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dgerard@awful.systems

OpenAI does not want you delving into o1 Strawberry’s alleged “chain of thought” (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 2 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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[–] mpk@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

relatedly, a somewhat common phrase around this side of the world is/was “it’s greek to me”. I don’t know the history of why it came into public lexicon around here (whether it was imported or grew locally), but been curious.

Wikipedia has quite a comprehensive list of similar idioms from a lot of different languages. Chinese gets a lot of mentions, but so do Greek and Spanish. Plus Turkish and Hebrew. As far as I can tell the Chinese describe any incomprehensible language as "Martian". But "It's Greek to me" goes right back to the Romans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

But “It’s Greek to me” goes right back to the Romans.

The wiki seems to say the aphorism originates with medieval scribes and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The actual ancient Romans are unlikely to have had such qualms, since at the time Greek was much more widely understood than Latin, so much so that many important roman works like Caesar's Memoirs and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations were originally written in Greek, with the Latin versions being translations.

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

Pedantic note: Yes, Meditations (a phisosophical treatise) was written in Koine, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (veni, vedi, vici—self-aggrandizing combat-reports meant for the senate and propaganda) or other "published" works from Caesar were not.

Although bonus points, the ancient sources portray Caesar (a proper educated major family Patrician) as speaking his dying words—if reported saying anything at all—in Greek, not in Latin: "Καὶ σὺ τέκνον" (Even you, child) rendered in Shakespeare as "Et tu, Brute".