#what is a data dictionary

[aamerajj]

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[saad1505]

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[pukefactory]

Okay I’ve gotten way to much back into ENA and I had an idea of Ena from dream bbq with reader were the reader speaks a whole new language and Ena takes time to learn and understand this new language just to feel closer to reader. I’m not sure if it should go romantically or more platonically lol

I more just wanted to put my thoughts out there! Thank u if u do write for this! Have a good week <3

•☽────✧˖°˖ SOMEONE WROTE THIS SONG BEFORE ˖°˖✧────☾•

★ Summary: A Compilation of Headcannons Featuring Salesperson Ena X Reader Who Speaks An Unknown Language

★ Character(s): Salesperson Ena (ENA: Dream BBQ)

★ Genre: Headcannons, SFW

★ Warning(s): None - Completely Safe!

★ Image Credits: @JoelG

☆ Salesperson Ena was immediately fascinated when she realized you spoke an entirely unfamiliar language. “A rare commodity! A unique dialect with limited market exposure! Tell me—what’s the valuation on fluency?” She started taking notes right away, promising to invest time into learning.

☆ “WHY CAN’T I UNDERSTAND A SINGLE THING YOU’RE SAYING?! WHAT ARE YOU, SOME KIND OF ORACLE?! SOME COSMIC JESTER?! A MESSENGER OF GØD WHO WON’T JUST SPIT IT OUT?!” While her Salesperson side was taking a structured, strategic approach, Meanie Ena was screaming into a dictionary, shaking it like the words inside might rearrange themselves into something she could grasp.

☆ Ena’s learning methods were… questionable. At one point, she tried to absorb your language through osmosis, pressing her forehead against yours while mumbling, “Downloading linguistic data… recalibrating neurons… okay, that’s not working.” Then she switched to frantically gesturing at objects and waiting for you to name them.

☆ One day, Ena decided to fully commit. She put on a little presentation, flipping through a self-made slideshow. “Ladies and gentlemen of the universe, I present to you—MY NEW LANGUAGE ACQUISITION BUSINESS PLAN. Featuring: memorization! Pattern recognition! And my personal favorite—aggressive trial and error!” She even had graphs, though they didn’t make any sense.

☆ As she improved, Ena started offering (unwanted) translations to everyone in her bizarre world. “WORRY NOT, CITIZENS! I HAVE DECODED THE ENIGMA THAT IS MY PAL’S SPEECH!” She would then proceed to provide the most inaccurate translations imaginable. “They just said… ‘All business transactions should be made in good faith!’ See? Deep philosophy!” (You had actually just asked for a snack.)

☆ There was a moment—rare, fleeting—when Meanie Ena stopped shouting and just sat in quiet contemplation. “You… really spent time teaching me,” she murmured, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “That’s… nice, I guess. Ugh, shut up, I didn’t say anything sappy!” (She totally did.)

☆ Ena started mixing your language with her usual speech patterns, much to the horror of those around her. “DEAR CUSTOMER, LET ME OFFER YOU A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME DEAL ON—” she suddenly switched mid-sentence into a phrase in your language that made zero sense contextually. Even she looked confused. “…Wait. Did I just say ‘fermented pancake’ instead of ‘investment opportunity’? Oh dear.”

☆ One day, she threw you a curveball. “Now it’s YOUR turn!” Ena decided you had to learn her speech patterns in return. Suddenly, you were being quizzed on sales jargon and cryptic Meanie Ena-isms. “QUICK! WHAT’S THE CORRECT RESPONSE TO ‘SPONSOR MY BUSINESS’?” (…There was no correct response. Only suffering.)

☆ Once Ena became confident, she started using your language for private jokes and secret commentary. If someone was annoying her, she’d lean over and mutter something in your dialect that made you stifle a laugh. “Ugh, what did she just say?!” a bystander demanded. Ena grinned. “Oh, nothing. Just business talk!”

☆ Finally, after who-knows-how-long, Ena approached you with something clutched tightly in her hands. “TA-DA! My final product!” It was a handwritten letter, completely in your language. The grammar was awful, the spelling was questionable, but the message was clear: “Thank you for being my friend. I hope we can talk like this forever.”

[dduane]

A homebrew Iliad project

I've been fiddling with this for a long time.

Backstory: I've been dabbling in various depths of the great wine-dark sea of the ancient Greek classics since I was about seven or eight. (Might have been earlier, but I have no data to confirm that.)

I know Greek mythology like the back of my hand. (...Insert here the inevitable sound of Scotty whacking his head into an Enterprise bulkhead.) I know... a lot. And—leaving all the other stuff I know about that no one here is gonna care about one way or the other—I've read the Iliad and Odyssey probably about twice a year for the last fifty years or so. Or maybe more.

To my grief, I don't have enough classical Greek (or good enough Greek of any kind) to do any kind of respectable new translation of the work. That's far beyond my scope, or my level of scholarship. But I can sure as hell do... a retelling? A restatement? I have a number of favorite translations to use as guides, and the Perseus digital library... and, you know, dictionaries. And I'm not afraid to use them. :)

...And I'm a storyteller, and have no shame about the possibilities inherent in going where lots of others of my tribe have gone before—in restatement or in fiction. So let's just call this "a homebrew version of a work that hasn't been out of 'print' for thirty-five hundred years" and leave it there. (Is this ὕβρις? Yeah, seems likely enough. Whether this is going to be a manifestation of the downfall of the Greeks, or of the Geeks, remains to be seen.)

Anyway: my plan is to start publishing books (i.e., chapters) of this homebrew Iliad in the Fic Foundry writing website that will be opening up at last sometime over the next couple of months. The first few books will be open-access: after that they'll go subscription. They'll come out at irregular intervals (because there'll be paying work going on as well. [resigned sigh: So what else is new.])

When starting a project like this it seems like it might be wise to, in a general way, set out the goals.

Ease of accessibility. Lots of people have never read this story, or have experienced it only in one kind or another of paraphrase. (Yeah, well, here comes another one.) For maximum accessibility, I think this means what I want to do is a prose retelling. Nor am I going to get too hung up on anachronisms in the prose style. I'm reaching for the around-the-campfire sound, a little; or the story told after dinner, in episodes (and let's not throw the beef bones at the bard, she's doing the best she can).

Fidelity to the source material. This is an old, old story that both ascends to surprising heights of feeling and amazing depths of cruelty. There are things in it that some modern readers are not going to like at all: particularly the graphic gore and violence of what is repeatedly described as "the world's greatest war story". But these aspects of the Iliad, and the frequently callous, cruel and misogynistic understructure of its story, come with the territory of the original. I will in appropriate ficcer's style add trigger warnings where I think they're needed.

Completeness of the story. The temptation is always going to lurk for an adapter to decide what's important and what can be thrown out. I'm hardly immune. But it's my intention to leave the structure as intact as possible. Some people will disagree with my choices. (shrug) People have been disagreeing about ways to handle this work for centuries. What'll a few more be, among friends?

...So that's the plan. When this material starts to be ready to appear online, I'll let people here know where they need to go to access it. And after that... we'll see how things go.

I'll start this story as its first tellers did, and ask the Goddesses of epic storytelling to stand by me and lend a hand telling this one. At the end of the day, it all comes down to one angry young man: Achilles, only son of King Peleus. Achilles was completely possessed by a bitter rage that brought a whole host of troubles down on the great army of the Greeks. That unquenchable fury sent many a strong man’s soul to the Underworld, and left their bodies feeding the dogs and the vultures, while Heaven’s intentions moved inexorably on toward the Gods’ final goal...

[dragonnarrative-writes]

Generative AI Is Bad For Your Creative Brain

In the wake of early announcing that their blog will no longer be posting fanfiction, I wanted to offer a different perspective than the ones I’ve been seeing in the argument against the use of AI in fandom spaces. Often, I’m seeing the arguments that the use of generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) make creative expression more accessible. Certainly, putting a prompt into a chat box and refining the output as desired is faster than writing a 5000 word fanfiction or learning to draw digitally or traditionally. But I would argue that the use of chat bots and generative AI actually limits - and ultimately reduces - one’s ability to enjoy creativity.

Creativity, defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, is the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas. By definition, the use of generative AI discourages the brain from engaging with thoughts creatively. ChatGPT, character bots, and other generative AI products have to be trained on already existing text. In order to produce something “usable,” LLMs analyzes patterns within text to organize information into what the computer has been trained to identify as “desirable” outputs. These outputs are not always accurate due to the fact that computers don’t “think” the way that human brains do. They don’t create. They take the most common and refined data points and combine them according to predetermined templates to assemble a product. In the case of chat bots that are fed writing samples from authors, the product is not original - it’s a mishmash of the writings that were fed into the system.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a therapy modality developed by Marsha M. Linehan based on the understanding that growth comes when we accept that we are doing our best and we can work to better ourselves further. Within this modality, a few core concepts are explored, but for this argument I want to focus on Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation. Mindfulness, put simply, is awareness of the information our senses are telling us about the present moment. Emotion regulation is our ability to identify, understand, validate, and control our reaction to the emotions that result from changes in our environment. One of the skills taught within emotion regulation is Building Mastery - putting forth effort into an activity or skill in order to experience the pleasure that comes with seeing the fruits of your labor. These are by no means the only mechanisms of growth or skill development, however, I believe that mindfulness, emotion regulation, and building mastery are a large part of the core of creativity. When someone uses generative AI to imitate fanfiction, roleplay, fanart, etc., the core experience of creative expression is undermined.

Creating engages the body. As a writer who uses pen and paper as well as word processors while drafting, I had to learn how my body best engages with my process. The ideal pen and paper, the fact that I need glasses to work on my computer, the height of the table all factor into how I create. I don’t use audio recordings or transcriptions because that’s not a skill I’ve cultivated, but other authors use those tools as a way to assist their creative process. I can’t speak with any authority to the experience of visual artists, but my understanding is that the feedback and feel of their physical tools, the programs they use, and many other factors are not just part of how they learned their craft, they are essential to their art.

Generative AI invites users to bypass mindfully engaging with the physical act of creating. Part of becoming a person who creates from the vision in one’s head is the physical act of practicing. How did I learn to write? By sitting down and making myself write, over and over, word after word. I had to learn the rhythms of my body, and to listen when pain tells me to stop. I do not consider myself a visual artist - I have not put in the hours to learn to consistently combine line and color and form to show the world the idea in my head.

But I could.

Learning a new skill is possible. But one must be able to regulate one’s unpleasant emotions to be able to get there. The emotion that gets in the way of most people starting their creative journey is anxiety. Instead of a focus on “fear,” I like to define this emotion as “unpleasant anticipation.” In Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown identifies anxiety as both a trait (a long term characteristic) and a state (a temporary condition). That is, we can be naturally predisposed to be impacted by anxiety, and experience unpleasant anticipation in response to an event. And the action drive associated with anxiety is to avoid the unpleasant stimulus.

Starting a new project, developing a new skill, and leaning into a creative endevor can inspire and cause people to react to anxiety. There is an unpleasant anticipation of things not turning out exactly correctly, of being judged negatively, of being unnoticed or even ignored. There is a lot less anxiety to be had in submitting a prompt to a machine than to look at a blank page and possibly make what could be a mistake. Unfortunately, the more something is avoided, the more anxiety is generated when it comes up again. Using generative AI doesn’t encourage starting a new project and learning a new skill - in fact, it makes the prospect more distressing to the mind, and encourages further avoidance of developing a personal creative process.

One of the best ways to reduce anxiety about a task, according to DBT, is for a person to do that task. Opposite action is a method of reducing the intensity of an emotion by going against its action urge. The action urge of anxiety is to avoid, and so opposite action encourages someone to approach the thing they are anxious about. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has anxiety about creating should make themselves write a 50k word fanfiction as their first project. But in order to reduce anxiety about dealing with a blank page, one must face and engage with a blank page. Even a single sentence fragment, two lines intersecting, an unintentional drop of ink means the page is no longer blank. If those are still difficult to approach a prompt, tutorial, or guided exercise can be used to reinforce the understanding that a blank page can be changed, slowly but surely by your own hand.

(As an aside, I would discourage the use of AI prompt generators - these often use prompts that were already created by a real person without credit. Prompt blogs and posts exist right here on tumblr, as well as imagines and headcannons that people often label “free to a good home.” These prompts can also often be specific to fandom, style, mood, etc., if you’re looking for something specific.)

In the current social media and content consumption culture, it’s easy to feel like the first attempt should be a perfect final product. But creating isn’t just about the final product. It’s about the process. Bo Burnam’s Inside is phenomenal, but I think the outtakes are just as important. We didn’t get That Funny Feeling and How the World Works and All Eyes on Me because Bo Burnham woke up and decided to write songs in the same day. We got them because he’s been been developing and honing his craft, as well as learning about himself as a person and artist, since he was a teenager. Building mastery in any skill takes time, and it’s often slow.

Slow is an important word, when it comes to creating. The fact that skill takes time to develop and a final piece of art takes time regardless of skill is it’s own source of anxiety. Compared to @sentientcave, who writes about 2k words per day, I’m very slow. And for all the time it takes me, my writing isn’t perfect - I find typos after posting and sometimes my phrasing is awkward. But my writing is better than it was, and my confidence is much higher. I can sit and write for longer and longer periods, my projects are more diverse, I’m sharing them with people, even before the final edits are done. And I only learned how to do this because I took the time to push through the discomfort of not being as fast or as skilled as I want to be in order to learn what works for me and what doesn’t.

Building mastery - getting better at a skill over time so that you can see your own progress - isn’t just about getting better. It’s about feeling better about your abilities. Confidence, excitement, and pride are important emotions to associate with our own actions. It teaches us that we are capable of making ourselves feel better by engaging with our creativity, a confidence that can be generalized to other activities.

Generative AI doesn’t encourage its users to try new things, to make mistakes, and to see what works. It doesn’t reward new accomplishments to encourage the building of new skills by connecting to old ones. The reward centers of the brain have nothing to respond to to associate with the action of the user. There is a short term input-reward pathway, but it’s only associated with using the AI prompter. It’s designed to encourage the user to come back over and over again, not develop the skill to think and create for themselves.

I don’t know that anyone will change their minds after reading this. It’s imperfect, and I’ve summarized concepts that can take months or years to learn. But I can say that I learned something from the process of writing it. I see some of the flaws, and I can see how my essay writing has changed over the years. This might have been faster to plug into AI as a prompt, but I can see how much more confidence I have in my own voice and opinions. And that’s not something chatGPT can ever replicate.

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

Alt text is so incredibly useful when it comes to speakers of other languages. I follow a bunch of fiber artists from different parts of the world, Ukrainian fashion designers and Chinese antique garment collectors and Iranian university professors of textile art history. There are discussions happening in different languages, and resources like books and scholarship, simply not available in the English or French I know.

And a lot of them never even use the Latin alphabet a lot of the time! So sometimes I can photograph a book page or screencap an Instagram story and get my phone's OCR to give me text to paste into Google Translate, and I can sometimes use a Cyrillic keyboard to type out what I'm seeing, but but as soon as something is antiquated or handwritten or viewed at an angle, my goose is cooked. I can't even get the original phrase to try to translate at all.

Unless there's alt text. Because alt text gives me exactly the data I need in the exact right format to take to a dictionary and get the gist of what's going on.

It makes me reconsider how my own content is accessible or inaccessible not just to blind or visually-impaired people, but people who aren't perfectly fluent in English. Because I and a lot of my friends are native English speakers who usually only speak 1-2 languages total, I'm prey to assuming that everyone in my intended audience is like us. That of course everybody can easily process English text, whether it's printed or written in cursive or using some antique calligraphic hand. And of course, that's not true. Now when I look at my analytics for my business's rare medieval name, I occasionally see translation site traffic where people in Farsi or Ukrainian or Chinese have translated me in return.

The curb-cut effect is a wonderful thing, I think. The primary reason I've used alt text is a good one, and it also turns out that it's really useful for a lot of other people too.

[akula-blue]

Ok so we've talked about mech dysphoria and dysmorphia before yeah? Your body doesn't feel the same when you climb out of a mech, doesn't feel 'right' anymore.

Too few limbs, not enough sensors, everything feels too big, now that you're not? There's no more combat stims and pleasure chemicals either, you're down to just your stock standard dopamine, which you have a clinical deficiency of now, btw. You struggle to pick objects up, your hands an unfamiliar shape, with not enough strength. You struggle to get out of bed sometimes because you can't tell what proportions things should be anymore?

Yeah, all that has been discussed to death.

What about communication?

What about pilots who, just, can't talk outside of their mech? Become socially inept without all the assistant systems they plug themselves into within the cockpit?

Think about it, mech combat becomes very disorganised very fast if it's allowed to. We are talking clashes of potentially dozens of war machines, the size of buildings, with enough guns to level cities. Orders need to be direct, easily understandable, followed immediately, actually projected onto the pilot's vision.

Every order, every report, every sentence, is punctuated by hundreds of layers of feedback. Tactical simulations and overlays, attachments for battlefield plans, every order having many implied conditions transmitted to the pilot through code and dictionary references to make sure a pilot cannot POSSIBLY misinterpret it in the few seconds before the command should be executed. On top of that, each order can also be wired to project a different cocktail of stim/pleasure chems/whatever have you, ensuring a pilot knows exactly what to feel about the order, establishing the priority of it through the pilots own brain chemistry.

And the same can be true about communications between squad mates! So much of it would be sending those same simulations around as sit reps, or enormous data packets containing not just the words the pilot is trying to say, but also links to relevant information and mountains of meta data, establishing tone, intention, context. Within the cockpit, a portion of the onboard AI is delegated to parsing this metadata, projecting it into the pilots consciousness, speeding up the process of understanding these mountains of digital documents to mere moments.

Now put a person used to that in a social setting. Where they are not made instantly aware of what someone is talking about or referring to. Where they cannot just query an AI and receive every piece of relevant info at once. Where they have to understand the subtext of what that person is saying without any metadata to indicate sarcasm, annoyance, disinterest. Where they are unable to understand the many nuances of communication and body language and expression without the helpful hand of their mech's processors. Hell, where they don't know how hearing certain things should make them feel without the presence of the chemicals to guide their response. Imagine them seeming lost outside of their mech, unable to talk or connect anymore, the social, human part of their brain having atrophied from disuse much like their neurotransmitter production. Imagine them scurrying back to the safety of their mech where, in the digitally overlaid world, everything is so much clearer and understandable and-

HAS THIS BECOME AN AUTISM METAPHOR???

[reasonsforhope]

Interior Department Announces New Guidance to Honor and Elevate Hawaiian Language

"In commemoration of Mahina ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, or Hawaiian Language Month, and in recognition of its unique relationship with the Native Hawaiian Community, the Department of the Interior today announced new guidance on the use of the Hawaiian language.  

A comprehensive new Departmental Manual chapter underscores the Department’s commitment to further integrating Indigenous Knowledge and cultural practices into conservation stewardship.  

“Prioritizing the preservation of the Hawaiian language and culture and elevating Indigenous Knowledge is central to the Biden-Harris administration's work to meet the unique needs of the Native Hawaiian Community,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “As we deploy historic resources to Hawaiʻi from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, the Interior Department is committed to ensuring our internal policies and communications use accurate language and data."  

Department bureaus and offices that engage in communication with the Native Hawaiian Community or produce documentation addressing places, resources, actions or interests in Hawaiʻi will use the new guidance on ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) for various identifications and references, including flora and fauna, cultural sites, geographic place names, and government units within the state.  The guidance recognizes the evolving nature of ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi and acknowledges the absence of a single authoritative source. While the Hawaiian Dictionary (Pukui & Elbert 2003) is designated as the baseline standard for non-geographic words and place names, Department bureaus and offices are encouraged to consult other standard works, as well as the Board on Geographic Names database.  

Developed collaboratively and informed by ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi practitioners, instructors and advocates, the new guidance emerged from virtual consultation sessions and public comment in 2023 with the Native Hawaiian Community. 

The new guidance aligns with the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to strengthening relationships with the Native Hawaiian Community through efforts such as the Kapapahuliau Climate Resilience Program and Hawaiian Forest Bird Keystone Initiative. During her trip to Hawaiʻi in June, Secretary Haaland emphasized recognizing and including Indigenous Knowledge, promoting co-stewardship, protecting sacred sites, and recommitting to meaningful and robust consultation with the Native Hawaiian Community."

-via US Department of the Interior press release, February 1, 2024

--

Note: I'm an editor so I have no idea whether this comes off like as big a deal as it potentially is. But it is potentially going to establish and massively accelerate the adoption of correctly written Native Hawaiian language, as determined by Native Hawaiians.

Basically US government communications, documentations, and "style guides" (sets of rules to follow about how to write/format/publish something, etc.) can be incredibly influential, especially for topics where there isn't much other official guidance. This rule means that all government documents that mention Hawai'i, places in Hawai'i, Hawaiian plants and animals, etc. will have to be written the way Native Hawaiians say it should be written, and the correct way of writing Hawaiian conveys a lot more information about how the words are pronounced, too, which could spread correct pronunciations more widely.

It also means that, as far as the US government is concerned, this is The Correct Way to Write the Hawaiian Language. Which, as an editor who just read the guidance document, is super important. That's because you need the 'okina (' in words) and kahakō in order to tell apart sizeable sets of different words, because Hawaiian uses so many fewer consonants, they need more of other types of different sounds.

And the US government official policy on how to write Hawaiian is exactly what editors, publishers, newspapers, and magazines are going to look at, sooner or later, because it's what style guides are looking at. Style guides are the official various sets of rules that books/publications follow; they're also incredibly detailed - the one used for almost all book publishing, for example, the Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS), is over a thousand pages long.

One of the things that CMoS does is tell you the basic rules of and what specialist further sources they think you should use for writing different languages. They have a whole chapter dedicated to this. It's not that impressive on non-European languages yet, but we're due for a new edition (the 18th) of CMoS in the next oh two to four years, probably? Actually numbering wise they'd be due for one this year, except presumably they would've announced it by now if that was the case.

I'm expecting one of the biggest revisions to the 18th edition to add much more comprehensive guidance on non-Western languages. Considering how far we've come since 2017, when the last one was released, I'll be judging the shit out of them if they do otherwise. (And CMoS actually keep with the times decently enough.)

Which means, as long as there's at least a year or two for these new rules/spellings/orthographies to establish themselves before the next edition comes out, it's likely that just about every (legit) publisher will start using the new rules/spellings/orthographies.

And of course, it would expand much further from there.

[elumish]

A beta version of my romance novel database is finally live!

It has ~150 books in it right now. Most of it is locked, but you should be able to edit the Book Recs and Book Recs Tags pages to update the suggestions it gives. Please note that the inclusion of a book in this database does not mean I recommend it--it just means that I read it in the last year or so.

As you'll see if you take a look, there's still a fair amount of work to be done. A few things I'm working on right now:

Data dictionary: Definitions of the character traits, tropes, setting, etc. included in the database

Vibes: A column for how the book feels (rather than just what's included in it)

More books: The most important part of the database! These are all being put in manually, so right now it's pretty slow and labor intensive. But a database is only as useful as the data in it, so a database with more books is always going to be more useful

Working beyond romance: I'm currently playing around with ways to make a comparable database for urban fantasy series, but I'm still pretty far away from having something complete. Because of how I set this up, there's not an easy way to use it for other genres

Take a look and tell me what you think! What would make this more useful when looking for books either to read or to comp?

[imaginebetterfutures]

Useful (not AI) Tools for Writing

For years I've been compiling a list of useful tools for writing (fiction and non-fiction) and I thought it might be fun to share it.

What am I missing? What do you use and love? I'd love to keep building this list!

Historical Research

General plug: Librarians!!! They want to help you.

Search for words/signs in Brooklyn

Encyclopedia of Hair

Underwear, a history

Newspapers.com

Historical (and modern) meeting minutes

Find a grave

Political TV Ad archive

Oral Histories

Columbia

National Archives

MoMA

Archives of American Art

The Oral History Review

Words

Wordnik

Dictionary of American Regional English

Scrivener built in name generator

Lose the very

Scene Setting / Images

Animals & Plants by geolocation (also good for general scene setting)

Flickr world map

Past weather by zip code

Google Maps streetview / Google Earth

General Inspiration

Oblique Strategies

Worldbuilding

Tarot decks (my personal favorite is this one)

The Thing from the Future

The Picture Game

Misc

Data is Plural -- a newsletter full of interesting datasets

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Why Spell Check (and some grammar check) isn't AI

So I've seen in the wake of Nanowrimo some people claim that spell check is AI and thus is like Gen AI, and I saw the claim originator on Twitter, but when I pressed them, they basically tried to say they had a degree in computer science, so when I pressed into them if they knew what they were talking about, they couldn't answer because obviously don't know about AI.

For some background I've done some light programming (If you look at the Korean name generator, that's all me). And I also have relatives that did programming.

Here, I can lay out how spell check works without AI or a fancy algorithm.

The oldest spellchecks didn't use AI or Gen AI, they used what is your basic corresponding tables.

If you use something like google sheets (database), you can do this pretty quickly yourself though with a lot of manpower.

Here is a list of commonly misspelled words.

Add that with another table with how they are commonly misspelled.

Then you need a table with "common typos"

Then you need one more table for "Words the user adds."

The algorithm is basically this: Set up a loop. A loop is a mechanism that has an algorithm (or set of instructions in it) which repeats until a certain instruction is met. This loop with this algorithm will check for words. In this case, anything with letters, usually encompassing ' and - (though some programs ignore dashes).

So[,][ ]it[ ]will[ ]look[ ]at[ ]letters[ ]in[ ]this[ ]sentence[ ]and[ ]figure[ ]out[ ]if[ ]it[ ]is[ ]spelled[ ]correctly.

The first loop in the previous sentence will look at the word "so" by selecting everything it knows to be a letter in English. Tada "S, o" Then correspond that to the dictionary. So shows up in the dictionary listing it has of English words. Thanks Webster. (If you're British, the OED)

The Algorithm concludes the word is spelled correctly. No more work needs to be done on So. The next word is it "i, t" correspond that to the dictionary and so on.

If you have a "bad word" for example "alot" then the work is, word is spelled incorrectly. Next "work to be done" is to find out if this word is in the "commonly misspelled" words list. If yes, then underline the word in red to get it corrected.

AKA run Algorithm to underline word (usually a few lines of code if you're doing it the old way).

Then the algorithm moves on. The function of right click/Cntrl click is saying, OK, this word, "alot" is it commonly misspelled? Here are a list of corrections according to this other table. This is the work that needs to be done: We need a popup table. We need to pull from the database this misspelling, and then we need to pull from this other database and pull corresponding correct spellings based on this. Then you set up an if-then If the user clicks on this word, change highlighted word.

This is your basic spelling algorithm. You do not need gen AI for this or AI.

Grammar works similarly. You need a table, the type of speech it is (n, v, adv, adj) and then to load in "rules" one should use. You do not need AI. You need some basic programming skills. On the table of somewhere between "Hello, world" (1) and "OMG, I created artificial intelligence like Data " (10) My "Korean name generator" is like 2.5? in difficulty (minus all of the language and cultural knowledge). Haha. Still mocking myself. But a Spellcheck is not far from that. it is like 3. You could build one fairly easily with PHP and database access to a dictionary and misspelled words with corrections.

But Google pulled from the Enron Emails.

In this case, you can sorta fuzzy logic it and create bigger algorithms, mostly to sort out the *grammar* and *New words* that were used that aren't already in the database, which basically is another loop, but with an add to database function. (i.e. table). Then you would correspond this with another loop to look at "odd grammar" and flag it.

You can use AI to sort it faster than a basic algorithm, but nope, you do not need AI to correspond it. A basic algorithm would do. You can also use AI for "words that look similar to this one" and "Words commonly used in place of this one"

But overall, You do not need AI for a grammar check. You only need a dictionary, a set of commonly held rules of English and exceptions (maybe some Noam Chomsky, though he's controversial), and then some programming skill to get past the hurdle.

But Grammar check could use AI

AI as it stands is basically a large algorithm to match large datasets to the words you use. But the problem is that the datasets are taken from users who did not volunteer to put in that information.

It is not Data on Enterprise have novel experiences of every day and learning how to function in the human world by processing it through a matrix of quantum computing.

So WHEN grammar check does use AI, the AI is mostly doing the crunching of the corresponding the information into a more neat table option, as I understand it. It is not the same thing as Gen AI or your average spell check and Microsoft algorithm from say 2000.

Those are not equal things. Instead, adding Gen AI to say, Microsoft Word, is more like stealing your words for the machine (which BTW, Microsoft absolutely did and you need to transfer out to Anti-AI programs/Apps.) and corresponding them for Gen AI future use for people who can't write worth a damn, and then "averaging" it out. Elew. Who wants to write to the average? That's anti-Creative.

And just because it uses an Algorithm, doesn't automatically use AI.

Look, I can write a algorithm now:

Loop: If you want to be strong...

Go outside.

Do cardio.

Go lift weights.

Make sure you eat a healthy diet and balanced which includes reducing refined sugars and do not eat bad fats.

That equally is a set of instructions, but that's not automatically AI.

I programmed my calculator to spit out the quadratic formula. And this isn't even officially programming, this is a script. Dudes, if you're going to call that AI, then you need help with learning computer programming.

The threshold for making AI v spellcheck is a lot, lot higher programming than a set of simple tables and a loop that looks for letters and spaces corresponding it to an existing dictionary. If that's you're threshold for AI, then when you type words, you are caught in an algorithm. Ooooooo... OMG, when you pull up a dictionary to spellcheck yourself, that's AI. C'mon. The threshold is a might higher to make AI or "victim of algorithm" as in Twitter.

So anytime someone says, "All Spellcheck uses genAI/AI" Laugh in their faces and say no. 'cause like, I'm a terrible programmer, and even I'm like, Meh, not that hard to set up spell check, give me a solid dictionary database and I'll do ya.

That said, A human will beat AI on grammar anytime and will be able to sort weird spellings faster and A-OK, or not.

[saad1505]

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[missamyrisa2]

a tickle interrogation from someone who isn't into tickling, but is intensely curious about people who are and has nothing better to do with their endless resources than to capture you and start a line of questioning from the veryyy start, taking you alllll the way back to admitting how you looked up tickling in the dictionary and as you go through everyyyy little tickle memory that you hold soooo close and perfectly preserved, they start tickling you in similar wayssss likeeee talking about that time your tummy got poked they move in and follow your words "ohh yeah? LIke thissss?" ~~ fingers gliding on your riiiibs as you whimper out recollection of rib tickles "that must have really tickled huh~ tell me more" their lust for information and access to your history growing with that sly little curious grin, the questions becoming more loaded "and how much did that make you want tickles more?" with knowing nodssss ~ they question your own tickle knowledge on the side "so are you a tickle-r or, what's it? A tickle-lee? And do you like to tickle people back?" moving so fast to consume more data on tickling "is it coochie coochie coo or kitchie kitchie koo? Yeah? Which is it? Say them both. I want to hear you say them now. Who tickled you while saying that? Roll it back" ~ and you realize getting closer to the current dayyyy you're going to have to start talking about this session, you're going to have to loooop around and confess what this tickle interrogation is doing and admit to soooo much ~ which meanssss they're going to question you about their questioning ~ and there's a goood chance they're starting to get into those tickles themselves, or maybeeee they just delighttt in what tickles do to youuu ~<3

[alexanderwales]

How has Google Docs spellcheck gotten so bad? What are they doing over there?

Like, okay, they've done a gung ho switchover to "AI-assisted" spellcheck. Sure, fine, stupid but I get it, they're throwing money into Gemini or whatever, they want it to pay off, they're maybe trying to train it more.

But what fresh hell is this?

There's no word "hulkling". If you google the word, you get a Marvel character. If you google "hulking" then it gives you a definition from the dictionary. Google doesn't show you the number of results anymore, but I have to believe that "hulking" is entire orders of magnitude more common. If you enter both words into google's n-gram viewer, "hulkling" doesn't even get recognized.

So I have two theories.

Theory 1 is that their model just sucks ass. It's dog shit. It's suggesting a very uncommon non-word to replace a real word because ... well, maybe the model was trained wrong as a joke, maybe it's not the model per se but the criteria they're using to determine whether a word shows up as incorrect, I don't know.

Theory 2 is that this is a way of gaining more data. In theory, you can gain data not just from scraping millions of documents, but from suggesting words to people and having them say yes or no to the suggestion. But this would be such a low value candidate. If they're using spellcheck to refine their model (rather than good-faith effort to add value to their product) then they're doing a terrible job.

Theory 3 is that Goodhart's Law is in play somewhere. Someone got some incentive to have people interact with the spellchecker, and one way to do that is to just have the spellchecker throw out all kinds of shit. This seems unlikely to me, but you never know.

I just cannot understand the sheer level of incompetence and self-sabotage a company needs to be engaging in to have a publicly-facing product that works this poorly.

It really is seeming like now is the time to jump ship and start using something else to write with, but I have millions of words in GDocs right now, and it's super convenient for sharing with people, so I don't know.

[aspd-culture]

ASPD Culture is hearing the term "ASPD Flare" floating around and not knowing what the fuck that is, because it hasn't been described in any detail and of course looking it up brings results that don't answer that question in a productive manner, if anything at all. There are equal chances it could be a thing or it could not, but it's not like you can tell what it is since data is so damn limited on your end.

This is my convoluted way of asking what an ASPD Flare is and what it does, if you know.

No worries/gen - so this is a term most commonly seen in the chronic illness community. A "flare" is when the symptoms of a disorder that cannot be cured become more intense for any period of time. It's generally a commonly accepted thing that most if not all chronic disorders - both physical and psychiatric - have their better and worse days so far as symptoms go, and a flare is just when those symptoms are worse. Sometimes this happens for a specific reason or is triggered by something in particular, other times it can come for seemingly no reason.

So far as ASPD goes, it is generally easiest recognizable when the people you do tolerate or enjoy being around temporarily lose that status, when you become more irritable than normal, when the urges associated with ASPD become more frequent or more difficult to ignore, etc. Those aren't the only symptoms that can increase, nor are all of them required to be considered a flare as it's more a descriptive term than a defined medical definition, but it's probably the easiest to recognize for someone unfamiliar with what a flare is.

Note: I've been told in the past that my tone while defining things may come off as condescending, but I assure you that is genuinely not the intended tone here. My autism just sucks and makes me put out info like a dictionary or medical journal rather than however one is supposed to communicate information.

Plain text below the cut:

No worries/gen - so this is a term most commonly seen in the chronic illness community. A "flare" is when the symptoms of a disorder that cannot be cured become more intense for any period of time. It's generally a commonly accepted thing that most if not all chronic disorders - both physical and psychiatric - have their better and worse days so far as symptoms go, and a flare is just when those symptoms are worse. Sometimes this happens for a specific reason or is triggered by something in particular, other times it can come for seemingly no reason.

So far as ASPD goes, it is generally easiest recognizable when the people you do tolerate or enjoy being around temporarily lose that status, when you become more irritable than normal, when the urges associated with ASPD become more frequent or more difficult to ignore, etc. Those aren't the only symptoms that can increase, nor are all of them required to be considered a flare as it's more a descriptive term than a defined medical definition, but it's probably the easiest to recognize for someone unfamiliar with what a flare is.

Note: I've been told in the past that my tone while defining things may come off as condescending, but I assure you that is genuinely not the intended tone here. My autism just sucks and makes me put out info like a dictionary or medical journal rather than however one is supposed to communicate information.

[shimmershifts]

I discovered your blog literally 30 minutes ago and it truly made me feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulder 😅 Mainly bc I have been trying to understand/apply LOA and getting anxious and deeply frustrated. Your point of view makes me want to explore and actually excited to shift.

Anyway! Could you explain a little bit about what exactly is Awareness???

Thank you, in any case! 🐦🐦

so what is awareness, anyways?

in the shifting community, the words awareness, consciousness, self, you, subconscious, perception, etc etc, are often used different ways by different people, or sometimes even conflated to mean the same thing. i think this is part of the reason there is so much confusions surrounding the idea of "clones" and your other selves in other realities, because if our shared definition of "awareness" is so murky, then what does it really mean when someone says you can shift your awareness to another reality?

so what is awareness? and when we shift, do we leave something behind?

the dictionary defines awareness as "knowledge or perception of a situation or fact," and i think this is a very apt name for what we're really trying to refer to when we speak of our awareness. our awareness is our knowledge or perception of reality. not our brain, or the physical "meat" that makes us, not our nerves, and not really our consciousness. awareness cannot be entirely conflated with consciousness (the experience of this world, including thoughts, feelings, and memories) because people who reality shift do not leave behind an unconscious husk with no thoughts, feelings, or memories. there is no "clone" because your consciousness of this reality stays in this reality, whether you shift your awareness or not. when we reality shift, it must be that all we are doing is aligning with the knowledge and perception of another reality, and integrating that with our current one.

does this mean our awareness leaves this reality, and our CR is left without an awareness at all? well.... no, not exactly. some of what i'm about to say may be controversial in the shifting community, so remember it's just my personal understanding. i believe that all of time, all of space, and all of reality exists simultaneously. you already are your DR self, and you'll always be your CR self too. your entire past, present, and future all exists at once, and you've already lived all of it. when? right now. our "awareness" then, simply refers to our own personal, linear integration of our experiences. our 3D bodies in each reality take in sensory data, the consciousness/sentience produced by our 3D brains processes and perceives reality, and our awareness... well, it is aware.

our awarenesses, for whatever reason, are only capable of comprehending reality in a linear fashion. your current awareness (knowledge or perception of reality) likely started when you were born into this one, or a similar one. you likely understand your experience of this reality is a linear process. at some point, you found out about shifting. (good news!) we are capable of "shifting," aka integrating an experience of a different 3D reality with our current awareness, so that our perception of time and space looks like this: CR we were born into -> DR we shifted to. so... would that mean we actually left our old stinky CR and we're not there anymore? no! you've already lived your entire CR life, and you've already died here. the same way you're already in your DR, you'll be here while you're there too. the only thing that shifts is the order in which your "awareness" is perceiving the sensory experiences your physical meat brains are interpreting. you (CR self, consciousness, body, brain, etc) never leave this reality, your atoms, energy, etc are here.

this is why it is sometimes sad to see posts where shifters talk about how badly they want to leave their CR, or how they are permashifting and never coming back to this reality, or how they don't belong here etc etc. because, yes... your "awareness" can shift to perceive and know another reality. which is amazing, and a wonderful thing. but you (CR self), aka the one who typed that out and hit post... you'll always be conscious of the fact that you posted that. 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, you (CR self, brain and meat and consciousness and sentience) will still be here. even if your awareness shifts. you (CR self, aka the being reading this post) will live here your whole life. there are no sentience-free zombie husks wandering reality, there are no "clones." there is just you, in every reality, always, and your CR self cannot leave your CR anymore than your DR self can leave your DR.

i always hear in shifting communities "everyone is capable of shifting!" which i agree, is very true. what i rarely hear is the consequential fact of the matter which is that, because that is true, that means everyone is aware. even the people who shift. even the people with "permashifting" in their bio. there is no one in any reality who cannot shift their awareness, therefor there must always be an awareness there.

but shimmer! are you saying my awareness has to come back here when i die in my DR? will i be forced to shift back? what happens to my awareness?!?! i don't know. my awareness isn't any more capable of figuring out that secret of the universe than yours. maybe it means every time we shift, we're creating a new branch of linear awareness, one where our awareness stayed in that CR and one where it linearly progressed to the DR (we do know that our 3D reality is constantly expanding, so maybe it makes sense that 4D+ reality is constantly expanding in that same way?) or maybe it means we are cursed to live out the awareness of this 3D reality eventually. maybe it means "permashifting" as a concept is impossible, but i highly doubt that simply because of how many people (including myself) have permashifted to alt CRs and haven't shifted back to the old CR. maybe we will someday, i don't know. but i do know that there is never going to be an awareness-free person in this reality. you (CR self) will always be aware, because we're all always capable of shifting our awareness, so we all must always have awareness.