[HN Gopher] Here comes the Muybridge camera moment but for text
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Here comes the Muybridge camera moment but for text
Author : RA2lover
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-06-02 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (interconnected.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (interconnected.org)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _What would it mean to listen to a politician speak on TV, and
| in real-time see a rhetorical manoeuvre that masks a persuasive
| bait and switch?_
|
| Why do I suspect the offence will always be ahead of the defence
| in these areas?
|
| I'd earlier suggested that everyone, in elementary school, ought
| to watch Ancient Aliens and attempt to note the moment where each
| episode jumps the shark. I take it we could attempt this with
| LLMs, now?
| dhosek wrote:
| For those perplexed by the headline, the Muybridge camera moment
| refers to Eadweard Muybridge who managed via camera photos taken
| in rapid succession to prove that when a horse runs it at times
| has all four legs above the ground.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
|
| (the article doesn't bother to mention any of this until near the
| end in the tl;dr section, which since it's tl and you dr, you
| never got to).
| stavros wrote:
| Not only that, but the tldr basically _only_ talks about that,
| so it 's not much of a summary at all. I read the tldr and I
| have no idea what the article is about.
| Animats wrote:
| (On an irrelevant note, the Stanford Barn, where those pictures
| were taken, has gradually been closed off to the world. It was
| open to the public until COVID. It's still there, and there's a
| Stanford equestrian team, but road access has been cut and all
| mentions of the barn removed from directional signs.)
| gausswho wrote:
| There are so many of these places I've encountered what used
| to be publicly available pre-COVID and are no longer. The
| reasons/excuses vary.
|
| Example: Sometimes it's a symptom of a small business already
| wanted a reason to pivot to a new venture, and they keep the
| old thing going to profit from some old whales while in
| transition.
| qup wrote:
| https://archive.is/EcQfE
|
| Site is struggling
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Zardoz_ predicted this ~50 years ago
| nickreese wrote:
| I thoroughly enjoyed reading this style of loose connected
| thoughts.
| kepano wrote:
| The repercussions of what the author summarizes as "could you
| colour-grade a book?" still feel wildly unknown to me, even after
| a couple years of thinking about it (see _Photoshop for text_
| [1][2]).
|
| Partially it's because we're still wrapping our heads around what
| kind of experience this might enable. The tools still feel ahead
| of the medium. I think we're closer to Niepce than Muybridge.
|
| In photography terms, we've just figured out how to capture
| photons on paper -- and artists haven't figured out how to use
| that to make something interesting.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33253606
|
| [2] https://stephango.com/photoshop-for-text
| throw46365 wrote:
| > The tools still feel ahead of the medium.
|
| Or maybe it's that we instinctively feel that writing should
| still be linear writing, if reading is still going to be linear
| reading.
|
| Personally I think the "photoshop for text" analogy shows just
| how misguided it is to expect people to tolerate words that
| were calculated, not crafted.
|
| Literacy is too important to mess with like this.
| Animats wrote:
| So embedding space itself is interesting. It's more than a step
| to an LLM. That's been known for a while, back to that early
| result where "King" - "Man" + "Woman" -> "Queen". This article,
| though, suggests more uses for embedding spaces. This could be
| interesting. It's a step beyond viewing them as a black box.
| szvsw wrote:
| One thing I always find interesting but not discussed _all that
| much_ at least in things I've read is - what happens in the
| spaces between the data? Obviously this is an incredibly high
| dimensional space which is only sparsely populated by the
| entirety of the English language; all tokens, etc. if the space
| is truly structured well enough, then there is a huge amount of
| interesting, implicit, almost platonic meaning occurring in the
| spaces between the data - synthetic? Dialectic? Idk. Anyways, I
| think those areas are a space that algorithmic intelligence will
| be able to develop its own notions of semantics and creativity in
| expression. Things that might typically be ineffable may find
| easy expression somewhere in embedding space. Heidegger's
| thisness might be easily located somewhere in a latent
| representation... this is probably some linguistics 101 stuff but
| it's still fascinating imo.
| zharknado wrote:
| > Could you dynamically change the register or tone of text
| depending on audience, or the reading age, or dial up the
| formality or subjective examples or mentions of wildlife,
| depending on the psychological fingerprint of the reader or
| listener?
|
| This seems plausible, and amazing or terrible depending on the
| application.
|
| An amazing application would be textbooks that adapt to use
| examples, analogies, pacing, etc. that enhance the reader's
| engagement and understanding.
|
| An unfortunate application would be mapping which features are
| persuasive to individual users for hyper-targeted advertising and
| propaganda.
|
| A terrible application would be tracking latent political dissent
| to punish people for thought-crime.
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