Techbros are the most "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" motherfuckers on the planet, if someone said something to me about language being solveable with code I would have to restrain myself from punching them in the face
@coriander decades if not centuries of research into furmal models of language have only ever yielded more questions than answers
@coriander i somewhat contest this because it depends on how you define “best”; LLMs are not remotely informed by Real Linguistic Theory and you can go pretty interesting places translating that shit into something computers understand. (machine learning can even be done in ways that is at least infurmed by ideas in the field; i’ve done contact work annotating sentences fur some kind of speech recognition system that never ended up going anywhere…) which honestly just makes LLMs piss me off way more; it’s just the completely wrong direction fur this kind of research and application imo
@aescling Yeah I meant specifically in terms of generation of novel sentences, not things like speech recognition or TTS
@coriander i’ll fully admit part of this is like, pettiness, but LLMs feel like the industry smashing a giant hellish probabalistic sledgehammer to Ideas and Theory and Math that excite me. and it makes me so sad
@aescling @coriander one of my little brother's friends is in a master's program for machine learning and he gave me a 🏴☠️legal🏴☠️ pdf of the cutting-edge textbook for the field and that shit seems fuckin interesting imo
@aescling @coriander this guy is also AI's number one hater which is cool
@wallhackio @coriander honestly ML’s not one of the things that has excited me but i’ve never studied the underlying theory either
@aescling @wallhackio Pfft, she's not a Marxist-Leninist
@coriander @wallhackio not to be on brand but i’ve loved a lot of what i have read of Mao
@wallhackio @coriander i love ideas of unclear purracticality but unarguable application like type theory
@coriander it’s WORTH exploring language with computers, it leads to a bunch of really interesting ideas. computational semantics is cool as shit. but hell if anything has gotten solved
@aescling When I was in college the stuff they were starting to do with neural nets was genuinely so fascinating
Then everything got thrown off-course by LLM bull shit
@aescling @coriander i sat here for a good few seconds believing that "furmal" was some technical term i hadnt seen before
@wallhackio @coriander i feel like “furmal” is one of my pretty common cattifications
@wallhackio @coriander *Calvin of and Hobbes voice* cattifying weirds language
@aescling The best we've come to natural language through computers is LLMs doing predictive algorithms, which are absolutely nothing like actual language in any way