Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
fi-le.net
fi-le.net
I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi").
If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English and I guarantee people will adopt them as loanwords in short order. Never define them, we'll figure it out from context and vibes, and we'll never pronounce them correctly, which might make it grating to listen to them spoken back to you. But you can absolutely just incept words into English. We'll take them. We're hoarders. We all love that shit.
My favorite thing about it is the register system that developed from all this theft. There are at least three: German, French, and Latin. German is less formal, and French and Latin are often equal but differ in that French is less bureaucratic than Latin. The start, commencement, and initiation of something are different. And an initiation is different from an inauguration. You ask your friend, question a witness, and interrogate a suspect. Greek is more abstract than Latin. A moral question is nearer to the heart than an ethical question. You diagnose a disease, you judge a person. You have compassion, you merely feel sympathy.
Though, I would hate to learn it as a second language for the exact same reasons.
I've been doing something like this with Finnish (which is in the same language family as Hungary) - I use Finnish colloquialism but directly translated into English. Things like "going ass first up a tree" (meaning doing something in a sub-optimal way) or "better on the ground than in the devil's mouth" (when you spill something). I find it amusing.
The author is right though, the English language is dreadful; In Finnish the words are written and pronounced the same way. Try that with some names of cities or towns in England.
Come on now though, dreadful. There's something beautiful about a language that's a fusion reactor for all other languages on Earth.
Are you suggesting it's not intuitively obvious that the town 'Towcester' should be pronounced the same as a "toaster" for toasting bread?
"every day"
Perhaps the author should check grammar while he checks spelling :D (Not the only issue I noticed, and I didn't read the entire article...)
It's impressive. English language: ~500,000 words. German language: ~135,000 words.
"Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number."
Especially given we already have pretty good spell checkers, and have had for way over a decade.
Turns out that certain really helpful reddit posters respond in exactly the same way AI companies wish their models would respond, and the RLHF process really reinforces their mannerisms despite being 0.00001% of the total training data.
I feel sorry for them - their recent post history is full of mods banning them for being a bot.
My posts are link dense because citations are worth sharing.
It's really frustrating because they're half-assedly alleging in ignorance when I'm taking the time to do something more like actual research and sharing.
I don't want to assume it's an inadequacy or an inferiority self-soothing response.
Perhaps more troubling than AI replacing actual critical thought is "that's AI so it's bunk" replacing actual dissent and argumentation.
Someday I'll compare occasional archives of my outbound communications to see what's been flagged and censored for example "because that's AI".
The only reason this is a reasonable thing for this person to do is this:
> since I ultimately manually check every error
Imagine these emails going out automatically, and incorrectly.
Yeah, this gets me. Grammar is grating to me and I used to call out when someone would write "Me and my friend..." only to get attacked in response as if grammar matters to no one.