Powderhorn
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org
Editor and tech enthusiast
At some point, I have to admit neither is true. Let’s see …
Wage slave and vandweller.
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 9 hours ago:
The equivalent is NLP (natural language processing), which was already a huge research area in the '90s. In fact, had I not been a fucking idiot and caught the journalism bug, my studies in CS and linguistics, I’d likely be doing quite well.
This said, that was about voice input being converted to text – e.g. Dragon Naturally Speaking – but apparently little progress has been made going in the other direction. NotebookLM had other weird glitches where standard English words get weird vowels some 5% of the time.
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 9 hours ago:
Ironically, the context provided to the LLM is I accidentally shortened her name in the newsroom as her direct report. So, yes, we are talking about a Rachel, but that was very clear in the prompt.
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 9 hours ago:
The Great Vowel Shift in Middle English should be well understood by a computer system given that it happened centuries ago.
“Long a” (in most European languages, this is “e,” and I can’t be fucked to look up the IPA) and “short a” (closest I can come up with is “ä” in German, though the throat positions are different) were literally taught to me as the educational term in first grade.
If the training corpus is so poor that what a 6-year-old understands in the '80s is utterly baffling, NLP hasn’t advanced near as much as it should have.
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 18 hours ago:
To me, this simply is further evidence that LLMs aren’t ready for primetime, as though this were not already established.
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 20 hours ago:
I’m not claiming her given name was Rach. In fact, calling her that was rather disastrous (family only), but it was all my brain could come up with after “hon” was actually barely avoided. For my boss. In the middle of the newsroom.
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 1 day ago:
I swear, if I have to start misspelling things for computers to pronounce it correctly …
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 1 day ago:
It’s literally the English version of an Old Testament name. It’s not Aiden or whatever the new hotness is, but it’s not uncommon.
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 1 day ago:
It is if you just truncate! No one should do this, as I don’t recall the last time I saw such a textbook example of “rounding error” meaning “we fucked up while rounding.”
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 1 day ago:
How delightful. I mean, I knew there were reasons you don’t get the same results twice, but I’ve not dived into how all this works, as it seems to be complete bullshit. But it’s nice to hear that’s a feature.
- Comment on Tech CEOs Praise Donald Trump at White House Dinner 1 day ago:
What if I never started?
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 2 days ago:
I know IPA (the linguistic term, not the beer … OK, I also know the beer, but that’s not important right now) … and, yeah, I tried that, but on a laptop without a numpad, it’s a bit of a slog.
What was maddening was the LLM got it right somewhere around 10% of the time after I corrected it. This was a voice conversation, so every time I corrected it, that should have been clear data. Aren’t these systems simply supposed to be pattern recognition? How is it outputting wildly different pronunciations (N>5) with constant inputs?
- Submitted 2 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 26 comments
- Comment on Tech CEOs Praise Donald Trump at White House Dinner 3 days ago:
Sure, but what play is being performed here?
I can guarantee it’s not Othello.
- Comment on Tech CEOs Praise Donald Trump at White House Dinner 3 days ago:
I much prefer Something I Can Never Have.
- Comment on MIT scientists may have just cracked the code on EV battery recycling 3 days ago:
Pro-tip: If you have “may have just cracked the code” in your hed, what you’re actually saying is they didn’t.
Now, you can argue until you’re blue in the face that this is some sort of leap forward, but when advances are actually made, the heds look quite a bit different. You know, declarative. I’m not saying that means industrial scale needs to be ready tomorrow, but this is a clickbait hed.
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 3 days ago:
To be clear, I’m fine with RAM being base 2 – it’s rather difficult for it not to be given the structure – but for fixed storage, this is an old-school measurement that only gets worse with each order of magnitude.
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 3 days ago:
There are still Nordic countries outside the EU. Switzerland appears to be heading in the wrong direction as well, so I might suggest the Seychelles.
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 3 days ago:
Dear god, are we still using base 2 for file sizes?
- Submitted 5 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 7 comments
- Comment on Sainsbury's to trial facial recognition to catch shoplifters 5 days ago:
Here’s a zany idea: Make prices affordable so that people don’t need to shoplift.
- Comment on Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off 1 week ago:
Back in, I want to say, 2006, my fiancee and I lived in an apartment complex with nine units around a courtyard. We’d wheel the grill out, and after a couple of times, neighbours asked if they could throw something on. It was an absurdly large grill for two people, so it turned into a thing where almost every night, half of the residents were out in folding chairs, drinking beer and sharing food when it was done.
As a group, the only thing we had in common was our address. My fiancee and I were to the left of the Overton window, while another couple was that classic redneck “I don’t like dem gays, but if they ain’t hurtin’ me, I got no issue” sort. We ended up forming a bowling team that fall.
Seriously. The time when everything didn’t have to be about politics was less than 20 years ago. Hmm … wonder what changed.
- Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs? 1 week ago:
I’m reminded of when I started a team, and once assembled, I told them bluntly: “I don’t care how often you fuck up, so long as it’s a different fuckup each time.”
- Comment on Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off 1 week ago:
What, Manifest v3 wasn’t enough of a sign?
- Comment on Tesla said it didn’t have key data in a fatal crash. Then a hacker found it. 1 week ago:
How dare they hang out somewhere that isn’t a road and expect a lack of cars?
- Comment on Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off 1 week ago:
And this is why a reasonable person doesn’t intentionally install malware on their phones.
- Comment on Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off 1 week ago:
It’s worth remembering that critical thinking in education was gutted starting in the '80s. I’m 46, and by high school, interpreting literature was reduced to regurgitating that specific teacher’s analysis of a work. We were already being indoctrinated to accept what an authority figure said without question.
Resulting in all sorts of bullshit that brings us to today. I’ll be the first to admit that Facebook was useful for reconnecting with old friends when it first launched (I was out of college but retained a .edu email – my fiancee was in college, so I found out it existed through her), but that was a novelty with a short fuse.
If an individual did what Meta does on a daily basis across its platforms to another individual just once, you’d have and open-and-shut stalking case on your hands.
- Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs? 1 week ago:
“Janitors’ content output is terrible.”
- Comment on WhatsApp will help you become a better LLM: Writing Help AI feature, will rewrite your words to help you form a better sentences. 1 week ago:
Now you can get the authentic LLM experience from a real person!
- Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs? 1 week ago:
Dammit! Having to figure out what the flavours were was half the fun.
- Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs? 1 week ago:
I’m American and know that’s chocolate chip.