Language Log

Let's start with the last four panels of today's Doonesbury:

Pearls Before Swine, Feb. 18, 2024:

"The 'Effective Accelerationism' movement doesn't care if humans are replaced by AI as long as they're there to make money from it", Business Insider 12/30/2023:

The Effective Accelerationism movement — a staunchly pro-AI ideology that has Silicon Valley split over how artificial intelligence should be regulated — appears to be walking a razor's edge between being a techno-libertarian philosophy and a nihilistic, even reckless, approach to advancing one of the world's most significant technological developments. […]

A riff on the effective altruism, or "EA," philosophy touted by tech influencers like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk, e/acc took off in 2023, though its exact origins remain unclear. The movement has attracted a cast of unlikely characters, including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli.

"EA and e/acc are mostly the same people," Emmett Shear, the former interim CEO of OpenAI, said in an interview with Meridian. "Their only difference is a value judgment on whether or not humanity getting wiped out is a problem."

[This has been drifting down my too-long to-blog list for almost 16 months — but better late than never, I guess, and the world could use some pejorative-flavored humor…] 

Colin Morris, "Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin", 6/28/2022:

I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”) that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary’s English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains, including:

• • scatology (fart-, poop-)
  • political epithets (lib-, Trump-)
  • food (-waffle, -burger)
  • body parts (butt-, -face, -head, -brains)
  • gendered epithets (bitch-, -boy)
  • animals (dog-, -monkey)

Most terms were limited to appearing in one position. For example, while -face readily forms pejorative compounds as a suffix, it fails to produce felicitous compounds as a prefix (facewad? faceclown? facefart?).

Taking the product of these lists gives around 4,800 possible A+B combinations. Most are of a pejorative character, though some false positives slipped in (e.g. dogpile, spitballs). I scraped all Reddit comments from 2006 to the end of 2020, and counted the number of comments containing each.

This is not at all the experience that I've had with multiple-authored papers — but it's funny:

“Thanks everyone for comments on the draft, here it is revised with all your edits.” pic.twitter.com/pSV16wQqca

— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) September 17, 2023

Despite the evidence of my most recent relevant post, the best current speech-to-text systems still make mistakes that a literate and informed human wouldn't.

In this recent YouTube video on the history of robotics research, the automatic closed-captioning system renders "DARPA" as "Dartmouth":

Perhaps Victor can point us to an analogous ambiguity in Chinese poetico-political history:

Screenshots from @泰拳刚猛 on Weibo:

From the movie "Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową" (How I Unleashed World War II):

The initial Q&A:

Q: Name und Vorname?
A: Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz.

Nancy Kathryn Walecki, "Sound as Ever: Gram Parsons and Harvard’s hand in country rock", Harvard Magazine July-August 2023:

During Parsons’s Burritos era, Thomas left Harvard to write his dissertation in a cabin on Mount Baldy outside Los Angeles. Now more of an older brother to Parsons than a proctor, he would take study breaks with him in town: “It was a whole different world from Heidegger and Wittgenstein.” Once, they met Janis Joplin in a nightclub parking lot. “This is my adviser from Harvard. He’s into phenomenology,” Gram said. “Wow,” replied Joplin. “I believe in ghosts, too.”

An NFL policy prohibits players from endorsing alcoholic beverages. So Coors found a linguistic work-around:

The next event in the Salon Sanctuary concert series is "Victorious Secret: Love Gamed and Gender Untamed in the Sparkling Courts of the Baroque":

Before the bars of gender binaries caged the mainstream operatic imagination, a golden age of fluidity guided the vocal soundscape. Virility declared itself with the castrato’s clarion high notes, while femininity spoke in earthy tessiture that plunged to shimmering depths.

Texts of the period revel in ambiguity, unfurling genderless narratives of anonymous lovers and unnamed beloveds. Stories of active pursuit and passive reverie remain alike at loose ends, with neat resolutions many movements away.

Please join us for this special program in honor of Pride Month, as the music of the past reveals a golden underground of nonbinary riches, accompanying us in our witness to a new Renaissance.