49 entries in 0.271s
mircea_popescu: i suppose older writers told it in terms of "the shame", "l'embarass". obects that exist have to populate the whole array ; whereas objects that do not exist get away with
natural-
language sparse existence
mircea_popescu:
natural language, however, ablates the trees for "convenience" so to speak, ie, uses commonly what's known in computing as sparse trees.
☟︎☟︎ mircea_popescu: ie, while transistor is not
natural language semantic unit, isn't it machine
language semantic unit ?
mircea_popescu: we can't so assume, because
natural language has no definite meaning.
mircea_popescu: tu quoque, have spent time and effort doing all sorts of things with your life, none of which are bad or wrong per se. yet it never occured to you "must learn
language" in any effectual sense. this'd be a
natural occurence though, wouldn't you say ? what disocurred it for you ? how come you went in all the rooms in the palace but one ?
mircea_popescu: "Hermeneutics, a branch of continental European philosophy concerned with human understanding and the interpretation of written texts, offers insights that may contribute to the understanding of meaning, translation, architectures for
natural language understanding, and even to the methods suitable for scientific inquiry in AI. After briefly reviewing the historical development of hermeneutics as a method of interpretation, t
mircea_popescu: whole fucking
natural language is nothing beyhond "add aix^i terms until the damned P has only one real root."
mircea_popescu: "in
natural languages, we are used to context. indeed, contextual meaning is what makes
natural languages
natural. we have `list' as a verb, and we have `list' as a noun. we have `listless' as an adjective describing something (like a programming
language) that does not have lists, and an adjective describing someone who is sort of permanently tired. when we need to disambiguate, we do so with more words."
mircea_popescu: (but since we're on it -- the enduring interest in obfuscated-c is strictly this, "let us try and write a novel in orthogonal
language ; this should be done in c because it's very much not orthogonal". became a self-recursing joke, that the practitioners don't even properly understand, just sorta-feel. BECAUSE they talk about it in
natural languages.)
mircea_popescu: and all this goes right into that older thread of ambiguity, orthogonality and
language -- you can never make a
language that's orthogonal and ~useful~ in the
natural sense. let alone "that anyone'd want to use".
☟︎ mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not really, because there's no such thing as orthogonality in
natural language. that's a property of a correctly constructed theorem ("let it have no overlapping lemmas") and therefore relevant in computing.
mircea_popescu:
natural language is useless for any serious rational purpose without endless washing and starching. math does not suffer from the same problem.
mircea_popescu:
natural language dictionaries are usually in the 100k symbols range ; however
natural languages altogether are very large graphs, and i'd venture in the yottabyte range.
mircea_popescu: Framedragger we need no such thing, "0" means the same in the
language of the commutative ring R as "nill" means in the
natural language above.
mircea_popescu: but yeah, this is a pretty good model. "
natural language is just like a computer
language that had no // or quotations." "so how do i know magic strings, and comments, from code ?" "your mother."
mircea_popescu: so basically you're saying
natural language works because interpretable rather than compiled ?
mircea_popescu: that is the idea, yes. but the other idea is that it's not safe to use more than a few hundred words because
natural language usage does not normally distribute.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: "CHICAGO, IL – November 10, 2015 – Narrative Science, the leader in advanced
natural language generation for the enterprise, today announced the launch of Quill for Anti-Money Laundering (AML). According to recent research from KPMG, spending in North America to combat money-laundering activities has risen by 71 percent over the past three years and is predicted to keep increasing."
mircea_popescu: (yes, i confess, mp doesn't generally use
natural language "as it is", but "as it should be", like any serious autist. it's wonder anything i say's comprehensible to any degree)
mircea_popescu: we complain about the meagre attempts at
natural language shanonizing , but what of the poor computers ?
mircea_popescu: it deliberately and constructively is NOT
natural language.
mircea_popescu: a shannonizer is a formalisation, but not of
natural language.
mircea_popescu:
natural language "ambiguity" is a machine problem, not a human problem.
mircea_popescu: i don't write any c, either, or c++. i've never written either java or javascript. i sometimes to a little bash, and always to dig up
natural language strings in
natural language dialects. or otherwise mess the mup.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform incidentally, until such a time as
natural language works for coding, there won't be the "evil ai" whatever guy's worried about.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform incidentally, because orlovignorance is like the gift that keeps on giving : english is "not spelled like pronounced" for the exact any other
natural language (including ones that believe quite delusionally that they are, like romanian) is not : this allows for a variety of disjunct speakers to at least use the same writing.
mircea_popescu: the unrigurousness of
natural language is fundamentally useful here. you can ask about this without being able to define this.
mircea_popescu: this is not the case in any
natural language, poetry exists anywhere.
mircea_popescu: * asciilifeform has seen this said about more than one obscure
natural language, it always seems to be a reflection of the linguist's ineptitude, in practice. << quite. it's not true of inuit languages any more it's true of russian.
mircea_popescu: punkman i believe it'd be the proposition that words work unequivocally and logic may be applied to
natural language constructs.
mircea_popescu: "at mit, they made this self-learning machine which would try to make deductions sylogistically on a dictionary of
natural language constructs
mircea_popescu: greenspan_fan that's the beauty of
natural language vs math.
mircea_popescu: i think you underestimate the majorly powerful computer
natural language is.
mircea_popescu: whenever a player has read a
natural language word (ie, from the dictionary) out of the string (exact match, no mixing of letters or anything scrabble-ish) he now has that word.
mircea_popescu: each player has a pre-given "Table" consisting of a number of
natural language poems. these are actual literature.
mircea_popescu: the game board consists of an endless set of strings, which all start as
natural language constructs and are "decayed" by bit flipping by an actual rng.
mircea_popescu:
natural language does not allow specification, and most fields of interest for humans do not allow formal
language.
mircea_popescu: kleeck there's always going to be some edge.
natural language is what it is.