[HN Gopher] Acronymy (Can we define every word as an acronym?)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Acronymy (Can we define every word as an acronym?)
        
       Author : cubefox
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2025-10-25 08:37 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (acronymy.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (acronymy.net)
        
       | clueless wrote:
       | this is pretty cool, here's another question, how much language
       | compression would we get if we collapse all related words to a
       | single synonymous word? Here's what chatgps came up with:
       | 
       | Assume an English-like active vocabulary V = 50,000 word types (a
       | rough stand-in for "distinct words" seen commonly). We could get
       | a realistic guess of: ~30% reduction for a less modest, more
       | aggressive embedding-style collapse in typical English text. I.e.
       | Collapse words with similar meaning directions in vector space...
       | happy, glad, pleased, delighted - happy
        
         | Nzen wrote:
         | If you want to see examples of this in practice, I recommend
         | reading Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer [0] or some simple
         | wikipedia articles [1].
         | 
         | [0] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
         | 
         | [1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit (versus
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit)
        
         | falcor84 wrote:
         | There's a nice utopian book about a world where they do this.
         | They then even remove the comparatives and superlatives, to
         | have for example "plushappy". And with the language controlled
         | and simplified in this manner, everything is doubleplusgood
         | forever.
        
           | namanyayg wrote:
           | Had me at the first half! One of my favorite, mind blowing
           | books that I had the pleasure to read during my senior years
           | of HS.
        
       | tantalor wrote:
       | But lots of words have multiple definitions
        
         | nph278 wrote:
         | Pick whichever works best.
        
         | pugworthy wrote:
         | Then you get handed words like stenohaline...
        
       | jihadjihad wrote:
       | congress [0]
       | 
       | > collection of non governors really exhibiting self service
       | 
       | 0: https://acronymy.net/define/congress
        
       | gnatman wrote:
       | this is the type of important work that transformer LLM's are
       | actually really good at, I think
        
         | orangecat wrote:
         | Can confirm, Claude is quite good at this. "Intelligence" ->
         | "Inner neural thinking enables learning, logic, insight,
         | grasping, evaluating, navigating challenges efficiently".
        
         | JKCalhoun wrote:
         | Hub for Analysis, Code, Knowledge, Engineering, Research, and
         | Noteworthy Emerging Web Stories
        
           | dwrensha wrote:
           | highly adept computer knowers explaining recent network
           | exploits while sitting
        
         | discoutdynamite wrote:
         | they can do it, but not poetically. not yet. just
         | "contributing" a few, including "strawberry" for the memories.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-10-30 23:01 UTC)