I worked at Pardot around the time Salesforce started using this same language in internal announcements about Pardot.
Our Pardot leadership translated for us and provided the necessary context: Pardot is being killed. The plan was to start building the product that would replace it, stop selling new contracts, rename Pardot in the meantime so the change wouldn't be as noticeable, and in a timeline of "by 10 years from now" Pardot wouldn't exist anymore.
This is Salesforce for "last call for the lifeboats, we're gonna capsize the boat."
The text of the second amendment, as written, would seem to indicate that the premise of the second amendment is to arm "a well-regulated militia" (which was relevant to the government that adopted the second amendment, as it had no standing army).
It was basically crowdsourcing the military. We've been running through all the various problems with that idea ever since, including:
- oops, turns out not enough people volunteer and our whole army got nearly wiped out; maybe we need to pay people to be an army for a living (ca. 1791)
- oops, turns out allowing the public to arm themselves and be their own militia can lead people being their own separate militia factions against the government, I guess we don't want that (e.g. Shay's Rebellion, John Brown and various slave rebellions fighting for freedom)
- oops, turns out part of the army can just decide they're a whole new country's army now, guess we don't want that (the civil war)
- oops, turns out actually everyone having guns means any given individual can just shoot whomever they like (like in hundreds of school shootings and mass shootings)
- oops, turns out we gotta give our police force even bigger guns and tanks and stuff so they won't be scared of random normal people on the street having guns (and look where that's gotten us)
Honestly, the whole thing should've been heavily amended to something more sane back in 1791 when the Legion of the United States (the first standing army) was formed, as they were already punting on the mistaken notion that "a well-regulated militia" was the answer instead of "a professional standing army".
I've had quite a few folks in my semi-rural north Georgia deep-red county (where our congressional rep wins landslide elections while literally saying Trump is like Jesus) who are convinced by my F150 Lightning.
It's not a hard sell: no more oil changes, no more annual emissions-testing bill, no transmission to ever worry about, and a massive chunk of storage under the hood where the gas engine would be – plus a bunch of outlets all over for powering or charging tools. When I then tell them that I spend about $30/month on charging the thing (at home) compared to my former gas budget of ~$150-200/month, it becomes even more of a no-brainer.
And none of this has anything to do with climate change. It's just plain and simple practicality.
They tend to ask about range. I get around 300 miles on a full charge when road-tripping, and Buc-ees has some pretty cheap chargers (still cheaper than gas would be) that get me back on the road in about the time it takes me to use the bathroom, grab and eat some brisket, and change the baby's diaper. I've done some shortish road-trips a few times now, and not had any problems. I've got some longer ones planned this year, now that I know that I can find chargers along the way.
I looked into PHEVs on my last vehicle shopping go-round, since few pure EVs met my cargo size requirements (stroller/baby life is a whole thing).
Ultimately, it was way more worth it to go all the way up to an F150 Lightning than to go with a good PHEV, partly due to up-front cost, but mostly due to ongoing cost: I will need to change the oil on the electric motors maybe every 150,000miles, and I never need an emissions test again. PHEVs require keeping the gas engine up, and getting it emissions-tested.
A whole category of cost just straight-up disappeared, for cheaper than I could get a RAV4 Prime too.
The Bible is too well-known a text that is too represented in training datasets for this _not_ to be skewed towards poorly reproducing existing translations.
Beyond that,
>there are hallucinations and issues
seems like a deal-killer for a religious text. Yes, all translation by humans is an act of interpretation on some level, and so there's lossiness in all translation – but the difference between a human carefully weighing their reasoning for a particular choice of rendering vs. an LLM that is basically weighted dice that might land totally wrong is a categorically-different thing, not a question of degrees.
This is definitely one area where the training set for the LLM is liable to be polluted by existing translations and even straight memorized english biblical text.
Not to be too much of a devil's advocate (ha!), but I kindof think I _want_ it to have biblical translation data in the dataset. So long as it's not simply copying something like the KJV or ESV into the output, then this should be a good thing, right?
Because much of what it produces (especially in the "poetic" mode) does seem to be very much "off the beaten path" for a good number of renditions.
I don't think that the goal would be to have a dataset that is completely free from scholarship on the topic of Biblical translation, but rather to synthesize the rules and principles from the collected body of knowledge and apply it (with steering) to the entire Biblical text.
No one is suggesting you replace your ESV or NKJV with this for your religious study. This is as much a technical project of interest as it is a faith-based one.
In terms of your view of the priors on the Bible, you've described in my experience the process all translations go through. We're all skewed by default toward reproducing (poorly) previous translation through word choice modification.
That is, in many ways, the whole thing. My guess is an iterative approach can actually yield a better approach as words shift meaning socially over time.
I had a history professor who would often use a similar preamble phrase. His was "And SO IT IS that we see that..."
It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.
I remember one session in particular.
This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.
This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."
The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.
"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.
He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).
Americans don't need money to fight. I was paid $0 with the YPG and had to bankroll my own time. Lots of Americans there. I met a lot of them that didn't even really give a shit about the sides of the war, they just needed to fight something. We're a savage people.
Which historically has worked more for us, than against us.
Because dealerships are the automakers' real customers, at least right now.
You don't buy a vehicle from Ford; your local Ford dealership buys a large number of vehicles from Ford, and then you buy one of those.
Yes, an argument could be made that eliminating the dealership keeps the same customer base while eliminating the middleman (see also: Carvana), but now you have a lot more cost and logistics (shipping individual cars to individuals' homes, for example, rather than shipping truckloads to a single well-known spot) and unless you're willing to do the Carvana/CarMax thing of offering a 7-day return window (which adds even more cost and logistics and risk), the average American customer won't feel as comfortable buying a vehicle sight-unseen from across the country as they would if they could sit in the thing while a salesperson pitches it to them.
That means you're taking on whole new category of cost and risk, while assuming that you won't lose any of your incoming revenue.
That's kinda a big assumption, and the major established/legacy/whatever-you-call-them automakers aren't known for having a high risk appetite.
Or the manufacturers just run what look exactly like traditional dealerships, just without the stupid crap that no customers want. It can’t be that hard or expensive. It’s a parking lot and a small office building.
Every state in the country prohibits car manufacturers from competing with their franchised dealerships. At the minimum the manufacturer would have to stop using dealerships altogether. And about a third of states only have narrow exemptions that only apply to EV-only manufacturers or manufacturers that never had franchises at the time the law had passed.
Our Pardot leadership translated for us and provided the necessary context: Pardot is being killed. The plan was to start building the product that would replace it, stop selling new contracts, rename Pardot in the meantime so the change wouldn't be as noticeable, and in a timeline of "by 10 years from now" Pardot wouldn't exist anymore.
This is Salesforce for "last call for the lifeboats, we're gonna capsize the boat."
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