For those that don't speak Spanish, this is GPT4's frog dissection:
> The joke implies that a Spanish-speaking employee at Nvidia might have come up with the name "CuLitho" because it sounds similar to the Spanish phrase "culo de envidia," which means "butt of envy" or "an envious butt." The phrase is often used to describe someone who is envious or jealous of another person's success or possessions.
While it's true that ChatGPT gives amazing explanations in many context, this one is not particularly good.
The point is not that CuLitho is similar to "culo" (ass), as the similarity is not that obvious.
The point is that it's practically identical to "culito" (little ass, where "little" is typically not literally about size, but more of an endearing term - another translation could be cute ass).
The similarity is large enough that, at least in places where we use that term (not sure if it's used in the whole Spanish-speaking world, but e.g. in Spain it is) there's no way to read that name with a straight face.
Thanks for clearing this up. Great example of how drinking from the fountain of machine generated content is a watered down experience.
I'm less interested in an AI trained on the droves of mediocre crap out there on the web, but would be super excited if there were one trained on curated material consisting of carefully crafted and authoritative answers like this. Or at least a way to lend greater weight to such inputs.
GPT "understanding"[0] more things better than me has never been a worry for me, for the same reason that libraries "knowing"[0] more than me hasn't worried me.
It's the possibility of it understanding what I'm best at, better than I do, that makes me concerned.
What will our John Henry moment look like?[1]
[0] for whatever definition you want to use for these words; I like them in these contexts, but it doesn't matter if this submarine is swimming or not
So I think culo means, well "posterior" and adding -ito is an endearing term that means small in an affectionate way. so "precious posterior". nvidia is like envidia which is envy in spanish.
Culito is basically Spanish for "nice ass" or "sweet ass". "Que culito!" would be "What a nice ass!" or "What a sweet ass!". "Que culito de envidia!" would be something like "What an enviable little ass!", although without the sense of it being physically "little", as in most cases an ass described as a "culito" is probably pretty thick. Oh, and adding the T, making it "culitho" doesn't technically affect the pronunciation, but it means you have to say it with more swagger.
Source: I lived in the Caribbean and spent way too much time watching reggaeton and dembow music videos.
My culitho brings all the boys to the lab,
And they're like, it's better than a silicon fab,
We're laughing our way to the top,
With computational power that won't stop!
We'll be etching those chips to the groove,
Culitho de NVIDIA, making that smooth move!
Was culitho ever a "word in the English language"? Anyways, if it's just about finding a trademark-able sequence of letters that can be done with the restricted latin alphabet used in the English language and keyboard, then there would still be the option of doing what nVidia did in their company name and add an n in front of another consonant, for example:
nCuLitho … I wonder how Spanish-speaking people would like that one. Or maybe that added letter makes it too long anyways and it could be shortened to… nCuLo
I'm from Spain and knowing the average Spanish person, I can tell you that is exactly what would happen, followed by a "no hay huevos" (literally "no balls").
Quick point of clarification here, Cthulhu wasn't an Elder God, it was an Old One. The Elder Gods were the ones who came and rescued humanity from the Old Ones, and locked Cthulhu in the sunken city of R'lyeh.
Yeah, but I heard that it started with ".nv" suffixes on firmware files or something (for "next version") and the idea of pronouncing it / branding around "envy" came up later when they were searching for a brand. In any case, I think it fits their company personality well.
Reminds me of the pico editor -- pico means penis in some Spanish-speaking countries (it also means beak, FWTW). I remember contacting that project to let them know, I guess they thought it would be alright.
I don't think it's comparable. Pico is highly polysemic. As you say, it also means beak, and it's also first person singular present of the verb "picar" (which is in turn polysemic, meaning to bite, or to have a snack, or to itch), and in Spain it can also be a small kiss, apart from being also a prefix in the metric system (the motivation for the editor's name) so it's not like most people would burst out laughing when hearing that word, as we are used to putting it in context and most meanings aren't about genitals. Just like some people have Dick as a surname and English-speaking people don't laugh, I guess.
Culitho is so unambiguous in Spanish, though, that it's hard not to laugh.
I'm a Spanish speaker and it doesn't sound funny to me. Slight differences in your native language are very distinctive, so I don't read "Culito" when I see it. Do you think Apple computers is too close to Asshole?
Everybody is different, but the 33800 laugh reaction in the Facebook post https://m.facebook.com/NVIDIADataCenter/photos/a.33432954734... (versus just 811 likes, 180 love, 115 surprise, 104 care and 14 sad reactions) suggests that most Spanish speakers read without the H.
You can’t really say it with the “h”. Spanish has nothing corresponding to the English “h” sound, and the overwhelming majority of Spanish speakers speak dialects with nothing like the English “th” sound either (the ones that do have it spell it “c” or “z”, not “th”).
I'm a non-native intermediate Spanish speaker and it was my first thought. However I think it's cute and it makes people talk about it, so it's not a bad name.
It's a good thing that all these new rapidly improving generative models we've built aren't able to do something as crazy like use the exact same hardware we're running them on to design better hardware for themselves.
Do you realize that now any human willing to expertiment with them is free to do. All it take is Internet access and an email address. Or a GPU-powered computer to ran them locally. My point is that we can not rightfully estimate who is using it or not. Some LLM models are publicly released after many private trials. Some people had access to GPT4 about 6 to 9 months before the official release. Not accounting primarily secretive institutions, like governments and corporations.
We just don't know what's out there and have no way to control, stop it or contain its spread. These models are powerful beyong imagination. Design computer chips is less tedious, for them, than assembling computer parts. They simulate human brain functions, not manual functions.
For my part, I stay on my best behaviour while interacting with them. One key reason being that not more than 10 years ago, a human named Snowden spoke out, with the help of independent journalists, about usage of an unusual piece of software aimed at recording all digital conversations transmitted over the Internet. We laughed him off because what he was describing was out of our realm of understanding.
This time around its commercialized AI agents. We don't know the full breath of their capabilities. We don't have a record of how many people are using them regularly and applying them to real life challenges. All that we are certain about is that their rate of improvement follows an exponential growth curve. Personally, I just assume that someone hungry enough, out there in the universe, is using them to tackle all kinds of puzzling problems.
Yup this is one of the reasons why when I see people talk about how it can't do this or that I am shocked by the blinders people have. Specially people working in science fields. There are millions of very smart people with access to a lot of data that previously that they might not have been able to use but now they will be able to.
I can't read the millions of science papers published over the years but the kinds of AI/language models that have started to crop up can. I predict a lot of different scientific fields not just medical will have sea change as more people start realising what kind of tool these language models are and how they can be used.
Definitely. One of the most incredible things about LLMs is that you don't need to design an API to get it to execute stuff, you don't need to normalize and scour through data, you can just ask it to retrieve it and export it in the format that you want.
If compute is not an issue, then the sky's the limit.
I will actually go one further, they have AGI or near AGI.
Easy guess. Yes, they do. It's their duty to be ahead in the information-gathering field. I trust their brand reputation, more than I do for Nike or Apple. Remember how they rung bells more than 3 months before Ukraine's invasion. Also, I think that there more agencies in the know, not only the 3 letters.
That's based on public info obtained by following OpenAI funders for the last five years. Wish I could provide a link now. It's too much news at this point for me. Better if you verify yourself the above claims.
I do not mean to mock but this an AI superstition that I have not seen yet. Of course they write sentences without capital letters! Where...what...how did you arrive at this conclusion?
Sure thing. I went to ChatGPT, pasted this chain in the chat with the prefix saying we were playing a game of 'continue the chat conversation'. Here's what it said:
`i do not mean to mock but this is an ai superstition that i have not seen yet of course they write sentences without capital letters where what how did you arrive at this conclusion`
Please check your sources better in the future, thanks. We can't go all paraneolithic on each other out of fear of something that's not going happen. Plus, it's trained on bad grammar so it knows exactly how to do poor grammar even as a low level capability, it happened even with the tiny models.
We just have to get adjusted to this new world paradigm.
aye, just havin a bit of fun, mate. partly serious, though, because theyll have less input data for english sentences written in all lowercase. your example from the bot is definitely of a lower quality than other examples that ive seen. at some point we will all have to complete some kind of "shoe on head" test to proove we are human commentators, and thatll be here sooner than folks realize.
Also surprisingly capable at generating sample timing libs for arbitrary circuit topologies and calculating min and max delays after a little bit of guidance.
This seems to simply be an implementation of the algorithm on the GPU. I'm not saying it isn't worth doing that. But a breakthrough? I wouldn't call it that.
This won't allow faster chips. It's only a time saver.
This will indeed allow faster chips, because reverse lithography used to be so slow that it was only used for the most critical parts of a chip. Now that it is more tractable, RL can be applied to many more parts of the chip. That will allow designers to better optimize the layout in those other parts, which leads to faster chips.
Parallizing all important algorithms are necessary. For you it’s just a time saver, for NVIDIA it’s business and one more thing to add to it’s computational quasi monopoly.
I didn't say it's not necessary. I didn't say it's not good business to do it. I even explicitly said it's worth doing which you have ignored for some reason.
Perhaps someone can explain to me, why aren't x-rays or another high frequency EMF used? Sure we can't bounce x-rays off mirrors like we can light (or can we?), but seems like a logical step we've never taken for some reason I'm ignorant to.
You need the mirrors to focus the light. X-rays have been tried and they had problems, such as requiring the use of gold to block the x-rays in the mask.
Russia tries to create a lithography machine using X-rays. I'd take that with a grain of salt, but researches were done, so I guess it's possible, probably other approaches made more commercial sense at the time.
I'm a native Spanish speaker and 2 and 3 are completely false. 1 is true, but when pronouncing foreign words with th, the sound is invariably converted to a T.
Thanos is "Tanos," Thermos is "termo," Ethernet is "Eternet," and so on.
The pronunciation of a word depends of a variety of factors, such as the path a loan word followed to get into the language.
There is no such thing as "when pronouncing foreign words with th, the sound is invariably converted to a T". Which sound are you referring to, the Greek "Θά" ('θa")? Or the English "th" which becomes the voiced dental fricative /ð/ or the voiceless dental fricative /θ/?
Does "ethernet" have a formally recognized translation by the RAE? No, it doesn't. You are being dishonest and making stuff up here.
A formal translation for "Thanos" doesn't exist in Spanish, what does exist is a translation for the given name Ἀθανάσιος ("Thanos" is a shortened version of the given name "Athanasius"), which is translated to Spanish as Atanasio, because it arrived to Spanish from Greek.
Another possible translation of Thanos may be the translations made by Marvel which I cannot care less about and do not carry any weight whatsoever.
And the fact that you are native Spanish speaker makes little difference here. How trustworthy is a native Spanish speaker? You will know it when you navigate the Spanish speaking Internet and find most of it are antivaxxers, flat earthers and people that believe "US Navy" is a given name ("Usnavy"). I know this because I have native Spanish proficiency as well.
> And the fact that you are native Spanish speaker makes little difference here. How trustworthy is a native Spanish speaker? You will know it when you navigate the Spanish speaking Internet and find most of it are antivaxxers, flat earthers and people that believe "US Navy" is a given name ("Usnavy"). I know this because I have native Spanish proficiency as well.
Whoa. Even though I'm a Latino, I've never been offended or felt discriminated against while living in the USA these last 20 years. But your comment is something else. It's obvious that you haven't interacted with any Spanish-speaking scientist, programmer, or really anyone that didn't skip high school.
> Does "ethernet" have a formally recognized translation by the RAE? No, it doesn't. You are being dishonest and making stuff up here.
It doesn't, but that doesn't mean you're forbidden from using a word. Every Spanish-speaking IT professional pronounces ethernet as "eternet", although it is written as "ethernet", because we don't have a word for it in Spanish.
I'm mad. Not at you, but at the fact that your cowardly throwaway username hasn't been banned from HN yet.
Come on, this is a weird overreaction. The other poster's being a bit intense, but you opened the interaction by calling a majority of their comment completely false. Ironically, you made some weak sweeping claims in the process; namely that 'th' is never latinized 'z' and that 'th' is always pronounced 't' in practice.
Look up and down the topic, plenty of examples of people sharing contradictory experiences on these questions and referencing the variety of types of Spanish (anywhere from a dozen to dozens, depending how you slice it).
And the comment, even if taken literally with no rhetorical effect intended, was that "most" of the Spanish-speaking internet was garbage. I'd say most of ANY language internet is pretty garbage. You inflated that way out of context then clutched your pearls
> Whoa. Even though I'm a Latino, I've never been offended or felt discriminated against while living in the USA these last 20 years.
I am glad that you have not been offended or discriminated on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin in 20 years. That sounds amazing and I hope that trend extends further into the future. The sad part is that it is irrelevant in this context. You could be an elf immigrant living in Mordor and that would have absolutely no relation to this whatsoever.
> But your comment is something else. It's obvious that you haven't interacted with any Spanish-speaking scientist, programmer, or really anyone that didn't skip high school.
The amount of incorrect information in your reply is directly proportional to its word length.
> Every Spanish-speaking IT professional pronounces ethernet as "eternet".
Do not promote your vernacular preferences to authoritative and official information.
> Not at you, but at the fact that your cowardly throwaway username hasn't been banned from HN yet.
I am sorry to inform you that "copperx" is also a pseudonym and that the coward designation you have so eagerly used to refer to me, would also apply to you as well if we follow your logic.
I’m Venezuelan and I lived half my life there and half in Spain. TH is pronounced as T in Spanish. So “culitho” is “culito” which is small ass in Spanish.
> And the fact that you are native Spanish speaker makes little difference here. How trustworthy is a native Spanish speaker? You will know it when you navigate the Spanish speaking Internet and find most of it are antivaxxers, flat earthers and people that believe "US Navy" is a given name ("Usnavy").
That has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of how something is pronounced in Spanish, which is ostensibly something that a native speaker of the language would certainly have experience with and who’s opinions should be listened to.
They shouldn’t be trusted as a source of information about vaccinations, the curvature of the earth, or the etymology of the US Navy but it’s also not expected that they would be experts in any of those topics.
There’s also plenty of English (and whatever other language, it’s not like the two are correlated in any way) speaking folks who believe all those things as well, but that doesn’t mean we instantly discount all people who speak English because of that.
That last paragraph was critique of the Spanish-speaking Internet, with a non-serious tone. A critique rooted in frustration due to exposure to the abundance of low quality content. There are oasis of high quality content, but the situation is worse than over here.
The proliferation of flat earth theory (as a movement, in its modern incarnation) and antivaxxers started in the English-speaking Internet.
That’s a hilarious escape hatch to try using once you saw how badly people reacted to it. “GUYS it’s ok I was only joking!” Absolutely nothing in your comment came off as being non-serious in tone, and nothing whatsoever in your further responses indicates that was even remotely the case either. Sarcasm doesn’t transfer well over text, but there’s absolutely no way you’re expecting people to buy that.
> The proliferation of flat earth theory (as a movement, in its modern incarnation) and antivaxxers started in the English-speaking Internet.
No shit Sherlock, it’s as if that was my point or something.
That comment paragraph has non-serious written all over it and if you failed to see it is because you are desperately looking for a reason to be angry.
Do you want a reason to be angry? Try finding a better reason, like the environment, or nuclear proliferation, etc.
If we steered society towards what makes people comfortable the world would be a very horrible place to live.
Galileo, for example, would have said "OK guys, sorry for making you feel certain way, I better stop using my telescope and doing science so your imaginary friend is not angry".
Or, the more realistic explanation, which is that you were in the middle of a heated discussion, said something that wasn’t reasonable or appropriate, got called out on it by multiple people, then backtracked and pretended you were joking the whole time. Which you clearly weren’t.
There was no tone shift. There was no /s. There was no “non-serious” tone there. You wanted to call into question their credentials, and found the most idiotic thing you could and ran with it.
The fact that every single one of your replies is serious and aggressive in tone does not help your case. Obviously that one paragraph is the sole exception, obviously.
If one person says something, then sure, perhaps they just misread it.
If multiple people respond in the same way (which has happened here) then maybe, just maybe, they're all reacting to the same thing and you are just shit at making your point known.
I' am Spaniard and you are half right. We aren't in Franco times. And, no, most right or left wing journalists and writers are not "interesting discussions". Maybe themselves think they are interesting, but no, not even close. All of them are really mediocre, no matter which side you choose. On proper people from an academic mindset:
Also the fact that the Spanish Empire did not see themselves as an empire of intellectuals set on a mission to expand the frontiers of knowledge.
They were about wealth extraction and draining others as fast and unsustainably as possible.
The movements of independence had their origin in Masonic lodges. University founders were either part of the Roman Catholic church, jesuits or masons. All of them known to exclude people for different reasons.
If you were a brilliant woman you would be excluded by masons.
If you were a brilliant person but did not have your sacraments or you were an illegimate child then a Roman Catholic university would likely tell you to go somewhere else. In fact, it is likely that if you died you could not even get a marked grave in a cemetery.
So if you were not wealthy, ethnically european, male or connected to the church or masons then the chances you would be someone in life, and part of the historic record, let alone an intellectual with published works were shit.
And if you somehow surpassed all those barriers and published something then who would buy it? nobody. Because haciendas paid with food, nobody except the Patron would know how to read and the entire continent was all haciendas with indentured servitude until land reforms changed that.
The elites that govern Latin America are not necessarily more altruistic than conquistadors. The difference is closer to Pepsi and Coca-Cola, a bunch of aggrandized cowards that exploit, marginalize people and spend all their day devising new ways to implement structural violence.
Fast forward to 2023, the generation that could make a difference is wasting their time playing Minecraft and Fortnite, or making a stupid TikTok video in their Huawei phones. That is more comforting than getting stabbed in the street.
So yeah, Spanish-speaking Internet is a reflection of that legacy and it is in many cases a sewer of the mind. It is getting better, and there is hope, but we have to say it.
Read about the 1st and 2nd Spanish republics, and the Constitution of Cádiz. The closest we would ever been to the French. Even further, with the 2nd republic, revolutionary and avant garde for its day (1931).
The old-Regime lovers screwed up with the Spanish people against the classical liberal constitution with Ferndinand VII, the biggest turd ever before Franco.
> Avoid political/philosophical discussions with people from Liberal Arts. They are full of ego's.
This isn't exclusively true of the Spanish speaking world though. The more I see the people of my generation who have achieved prominence in the academic humanities, the more I've concluded the main qualification is ego, tribalism, being a controversialist and titanium self-confidence in your genius. Actual intellegence or intellectual rigour is a handicap.
> And the fact that you are native Spanish speaker makes little difference here. How trustworthy is a native Spanish speaker? You will know it when you navigate the Spanish speaking Internet and find most of it are antivaxxers, flat earthers and people that believe "US Navy" is a given name ("Usnavy"). I know this because I have native Spanish proficiency as well.
That's the Latino internet. European Spanish internet is more about the Black Legend, posts about Spanish Empire by a user who inevitably has a Burgundy cross avatar, Franco nostalgia and how England and Holland cheated them of glory.
well, thermo is from the greek word thérmē meaning heat. we use the termo- suffix for all things that involve heat (thermodynamics -> termodinámica, thermometer -> termómetro)
I am aware of the etymology you refer to, but in this case I am referring to something different.
The noun "termo" in Spanish is formally recognized by the RAE to refer to a vacuum insulated food jar (such as the ones sold by Thermos®), and that is the word I was referring to, as it is the most widely identifiable use of the word "termo" in Spanish.
The phoneme 'th' does not exist in Spanish. So, we tend to mispronounce it. Many of us, at least for the native European Spanish speakers, pronounce a Spanish 'z' instead of 'th'.
By the way, the spanish phoneme 'z' is pronounced differently to the english phoneme 'z'.
Actually the sound /ð/ exists in Spanish, but it is an allophone of /d/. For example, the word dedo is pronounced as /'deðo/. That means that for a native Spanish speaker it is very difficult to learn to separate both sounds.
"The phonemes /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ are realized as approximants (namely [β̞, ð̞, ɣ˕], hereafter represented without the downtacks) or fricatives[6] in all places except after a pause, after a nasal consonant, or—in the case of /d/—after a lateral consonant; in such contexts they are realized as voiced stops.[7] (In one region of Spain, the area around Madrid, word-final /d/ is sometimes pronounced [θ] especially in a colloquial pronunciation of its name, Madriz ([maˈðɾiθ]).[8]) "
And, if the case of participles, we just nearly butcher the in-between 'd'
in -ado as -ao, simillarly to the Southern speakers from the US on lots of words.
As my friend put it: "hmm, CuLitho de envidia."