Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.
The article defines accent strength in precisely this way, as the difference "relative to native speakers of English".
That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China.
Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that. And if language families exist upon a continuum - there must be some point on that continuum where you are no longer speaking English, but say Scots or Friesian or Nigerian Creole instead. Accents close to those points are objectively stronger.
But there is a lot of freedom in how you measure centrality - if you weight by number of speakers, you might expect to get some mid-American or mid-Atlantic accent, but wind up with the dialect of semi-literate Hyderabad call centre workers.
> Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that
Is that what BoldVoice is actually doing? At least from the article is saying, it is measuring the strength of the user's American English accent (maybe GenAm?), and there is no discussion of any user choice of native accent to target.
No, I don't think it is doing that, I'm just taking issue with cccpurcell, who seems to believe that any definition of accent strength is chauvinistic.
Indeed, although the inference output of the model is based on the ratings input that we trained it on. And that rating input was done by American English native speakers, so this iteration of the model is centered towards those accents more than e.g. UK or Australian or other accents of English from outside the US.
Native white middle class, from the South East. BBC accent is fairly neutral these days. If you're American, someone like John Oliver has a very neutral English accent.
I'm not American so I don't want to comment on that.
Sure, that's fair. We apply labels that have a connotation of strength based on the distance, but the underlying calculation is indeed based on distance.
Agreed except that the capital B D and P are not easy to describe as modifications of the capital O (even lower case q is a stretch but the point stands)
Wait I don't understand is this just an excuse? Is this a slightly more subtle example of an "anti" movement being emboldened by what's happening in the US, despite the same legal framework not applying? Like the anti abortionists in Europe are on the rise. Or is there a legitimate reason that it depends a bit on US policy?
Nothing "anti" about this decision. The province's credit rating was recently downgraded (1). Investing in a struggling local company that had a dim outlook even before the US election (2) would be a tough sell.
If there is a federal tariff on Canadian vehicles that applies then everyone including states has to decide if they want to purchase what they intended or keep the budget they planned.
I read it as the opposite. A business that's already in trouble that has cross border entanglements in the current climate and can't get private support is a perfectly reasonable time for a government to cut off money.
The only bit where slowing electrification comes up is the first sentence, which felt like an attempt to spin fallout from Trump chaos as people waking up to the folly of electrification instead.
I was always taught that relativity, evolution, an old universe and even a not too literal interpretation of the bible (some caveats to that last one) are perfectly compatible with Catholicism. My dad was taught by Jesuits and I was taught at a former convent school. The Vatican has an observatory and the pontifical academy of sciences is far from an "answers in genesis" type organisation.
Some British right wing journalist/politician made a splash complaining about health and safety announcements and signs on the underground recently. I think the issue they have is that it's a tacit admission that we have a responsibility to other people, individually and collectively. And not just to those who pay us or who we can benefit from, but to humanity as a whole.
The “see it say it sorted” messages have been fodder for left wing comedians for years. Everyone hates them. Most people ignore them by donning headphones.
This is completely out of touch with my worldview. I've lived in and around London my whole life and, while "see it say it sorted" is a common joke, I've never once heard someone say they dislike them
Question for users of such tools: can't you ask the LLM at the end of the session to choose the most important parts of the context, compress it using your favourite tool, then decompress at the beginning of the next session?
This is basically what the OP is doing - just think of this of the cursor rule as a summary (aka a compression) of the session.
I did something similar for a small vibe-coded app. After a few back and forths to develop the first working version, I asked the LLM summarize the requirements and state of the app so far. I saved that summary into a `description.md` file, and can include it in a fresh conversation.
I was using simonw's llm so adding a new feature or making a change looks like:
`llm -f description.md -f code.py "Instructions for making another change."`
And no one is complaining about people who restrict themselves to that.
The issue is those people who want to completely dismantle the state of Israel and evict (or kill) all the Jewish inhabitants. They call themselves "anti-Zionists", but they are simply racists because they are fine with the Arab citizens of Israel.
> The issue is those people who want to completely dismantle the state of Israel and evict (or kill) all the Jewish inhabitants.
This is equally as wrong as those Israelis who want to wipe Gaza off the map and occupy the entire West Bank. Sadly for the Palestinians, a bunch of people who believe this are part of the Israeli government.
A state which commits genocide forfeits its right to exist. A secular pluralistic state can exist in the place where the ethnonationalist Israel currently exists. But its formation and continued security must not be contingent on the genocide of a people.
Great, so we're in agreement: Gaza has forfeited its right to statehood after committing the October 7th massacre, literally aimed at destroying Israel. Quoting the Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad: "Hamas is prepared to repeat the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood Operation time and again until Israel is annihilated."
I won't support the idea that Hamas has a right to govern Gaza, no. But I think that ideally a single secular pluralistic state would encompass current Israel and the Palestinian territories, and I hope the people who live there would one day assent to such a peaceful coexistence.
Well, partial good news, then: we have a secular, pluralistic state that covers at least most of that territory, namely the State of Israel, and the Jews, Christians Muslims and Druze living there assent to peaceful coexistence.
And entirely different matter is the fate of the people who are not citizens of the state of Israel. Where do you hope for them to live (and why)? Surely not in the pluralistic state we just talked about, since peaceful coexistence is far from a mainstream viewpoint among that population, to put it mildly.
A relevant Ask Project video from recent memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grq1Ro9vlyU - note that none of the Palestinians consent to living peacefully with the Jews in one state.
Hm, the problem is that a little over half of all politicians are ideologically opposed to the government running anything (the reason your comment felt "controversial", I suspect). Id hate to come to depend on it and always be one election away from it falling apart.
I can't say I have a good alternative. The co-op model works for supermarkets on an international scale, and for banks on a national scale (I am unaware of any international co-op banks). I wonder if it could work for payments.
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