on a learning arc | alt: @springofmaya | also on 🦋
Joined June 2024
- Tweets 6,138
- Following 547
- Followers 830
- Likes 42,548
618 Photos and videos
2011: totally reading that 300-page T&C before agreeing
2026: totally scrutinising that 300-line inline Python tool call before approving
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Jun 12
clicking buttons, making sounds, adjusting synapses, widening the range of my perception
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Jun 11
the learning materials for both Japanese and Chinese tend to include the word for 'overtime work' suspiciously early :c
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Jun 11
My name is extremely translingual and so sidesteps the discourse entirely
i dont care about white trans girls who pick japanese names but I do think that latinas picking english gringx names is silly like you're not "emily" or "lucy" you live in vigário geral rio de janeiro name yourself larissa or smth like that
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Jun 11
Studying two foreign languages at the same time but at different proficiency levels is an interesting comparison as to what the challenge at each level is.
Mainly it makes it apparent that the curve feels like this
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Jun 11
The corollary is that I should optimise for somewhat different things in either; early on I should make sure I can absorb the words at all, but in the later stage I can't afford to painstakingly memorise each dictionary entry and so I need to optimise for volume instead
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Jun 10
The most important thing you should learn when studying Chinese is that those charts are nonsense and you should discard them past the first lesson
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Jun 10
This might sound silly but this realisation has been a breakthrough just now – turns out the charts were actually holding me back as I had been putting more faith in them than in the evidence of my own ears
and those tone charts are in the 'not even wrong' territory!
Jun 10
The most important thing you should learn when studying Chinese is that those charts are nonsense and you should discard them past the first lesson
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Jun 10
as in now I feel like I can actually read out sentences out loud without stopping to second-guess the tone at each syllable
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Jun 10
Mandarin diary, day 48: I guess we're doing voice training now
unfortunately I can't learn chinese because tones are a type of voice training and as a trans girl I will NEVER get around to doing that
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Jun 8
It's been helpful to have had small ideologies, believe in them, start implementing them, and then witness their failings. At some point one just has to accept the humility of being fallible
I think one should extend this to the big ideologies too
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Jun 7
the realisation that there is no difference between people obsessively getting into physical exercise and me obsessively getting into Anki, other than the subject matter
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Jun 7
Though in fairness it's clear that innately I'm much more of the type to show off foreign language proficiency rather than gym gains
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Jun 7
Maybe the point of the tweet is that I used to wonder "but how do people get into doing that, sounds unpleasant", and now I think "... oh right"
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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 retweeted
Chinese state media: Look at all the nice things that China is doing at home and abroad :) new bridge :)
Russian: Ukraine had it coming and we like the sanctions actually, says President
America: Operation Bring Freedom to Cuba is go
France: French police preparing for riots ahead of world cup
UK: Inquest as judge's hand slips and accidentally sentences child rapist to 10 minutes
countries ranked by how good they seem if you exclusively trust state media reporting on what it's like in the country
china > russia > us > france > uk
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Jun 6
Personal perspective:
Translation is solved. For any sentence in a foreign language, paste it into AI textbox, and it will say what it means in English, flagging if there are any contextual nuances
But if anything that made want to learn Japanese and Chinese myself even more
Jun 6
I'm not sure this lands.
Take chess to see what it looks like at the limit. There is no skill in being an Engine Operator. Humans don't add to the engine by knowing how to turn it on just right. You run Stockfish and humans cannot even contribute.
Skill development changes you in concrete ways. A skilled chess player sees the board fundamentally differently, and better, than an unskilled one, memorizing positions in the blink of an eye, noticing patterns, spotting tactics. Yes, humans are obsoleted by machines there. But that does not make you equal to Magnus Carlsen.
So – school. Maybe we just want it all to be trade school, where the goal is to maximize earnings, and so humans should abandon every intellectual task obsoleted by AI. Maybe. And on that trajectory, perhaps we can abandon every intellectual task, full stop, because the train shows no signs of slowing down, and we're all about to be left behind.
Do we want to be slaves to minds greater than our own, masquerading as their masters because we know how to turn them on? Do we want to stop creating Terence Taos because Codex out-calculates us? Do we want every classroom to maximize the skill of flipping switches, accepting our own obsolescence by becoming eternal adolescents?
I do not. Skill-building matters as a good in itself. Training your mind matters. Becoming better and more knowledgeable, in concrete ways and in narrow topics, climbing skill pyramids ourselves rather than abandoning every intellectual skill, matters.
And any skill that is worth training, any subject that is worth learning, is worth training and learning right: in a way that actually improves the individual.
AI is not going away. But I'm not ready for human skill building to go away either. There are more chess classes worth preserving than "how to download Stockfish."
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Jun 6
It's not so that I could handle errands (AI can do that for you); it's so that I can interact with the respective cultures without any intermediary. A version of me that knows those languages can see more and express more. And it's that understanding that I find exciting
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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 retweeted
Jun 6
I'm not sure this lands.
Take chess to see what it looks like at the limit. There is no skill in being an Engine Operator. Humans don't add to the engine by knowing how to turn it on just right. You run Stockfish and humans cannot even contribute.
Skill development changes you in concrete ways. A skilled chess player sees the board fundamentally differently, and better, than an unskilled one, memorizing positions in the blink of an eye, noticing patterns, spotting tactics. Yes, humans are obsoleted by machines there. But that does not make you equal to Magnus Carlsen.
So – school. Maybe we just want it all to be trade school, where the goal is to maximize earnings, and so humans should abandon every intellectual task obsoleted by AI. Maybe. And on that trajectory, perhaps we can abandon every intellectual task, full stop, because the train shows no signs of slowing down, and we're all about to be left behind.
Do we want to be slaves to minds greater than our own, masquerading as their masters because we know how to turn them on? Do we want to stop creating Terence Taos because Codex out-calculates us? Do we want every classroom to maximize the skill of flipping switches, accepting our own obsolescence by becoming eternal adolescents?
I do not. Skill-building matters as a good in itself. Training your mind matters. Becoming better and more knowledgeable, in concrete ways and in narrow topics, climbing skill pyramids ourselves rather than abandoning every intellectual skill, matters.
And any skill that is worth training, any subject that is worth learning, is worth training and learning right: in a way that actually improves the individual.
AI is not going away. But I'm not ready for human skill building to go away either. There are more chess classes worth preserving than "how to download Stockfish."
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