Here’s an excerpt from a particularly egregious recent example I ran into, which had this to say on the subject of meaningful comparison to recent work:
> Additionally, while the bibliography appears to be comprehensive, there could be some minor improvements, such as including more recent or relevant references if applicable.
The whole review was written like this, with no specific suggestions for improvement, just vague “if applicable” filler. Infuriating.
Funny. It used to be if you received that sort of response, you might imagine the author being pressed for time and giving a sort of prewritten/canned copy response.
I guess LLMs have removed some of the tedium from the process while making it more tedious for the recipient. That's annoying.
So happy to see tarot games mentioned on HN, I'm a big fan of their strategic depth and centuries-old cultural background.
Something a lot of people don't realise is that when tarot cards were invented, their intended purpose was to be a game. The whole divination/cartomancy aspect was made up much more recently, mostly to amuse French aristocrats.
A similar concept, but no. These ones are long, almost like a sofa, and I believe you can actually sit on the long clay part because it's not the part releasing much heat. bananabiscuit's link was a bit closer, but I believe the heaters we're thinking of are a more recent development.
This brings back memories. I used Seat61 to plan a 40-day-long trip across Europe and Asia back when I was an undergraduate, and it was an invaluable resource.
This is serious concern for me regarding the rise of China. Access to their market is already so valuable that they are able to impose their censorship program internationally via implicit threat against corporate proxies abroad. See the similar NBA Hong Kong controversy[0] and the YouTube 'communist bandit' ordeal[1].
> I've never had it be necessary to use these words. Often "on my/your side" if I'm walking with someone, or "beside/towards X" if there's a feature there.
> (it has deficiencies, and can be cumbersome, but these aren't them)
Surely the lack of words for left/right would make it pretty cumbersome to describe, say, the vehicle code, or to give driving directions, no?
Vehicle code is a good example. Having a limited vocabulary hits you hard when it comes to technical/legal texts, and when you don't have context to refer to (The text on the page linked to doesn't make sense when you can't see the pictures). If a very specific word isn't in the language, and can't be easily described using other words, it just gets very messy/unpleasant (even if you can technically do it, nobody's going to want to read it).
You can often give directions in english pretty well in many places using landmarks "go to the crossing, you'll see a church - go there, then...etc." . But yes, not having left/right is a bit cumbersome for this application. If I was giving directions in Toki Pona to someone, I'd probably just draw a map if it was in any way complicated ... .
On the other had, as you can see by the translation someone made in the comments here of my page, you can talk about some technical things just fine, like building a computer! (if you have enough photos to refer to).
Edit: Oh, here's what the creator of the language had to say about it:
"Toki Pona has a rather narrow range of functions. Although it is very easy to meditate and communicate honest thoughts and everyday activities in Toki Pona, it is impossible to translate a chemical textbook or legal document in the language without significant losses. Such texts are products of the complex, modern civilization we live in and are not suited for a cute, little language like Toki Pona.
As an artistic language with limited means of expression, Toki Pona does not strive to convey every single facet and nuance of human communication. Nevertheless, the results we can achieve with so few elements prove to be very interesting, if not spiritually insightful."
It might be interesting to explore what a minimalistic language explicitly for technical concepts might look like. It's easy to imagine falling into 'import blocks' declaring what particular variable jargon placeholders will refer to... But probably there's a more elegant way to deal with the problem of an explosion of concepts as you get into the weeds of a technical area.
Or to go full Sapir-Whorf, one could ask what it would look like to design a language where (say) linear algebra is intrinsic, and thus intuitive.
I think that the combination of an array language (like APL or J, but smaller like K) which intrinsically incorporated geometric algebra so that concepts like complex and imaginary numbers or trigonometry are not essential, and a minimalist artificial language like Toki Pona, would make an excellent tool for communication of technical concepts.
I'm sure you could go for something like "drivers side" and "the side the driver is not on". From a quick look at the toki pona dictionary that'd be something like "tawa ilo lawa" for drivers side and "ala tawa ilo lawa" for the not drivers side.
I think when performance on a real world task can be expressed as a single percentage, we've over-simplified the hell out of it and it's time to rethink the problem.
