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Why wordfreq will not be updated

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Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#261

Post by homebrewer »

frognumber wrote: post #142
weinzierl wrote: post #64

"I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans." We've been past the tipping point when it comes to text for some time, but for video I feel we are living through the watershed moment right now. Especially smaller children don't have a good intuition on what is real and what is not. When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer but…

There are a series of challenges like: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/09/technology/ai... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/19/technology/ar... These are a little bit unfair, in that we're comparing handpicked examples, but I don't think many experts will pass a test like this. Technology only moves forward (and seemingly, at an accelerating pace). What's a little shocking to me is the speed of…

> so much stuff is basically free

It really isn't. Have a look at daily median income statistics for the rest of the planet:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...

  $2.48 Eastern and Southern Africa (PIP)
  $2.78 Sub-Saharan Africa (PIP)
  $3.22 Western and Central Africa (PIP)
  $3.72 India (rural)
  $4.22 South Asia (PIP)
  $4.60 India (urban)
  $5.40 Indonesia (rural)
  $6.54 Indonesia (urban)
  $7.50 Middle East and North Africa (PIP)
  $8.05 China (rural)
  $10.00 East Asia and Pacific (PIP)
  $11.60 Latin America and the Caribbean (PIP)
  $12.52 China (urban)
And more generally:

  $7.75 World
I looked around on Ali, and the cheapest charger that doesn't look too dangerous costs around five bucks. So it's roughly equal to one day's income of at least half the population of our planet.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#262

Post by Fargren »

ljsprague wrote: post #257
Ensorceled wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I see a lot of the "right" discourse. Many are openly supporting Putin now. I follow many conservative (US) pundits and journalists and they have either taken a hard right turn or are raising the alarm and supporting Harris. I see similar trends here in Canada. Yes, I see that the left has become more authoritarian, but it pales to the hard shift I see on the right.

Something inherently wrong with supporting Putin?

No one said it was wrong, they just said it's "right" discourse.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#263

Post by vundercind »

squigz wrote: post #234
bongodongobob wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's high quality when the content is within HN's bubble. Anything related to health, politics, or Microsoft is full of misinformation, ignorance, and garbage like any other site. The Microsoft discussions in particular are extremely low quality.

I disagree. Even politics spurs intelligent, nuanced discussion here on HN. And to hold up discussions about MS as an example of 'extremely' low quality discussion is, ah, interesting. Do you have any recent examples of such discussions?

Politics and philosophy discussions here are intelligent in that most of the commenters aren’t dumb. They tend to be entirely uneducated and resistant to the educated.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#264

Post by nick3443 »

halostatue wrote: post #226
jerf wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wife and I use the internet for recipe ideas ... but we hardly ever follow them directly anymore. We're no formally-trained chefs but we've been home cooks for over 20 years now, and so many of them are self-evidently bad, or distinctly suboptimal. The internet chef's aversion to flavor is a meme with us now; "add one-sixty-fourth of a teaspoon of garlic powder to your gallon of soup, and mix in two crystals of t…

It's not just online recipes, but cookbooks written for the Better Home & Gardens crowd. The ones who write "curry powder" (and mean the yellow McCormick stuff which is so bland as to have almost no flavour) or call for one clove of garlic in their recipe. I joke with folks that my assumption with "one clove of garlic" is that they really mean "one head of garlic" if you want any flavour. (And if the recipe title has…

If the recipe has "garlic" in the title, I'm budgeting 1/2 head per serving.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#265

Post by Retric »

bongodongobob wrote: post #231
squigz wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have "good" small webs EVER prevailed? You ask on HN, one of the highest quality sites I've ever visited in any age of the Internet. IRC is still alive and well among pretty much the same audience as always. I'm not sure it's fair to compare that with the others.

It's high quality when the content is within HN's bubble. Anything related to health, politics, or Microsoft is full of misinformation, ignorance, and garbage like any other site. The Microsoft discussions in particular are extremely low quality.

IMO HN actually scores quite highly in terms of health/politics and so forth content because the both mainstream and fringe ideas get both shown and pushback.

A vaping discussion brought up glycerin used was safe and the same thing used in smoke machines and someone else brought up a study showing that smoke machines are an occasional safety issue. Nowhere near every discussion goes that well but stick around and you’ll see in-depth discussion.

Go to a public health website by comparison and you’ll see warnings without context and a possibility positive spin compared to smoking. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/index.html I suspect most people get basically nothing from looking at it.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#266

Post by skissane »

bongodongobob wrote: post #245
squigz wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Even politics spurs intelligent, nuanced discussion here on HN. And to hold up discussions about MS as an example of 'extremely' low quality discussion is, ah, interesting. Do you have any recent examples of such discussions?

I hide every single article about MS because it's filled with all the neckbeardy tropes about their products being garbage spyware, switch to Linux, they're stealing your data, the OS is trash etc. It's comments from people who have never managed large scale MS based environments comparing their Windows Home to the other 90% of the business ecosystem that has nothing to do with home users or MS's main cash cow, busin…

I’ve posted four comments here on Microsoft in the last 30 days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41499957

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408124

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41335757

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41327379

None of which fit your description of “neckbeardy tropes about their products being garbage spyware, switch to Linux, they're stealing your data, the OS is trash”.

And it isn’t just me, because if you look at those comments, I was talking to other people who weren’t invoking those “neckbeardy tropes” either

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#267

Post by nick3443 »

solardev wrote: post #222
squigz wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have "good" small webs EVER prevailed? You ask on HN, one of the highest quality sites I've ever visited in any age of the Internet. IRC is still alive and well among pretty much the same audience as always. I'm not sure it's fair to compare that with the others.

Well, niche forums are kinda different when they manage to stay small and niche. Not just HN but car forums, LED forums, etc. But if they ever include other topics, they risk becoming more mainstream and noisy. Even within adjacent fields (like the various Stacks) it gets pretty bad. Maybe the trick is to stay within a single small sphere then and not become a general purpose discussion site? And to have a low enough…

The car headlight forums seem to expose the weakness of small web though, in that a lot of the forums that show up in search are "sponsored" by one or two major brands and any open discussion or validation of off-brand solutions, AliExpress parts, etc are quickly shunned or banned.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#268

Post by greentxt »

croes wrote: post #200
greentxt wrote: post #186

I think this person has too high a view of pre-2021, probably for ego reasons. In fact, their attitude seems very ego driven. AI didn't just occur in 2021. Nobody knows how much text was machine generated prior to 2021, it was much harder if not impossible to detect. If anything, it's probably easier now since people are all using the same ai that use words like delve so much much it becomes obvious.

>AI didn't just occur in 2021. Nobody knows how much text was machine generated prior to 2021 But we do know that now it's a lot more, with a big LOT.

I assume you are correct but how can we know rather than assume? I am not sure we can, so why get worked up about "internet died in 2021" when many would claim with similar conviction that it's been dead since 2012, or 2007, or ...

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#269

Post by robertlagrant »

Ensorceled wrote: post #91
next_xibalba wrote: post #45

[flagged]

> Also, it is shocking how authoritarian the “left” has become in my lifetime. We are going through a general uptick in authoritarian "discussions" online. It's interesting that you are only seeing it on the "left".

> It's interesting that you are only seeing it on the "left".

One explanation is that now things have switched round, and people with left-wings beliefs, sometimes extremely life-wing beliefs, control a lot of institutions and structures. People who are my age (too old) grew up with the right being in that position, but I don't think that's a contemporary instinct to possess.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#270

Post by swyx »

ziddoap wrote: post #153
freilanzer wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't seem to get it.

Steel without nuclear contamination is sought after, and only available from pre-war / pre-atomic sources. The analogy is that data is now contaminated with AI like steel is now contaminated with nuclear fallout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel > Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel[1] and pre-atomic steel,[2] is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in…

and I applied to LLMs here: https://www.latent.space/p/nov-2023
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