311–320 of 533 posts
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Yea. I've been in the States for 8 years, yet sometimes my brain thinks about a word and writes it down phonetically. But hey, at least you know I didn't use ChatGPT to conjure that comment.
Sorry for the pedantry, but "thought" and "taught" are actually phonetically different (/θɑːt/ vs /tɑːt/).
But the voice in my head does not.
Pedantry is what makes me better.
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged we…
Why did you say you were "pushed towards" simpler language instead of "I liked it more"?
Why did you say "I feel the pain in my bones" and "drives me insane" instead of "I dislike it"?
Why did you say "the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied" instead of "there should only be one big word per page"?
Perhaps flowery language expands your ability to express yourself?
I was just reading the 1897 style guide of the City News Bureau (Chicago), in the book "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite!". Some highlights: - Do not confuse 'night' with 'evening'. - This office spells it 'programme'. - Hotels are 'kept', not 'run'. - Dead men do not leave 'wives', but they may leave 'widows'. - 'Very' is a word often used without discrimination. It is not difficult to express the same meaning when…
For what it's worth, LWN maintains the same attitude towards "very" today.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-unique-and-abso...
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Obsession with short sentences and generally pushing extreme simplicity of structure and word choice has been terrible for English prose. It’s not been terrible because most people aren’t aided by such guidance (most are) but because the same people who can’t be trusted to wield a quill without the bumper-lanes installed see a sentence longer than ten words, or a semicolon, or god forbid literate and appropriate nuan…
"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version. Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/rep…
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You forgot: "He waddled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He scrambled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He kick-flipped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" [edit] electric-slid! Pirouetted! Somersaulted!
> I don't write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. We will all soon write and talk like ChatGPT. Kids growing up asking ChatGPT for homework help, people use it for therapy, to resumes, for CVs, for their imaginary romantic "friends", asking every day questions from the search engine they'll get some LLM response. After some time you'll find yourself chatting wit…
> I don't write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. We will all soon write and talk like ChatGPT. Kids growing up asking ChatGPT for homework help, people use it for therapy, to resumes, for CVs, for their imaginary romantic "friends", asking every day questions from the search engine they'll get some LLM response. After some time you'll find yourself chatting wit…
(check-mark emoji) Add more emoji — humans love them! (red x emoji) Avoid negative words like "bullshit" and "scarier."
(thumbs-up emoji) Before long you'll get past the human feedback of reinforcement learning! (smiley-face)
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Feel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs every day writing. I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point. When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally. Any other way of writi…
>> Just spell it out literally. Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling. This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs every day writing. I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point. When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally. Any other way of writi…
>> Just spell it out literally. Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling. This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount o…
Brevity is the soul of good communication.
A lot of training data was curated in Kenya[0]. I would imagine if LLM data was curated in Japan our LLMs would sound a lot like the authors of their most popular English text books. Maybe other common Japanese idioms would leak in to the training data, like "ね" or "でしょう", ChatGPT would say "Don't you agree?" at the end of every message. [0] https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...
ChatGPT :|
ChatGPT (japan) XD