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Why wordfreq will not be updated

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Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#531

Post by cdrini »

mark-r wrote: post #510
cdrini wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha I'm pleasantly surprised to see my comment at the top, I genuinely thought it would drown to the bottom! Not due to disagreement, just due to sheer volume and being posted rather late in this posts lifespan. Anyways my meta comment wasn't that I disagreed with all the other comments, I was just frustrated at how repetitive they were of one another. When I go to leave a comment, I do a pass reading through all or…

Sure, ChatGPT knows every word in the English language (and probably quite a few that ain't). But how likely is it to use them all?

Now that's an argument! Agreed, it won't use them of its own accord, but the fact that you can ask it about words, or ask it even to break down important words in a new field, or give it a paragraph from a paper not in your field and have it explain the jargon, I think that's how it can help someone grow their vocabulary.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#532

Post by Drew_ »

lobsterthief wrote: post #417
coldpie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are smaller, gated communities that are still very valuable. You're posting in one. But yes, the open Internet is basically useless now, thanks ultimately to advertising as a business model.

Also our collective unwillingness to pay for subscriptions for publications

Publications need to charge a-la-carte instead of force feeding subscriptions.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#534

Post by selestify »

nneonneo wrote: post #447
jsheard wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The training data is weighted by a quality metric At least in Googles case, they're having so much difficulty keeping AI slop out of their search results that I don't have much faith in their ability to give it an appropriately low training weight. They're not even filtering the comically low-hanging fruit like those YouTube channels which post a new "product review" every 10 minutes, with an AI generated thumbnail…

Reminds me of a Google search I did yesterday: “Hezbollah” yields a little info box with headings “Overview”, “History”, “Apps” and “Return policy”. I’m guessing that the association between “pagers” and “Hezbollah” ended up creating the latter two tabs, but who knows. Maybe some AI video out there did a product review of Hezbollah.

Wow, you’re not kidding. The “return policy” info box officially links to https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#535

Post by valval »

shmageggy wrote: post #522
shreddit wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so optimistic. The thing you call "way" is actually just time. Yes, anything humanity does (good or bad) will fade with time. But do we have the amount of time to clean up X (and i don't refer to X as in "formally twitter")?

This is (one of the many) reasons why I care primarily about biodiversity and preventing as many human-caused extinctions as we can. Those are a permanent loss to the beauty and complexity of the universe built up over millions of years, and they are permanent and irreversible.

Not everything that’s been permanently lost is bad, that’s just the nature of our reality. This too shall pass.

New things arise from the ashes.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#536

Post by matrix87 »

squigz wrote: post #465
matrix87 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spurs intelligent, nuanced discussion here on HN relative to what? reddit? also there's a trade off between entropy and "quality". too much "quality" and everyone gets bored and goes somewhere more entertaining

Relative to... unintelligent discussions? I also don't care if people leave because HN isn't 'entertaining' enough. I don't come here for that, and I don't expect the community members that make this place what it is to either.

Idk, compare it to a forum like lobste.rs that has a much more strict filter for what's allowed. Personally I find lobste.rs a lot less entertaining because it's too on-topic and has a stuffy feeling

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#537

Post by Matumio »

mlsu wrote: post #388
taneq wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM uses delve more, delve appears in training data more, LLM uses delve more... Some day we may view this as the beginnings of machine culture.

Oh no, it's been here for quite a while. Our culture is already heavily glued to the machine. The way we express ourselves, the language we use, even our very self-conception originates increasingly in online spaces. Have you ever seen someone use their smartphone? They're not "here," they are "there." Forming themselves in cyberspace -- or being formed, by the machine.

I think they meant culture in the sense of knowledge that gets passed down from one generation to the next. Not a human culture of using machines, but a machine culture of using human languages.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#538

Post by mlsu »

Matumio wrote: post #537
mlsu wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, it's been here for quite a while. Our culture is already heavily glued to the machine. The way we express ourselves, the language we use, even our very self-conception originates increasingly in online spaces. Have you ever seen someone use their smartphone? They're not "here," they are "there." Forming themselves in cyberspace -- or being formed, by the machine.

I think they meant culture in the sense of knowledge that gets passed down from one generation to the next. Not a human culture of using machines, but a machine culture of using human languages.

Consider that the algorithm cannot evolve without human interaction. That's what I'm saying, it's a symbiote to us. If you consider "weights in the Instagram recommendation algorithm" to be "the machine", what we are talking about here has been happening for a long time now and has seen many generations, with each entity influencing the other.

I don't think we'll have true machine culture until we have fully autonomous agents in the wild that are interacting with the world independently on its own terms. Right now the substrate is text which comes from a human mind -- it does not arise naturally from nothing. So the machine is a symbiote for now until we solve some difficult robotics problems.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#539

Post by mlsu »

noduerme wrote: post #470
mlsu wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human me just thought it was a good word for this. It implies some irreversible process of mixing, I think that characterizes this process really well.

There were dozens of 20th Century ideological movements which developed their own forms of "Newspeak" in their own native languages. Largely, natural human dialog between native speakers and between those opposed to the prevailing regime recoils violently at stilted, official, or just "uncool" usages in daily vernacular. So I wouldn't be too surprised to see a sharp downtick in the popular use of any word that become…

Really insightful.

I'm a little more cautious though. I think GPT will be way more integrated, simply because it's useful. Stalinist language was artificial, in the sense that it was basically imposed on you from outside for no good reason. When you wanted to get real stuff done (either talking to close friends, being productive with colleagues, etc) you wouldn't use socialist newspeak because it got in the way. GPT will be imposed by the outside world, but it's actually a useful thing to be able to converse with a language model; you'll do it every day at work, when buying things, when using your phone/PC.

And also, unlike in USSR times, so much of our communication is online and visible. It would not surprise me if we develop a model that can train continuously on the firehose. Text is small. Data rate of every person on earth speaking simultaneously:

- 150 words per minute spoken

- 150 words × (5 characters/word + 1 space) = 150 × 6 = 900 characters per minute

- 1 byte per char = 900 bytes/min = 15 bytes/sec

- 15 bytes / sec * 8,000,000,000 people speaking continuously = 120 gigabytes/second

That's a lot but it's not even the bandwidth of a single consumer GPU.

Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated

#540

Post by taneq »

Matumio wrote: post #537
mlsu wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, it's been here for quite a while. Our culture is already heavily glued to the machine. The way we express ourselves, the language we use, even our very self-conception originates increasingly in online spaces. Have you ever seen someone use their smartphone? They're not "here," they are "there." Forming themselves in cyberspace -- or being formed, by the machine.

I think they meant culture in the sense of knowledge that gets passed down from one generation to the next. Not a human culture of using machines, but a machine culture of using human languages.

Yep I was going for more "the machines have their own culture increasingly independent from ours."
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