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Why wordfreq will not be updated

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Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#401

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #320
travisb wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the left-most edge of the Overton Window had been pushed right of the centrist position of, say, the 90s that would be correct. But it's obvious that isn't at all true -- many moderate left positions today would have been considered outlandishly radical in the 90s. It's rather more likely that the increase of left-authoritarianism is due to increasing resistance to moving the Overton Window, both the left-most edg…

> many moderate left positions today would have been considered outlandishly radical in the 90s. Such as?

Gay marriage, for instance. In the 90s (and even the 2000s) it was pretty common even for people on the left to come down on the side of "I don't think we should allow gay marriage". Whereas now, it's so firmly within the Overton window that even most of the right thinks gay marriage is fine.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#402

Post by cedric_h »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #362
odo1242 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is why I still use the web to order things in a nutshell lol

Where do you order things online that you aren't inundated by ads?

Ad blocker. Even just putting https://12ft.io/ in front of your link gets you pretty far.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#403

Post by cedric_h »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #280

I'm going to call it: The Web is dead. Thanks to "AI" I spend more time now digging through searches trying to find something useful than I did back in 2005. And the sites you do find are largely garbage. As a random example: just trying to find a particular popular set of wireless earbuds takes me at least 10 minutes, when I already know the company, the company's website, other vendors that sell the company's goods…

There is a startup whose product is better search. The killer feature is that you pay for it, so you aren't the produdct. https://kagi.com/welcome

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#404

Post by Eisenstein »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #401
Eisenstein wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many moderate left positions today would have been considered outlandishly radical in the 90s. Such as?

Gay marriage, for instance. In the 90s (and even the 2000s) it was pretty common even for people on the left to come down on the side of "I don't think we should allow gay marriage". Whereas now, it's so firmly within the Overton window that even most of the right thinks gay marriage is fine.

The fact is that society changes over time and what was unacceptable during one time becomes acceptable in another. This does not indicate a shift to the left, it indicates humanity becoming less intolerant. Are you going to argue that allow black people and white people to marry and repealing miscegenation laws mean that the country shifted to the left?

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#405

Post by nlpparty »

It's just inevitable. Imagine a world where we get a cheap and accessable AGI. Most work in the world will be done by it. Certainly, it will organise the work the way it finds more preferable. Humans (and other AIs) will find it much harder to train from example as most of the work is performed in the same uniform way. The AI revolution should start with the field closest to its roots.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#406

Post by Calzifer »

fer wrote: post #306
bane wrote: post #300

This is one of the vanguards warning of the changes coming in the post-AI world. >> Generative AI has polluted the data Just like low-background steel marks the break in history from before and after the nuclear age, these types of data mark the distinction from before and after AI. Future models will begin to continue to amplify certain statistical properties from their training, that amplified data will continue to…

> Future models will begin to continue to amplify certain statistical properties from their training, that amplified data will continue to pollute the public space from which future training data is drawn. That's why on FB I mark my own writing as AI generated, and the AI generated slop as genuine. Because what is disguised as "transparency disclaimer" is just flagging content of what's a potential dataset to train f…

Reminds me of the good old times of first generation Google ReCaptcha where I always only entered the one word Google knows and ignored or intentionally mistyped the other.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#407

Post by nlpparty »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #280

I'm going to call it: The Web is dead. Thanks to "AI" I spend more time now digging through searches trying to find something useful than I did back in 2005. And the sites you do find are largely garbage. As a random example: just trying to find a particular popular set of wireless earbuds takes me at least 10 minutes, when I already know the company, the company's website, other vendors that sell the company's goods…

I suppose it is just Amazon problems. I have never lived in the area where Amazon is prevalent. Where I live, search engines still can't find synonyms or process misspellings.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#408

Post by chowells »

PhunkyPhil wrote: post #293
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse because many humans don't know they are. I see a lot of outrage around fake posts already. People want to believe bad things from the other tribes. And we are going to feed them with it, endlessly.

Did you think the same thing when photoshop came out? It's relatively trivial to photoshop misinformation in a really powerful and undetectable way- but I don't see (legitimate) instances of groundbreaking news over a fake photo of the president or a CEO etc doing something nefarious. Why is AI different just because it's audio/video?

"AI" is different because it's low-effort and easily automated, making it easy to absolutely flood public spaces. Quantity has a quality all its own.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#409

Post by nlpparty »

miguno wrote: post #276

I have been noticing this trend increasingly myself. It's getting more and more difficult to use tools like Google search to find relevant content. Many of my searches nowadays include suffixes like "site:reddit.com" (or similar havens of, hopefully, still mostly human-generated content) to produce reasonably useful results. There's so much spam pollution by sites like Medium.com that it's disheartening. It feels as…

It has been for me the last 15 years like this.
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