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Why wordfreq will not be updated

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Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#431

Post by ars »

xsmasher wrote: post #340
PhunkyPhil wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common survivorship bias fallacy since you only notice the bad CGI. I'm certain you'd be shocked to see the amount of CG that's in some of your favorite movies made in the last ~10-20 years that you didn't notice because it's undetectable

This is an amazing demo reel of effects shots used in "mundane" TV shows - comedies and produce procedurals. - for faking locations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k

And keep in mind - that video is 14 years old!

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#432

Post by girvo »

adastra22 wrote: post #398
girvo wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA means "the featured article", so in this case the "Why wordfreq will not be updated" link we're talking about.

To be pedantic, the F in TFA has the same meaning as the F in RTFM. It’s the same origin. On Slashdot (the HN of the early 00’s) people would admonish others to RTFA. Then they started using it as a referent: TFA was the thing you were supposed to have read.

Oh that I'm aware of, but it's softened over time too haha

I miss the old Atomic MPC forums in the ~00s.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#435

Post by c6400sc »

Freak_NL wrote: post #62
creshal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why search engines rated them highly, and why a million spam sites cropped up that paid writers $1/essay to pretend to be Aunt May, and why today every recipe website has a gigantic useless fake essay in front of their copypasted made up recipes.

I hate how looking for recipes has become so… disheartening. Online recipes are fine for reputable sources like newspapers where professional recipe writers are paid for their contributions, but searching for some Aunt May's recipe for 'X' in the big ocean of the internet is pointless — too much raw sewage dumped in. It sucks, because sharing recipes seemed like one of those things the internet could be really good a…

It's interesting to search for recipes in other languages and not find junk as we do in English.

I read Spanish and Italian fluently and stumble my way through Japanese (with translation). It's easier to find a good recipe in these languages, provided you can find the ingredients or substitutes.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#436

Post by rockskon »

voytec wrote: post #13

I agree in general but the web was already polluted by Google's unwritten SEO rules. Single-sentence paragraphs, multiple keyword repetitions and focus on "indexability" instead of readability, made the web a less than ideal source for such analysis long before LLMs. It also made the web a less than ideal source for training. And yet LLMs were still fed articles written for Googlebot, not humans. ML/LLM is the second…

Don't forget Google's adsense rules which penalized useful straightforward websites and mandated websites be full of "content". Doesn't matter if the "content" is garbage nonsense rambling and excessive word use - it's content and much more likely to be okayed by adsense!

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#437

Post by vundercind »

xsmasher wrote: post #340
PhunkyPhil wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common survivorship bias fallacy since you only notice the bad CGI. I'm certain you'd be shocked to see the amount of CG that's in some of your favorite movies made in the last ~10-20 years that you didn't notice because it's undetectable

This is an amazing demo reel of effects shots used in "mundane" TV shows - comedies and produce procedurals. - for faking locations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k

Luckily, for those of us who prefer when film photography meant at least mostly actually filming things, there’s plenty of very good film and TV (and even more of lesser quality) to keep a person occupied for a couple lifetimes.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#439

Post by vundercind »

ryukoposting wrote: post #360
QRe wrote: post #351

I understand the frustration shared in this post but I wholeheartedly disagree with the overall sentiment that comes with it. The web isn't dead, (Gen)AI, SEO, spam and pollution didn't kill anything. The world is chaotic and net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase. Same goes for the web. We just have to embrace it and overcome the challenges that come with it.

I'm not so optimistic. The most basic requirements are: 1. Prove the human-ness of an author... 2. ...without grossly encroaching on their privacy. 3. Ensure that the author isn't passing off AI-generated material as their own. We'll leave out the "don't let AI models train on my data" part for now. Whatever solution we come up with, if any, will necessarily be mired in the politics of privacy, anonymity, and/or DRM.…

The good news—such as it is—is that the Web never really became what we assumed it surely would in its early days.

If it was never really the case that you’d be better off for serious or improving reading having only the Web versus only access to a decent library, then we haven’t lost something so precious.

I mean, the most valuable site on the Web is probably a book & research paper piracy website. That’s its crowning achievement. Faster interlibrary loan, basically, but illegal.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#440

Post by cosmotron »

Vegenoid wrote: post #384
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…

On Amazon, you used to be able to search the reviews and Q&A section via a search box. This was immensely useful. Now, that search box first routes your search to an LLM, which makes you wait 10-15 seconds while it searches for you. Then it presents its unhelpful summary, saying "some reviews said such and such", and I can finally click the button to show me the actual reviews and questions with the term I searched.…

You can still get to product reviews directly and search them. Here's an example:

Product page (copy the identifier at the end): https://www.amazon.com/Long-Thanks-Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-...

Review page (paste the identifier at the end): https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B001OF5F1E/

This seems to bypass all of the LLM stuff for now.

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