[HN Gopher] Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of f...
___________________________________________________________________
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or
less (1999)
Author : signa11
Score : 222 points
Date : 2025-04-14 05:22 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.muppetlabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.muppetlabs.com)
| crooked-v wrote:
| People talk about the 'good old days' of the web, but boy, in a
| multi-tab environment it stucks to try and read something that
| doesn't put any effort at all into side margins.
| politelemon wrote:
| Reader mode (FF) helps a lot here.
| hexo wrote:
| And yet, it is 1000 times more readable than any "modern"
| website.
| brettermeier wrote:
| Hell no. Typograhy class Lesson 1, never put more than a
| certain number of words per column (in any case never the
| whole screen width, on desktops)...
| Timwi wrote:
| And yet, for some reason, most people want their tabs and
| toolbars on the top, and the taskbar on the bottom, taking
| away vertical space that is actually used, and leave
| swathes of space on the left and right completely unused. I
| will never understand the resistance against putting things
| on the side.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Probably because English is written left to right and
| doesn't work so well top to bottom. So vertical bits tend
| to not include text, which is quite limiting. I do
| remember older UIs that included text at 90 degrees on
| sidebars, but that seems to have gone completely out of
| fashion.
|
| The real problem is our screens are the wrong shape. 16:9
| is a stupid aspect ratio for a computer monitor if you
| work mostly with text. Square is probably the best. Using
| floating windows (like classic Mac OSX) is an option, but
| for some reason people like full screen windows these
| days. A tiling window manager is another option to
| effectively divide the screen up into better shaped
| areas. I tend to have 6 columns across 2 screens which
| works well.
| creata wrote:
| > 16:9 is a stupid aspect ratio for a computer monitor if
| you work mostly with text.
|
| Why? I also usually use it with three columns of text,
| and it works well at that aspect ratio.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Right, so you essentially use mini 16:27 screens which is
| a better aspect ratio than 16:9.
|
| What you really have to ask yourself is why 16:9 is a
| better choice than anything else. It wasn't picked
| _because_ 3 16:27 columns is ideal for text. The main
| reason we have them is because it 's easier for the
| screen manufacturers to have just one aspect ratio to
| deal with. With 16:9 we're forced to have three columns
| per screen, but what if I only need two? What if I want
| more _lines_ of text per screen? Square seems like a much
| more obvious middle ground.
| creata wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks. I've seen people give similar
| praise to 4:3 and 3:2 laptops.
| zahlman wrote:
| >The main reason we have them is because it's easier for
| the screen manufacturers to have just one aspect ratio to
| deal with.
|
| Not just that, but it was an average of aspect ratios
| considered for the _aesthetic of video_ data. Not text
| presentation.
| codingdave wrote:
| > I will never understand the resistance against putting
| things on the side.
|
| It is a side effect of mobile devices -- Mobile-first
| design. When apps got popular, people decided that
| everything needed to be designed for mobile devices
| first, and adjusted for larger browsers screens later. So
| people started making everything tall and narrow. And
| said it was bad practice to do otherwise. Now people who
| learned UI design after those days often follow that
| idea. Personally, I am not a fan, but that is where it
| comes from.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| the lack of large video ads really is jarring too
| baxtr wrote:
| I was hyper confused that I didn't need to hide ANY HTML
| element.
|
| Also, reader mode was not suppressed by some naughty trick.
|
| Unreal.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| And what is the deal with functional scrolling?
| empiko wrote:
| It also did not ask about my cookie policy, how am I
| supposed to tell the site my preferences? I just wrote them
| via email to make sure.
| subscribed wrote:
| It depends on the purpose of the cookies:
| https://www.blackboxdesign.co.uk/gdpr-do-i-need-a-cookie-
| war... for in-depth answer.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| Works great on mobile, fwiw
| globular-toast wrote:
| What does multi-tab have to do with it? You are in control of
| your computer aren't you? Just make the window narrower.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Or set the zoom to around 240-300%
| creata wrote:
| It's annoying for sure, but at least you can resize the window.
|
| Side note: Dan Luu claims[0][1] that there's no readability
| advantage to narrow line width. I haven't really looked into
| it, but in my experience it _feels_ like he 's very wrong.
|
| [0]: https://danluu.com/slow-device/ [Appendix: this site vs.
| sites that don't work on slow devices or slow connections]
|
| [1]: https://nitter.net/danluu/status/1115707741102727168
| orlp wrote:
| I'd suggest you not take readability advice from a guy who
| uses a red-green color scheme for their tables.
| lelanthran wrote:
| He makes that claim because he doesn't like the sources, not
| because the sources are wrong.
|
| Reading the wikipedia references show me that this is well
| studied and sourced.
|
| Academic sources for his argument either dont exist or are so
| rare even he can't find them.
|
| IOW, it's a post hoc rationalisation from him.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Open the "developer's tools", find the '<body>', inject a
| 'margin' CSS - customize the page locally.
| flysand7 wrote:
| Folks, just for these kinds of websites I made an extension
| that trims the body of the text to 80 characters. I don't have
| a way to pay to get it on google's or firefox's extension
| marketplace, so you'd have to install it from source.
|
| https://github.com/flysand7/breader
| deadbabe wrote:
| Well I can see why you can't afford to put it on a
| marketplace.
| schneehertz wrote:
| Just a suggestion
|
| You can write this feature as a userscript and then publish
| it to greasyfork
| ghusto wrote:
| We did have ways to create margins, you know :/ Aside from
| simple CSS, you could still do it with pure HTML.
| bslanej wrote:
| Screens were much narrower then so constraining the width of
| text was not necessary.
| danadam wrote:
| I have a bookmarklet, since forever, labelled "sane width",
| with the following code:
| javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='body { width: 800px !
| important; margin: auto !important } ';
| if(document.createStyleSheet) {
| document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else {
| newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet';
| newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles);
| document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); }
| })();
|
| It forces the body width to 800px and centers it. Crude but it
| is enough for me.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I haven't checked and I don't know how it would render. But it
| is worth noting that since this was designed against an earlier
| version of css, it might render differently in older browsers.
|
| For example, older monitors had less pixels, so it's likely
| that the wrapping was sensible in older monitor/browser
| configs.
|
| To say nothing of browser defaults being different, if this was
| pre-css, then the margins might have been baked into the
| default browser interpretation. In other words, pre-margin
| property, a webpage without margin didn't mean "this has no
| margin", in the sense that a modern webpage without margin
| specified would mean "DO NOT ADD MARGIN TO THIS!".
| hkmaxpro wrote:
| Reminds me of Yasha Berchenko-Kogan's excellent answer to the
| question "What do grad students in math do all day?"
|
| https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-do-grad-students-in-m...
|
| > a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who
| has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that
| are four letters long or shorter.
|
| > What can you say?
|
| > "It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on
| in a home tidy."
| pavlov wrote:
| Somehow the sequences of small words and ample syntax make this
| sentence quite difficult to parse.
|
| Maybe just go full pidgin:
|
| "Tool to suck dust, make tidy for walk in home."
| card_zero wrote:
| Oh come on, this shit is easy. Why did they say "it is" and
| not "it's", by the way? To put it that way can't help. So
| yeah, it's a pipe that can suck, and you push it all over
| your room, to suck the dust and dirt up off the rugs and
| such, and in fact off of any low down flat part. One kind can
| even move on its own! But what I want to say here, in the
| main, is that you math guys have all lost your grip on how to
| say any idea in an easy form. You are not able to do it any
| more, 'cos too much math has made you sick in the head.
| lgeorget wrote:
| Nice one but "'cos" does not go by the rule, I feel. You
| can use "for" at the same spot but, well, it has a tone you
| did not go for in your text.
| zahlman wrote:
| One can also use "as" in that spot, no?
| floxy wrote:
| s/, 'cos/;/
| saghm wrote:
| I feel like there's still room to avoid pidgin while making
| it less awkward, e.g.: "It's a tool that can suck up dust or
| dirt to make your home more tidy."
| neogodless wrote:
| This version reminds me of _Poetry for Neatherthals_ (board
| game).
|
| You have to get others to guess a (typically multi-syllabic)
| word or phrase, but use only one syllable words to get them
| there.
|
| "Tool suck dust, make not dirt for walk in home."
| stevage wrote:
| You don't need the awkward "does". I'd go with:
|
| It is a tool to suck up dust and dirt from rugs, wood or even
| tile.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I liked that the original explained the value of the vacuum
| cleaner. It's not that it removes dirt and dust _per se_ ,
| it's that it makes spaces you walk on tidier.
| HPsquared wrote:
| A tool to take away dust and dirt in the home.
| pyfon wrote:
| It suck shit up
| efitz wrote:
| As someone who's encountered the "pet-shit-on-the-floor"
| problem, I can assure you that this description is
| inaccurate.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Why use many word when few word do trick
| jaynetics wrote:
| Reminds me of "Gadsby", a 50.000 word novel without the letter
| "e":
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
| koiueo wrote:
| I imagine LLMs would excel in this kind of writing these days.
|
| But really impressive for the time.
| chillitom wrote:
| They'd probably sucks at a challenge like that because they
| work on tokens and don't really see individual letters.
|
| There was a post here a little while back asking AI models to
| count the number of Rs in the word raspberry and most failed.
| lvncelot wrote:
| I think it's the exact opposite, as they operate on a token-
| level, not a character level, which makes tasks like these
| harder for them. So they would generate a sentence with
| multiple _e_ s in it and just proclaim that they didn't.
|
| (Just tried it, "write a short story of 12 sentences without
| one occurence of the letter e" - it had 5 _e_ s.)
| Timwi wrote:
| You're assuming all you can do is prompt it. Surely you
| could also constrain its output to tokens that genuinely
| contain no e's (or make only max 4 letters per word). LLMs
| actually output a probability distribution of next tokens;
| ChatGPT just always picks the top one, but you could
| totally just always filter that list by any constraint you
| want.
| lelag wrote:
| I was going to point that out.
|
| What I will add is that constrained generation is
| supported by the major inference engine like llama.cpp,
| vllm and the likes, so what you are describing is
| actually trivial on locally hosted models, you just have
| to provide a regex that prevent them to use the letter
| 'e' in the output.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You can do this more properly with the antislop sampler
| and we are working on a follow up paper to our previous
| work on this exact problem.
|
| https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| But the problem is that the tokens are subwords, which
| means that if you simply disallowed tokens with es, you'd
| make it hard to complete a word given a prefix.
|
| For example, it may start like this "This is a way to
| solv-", or "This is th-"
| lelag wrote:
| If I understand it correctly, that's a valid concern but
| the way structured generation library like outlines[1]
| work is that they can generate multiple variants of the
| inference (which they call beam search).
|
| One beam could be "This is a way to solv-". With no
| obvious "good" next token. Another beam could be "This
| way is solv-". With "ing" as the obvious next token.
|
| It will select the best beam for the output.
|
| [1]:https://github.com/dottxt-ai/outlines
| zahlman wrote:
| ... What if you retrained it from scratch, on an e-less
| corpus?
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Yes, that would probably work quite well, given enough
| training data. However, I interpreted the question/claim
| as a task that LLMs excell at, meaning that writing text
| while avoiding a certain character is a task for a
| general purpose LLM.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I tried something like that some time ago. The problem
| with that strategy is the lack of backtracking.
|
| Let's say I prompt my LLM to exclusively use the letters
| 'aefghilmnoprst' and the LLM generates "that's one small
| step for a man, one giant leap for man-"[1]. Since the
| next token with the highest probability ("-kind") isn't
| allowed, it may very well be that the next appropriate
| word is something really generic or, if your grammar is
| really restrictive, straight up nonsense because nothing
| fits. And then there's pathological stuff like "... one
| giant leap for man, one small step for a man, one giant
| leap for man- ...".
|
| [1] Toy example - I'm sure these specific rules are not
| super restrictive and "management" is right there.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The next token is obviously "goes". (Any language model
| that disagrees is simply wrong.)
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| I'm not sure if my chain's bein' yanked right now, but
| surely you mean "gos"!?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The plural of mangoe is mangoes.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mangoe
| HPsquared wrote:
| All the training data contains 'e's.
| pyfon wrote:
| That is not a counter point! The output has a probability
| distribution so you can assing zero to any e-containing
| token and scale everything else up accordingly.
| stavros wrote:
| I think an LLM would do well on this if you gave it a
| function that located words with an e so it could change
| them.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| You don't need to go all the way to LLMs when a simpler
| approach may do.
|
| Here's a "What if?" on a very similar issue that uses Markov
| chains: https://what-if.xkcd.com/75/
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I wrote the relevant paper about this:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926
|
| https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-
| Genera...
| mock-possum wrote:
| LLMs are usually shit at this kind of wordplay, they don't
| understand the rules - words that begin or end or include
| particular letters, words that rhyme, words with particular
| numbers is syllables - they'll get it right more often than
| wrong, _maybe_ , but in my experience they just aren't
| capable catching wrong answers before returning them to the
| reader, even if they're told to check their work.
| isolli wrote:
| I'd be curious to know if it was easier or harder (or perhaps
| just as difficult) to write than the French equivalent. [0]
|
| The Wikipedia article goes on to discuss interesting aspects of
| how the book was translated in different languages, with
| different self-imposed constraints.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
| lelag wrote:
| I can't say for certain, but I'd guess that writing without
| the letter "e" is slightly more difficult in French than in
| English. For one, "e" is a bit more common in French (around
| 15% of all letters, versus about 12% in English). But more
| importantly, French grammar adds extra challenges--like
| gender agreement, where feminine forms often require an "e",
| and the frequent use of articles like le and les, which
| become unusable.
|
| That said, I think the most impressive achievement is the
| English translation of the French novel. Writing an original
| constrained novel is hard enough, but translating one means
| you can't just steer the story wherever you like. You have to
| preserve the plot, tone, and themes of the original, all
| while respecting a completely different set of linguistic
| limitations. That's a remarkable balancing act.
| vodou wrote:
| Georges Perec did the same with his novel "La Disparition".
|
| What is almost as impressive is that these novels (at least
| Perec's) have been translated to other languages.
| pyfon wrote:
| 8 of them on the cover!
| amelius wrote:
| Reads like it could have been AI generated.
| Tepix wrote:
| Not in 1999.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| For reference, Poul Anderson's 'Uncleftish Beholding' -- an essay
| on atomic theory written in modernized anglo-saxon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
|
| Up Goer Five; rocket science explained using only the one
| thousand most common english words.
|
| https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1133:_Up_Goer_Fiv...
|
| https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Thing_Explainer
| rootbear wrote:
| I love "Uncleftish Beholding", which someone said is written in
| "Anders-Saxon". I think it would be fun to do it live as a
| Power-Point presentation.
| TobTobXX wrote:
| Reminds me also of the "Up Goer Five". An xkcd poster which
| roughly explains Saturn V with only the top 1000 used words in
| English[0]. Even better IMO is the collab video with
| MinutePhysics[1].
|
| [0]: https://xkcd.com/1133/
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_8gx-XHJo
| erk__ wrote:
| Randall Munroe (of xkcd) went on to write a full book in that
| style: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
| ActorNightly wrote:
| The explanation still kinda sucks. I like this one:
|
| The easiest way to understand the relationship between time and
| space is repeat the thought experiment with the void, but assume
| that there is no consciousness there (i.e nothing running that
| can sense time passing).
|
| Now imagine the only action you can take is to fire particles
| (say photons) in a given direction. In a void, that action is
| meaningless - the particle fires and never comes back. No
| information exists.
|
| Now imagine there is a mirror somewhere in space. A particle
| fires, and then comes back. And maybe interacts with another
| particle. But still, this is generally meaningless and you cant
| derive any measurable thing from it, but you have a piece of
| information - particle comes back.
|
| Imagine there are 2 mirrors in different directions. What you do
| is you set up 2 identical devices. Each one fires a particle, and
| when the particle comes back, it triggers a certain color ball to
| fall down a common shared tube, and then the particle gets fired
| again.
|
| So with 2 mirrors, you get a sequence in the tube that looks
| something like blue, blue, blue, green, blue, blue, blue, green.
| Now you can make a measure of distance. You take the "blue"
| mirror as your unit, and say green mirror is 2 away.
|
| You have also in fact created a clock. The tube contains
| information on how many cycles have passed - i.e in order to say
| that mirror is x away, you need to have counted x blue balls
| before that respective ball shows up. So you can see how distance
| and time is intimately intertwined. To measure distance, you have
| to necessarily have something that measures time.
|
| Now lets say that the "green" mirror starts moving away from you,
| at a slow speed (i.e your particles are much faster. You start to
| see 3 balls in sequence, then 4, then 5, and so on. By comparing
| the difference in the subsequent position of the green balls, you
| can measure speed.
|
| What happens if the speed of the mirror is 99% of the particle
| speed? The particle takes its sweet time getting there, and sweet
| time coming back. Even if you fire the particle as the green
| mirror is close to the particle emitter, its going to result in a
| measurement of a very large distance.
|
| This is the relativistic effect where the space behind something
| moving fast increases.
|
| This whole experiment demonstrates that what we consider space is
| precisely defined by measurements, and relativistic effects alter
| these measurements, which alters our perception of space.
|
| You can do similar thought experiments to understand why space in
| front of you seems to shrink, why time dilation becomes a thing,
| and so on.
| arijun wrote:
| That explanation seems like it would not line up with the
| mathematical reality of the situation. It seems like one of
| those handwave-y things that always confused me as a child.
| "Gravity is just massive objects deforming space like a weight
| deforming a sheet, and things fall into the well they make." Ok
| but what would make something fall into the well, there is no
| gravity.
| jdranczewski wrote:
| That is a very good point! Gravity is just such an ingrained
| intuition that people tend to be ok with saying things go
| into the spacetime wells, but it is a little tautological.
|
| My understanding is that a more correct intuition is thinking
| of straight paths on the curved sheet. Say it's like a
| loosely woven tablecloth - objects in free fall will go along
| the threads of the weave, so if you stretch the fabric by
| placing a heavy object on it, the paths of smaller objects on
| the fabric will be stretched towards the heavy thing.
|
| This metaphor falls apart for orbits though, as it requires
| "stretching" the fabric so much that the threads now somehow
| go in a circle around the mass heh. But the underlying
| principle is the same - an object in orbit is in free fall
| along a straight path in curved spacetime.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| In my explanation, if the particles trajectory can change,
| you can see how gravity affects distortion of space. Its
| not really that the space is some sort of entity that is
| being distorted, its the concept of measuring what you
| define as distance gets influenced by how these particles
| fly about.
| meindnoch wrote:
| No. What you described is still 100% Galilean relativity.
| Special relativity cannot be explained with Galilean
| relativity.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| I guess I forgot to mention one fact - the particle speed is
| set and constant, and does not change.
|
| The point overall is to demonstrate that ideas of time,
| space, and speed are all just sequences of events from which
| you derive those metrics, and relativity is the fact that
| those sequences change with all three.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think I get it ... kinda. Thank you.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Hi, as a person who can only read words with 4 or less
| characters your explanation is really confusing
| TZubiri wrote:
| I personally don't find metaphorical explanations helpful,
| especially considering this is not the only time I have heard
| or will be hearing about relativity, so if I get another
| explanation I will have to either map the concept of balls to
| whatever metaphor another teacher uses, which is just more
| work. I'm fine with using generic words like 'information',
| which I can map more naturally to other explanation wordings
| like 'signal'.
|
| The same applies for explanations of bitcoin, or Machine
| Learning, or stock markets, just use the proper wording,
| difficulty, weights, secondary market. Metaphors are not
| teaching.
| Tepix wrote:
| Needs a (1999) tag
| janpmz wrote:
| I turned this into a little audio book:
| https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67fcc7f933aa6c3115b114da
| no_news_is wrote:
| No, you didn't. This doesn't match the original text.
|
| 0:47 Added in text: "Okay, here's the text prepared for reading
| aloud."
|
| 0:58
|
| Original: "Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea,"
|
| Audio: "Okay, yes, it's a bit of a strange idea"
|
| 1:08
|
| Original: "Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I
| want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see
| that, sure."
|
| Audio: "Or do you drift off to the left a bit? The question is,
| can you figure it out? No, you can't. You can see that."
|
| ---
|
| It appears you are using "Variational Lossy Autoencoder (VLAE)"
| as the basis for your website[1], which might be good for
| simplifying more complex things but defeats the purpose here.
| It's using more than four letters in words, and censoring out
| "dumb" and "hell"?
|
| Why don't you try pointing that another explanation of the
| theory of relativity without this limitation? Seems like that'd
| be a more interesting exercise.
|
| [1a] https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67e178f428779824db2e06c6
| [1b] https://pdf-reader-storage-f55b8c51173224-staging.s3.us-
| east...
| janpmz wrote:
| Ah, I just want to clarify that I'm very unhappy about the
| censoring of "dumb" and "hell".
|
| I allow the text to get slightly optimized for audio
| experiences, e.g. page numbers or mathematical notation gets
| replaced. But I have think about that again.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| OK, I'll give it a go...
|
| _" Any glow from an item will move in a void at the same rate.
| Each item has mass. Mass is the same as a glow. Mass will bend
| the area near it. Each item will move on a bent path in that
| area. If you move at a fast rate, time will seem to slow. An item
| will feel a pull down if the item goes up and does not stop."_
|
| That's way more work than it seems! Not being able to use -s or
| -er words is a real problem.
| stavros wrote:
| This essay is fantastic at demonstrating that putting a word
| length limit actually makes explaining things _more_ complicated.
| I got lost at around chapter 5 because the author couldn 't use
| words like "gravity" and "acceleration" and I got confused by
| which one is "new pull" and which one is "old pull". It's too
| bad, as it was interesting up to that point.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Of course you find it hard to distinguish the two! You don't
| have equipment for measuring tidal forces, and they are locally
| indistinguishable.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Of sure you find it hard to tell the two away! You lack the
| gear for tide pull test, and they feel the same here and
| local.
|
| I hate this.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The new pull and the old pull both just feel like a pull,
| if you can only feel the pull at one spot. To see how the
| old pull is not like the new pull, you have to test the
| pull at a spot near you (but not the same spot), too. The
| new pull will be the same at each spot, but the old pull
| may not be the same (we call this the tide), and you test
| the sum of the new and old pull.
|
| (This is hard.)
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's fair that it's hard to keep the two from becoming the
| same in your head, you need fancy stuff to test for the
| force of the tide, and they are more or less the same from
| a close-up (any which is much closer than, say, the moon)
| view!
|
| (Verbosity is your friend)
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| > It's too bad
|
| I think that's the whole point. It was never meant as being
| easier to grok
| stavros wrote:
| What was it meant as?
| HPsquared wrote:
| A statement on the value of vocabulary, perhaps.
| K0balt wrote:
| There's a reason why vocabulary exists. It isn't to make things
| harder to understand. Sometimes the best way to explain
| something to someone with a limited vocabulary is to expand
| their vocabulary in the process.
| Finnucane wrote:
| To expand the vocabulary, you'd still need to break down
| 'gravity' and 'acceleration' into simpler words. Though still
| easier without an arbitrary length limit. You could say,
| "change in the speed a thing moves" but that needs five or
| six letters.
| karmakaze wrote:
| It's an exercise. I would have much preferred using the 20k
| most common words or something like that. The first thing that
| came to mind is "elevator" which is where the equivalence
| eureka comes from. It can be done in British English as "lift"
| but difficult otherwise.
|
| Elevators are cool like telephone booths. I've wondered what a
| dog thinks using them for the first time, then accepting what
| they do and how much they understand its geometries.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Reminds me of Guy Steele making the point about big languages
| and small ones in his talk about Scheme. Started the whole
| lecture using only one-syllable words then gradually defined
| two-syllable words using only single syllables and so on.
| zahlman wrote:
| Ah, I take it that's "Growing a Language"?
| malfmalf wrote:
| There was a talk at a university, where the presenter used only
| words of two or less SYLABLES , but he allowed himself to use
| more complicated words after explaining them (but kept that to
| a minimum).
|
| I can't find either the author or the talk. I think it was some
| 5 years ago.
|
| At first, I thought it was Randall Munroe, but I might be
| remembering this: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
|
| I've also tried with Paul Graham, who has some articles trying
| to convey something similar, but no luck there.
|
| Edited to add : I think the original proponent of a similar
| idea was Richard Feynman :
| https://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2022/03/understandi...
| freetonik wrote:
| It was interesting to notice that not all short words are
| necessarily simple. Words like "void", "iota", "mass", or "veer".
| patates wrote:
| Thanks to Javascript, I know void.
|
| Thanks to Go, I know iota.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The question is: Do you know the words or do you know the
| meaning in the context of the article?
| adityaathalye wrote:
| They demonstrate they know 'veer' (off topic) without
| saying 'veer'.
| mjbrusso wrote:
| Now I feel old. I know void from K&R C and iota from APL
| moomin wrote:
| Thanks to Java, I know pain.
| robinhouston wrote:
| On the theme of difficult ideas explained using a limited
| vocabulary, I suppose one has to mention xkcd's Thing Explainer
| as well as George Boolos's classic _Godel's Second Incompleteness
| Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable_:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer
|
| https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BoolosOneSyllable.pdf
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I wrote the OG paper about making LLMs do this task (before
| chatGPT came out too!!!)
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926
| blueaquilae wrote:
| This is kinda confusing at it's more for people who already know
| the meaning. Take the bus exemple, it's so short that it skip
| explaining why someone on a moving bus will see different timing
| for the asteroid landing. You can decipher it if you know it,
| you'll not gonna learn from the story line.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Four letters is an interesting constraint, but it doesn't
| guarantee simplicity. I'd replace
|
| > no one can say who's held fast
|
| with "no one can what does move and what does not"
| andrepd wrote:
| I'm patiently waiting for the translation of Misner Thorne and
| Wheeler to Toki Pona.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| len("gravity") = 7 > 4
| api wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is physically accurate, but the best
| description I've encountered for relativity is:
|
| You are always traveling at the same speed. That speed is 'c',
| the speed of light.
|
| If you are sitting still, you are 'falling' through the time
| dimension at 'c'. If you move in the X,Y,Z dimensions, you must
| move slower in the 't' dimension so that your velocity vector
| still sums to 'c'.
| quibono wrote:
| An immediate follow-up is: why do we always travel at c?
| api wrote:
| Maybe it's just a cosmic constant, or a result of other
| parameters and how they interact (a second order constant).
| Why does the electron have the mass that it does? Why do
| protons have the charge that they do? Etc.
| ck2 wrote:
| I was thinking this morning how weird it is that everyone knows
| who Einstein was
|
| But much smaller percent Niels Bohr
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates
| andai wrote:
| I appreciate this, though the hard rule seems to be doing more
| harm than good. For example, one 5-letter word became 6 words,
| because 5-letter words aren't allowed!
|
| So while the vocabulary is kept low, the writing style becomes
| harder to process, at least for me. I wonder if there's a way to
| win on both fronts, to make it maximally comprehensible for all
| involved.
|
| I'd argue "use normal words that everyone knows" (even if they
| are 5 letters!) would be included in such a strategy.
|
| Edit: Okay now I made it further in and I'm being asked to keep
| several different perspectives in my head simultaneously,
| perceiving different events at different rates of time... I think
| I need a diagram... or a microdose...
| lgeorget wrote:
| Several variants of simplified English have been designed for
| the purpose of being understood by learners or people with only
| basic command of English as a foreign language. Wikipedia has a
| version in Simple English for instance:
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Fun fact, this is a great piece of art because it was written in
| 1999.
|
| If you were to write this in 2025, it would be indistinguishable
| from trash.
|
| So many doors are closing.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Or, if you want to learn the core ideas and math involved, but in
| terms of computer programming, see:
|
| _Functional Differential Geometry_ by Gerald Sussman, same
| author behind _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_
|
| https://archive.org/details/FunctionalDifferentialGeometry/
| FilosofumRex wrote:
| "It's tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat
| everything as if it were a nail." Maslow 1966. The essay is about
| physics, but all comments are about formatting and LLMs.
|
| The conversationalist tone of the essay is misleading too.
| Hilbert, Minkowski, & Poincare, had done all the heavy lifting
| math and had held Einstein's hand all through 1915. As
| mathematicians they wouldn't qualify for Noble prize so made no
| claim to the discovery of GR.
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