home garden / language
- I majored in Linguistics in college, so I gotta keep a special place here on my site for cool language nerd stuff.
- coming from Linguistics, I’m equal parts fascinated by computers’ capabilities using language and frustrated by the things people insist computers do when they really don’t. Dr. Emily Bender here writes a very compelling thought experiment demonstrating that LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT don’t really “understand” human language. They merely manipulate its form. Ted Chiang makes a similar point about how computers really process information in this New Yorker article<.
https://github.com/catatsuy/purl
- now I still want learn Perl (eventually), but this sounds really nice and the demo was sick. also now that I’ve got WSL up and running, I can install linux things!! one day I’ll have a pure linux set up. I could just dual boot or wipe my windows and reinstall whatever distro I’m feeling. But that takes a lot of work. Windows doesn’t make me too mad unless I need to code. for some reason Vim was getting all wonky on Windows compared to my work machine which is a Mac. well this certainly got off topic huh?
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/weird-nonfiction/
- a friend told me a story about seeing a documentary claiming mermaids were real on the Discovery channel. they said it was presented not as a mocumentary or anything, making it a very odd watch. that documentary definitely fits the category described in this piece.
- i also read one of the books listed in this piece, which was a collection of short stories.