It's more than reading. Peoples' patience for long-form anything is dying, and I'm guilty too. Too often I'm on my phone with a movie playing in the background. When it ends, I can't even tell you what happened. It was just noise in the background, to raise the dopamine floor of twitter even higher, and because nothing goes in long enough to remember, nothing interesting comes out in conversation.
Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.
I don't have to guess because I'm smart enough to look things up.
P.S. The response is a ridiculous non sequitur -- I didn't say anything either for or against such terms, just that their meaning can be discerned.
But I would note that all of language requires all readers to be familiar with terms and their meanings. And specifically, if people aren't familiar with the notion of language-independent code then they aren't likely to understand what "internationalization" refers to, and if they are familiar with the topic then they almost certainly know what i18n means ... and the time and effort that it took to learn it is infinitesimal relative to all the other language and meanings that they have acquired.
Further, the whole argument from this person is intellectually dishonest nonsense. They claim that terms like HTTP and NASA are "at the expense of the reader", which is simply false. I and most other readers would far prefer to see these acronyms and initialisms than to have them spelled out every time. (And it would be a disaster if http were spelled out in URLs -- and it would be a disservice to the reader to spell that out.)
Yes, let's have each reader spend time and energy all day looking up abbreviations/acronyms/initialisms, so that the single writer can spend a little less time and energy in getting their own point across.
You know it never occurred to me I could look things up before. Everything I've ever known I learned orally. Even C. I remember sitting on pappy's lap, watching him wave his hand to draw out an asterisk in the air. "A pointer..."
Literary culture is so confusing.
Anyway, the editorial rule is to spell it out on the first use and then to abbreviate it:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced today...
...NASA says...
Many articles fail to do this and assume insider knowledge. It's all fine and good after you look it up or if you're an expert and familiar with the topic. Good for you. For everyone else, in other disciplines, or lay people, or for students, it's nice to extend the courtesy of spelling it out once.
Although that would make a cool number plate. Someone called Kate should get k8s c4r as her number plate. It would be an accurate description and also s4dly confusing.
If you don't understand anything I've written, you can catch my technical sales pitches here: https://t7ls3sp5s.com
Derrida was worried that people were merely imitating his style of thinking without the substance, but it's fine for AI to do it to humanity-in-general. OK.
Different models, similar number representations. Different models for different languages, similar concept representations. They have to learn all of this from human text input, so they're not divining it themselves. It all makes a strong case for universal grammar, IMO.
Surely the "universal grammar" is "every country adopting Western Arabic numerals, largely for commercial reasons, but also acknowledging that their indigenous systems kind of sucked in comparison." The fact that there are different languages truly means nothing, Arabic numerals spread much further than the Latin alphabet.
I really don't think this is evidence for "universal grammar" in any sense. It is evidence that we are all using the same very specific grammar for very specific cultural reasons.
This would be a sort of convergence? They were both right in part (Chomsky that there was structure there, Norvig that it could be sussed out using brute force statistics). As is often the case, when two smart people who have thought a lot about something complicated disagree, the truth comes out when their unstated assumptions are finally exposed to the light.
In this case, Chomsky's LAD almost certainly relies on Baldwin-effect structure to get around the paucity of stimuli, and the LLMs are just getting to "the same place" through sheer masses of data.
That's incredible. Had do idea this existed. I'm listening to it right now and I can fully understand it as polack! I might actually want to learn this as it'll help me communicate to all my different slavic friends.
What if we turned the regional love for megaprojects into something actually useful like a canal from the UAE through Oman, to permanently weaken Iran?
At some point you just have to spend spare cycles on ideas you think matter. What's harder than rejecting an idea is rejecting a finished, working product. And if your team says "I wish you had worked on something else", that's great, but if you're not my boss and and they're happy, who cares? And sometimes even your bosses. If you believe in something hard enough you will build political capital by meeting work obligations and spend it down working on your baby.
