Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

I feel like as an intro aimed at "normies" it still manages to communicate in a more abstract and overthinky way than necessary.

People often find it difficult to intuit examples from abstract descriptions. BUT, people are great at intuiting abstractions from concrete examples.

You rarely need to explicitly mention abstractions, in informal talk. People's minds are always abstracting.

> If I’m relating the collections {cat} and {at-cay}, that’s a standard “Pig Latin” transformation I can manage with a simple, handwritten rule set.

Or...

"Translating {cat} to {at-cay}, can be managed with one “Pig Latin” rule:

  If input is {cat} then output is {at-cay}."

"Translate" is normie and more context specific to the example than "transformation". "Set" is not "normie" (normies say "collection"), and its superfluous for one rule.

Concrete, specific, colloquial, shorter, even when less formally correct, all reduce mental friction.

View on HN

And it talks down to the reader. "Ok! You made it! Phew! I'm sorry you're too stupid to understand this stuff, so I'm going to blow emotional smoke up your ass so that you aren't so intimidated"

Gag.

edit- and then he just casually starts talking about collapsing wave functions and hermeneutics. With no explanations, just assuming the reader knows it. (I had to look up both those concepts) So who exactly is he writing to here?

Technically it's a transformation rather than a translation because Pig Latin isn't a real language, it's the product of a word game to make up new words out of English words by rearranging them according to certain rules. The article does assume you know this though (and doesn't consider the alternative of picking a simpler example like cat to CAT in capital letters or cat to chat in French)

Same goes for its super brief explanation of a core term like "latent space", and it explain probability distributions by invoking atomic structures rather than a more basic stats example like a bell curve of adult human heights. It's definitely aimed at the sort of "normie" that reads Hacker News rather than actual normal people! I liked it though...

“Translate: to transfer or turn from one set of symbols into another” – Merriam-Webster

No, “translate” still works here, regardless of Pig Latin not being a language. And I agree with the GP that it’s more intuitively understandable word than “transform.”

You can call it both a transformation or a translation, but that doesn't make 'translation' more appropriate of a term. It is a procedural transformation that can be expressed entirely in a one line function of pseudo-code.

translation from one real language to another is so complex that it cannot even be represented in a hash table. Notably, the elements of grammar and syntax are not present in this naive form of translation. It is also lacking the element of bridging understanding, the root of the word translate.

I would even posit that many CS words that are more appropriate here: encoding, compiling, cyphering, mutating, obfuscating,

Thus insisting on a word where critical elements of that word are lacking and despite the existence of more precise language is itself a poor translation.

"Translate" is an appropriate term, because pig-latin is a language. I.e. you can communicate with it.

The fact that it is an invented, derivative, isomorphic language doesn't mean it loses any properties of being a language.

Being precise in mathematical or technical terms to a non-technical newbie makes no sense. They need to grasp some basic concepts of what its all about first, in terms that will make immediate sense to them.

Only introduce formalisms when the need for them arises. That way, the reader is not only prepared for them, but can understand the motivation for learning them.

Unless the intro is going to go long and deep, as in the reader is going to become a practitioner, overly precise formalism or language may not add anything at all - because they won't be ready to understand the nuance.

One novel step at a time.

It ends up being easier for the reader, gives them a series of rewarding light-bulb experiences, and requires less explanation in then end. Win-win-win.

> a generative model is a function that can take a structured collection of symbols as input and produce a related structured collection of symbols as output.

Yeah that’s exactly the way a nOrMiE would find easy to think about it. Duh.

The author probably should dish out that sentence on his grandparents and see how that would work before putting it on the internet and labeling it as “for normies”.

Ha, good luck with that. I’m still trying to convince my own grandparents that a monad is simply a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

At least you’re actually trying! :)

Have sympathy. The wall of monad is a hard one to get over.

Geez, how much more can you dumb it down?! /s

Woah, article is way to TL:DR too! Let me show how it is done:

A generative model is just a computer program. The program is incredibly book smart. No matter how incoherent your ramblings it will find the most likely connection between words, string them into (mostly wrong) candidate sentences with different degrees of certainty, it looks in its database where everything you said is compared to the wrong word combinations assigning scores to each and then it adds up all the points scored and it finds THE most likely correct response: "All gore invented the internet"

There, that is all there is to it.

A normie's guide that references subatomic particle mechanics...

I flinched at that too, but the payoff of being able to talk about probability lobes was well worth it. I do think it could handle the electron cloud part better. Definitely lead with the electron shell diagram that most normies have actually seen, the incorrect one with the discrete electrons in rings around the nucleus, and THEN say “after you graduated high school, scientists have built cameras that can actually look inside individual atoms, and this is what they see: lobes of probability indicating where the electron most likely is.”

> after you graduated high school

Depends on age. I’m 35 and we did electron rings in middle school and probability orbitals in high school.

With no good explanation of course. Just expected to memorize. It didn’t make sense to me until college physics

> "Translating {cat} to {at-cay}, can be managed with one “Pig Latin” rule:

> If input is {cat} then output is {at-cay}."

Even this can be translated further into “human-speak”:

“Move the first bit of the word to the end, and add ‘ay’. Like, ‘cat’ becomes ‘at-cay’.”

Yes, that would be a good second step!

Fixed rule, pattern match rule, collections of rules, ...

Obligatory xkcd - https://xkcd.com/2501

Reply on news.ycombinator.com