You can discover beliefs that are shocking today, such as this excerpt from the article "Adolescence":
"In the case of girls, let them run, leap and climb with their brothers for the first twelve years or so of life. But as puberty approaches, with all the change, stress and strain dependent thereon, their lives should be appropriately modified. Rest should be enforced during the menstrual periods of these earlier years, and milder, more graduated exercise taken at other times. In the same way all mental strain should be diminished. Instead of pressure being put on a girl’s intellectual education at about this time, as is too often the case, the time devoted to school and books should be diminished. Education should be on broader, more fundamental lines, and much time should be passed in the open air."
No doubt. That’s one of the reasons I find the 1911 edition interesting — the authors have more license to express their own opinions, which naturally reflect those current at the time.
"Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us."
It’s only shocking to write it, or declare it as sacrosanct
Many people practice it, and women’s movements that put most energy on doing the opposite have since dialed back to pointing out that they were fighting for choice, including that choice of not being in a workforce. An option of a “soft life” that is wildly popular, and timeless. People just needed a new way to say it.
If it was culturally supported for men to be subsidized by another, a large percentage of men would immediately take that graduated and intellectually diminished role too. This is not a reliable option and is rare.
If common, it would unironically solve representation imbalances in other fields, since it would no longer be about shoehorning women into them, because enough men would leave on their own. A level of enlightenment still missing from Women in <field> fireside chats at every industry conference worldwide
You can nowadays paste the text from pretty much anything that's in the public domain into a near-SOTA LLM such as Kimi or GLM and it will give you a pretty nice summary of what it's about in modern language (Extremely useful: the LLM tendency to go overboard on formatting nicely balances out the wall-of-text format from historical publications, which was aimed at saving paper and minimizing manual layout effort), and then gladly tell you about all the things in the historical text that would be absolutely beyond the pale today. (Sometimes you have to nudge it by prompting "How would this text be received today?" or something like it after it has put its nice summary in context, but once you do that it tends to be quite thorough.)
I beg of thee, use that brain of yours and read a text that was made scarcely more than a century ago, a blink of an eye in the grand scale of the changes of the linguistic features of English, and interpret it for yourself.
I'm in favor of using all the tools available to better yourself, including LLM's. However, for things like this the I would argue that one should first try to understand it on their own.
Sometimes the work is the POINT. We read things like this not just to learn about the past, but for novelty and to exercise our critical thinking powers. To outsource that labor before even trying is like going to the gym and having your butler lift the weights. The weights got lifted, but what was really accomplished?
Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself. They were more like a written-down formal speech to be slowly pondered upon than something to be read smoothly and silently on one's own, which is how we now regard almost all texts. There was "labor" involved but that labor was not really about being more literate or exercising more critical thinking: it was simply about slowly recreating in one's mind the kind of broad structural scaffold we now expect to see in a text as a matter of course. It's in fact easier to think critically about a text when its sections and structure are clearly laid out, and having a LLM do this for you is a nice way of avoiding personal tendencies and biases that might lead one to misinterpret what the text is really about.
>Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself.
In the middle ages this was true, mostly because few people were literate at all and the words didnt have spaces between them. The ability to read silently was regarded as impressive.
By 1911 reading silently to yourself was the expectation of a normal literate adult. Only hillbillies and their ilk could not.
This is a simple text, intended to be legible even to school children of the era. It's also very structured already.
Their contemporary English was a bit different, but not so far removed that you should need assistance.
It was very much the norm in formal and semi-formal gatherings. They didn't have conference talks with PowerPoint slide decks, their own equivalent was to read out articles or papers. This often extended to university-level lectures, in a practice that was arguably carried over from the middle ages as you mention, but was very much still in use.
> It's also very structured already.
It's definitely not very structured by modern standards. The length of paragraphs alone would be described as "wall of text". Again, this was an ordinary practice back in the day, aimed at saving costly paper and reducing the manual effort involved in physically laying out the work on the page. It was far from exceptional: to a first approximation, most texts from the early 20th c. or before will look like that.
Entertaining to think that "that's too difficult to read for us nowadays" and "look at these unacceptable things" already sound pretty much like some poor Medieval literates who got their hands on Ovid or Lucretius, while under the rule of king Theodoric or something.
I don't have to say I don't question that we are very civilized and powerful.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with public domain texts from around the 19th or early 20th century, but they were not intended to be skimmed or speed-read the way we'd skim a modern text prior to getting into a more attentive close-reading. Even their short magazine articles were actually the near-equivalent to our scholarly papers, and were often read aloud at length in parlor gatherings. So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.
So before you were talking about summarizing whole articles and asking the LLM to find the things that would be "beyond the pale", but now you're just suggesting using it to insert paragraph breaks and section headings?
The LLM will easily do both for you. Particularly the thinking it does when constructing the summary generally involves a structured close reading of your text, and you can easily think of it as providing "paragraph breaks and section headings".
> So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.
Learn to play by ear. Practice scales. Practice arpeggios. Learn open chords. Learn barre chords. Learn moveable shapes. Learn to move among chord shapes. Practice with a metronome. Find people to play with. Learn to read music. Learn to sight read. Do all of these things and you will be a musician.
The AirPods Max are the most comfortable headphones I've ever worn. My head and my ears are both significantly larger than average and they are the only ones that don't squash my ears. I keep the Apple bra on it, inside a 3rd-party hard case, and it never runs down on its own. The battery is still healthy five years later. It's the last surviving Lightning connector in our household, and I might keep them for another five years.
The lack of agreement on how to spell chord symbols is a genuine problem. Brandt and Roemer's 1976 Standardized Chord Symbol Notation provides a reasonable standard, which was adopted by Sher Music in their "New Real" line of books, but it's not quite the same as the style chosen by the original Real Book authors that was mostly kept in the Hal Leonard editions. iRealPro uses a slightly different style. Chord chart readers have to be prepared for a variety of styles, unfortunately.
There are now six volumes of Real Books from Hal Leonard, plus a several others organized around genres or artists, plus the Sher Music books. A few thousand songs. Not every player has every book, but they are all available. Most songs are available for purchase for a few dollars each as downloadable PDFs.
If the band is flipping through their books, paper or electronic, to choose what tune to play next, that isn't a performance worthy of the term. It's a jam session. Which is fine, but hopefully nobody is paying to listen to it.
I agree, but sometimes you don't know all of the details of a gig before agreeing to play, especially since I'm not the top call bassist in my locale. Then you put on the best show you can under the circumstances.
iReal Pro is a great resource, but what it provides are not lead sheets, they are just chord charts. Lead sheets have the melody of the song in standard notation, along with chord names and sometimes lyrics. iReal Pro's charts give chord names only.
I get very frustrated with cats on the stage who rely too much on the iReal Pro. If they don't know the melody, then they easily get lost when, for instance, an intro or other section is skipped (such as when the singer re-enters on the bridge after solos), and in general their comping tends to not be aware of how the melody fits in with the changes. At least when reading a leadsheet, readers know how the melody and harmony interact and can better play fills around the melody.
Indeed it's worth mentioning, to a general audience, that iRealPro only displays the harmonies (chord changes) for tunes, and not melodies. Whereas, "fake books" include both melody and harmony.
The reason is that copyright only covers melody and lyrics, not harmony. So the harmonies are essentially public domain.
First-class continuations remains the hardest nut to crack to implement any full specification of Scheme, especially if performance and/or compactness and/or simplicity of implementation and/or integration with other languages (C, C++, Java, etc.) is a priority. Scheme--, a subset with only downward continuations, i.e. continuations that could be implemented using only C setjmp and longjmp or equivalent, would still be an extremely useful language, but it is much harder to gather a community for such a project.
I was lucky enough to meet Alonzo Church and Haskell Curry at the ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional Programming at CMU in August 1982. Curry was clearly not well and only lived about two weeks after the conference, but Church was in good form and lived about 13 more years. Gerry Sussman was very excited while he went around the room at the reception introducing them, and of course it was a great thrill for us to meet them.
"In the case of girls, let them run, leap and climb with their brothers for the first twelve years or so of life. But as puberty approaches, with all the change, stress and strain dependent thereon, their lives should be appropriately modified. Rest should be enforced during the menstrual periods of these earlier years, and milder, more graduated exercise taken at other times. In the same way all mental strain should be diminished. Instead of pressure being put on a girl’s intellectual education at about this time, as is too often the case, the time devoted to school and books should be diminished. Education should be on broader, more fundamental lines, and much time should be passed in the open air."
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