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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The situation in the US is a bit different though because the US has been doing this for over a hundred years and only turned around “recently” (in my lifetime, in particular via NALA in 1990 for native American languages). The US famously went as far as kidnapping native American children, and the path to any kind of protection has been a long struggle that people still remember. Non-native languages also were systematically eradicated (e.g. famously German after WWII).

    At the same time the Civil Rights Act requiring equal access is still interpreted to mean that everybody needs to learn English, state laws still require grading within an English based framework, etc. As a result Americans who grew up in the US can generally speak English, and most people probably consider that a good thing too because in theory it means young Americans are not blocked from climbing the social ladder on grounds of their language.

    In contrast, China has 20-30% of Chinese born in China who can’t speak standard Mandarin. There are large differences between more urban and more rural areas. For example, in Shanghai virtually everybody speaks Mandarin and nowadays it has more speakers there than Shanghainese has. But e.g. in Kashgar in the Uyghur AR, around 50% can’t speak Mandarin at all.

    In the US you basically have to go to Puerto Rico (which is less integrated than a Chinese AR, e.g. with no voting rights in US elections) to get anything close to that, and even there English is mandatory in schools. Otherwise, Hawaii is the only actual state with two official languages, but Hawaii has very high English proficiency regardless. The same goes for other areas where some other language than English is dominant - the US has areas with >90% Spanish as a first language outside Puerto Rico too, but people there generally also speak English.

    So basically if we’re judging these laws by US standards we’re looking at it a bit differently than it looks from a Chinese POV because the US has previously already put significant effort in suppressing languages other than English, which we still remember, and as a result there also is no problem of children of minorities not speaking English and thereby not being able to work and live in most of the US. For the US it would be a regression, but for China it’s also progress in terms of integration and equal rights.






  • We can all click on your name and see your other comments, I suspect that’s what they’re referring to. There is a really strong correlation between the number of downvotes you received for past comments and whether or not they contain language like “fuck off retard” or similar.

    I think they hit the nail on the head, and there is no point in botting downvotes on this platform in the first place, since there is no karma.

    My client tells me I’ve downvoted you before as well, though I don’t remember where.









  • Nowadays agents like Claude Code can run autonomously for hours just given a goal description. It doesn’t take a lot of human effort at all to set up a bunch of sessions, and these companies don’t limit how many instances you run in parallel. Agents can also spawn sub-agents that run in parallel if a task calls for parallelization. Whether all this produces good results is a different story, especially if you don’t put enough effort into the goal description. But burning tokens as such is not difficult.

    Even workflows where you’re just chatting with an agent can burn a lot of tokens. When you’re chatting with an LLM, the entire history becomes part of the input each time you send something. This also applies to tool calls, so if the agent decides to read 20 files before it can work on your request that’s 20 times a file gets added to the history and 20 times that entire growing history is then sent back as input to drive the agent’s next step.

    Coding is more affected by this than many other applications because even a new conversation tends to start with the agent gathering a bunch of source code files, and then the response to a task is not just a bunch of text once, but a sequence of tool calls to make edits across files, build, run tests, react to test failures, and so on, all for one actual human prompt - but in reality a back-and-forth between the LLM and the harness with a quickly growing history.