There was an MS-DOS tool by James Korenthal called Babble[0], which did something similar. It apparently worked according to a set of grammatical transformers rather than by generating n-grams, so it was more akin to the "cut-up" technique[1]. He reported that he got better output from smaller, more focused corpora. Its output was surprisingly interesting.
That piqued my interest, so I searched for it but Google AI told me to give up. :-/
Sam Neill has not written about the filming of The Hunt for Red October; he was not in the cast of that film, which starred actors like Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, and Scott Glenn. He is, however, known for his role in Jurassic Park, and there are interviews where he discusses that experience and his work with Steven Spielberg.
I recently watched the whole season of UFO, wanting so badly to like it because of its music and set design, but episodes were soooooo dull. The plot premises seemed promising, but the development was poor.
I recently attended someone in the hospital. The constant beeping and alarms round the clock prevented any deep sleep for days, and seemed to hinder recovery.
This is a strange feature of hospitals that seems very much like we should know better, yet it’s pervasive. Hospital-acquired delirium is very common and awful, and is associated with bad outcomes after leaving the hospital—higher risk of death, and ongoing dementia-like problems.
We know sleep is so critically important to health, yet everything about most hospitals seems basically incompatible with proper sleep: beeping, lights, middle-of-the-night blood draws, shared rooms, no sense of day or night. Not dissimilar to how how we know that people make terrible decisions when they’re sleep deprived, but continue to have resident doctors work unreasonable hours, this is a status quo bias that harms people.
Support for part of this from another source. I've read through the collected letters of many famous intellectuals (just for hobby), and I've noticed a common dramatic shift in personality starting around age 28-30. People become more attentive to the needs of others and their own role in a network of social responsibilities. It's no longer "me, me, me".
I was in Hokkaido many years ago for work and loved it. Compared to the rest of Japan, indoor/outdoor spaces are wider, food is better, and people are friendlier. I never could swing another work visit, so I dream about spending time there in retirement.
I could imagine, though, that companies might have trouble attracting quality talent to Hokkaido, because people see more opportunities in the big cities down south. I suppose it's like if you were trying to build a tech hub in Montana.
It's not landlocked and less isolated than Montana. Montana is beautiful in select parts but it's also a little bleak. Hokkaido is still a lush island and Sapporo is a proper city. I'd say it's more like getting companies to move from SF or LA to Seattle.
The same could probably be said of many areas of the US (or other countries). Good outdoor recreation opportunities, some good local food options, but not a huge number of (local) employment opportunities or the nearby options that density brings.
As you say, if you can work remotely, it may be fine but it's a different situation from working in a hub of whatever your specialty is.
> As you say, if you can work remotely, it may be fine but it's a different situation from working in a hub of whatever your specialty is.
The question is: is that actually a problem with Japanese work culture? That would be a large problem in US work culture because there's no loyalty from your employer, so you have to be prepared to find a new job at any moment. But it certainly used to be the case that if you worked for BigCorp, you could reasonably expect to work there for the rest of your life if you wanted. And under those conditions, it doesn't matter if the area is a hub for your job specialty.
I know Japan at least used to have a work culture where companies would be loyal to their employees, based on patio11's excellent blog post on how Japanese business culture differs from that of the US. But that was many years ago now, so I don't know if the culture in Japan is still like that or if it has changed.
Well, many of those BigCorps simply went out of business over the years. Kodak in Rochester was a pretty good bet until it wasn't. Not so much culture as business realities.
Japan has been more stable in that regard. More stability but probably also fewer real opportunities.
Kodak actually spun out their chemical company quite a while before things really went south with film. The real problem was that Kodak had a huge film-related consumables business and, to a first approximation, that just went away.
As a teacher, I have closely watched the effect of LLM use on student writing and attempts by colleagues to use automated detection. I plead with you, DO NOT USE AUTOMATED DETECTION.
I hate AI slop and I fight against it in my work, but as that style of writing becomes increasingly prevalent, students are unconsciously adopting it for their base writing style. Automated detection of LLM writing never worked well, and now LLM and human writing have converged so much in style that machine detectors are worthless.
Our response should be to refuse to accept slop, whether produced by human or machine. I strive to point out the stylistic details of slop and how to avoid or edit them away.
Problem solving is a well-explored field in experimental psychology. TFA is a bit unfocused, making both some generally supported speculations and some traditional ideas that haven't been supported. A very good survey is the edited volume, The Psychology of Problem Solving (Davidson 2003).
Although TFA doesn't refer to it by name, "insight" problem solving is when you are stuck on something and then suddenly realize the solution. The common explanation for being stuck is "fixation" on the wrong things. In agreement with TFA, there is indication that verbalization supports fixation more than visualization.
It's quite frustrating when writers like the author - who seem quite thoughtful and potentially useful to read - appear to pontificate on a field without seemingly being aware of it; using a great mathematician's thoughts on it as a springboard doesn't justify it as its not his field of expertise either.
The essay might be more useful grounded with references to the sort of thing you link to.
There is an even longer history of denigration of the Anglo-Saxon-Jutes and mythologizing the Normans, but 11th century animosities were a different phenomenon that the modern British use of those groups as political symbols.
[0] https://archive.org/details/Babble_1020, https://vetusware.com/download/Babble%21%202.0/?id=11924
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique