RE: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:cyyd366g3hrxp5rynixm2mm3/post/3mxaaoea7nc2g
THEY CAN DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE SITE. THERE'S A PLACE FOR THAT. THE LICENSE IS SUPER PERMISSIBLE.
THESE CHUCKLEFUCKS ARE JUST TOO LAZY TO ACTUALLY DOWNLOAD THE XML AND PUT IT IN THEIR TRAINING PROCESS.
THIS WAS SHIT I DID AS A FIRST YEAR GRAD STUDENT; IT'S NOT HARD.
That said, CD's thread really clarified something there -- I was looking to enhance expertise, but the LLM companies are looking to displace it.
And that's one of the things that's been baseline pissing me off the last 5 years.
I still struggle to express exactly what I was going for there -- I feel like I've had moments where I was closer to it, but linguistics itself is still a relatively primitive science and so remains a relatively limited guide. A lot of work has been put into the field, but it's very easy to stumble into phenomena where no one has looked because language is so vastly complicated.
That's not to say the choice toward statistical inference wasn't motivated. Our theories of the world gloss over a lot more than we consciously bring to light, and statistical methods patch over a lot of those gaps.
But I always imagined, through understanding of language, you could better understand how to express ideas in a way that was theoretically elegant, with inference filling the gaps where theory could not, perhaps with analysis of those gaps advancing theory.
RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/117394121557407314
Cory Doctorow's morning thread helped make something click I'd been wrestling with for a long time but struggled to express.
When I got into linguistics and AI about 15 years ago, I was imagining devising systems that made it easier to express expertise.
What I found was techniques that barreled toward what we have now -- statistical inference on sets of data that produced an approximation of the phenomenon under scrutiny.
It was a bit of a disappointment, tbh
"Every victory is to be savored. Our constitutional crisis has been marked by elite capitulation but the average citizen raising a stalwart middle finger. That's a huge part of this story, and it is tripping the Trump administration up."
https://episodes.ghost.io/trans-media-panic-fear-rights-katherine-cross-interview/
I'm optimistic because of this. it sucks to see people like this with power, but while they possess massive amounts of capital and have the initiative, they are deeply ignorant, broken people. they will fail, even if they weren't resisted, because they're too ignorant to function in the long run, to understand the origin of their own power.
we have capacities -- already developed and to be developed.
our difficulty is in cultivating mass awareness and mass action.
RE: https://sfba.social/@markmetz/117354181622424434
the hype class itself is projecting its own shallowness and uselessness on to everyone else
RE: https://mastodon.social/@calyxinstitute/117292888494962650
wow. that sucks!
One thing that's been interesting getting older is seeing style and fashion from a bird's eye perspective.
When I was a kid, I remember seeing older fashions---even from like, the decade before---as deeply cringeworthy. But now that the fashions I grew up with have themselves descended into the cringe (and even retro phase), the older fashions feel less so or no longer cringe at all.
It creates this change in perspective --- like the whole of time is opened up.
Some people say “open-minded” like it’s some kind of virtue and not a big target on your back for getting manipulated by people who are closed-minded
I fucking hate helicopters
Holy shit
Hmm
People perceive the media as an independent observer and not an actor with objectives who transforms observations into things that meet those objectives.
In any case, it's nice to see it done, and a special thanks to the people who helped us along the way: Jen Nycz, Barbara Ailstock, Jessica Locke, Caroline O'Meara, Ana-maría León Barrios, Daniel Pérez Astros, Aris Clemons, and Diana ben-Aaron.
4/4
We presented an early version of this project at NWAV 2014. Bill Labov even showed up to the talk! He fell asleep, but we were still flattered to have one of the titans of the field there.
For a while, the paper was kind of back burner for both of us. Variationist sociolinguistics isn't really either of our wheelhouses: Sylvia's institution preferred single-authored publications for tenure, and I was working on automating contract review.
3/
I had no idea for a project, but when Sylvia mentioned her idea, I knew how we could get data. Working within the free API limits of Twitter at the time, that was what became "Spyts:" https://github.com/thedansimonson/spyts
The tokens we analyzed are expressions of surprise. An on-going soccer game produced many of our target tokens from men; a Justin Bieber tour announcement produced many from women, one who announced she was going to throw herself out of a window in sheer excitement. I hope she's okay.
2/
After 12 years, Sylvia and I's paper is finally published!
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/sic.23011.sie
This all started a long time ago in Jennifer Nycz's sociolinguistic variation class. Sylvia A. Sierra had an idea for a final project---analyzing some slang phrases in Mexican Spanish to see if gender conditions their use---but she had no way to get data.
1/
RE: https://lingo.lol/@thedansimonson/117045524189441605
Pizzas nine and ten. Pretty much same setup as the last, but I was too lazy to use a measuring cup and weighed the flour out instead. The dough came out much tackier, the resulting crust much less dry.
