“Respondents explained that they found spellings with u to be less confusing
because that spelling kept the initial letter in common with usual — as long
as a silent e was there at the end to cue the pronunciation of the u away
from the sound in untie . I find this resolution elegant in its clunkiness:
Solving the problem of two unwritten sounds by writing a further, unpronounced
letter is a truly Englishy solution.”
posted 12/26/2022 8:00pm ∞
“Translated, the inscription reads, ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair
and the beard.’ … This purpose was confirmed when the authors searched for
evidence of head lice on the comb under a microscope and found some remains on
the second tooth, still in the nymph stage of development.”
(See also the discussion at Language
Hat .)
posted 11/23/2022 8:00pm ∞
“Ogbogu wasn’t familiar with Hollie Mengert’s work at all. He was helping
another Stable Diffusion user on Reddit who was struggling to fine-tune a model
on Hollie’s work and getting lackluster results. He refined the image training
set, got to work, and published the results the following day. He told me the
training process took about 2.5 hours on a GPU at Vast.ai,
and cost less than $2.”
posted 11/19/2022 8:00pm ∞
“For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible
without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models
… demonstrate that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned
from linguistic experience alone.”
posted 11/4/2022 8:00pm ∞
“[A] multilingual person’s dominant language can sometimes take a bigger hit in
certain scenarios. For example, in that colour naming task described earlier,
it can take longer for a participant to recall a word in their first language
when switching from their second, compared to the other way around.”
posted 10/22/2022 8:00pm ∞