This comment leaves me confused as to what you believe. Do you believe a man biking across the country "takes and does not give" in a different way from a charity, or was "someone who takes and does not give" simply not meant in a bad way?
I do like that the article touches exactly this, and even though I'm a stranger to the entire concept, it makes sense:
>Hardly anyone hitchhikes any more, which is a shame because it encourages the habit of generosity from drivers, and it nurtures the grace of gratitude and patience of being kinded from hikers
Not sure I agree, the systematicness can be cultural as well.
In my area there's a bunch of Islands with ferry service, but the ferry terminals are often remotely located on these islands, away from lodging and population centers.
It's fairly common to see people hitchhiking their way to hop off the islands. Every time I've chosen to do it, I'm still filled with the same sense of gratitude Kevin Kelly describes. The folks picking me up always feel like they're experiencing the sense of levity and kindness, not habituality and scorn.
yes. There are mafia&organized beggers and cheaters in every major tourist city.
Someone looking for your pity $, but is actually faking it.
especially gypsies
I wasn't trying to enforce reciprocity. I'm just saying that if you don't need help you shouldn't be asking for it from strangers.
If you have a job and income you can afford transportation. Behaving like a broke person when you are not is taking advantage of other people, and taking limited kindness resources away from people who actually need help.
If you are morally obligated to use your own resources if you have them, then you're stratifying society. The financially comfortable can never ride a bus. The rich cannot drive themselves. Nobody can ever learn what those less fortunate are like, and must necessarily look down upon them and use their imagination to figure out what "those people" care about and need.
So that's not a great outcome either.
(I don't exactly disagree with you either. Accepting a scarce resource from someone when you possess significantly more? That rubs me the wrong way too. Get their mailing address and pay it back later, in spades, if it deprived them of something!)
It's a distinct possibility. What's more likely is that this person is an example of someone robbed of their own agency, either intentionally or not.
It leads to becoming dependent on others, a true Last Man in the original sense. That's where the resentment starts on the part of the giver, especially when enabling people such as this repeatedly and on long enough timescales.
What's become clear to me is that there isn't anything inherently wrong (morally speaking) with these people, but they need to be moved out of the way so to speak. They cannot be allowed to escape their various containment zones, and the mechanism for their containment must be strengthened.
This was my impression as well. I'm supposed to wander around and wonder who I will leech off of today, while presenting it both a skill and to some extent as a favor to the person helping me?
Even mentions in the article that he would be hesitant to respond the same way with his resources... that's when I stopped reading, so frankly don't know if he changed that attitude or not...
Sure, and a world where we're more dependent on each other would be a better world. It's clearer all the time that humans work much better that way.
But if you're only a "kindee", if you structure your life in a way that you can only receive help from other people and never be the helper, that's not humans dependent on each other.
"When we read a sentence like “The cat sat on the mat because it was comfortable,” our brain automatically knows that “it” refers to “the mat” and not “the cat.” "
Am I the only one who thinks it's not obvious the "it" refers to the mat? The cat could be sitting on the mat because the cat is comfortable
You are correct. This is pronoun ambiguity. I also immediately noticed it and was displeased to see it as the opener of the article. As in, I no longer expected correctness of anything else the author would write (I wouldn't normally be so harsh, but this is about text processing. Being correct about simple linguistic cases is critical)
For anyone interested, the textbook example would be:
> "The trophy would not fit in the suitcase because it was too big."
"it" may refer to either the suitcase or the trophy. It is reasonable here to assume "it" refers to the trophy being too large, as that makes the sentence logically valid. But change the sentence to
> "The trophy would not fit in the suitcase because it was too small."
Why would the cat being comfortable make it sit on a mat?
Many sentences require you to have some knowledge of the world to process. In this case, you need to have the knowledge that "being comfortable dictates where you sit" doesn't happen nearly as often as "where you sit dictates your comfort."
Even for humans NLP is probabilistic, which is why we still often get it wrong. Or at least I know that I do.
Ah, but cats won't just comfortably sit on a mat if they feel there is danger. They will only sit on a mat if they feel comfortable! Absent larger context, the sentence is in fact ambiguous (though I agree your reading is the most natural and obvious one).
But do we usually describe cats as comfortable, as in their feelings? We might say he IS comfortable, or he feels comfort, but for something to be "comfortable" that implies it gives comfort to others. I can see a cat being comfortable to a human, in that a cat gives comfort to a human. But I wouldn't say "The cat is comfortable, therefore he laid on a mat." Its almost a garden path sentence, I would expect "The cat is comfortable, that's why I let him lay on me".
In literary and casual contexts, absolutely (though we'd probably say "he/she" instead of "it" here). As I said, "it" referring to the mat is the most natural and obvious reading, but other ones are perfectly logical and sound, if less likely/common.
Although the sentence is itself a bit awkward and strange on its own, and really needs context. In fact, this is because the sentence is generated as a short example to make a point about attention and tokens, and is not really something someone would utter naturally in isolation.
I mostly just wanted to playfully comment that original GP / top-level comment had a valid point about the ambiguity!
> Although the sentence is itself a bit awkward and strange on its own, and really needs context.
Absolutely, but in this case and in many others we just don't have that kind of context. So we do what comes naturally and make assumptions based on past experience. We assume that the most frequently encountered form of it is the right one. From one perspective it can be said that LLM's are doing the same.
It's interesting to note that jokes are absolutely riddled with confusing and syntactically vague language like this. If you're ever looking for a good NLP test find some children's joke books. Those old dad jokes are mostly just about the vagaries of the English language and how easily you can be surprised when the "solution" to a sentence is not the most common one.
It's pretty clear he meant Europe as the continent, which London is a part of.
It's very similar to "Europeans" broadly generalizing the US as one homogenous country, assuming everyone and everything in Chicago is the same as New York or Dallas.
Source: me, a brit, who has lived and worked in UK and US.
> Why would you want to destroy your enemies' industries, is what you're asking?
Do you have any evidence that pirating is destroying industries? My guess is I can find the majority of this release by anna's archive on some combination of the pirate bay and the soulseek, or private music trackers. And yet, Spotify is still a thriving company, as is the entire music industry as a whole. There's even room for competing streaming services like Tidal and Youtube Music.
Then why would Anna's Archive also release archives of some of the largest Chinese publishers? Surely Putin wouldn't want to destroy China's industries.
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