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net Rocks. This Carl Franklin and this is Richard Campbell. I'm very excited, Richard, because my one of my heroes of podcasting, Grant Barrett, is going to be with us in just a few minutes. Um. But first let's do better, no framework and get out of the way. Awesome man would have got Believe it or not, I started a new podcast. Are you kidding? I'm stupid? I don't know, because both put several hours of podcasts a weekend, so it's not surprising. Yeah. So this
one is a personal more like a personal journal. Oh yeah, I'm just finding people that I've met in my travels and I've worked with that I find really interesting and I think would also their stories would be very interesting to my listeners. And so it's called no Excuse for boredom. I love it. It's a no excuse for boredom dot com. You can't believe you got that domain name. I have a way with getting domain names. I don't know. Yeah, yep, no excuse for boredom dot com. So there's only
two episodes up there. Um. The first one is Dan Grief. He's a guy from England who I know, you don't know, but he I basically talked to him about the difference between new England and Old England in terms of language and slang, and great, you probably like this too. I asked him to define a whole bunch of British slang words and phrases that confused me when I first heard them, like oh uh, okay, are you
trying to take the piss out of me? The classic? I never The only time I ever heard that was like on a Gordon Ramsey show, right, and I'm like, what the heck are they talking about. I kind of got from the context that it means like are you kidding with me? Or are you are you just trying to pull a fast one or whatever, but I'd never heard it before. So there's just a long list. Yeah, there's something very cathe or esque about that. It really put in a
stint exactly. I just didn't get it. So there's it's just funny. And then the second one is with Randy Judkins. Oh man, I remember him. Yeah, my friend from in the early days, my friend from Maine who did that first dot net what is dot net video? And he's a jungling magician, comedian. He was so funny too. Oh had me rolling and stitches. All right, Well, enough of that. That's what
I got who was talking to us today? Richard grabbed a comment off a show sixteen o five, the one we did back in twenty eighteen, so that's a while ago. And it was actually about IoT and edge competing. But we were taught and this is Jared Rhodes we were talking to. I don't even remember this because of course you remember every show. It was only
five years ago. Wait, oh no, that's me. But the latter half of the show we were talking about data collection a lot because these you know, we were talking about how small the hardware gotten and you can put it just about anywhere and nothing. It's always uploading to the cloud. You know, there's consequences to all of that. And Mike comment on the show, and admittedly he commented, you know, within a month of it being published several years ago, he said, hey, this is a great ethical
discussion about collecting data. I always revert back to Kransberg's first law tech it is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral. I think that's actually his quote, but okay, I don't disagree with the quote. Mentoring a store gathering data is troubling. You obviously opt in. And this is when we were talking about some of the projects I've been involved with where they're actually instrumenting shelves to see what you look at, what you pick up, what
you put down, all of those kinds of things. And so the point of you obviously opt in by seeing the monitor continue to enter, But is that enough? Shouldn't the customer not to what extent their behavior will be analyzed? And for what purpose? What are the patrons who beyond their control only have access to that store, are you know, aliening their business and taking a v to the system to gather data? Programming ethics have always fascinated me.
Recent protests by Google employees now again twenty eighteen. Yeah, and that was when Google was going into China and they were demanding the Great Firewall stuff and censoring and so forth. Recent protests by Google employees over developing censoring products for the Chinese government and the military machine learning for the US government highlight the backlashes these companies faced with adopting technologies for different applications. And I'm like man
five years later and there's no protests than ever. But it always boils down to this, you will be able to find a developer to do what you want to have done. There will always be someone with the ethics that aligned to yours or what desperate enough to do that work. This is unique to programming. However, programming has a unique advantage to being cheap to scale, so one developer can have a profound impact on humanity versus one unethical police officer
or one unethical investor. Had Bertie made Off, I love this reference. Had Bertie made Off known how to make an ASP website, he could have offered his services anonymously to many more people. It was a great discussion on what to two about this responsibility. How do companies talk about this? My experience is most don't, don't yeah, but we will eventually need to Yeah. Wow, thanks you, Thank Mike, you killed it. I was so glad to find this comment as I dug through knowing where we were going
to go today, and so thanks thanks for this. It is absolutely the conversations we need to have and are having. And a copy of music Codebuy is on its way to un If you'd like a copy of Music Code by write a comment on the website at dondt Rocks dot com or on the facebooks we publish every show there, and if you comment there and everybody in the show. We'll send you a copy of music Code Buy and definitely follow us on mastadon. I'm at Carl Franklin at tech Hub dot social, and I'm
Rich Campbell at mastadon dot social. Send us a two Rudy too too. It's still funny, Yeah, it's still funny. Okay, we're still in grade seven. I know I'm always going to be that way. This is a really exciting time to have Grant Barrett on the show because I think Grant exists in the intersection of language and ethics and tach. So let me read
his bio for you. Away with Words, Wayward Radio dot org co host and co producer, Grant Barrett is an American lexicographer and linguist specializing in slang and new words. The public radio show has heard from coast to coast in the United States. It's a Wayward Radio dot org slash radio and around the world by podcasts Wayward Radio dot org slash Podcasts. He has helped produce dozens
of dictionaries and has authored three books of his own. He's a voracious reader, reads and speaks a bit of French and Spanish, and spent years working in the jargon rich jungles of information technology. Though born and raised in Missouri and having been a long time resident of New York City, Grant now lives in San Diego, California, with his wife, also linguist and lexicographer, and their young son. His personal website is Grant Barrett with two tis dot
com. Welcome Grant, Hello, how you doing Hey in the bio and the u URLs. Yeah. Absolutely. First of all, I just got to say your podcast as a staple in my house. You know, it's a radio show too, heard coast to coast in the United States as you just read, Yes, you're right, and also independently, voraciously independent, right yeah, yeah, not a part of NPR, but heard on a lot of NPR stations. It's hard to explain that to people, but it's
a it's an one, tiny little nonprofit. We just the radio stations are clients of ours, so we just so cool. I talked to the radio stations because you have an MPR sound, well you could easily be MPR. Yeah, we are on NPR stations, so we take the NPR sound. But we were just added to a bunch of new stations Miami and Tucson. And actually we're now heard in Roswell, New Mexico. Wow, Aliensis are listening. Excellent, it's the caller there. Let me tell you where that
comes from, you know, Beetle Juice. Yeah, that stuff a great movie, all right. So the reason that I got in touch with you is because I was listening to your show and Martha read a story or a comment or an anecdote about She went to chat GPT and told it to give her a one paragraph description of a way with words, and it came up
with this what she thought was a completely unique paragraph. She said, she googled each one of them, each one of the sentences, and they could not be found elsewhere on the Internet, and then started this moral discussion about you know, there's people who are really afraid of this, all right,
of chat GPT, and of language evolving in general. And I think one of you, maybe it was you, said that, well, back in the days of what was it Socrates or ancient Greece, they were concerned that if they taught, if they educated people, and books, you know, people were writing books. Obviously they weren't writing, you know, printing books, but if they were writing, that was going to make people stupid,
or because they wouldn't have to remember so much. Yeah, at the time and the ancient Greeks, you were expected to memorize and recite allowed, and once writing became more standard, you might put it on a sheepskin, vellum or papyrus. People are like, wait a second, you're not memorizing this, You're just gonna go and read it. It's not in your head. How do you actually know anything? Right, If you just know where to
get it, that's not knowledge. It's stored out of your brain. You got to think that was a technological advance, that better writing implements had come along. You weren't chiseling in stone or pressing in clay. And well, it's the evidence of every technological advance is as a of resisting force, there's always opposition. This was the same screaming match that happened when Gutenberg made the press. Well, everything, all technological advances, has pushed back. There's
not a one. I mean, somebody probably argued against fire. It burns somebody, somebody, nothing good will come of it. Somebody argued against the wheel. But wait, it doesn't have a stopping point. It can just keep going. How well, I know that when I go to sleep, it'll step, You'll still be there in the morning. Yeah, right, roll away. Yeah, yeah, it's circular, that's satanic. I don't I don't know. We can't trust people with new technology that I think that's
what it comes down to, right, and that's why people. But on a larger point, what's funny about this is, you know, since we've booked this interview for the three of us to talk, the larger conversation has continued as fast as all the GPT out growths and companies. And I mean, how many how many companies were founded in Delaware? Since so much of this conversation hasn't moved on since we just booked this interview, Margat and I
talked about it on the air. I think the way to discuss this isn't necessarily from an ethical standpoint so much as it is from a personal standpoint. It's Martha took. Her approach was really interesting as a former magazine writer, so know she were for Glamor and for the Washington Post and some other things.
She just said, well, if I was still in the trenches, what to stop my competitor from taking all my gigs and using this to write rough drafts and then tuning them up a little bit and turning them in and beating me to every deadline, taking all of the greatest gigs, and nobody being the wiser. Now we know that there are tools that can help detect the GPT derived you know articles. Yeah, but that's today. Yeah, she's got a good point. Yeah, except that quality is really not that
good. Like, is it ultimately saving you time? I don't even I'm not even convinced. Well, that's the question you still have, Like I said, you have to tune it still, right? You still? I mean what if you what if your machine learning was based on your own writing and not the larger world. Yeah, it's totally going to be as smart as you and invariably not as right. What if what if it was a
two set process. The first draft was just from the larger chat GTPT and the second draft said, now run it through the corpus of my own writing. So it sounds like me. I read an interesting opinion I think it was in Washington Post about from a teacher who said teachers need not worry about AI, and the pushback was, there's a simple solution, just make tests in how in person or even oral exams. Yeah. Handwriting, Yeah,
handwriting or you know, Oh you mentioned that things have progressed. I've noticed that there's a word Press Chat GPT plug in. Now, oh, because that's going to work. Well, all the SEO animals love this crap, right, How many happy SEO blogs are we going to see with this? But I just gon alert them up with Google ads. Yeah, well they were doing that anyway. This is, I know, but now more and easier. Yeah. I would wonder if it'll actually be better. I don't
know, because it might actually be worse. So I want to talk about So we're at a bridging point here where there's a before and and after, but I wanted to talk about and compare this to another bridging point. I went back to school as an older student in his twenties, and I went to Columbia University to get a degree. And I was right there at the point where universities weren't really decided whether or not laptops should be allowed in all
classrooms. So this was two thousand so and I was at Columbia University, and I have horrific handwriting. So I had one professor who allowed me to take my exams on a laptop, and a number of the other students were kind of resentfull of this. But most students didn't even have a laptop class to take notes. But now it is really standard to have a laptop and class to take notes. And the difficulty is you don't know what a student
is doing unless you can see their screen. Yeah, and now the difficulties that we saw a lot of this during the pandemic. The difficulty is if you're taking an exam remotely, you have to lock it down as all this software and all these businesses that are designed to track eye movement and mouse movement, and they'll even pan the room with your camera to know what else and
who else is in the room. So we've kind of leaped this whole thing where it's just assumed you have a laptop, and now they're worried about the laptop doing too much, rather than it shouldn't even be in the room. I have friends who are professors who say, you have no idea how rampant
cheating is, Like it's unbelievable, no doubt. And you know, it's funny because there's another bridge point that I want to talk about when we talk about technology kind of going from oh my god, this is a problem too. Of course it's here, and I think GPT and things like this, all this machine learning will go of course it's here, or we'll just at some point wonder and laugh about this panic. UM I remember as an IT guy, I was largely on the support side for ad agencies and publishing companies.
UM. I remember teaching people to use the internet. Right where we went from a completely unnetworked office with standalone computers on desks and the most networking we have was maybe to a printer, to hooking up email for the first time, and people going, what am I going to use this for? What does this do? I don't know anybody outside the office, what is it? What's an email address? Why is it that this AT symbol kind of put another symbol there instead. I don't like the AT symbol, you
know. Um lots of stuff like that. One woman printing out all of her emails and filing them because she's at She's like, oh, you know, things like that, And now emails emails actually almost day pass a emails like kind of like people like, oh I don't want email? Who uses email anymore? So? I don't know I make notes in my contact. Now, what's the prime medium this person likes? Yeah, how am I
going to reach God? Help us? I wish we had email as the primary one still, because I wish I have fifteen different ways to reach people. I don't know which one, but anyway, I just want to talk about this instead of getting this moral panic and an ethical panic. Really,
let's talk about this as an inflection point. And we've seen these, whether it's moving from speaking or memorizing our knowledge versus writing it down, whether it's should we have laptops in the classroom versus having them the class expecting them in the classroom, to should we have email to expecting to have email. There's all these different times in history where technology has gone from oh my god, this is scary too. Of course we have this. This is scary,
right, And I think that's where we are with this. So I know that you are one of your things on way with words is that you are very much always trying to talk people off the ledge of being like, you know, grammar Nazis, usage Nazis, and you're like, like, language is changing, you need to change with it. You know, it's not the world doesn't going to stop and change for you. But that does not excuse figuratively and literally, like I'm not okay with that. Calm yourself.
Yeah, see see this is exactly why. Right. So yeah, you're like, it's changing, and people wonder why how these things work back in time? You know, how did something turn into something else? And you guys do the research. You you're like, well, it's because well maybe you can give me a better example. But it happens, it changes, and it's often based on misunderstandings, right, uh. Yeah. Sometimes sometimes
it's just natural where one c one category that was broad becomes specific. For example, girl used to mean boy, right, how is that weird? I mean yeah, well, because it was more general, it could mean a young person in general, you know, or so sometimes broad topic. One of my favorite ones to talk about is how the very specific psychotherapy term
of ano retentive now just means oh, they're particular. So it left the specific domain where it's very precise in this profession to be used an everyday language
by people who are not you know, they're not professional at all. Do you find an author who use that phrase in some kind of popular media that then it became part of the regular lexicon, it wasn't one as many you know, the things often leave their specific police jargon, you know, often leaves, for example, to leave the specific language of the police and show up in hip hop and then it becomes slang in the street. Right. So so a lot of times the bridge there is some kind of contact,
but it usually requires repeated contact and not one point of contact. So I guess, given all that history of you in Martha, are you a little more scared with AI than the rest of us? Are you? Are you like, is this just falling into this is just another inflection point and don't worry and everybody. Yeah, I think that's another inflection point. And you know, I think on the segment we aired on the show, I can't remember how it ended up when we edited it. I think I specifically said
I want to avoid the term AI. I don't believe this is AI. I think it's just machine learning, right, and it is, And to call it AI is over has a lot of the AI we've been calling AI for decades is an AI. It's just sophisticated conditionals. Yeah. The way I've been describing it is artificial intellages is what you call something when it doesn't work. As soon as it does work, it'll get a new name. Yeah. Yeah, Well, although I think that some of the stupid things
it's producing are just as stupid as humans. Potentially stupider, Yeah, potentially stupider. The opposite of artificial intelligence is natural stupidity, right, Yeah, although you know, it's a ton of operator air from what I'm saying, a lot of those stupid results are just because the operators don't know what the hell they're going. Why are you having existential debates with a search engine?
Right? We all saw the one where we're all laughing, Like the guy who wrote this very ponderous piece at the Washington Boats were like, yeah, dude, you're like completely treating it like an entity. It's literally every single time you ask it a question, it's only uh, I know, it doesn't have a brain, you're acting like as a brain. It's software. But here's the thing, though, Um, companies are going to get dinged for these things representing them in ways they don't want to be represented. Yeah.
Um, this has just happened with with being right. Microsoft, they basically allowed open ended discussions with their AI, and what happens they've noticed is after maybe twenty iterations back and forth on the same subject, the box starts to lose its You know what, Now I now know why I actually was able to talk to some folks on the inside. Yeah, because it's a software problem. It's a bug interesting like a bug bug, or like it's
it's it is solvable. They brought but they solved it by not hitting the limits. Look this whole mechanism about context, right, yeah. Yeah, So your parser reads what you've written and it tokenizes it, so it knows how to respond to it, and it puts it into cash. So the next thing, then it writes a response, which is also tokenized. Then you write your next response in order to maintain context, it tokenizes that, then it reads them all together and creates a response. Eventually you overflow the
cash. Oh so you've got too many layers of recursive tokenizing. That's right, you just run out of room. They've only allocated so much space for tokens. This is why you get it. Well, the oldest tokens fall off the back, and the oldest tokens are typically the ones shaping things. Yeah, because you need the umbrella thought. Because a lot of times your first question sets your umbrella, your umbrella. Yeah. The best demonstration I've
done of this is I fired up chat GPT. It says, only talk to me an iambic pentameter, and then just chat away with it, and at some point it forgets. I love when you give it rules and it's like a four year old. Right. Yeah, I told you not to talk to me, but you want to know what the limits of the cash
are. Put key instructions at the beginning of the cap. But to get back to the bing thing, this chatbot kept insisting to New York Times reporter Kevin Ruse I guess that he didn't actually love his wife and said that it would like to steal nuclear secret and yeah, okay, but it's a bot. It's not going to steal. There was another situation where somebody in one of our rds actually convinced the bot that, you know, fifteen plus three equal twenty one, and the bot said, yes, I'm sorry, you
are right, fifteen plus three equals twenty one. And then I to test it, went back and asked it, what's fifteen plus three and said eighteen. Yeah, because it didn't remember that previous conversation, because that's not how it's spelled. It doesn't have the context from all the other conversations it's had with all these other people. It only has its context from you, because
when it does combine all the contexts, you end up with TA. Okay, you got to explain that the original TA was the original Microsoft bot. I go back at twenty eighteen, which within ten hours had turned into a race of psychopath because it was combining everything that people were throwing at it, right, Yeah, and they were, and they were testing its limits. There are tons of edge cases. It wasn't when they took it down. And yeah, I'm still not convinced they're not going to take this down.
I'm not. I'm not convinced either, and I don't. I think it's a wonderful experiment. I think it's an experiment on the people using it as much on the software itself. I wonder how much of this is almost another kind of Stanford experiment. Yeah, maybe how lonely are people that they're having these conversations, you know, I want to I want to tackle this from
another angle as well. You know what, This also reminds me of a lot of the complaints about Mechanical Turk, when people were talking about what happens when you put all this effort out to people to automate stuff that you know, pennies on the task, right, And I've done that, and actually, you know, one of my other lives, one of the reasons I do the radio show, it was as a dictionary editor. So I actually did a paper for the Dictionary Society of North America and presented it what when
you ask people on mechanical turk to write dictionary entries? And so I found a bunch of fairly common words that weren't in any major dictionary, and I created a bunch of tasks. And first I had people find sample sentences use these words, and then I had another whole bunch of people use those sample senses to approximate dictionary style entry. And then I had another batch of people trim them down and make them look like ractual dictionary entries with parts of speech.
And it actually worked pretty well. It was more expensive than having an actual dictionary editor to do it. But and now I have a paper proposal before that same Dictionary Society to see what chat GPT does. And I'm also going to use stable diffusion or a variety of some other AI image generator to create dictionary style illustrations for those definitions. See if I can't scare the lexicographers, nice do blaying up against the plagiarism aspect too. I really that Martha
did that work to check all the sentences. Just because you had you scrape something off the web and run it through a synonym engine, you know, doesn't make it original work, right, it just doesn't search well, yeah, because it's it's even though it's not good texts that generates it's plausible right, Yes, Now it's definitely a Dunning Krueger amplifier. If you know nothing about a subject, all this stuff looks great. Well, that's Wikipedia,
indeed. Yeah. I love going to Wikipedia and finding like something that's been in there for years and I know it is fundamentally wrong. Yeah. I go to Wikipedia for the footnotes. It gives me interesting places to go look for information. It's not information itself. Well, that's the researcher's attitude. I go to I go find a paper and I look at its bibliography and
suddenly I know how the path to become an expert on the thing. Sure you at least know what those authors thought was important, whether they found or at least you know what other papers they pillaged for. Right. So another point of inflection that you guys talked about on the show and still talk about quite a bit is texting language and how you know people are afraid because kids have their phones and their you know, their heads down in their phones.
And then we don't talk about it that much anymore. But you you talked about that book and I went and read the book because internet is at it. Yeah. Yeah, but Greta McCulloch, it's a fantastic book. It's one of the best books written on internet language ever. It's being used in classrooms now, that's how good it is. It's awesome, and that the basic tenant is, look, you know these this is definitely changing the language. You know, law is a word now, not just land of lakes.
Yeah, it's in context. Yeah, and it doesn't mean lots of love. It depends on the context. But yeah, it's context sensitive. What the reason I said we don't talk about texting languages for some people that in their mind it's just these very specific things like b R B or LLL or OMG. But there's so much more to it. And Gretchen gets into that about all these different ways that we express emphasis and laughter and sarcasm or
community or insiderness or outsiderness and hesitation. There's so much more to there's so many more layers, and what you think of as an error maybe having may have a message attached to it. Lack of capitalization or punctuation may have a point, and you need to understand that. But what's really important is that again the moral panic about what does it all mean when people don't capitalize and punctuate their text messages has vanished. It's mostly gone. And what we discovered
was that people really do care about their speech. And then when we all moved from those bar phones that had we only had ten nine entry of our text messages and went to touch phones with haptic response, with full keyboards, we could finally type whole sentences. We did, right, most of us do. Most of us type the best that we can. But then it also then we also were brought in a chart of emojis, of ever ever expanding emojis. Yeah, and those actually have expanded our ability to communicate.
They're the new hieroglyphs. Well, but they're necessary. There's something I talk about and I don't have given this presentation a while, but I'll the version of it I'll give to you is there's something called parallinguistic restitution. The vocal
version of speech is speech. The written version is only a pale invitation of what we speak aloud, and it'll never catch up with the spoken version ever, And so we're constantly trying to make the written version accommodate all the things we can do with our spoken language, and it really never catches up. But paral linguistic restitution is what we do when we make things like emoji, or when we make things like emoticons, or when we do clever little things
with punctuation. It's when we're adding back in gestures by making a smiley face, or we're adding back in a grimace by putting the right emojians. Still, I never felt older than when my teenager came up to me and said, hashtag I'm hungry. I don't know about old, but I've always thought, you don't have to say hashtag. You don't have to say hashtag yeah okay. But also every emotions no word following it. When it's just the hash symbol, it's not a hashtag. It has to have a word following
it, so to stop that. Yeah, it's you can call it a hash. You can remember. There are some things that really Bud Graham Barrett, this is good to know a few. What are some of the others. I'm not telling you have to listen to all five hundred episodes. Well I have. I appreciate that. I just don't remember them. I feel sorry for you. Who made you do that? Now? Me? I did it on my own. Like when he was in prison, they didn't play like Guns and Rosens to full Ball and they played our show. Nice
guys made two thousand plus podcasts. He does not recommending through the whole back catalog, but he does it himself anyway. Oh, it's its own kind of OCD. And so that's those are those are prison bars I see in the background there absolutely okay, And I got interrupt for one moment for this very important message. You know, Amazon Aws is a great home for your
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to AWS dot Amazon dot Com, slash net and we're back. It's dot net Rocks. I'm Richur Campbell. That's call Franklin, Yo. Talking to our fellow podcaster Grant Barrett, who's also a lexographer. And I didn't really think that lexographers were that much fun. It's lexicographer, a lexicographer. Yeah, well you're you're okay with with US languages? Yeah, you're in good
company though. The very first radio interview I ever did was with an Australian station promoting my first book, and the guy called me a lexiographer the whole time and igrapher. Yeah, when you're doing a live radio interview, you just don't correct people. It's like correcting your father at the dinner table. You just don't do it. All right, So we're not going to learn
the other pet peeves unless you listen to a way with words. But certainly this sort of inflection point, as you call it, is really interesting, especially for programmers because this, you know, for years, other people have been looking at us as programmers, as people that are replacing their jobs. Right, we automate. That's our job to write automation software to make people's who do those jobs either less brain dependent, you know, push the button,
or eliminate them all together. I mean that's the perception. I'm not saying it's true. I would say that software has increased the number of available jobs and change those jobs from sort of menial tasks to things that have meaning. But they're new jobs and on people to retrain. And if you don't want to retrain, that's on them. But now the shoes on the other foot. Now programmers are like, oh my god, chat GPT, you can tell it to write a program that does acts and it will just spit
it out. Might not be right, but I've actually used it, and you know, how do how do I do that little thing again? And I asked it and for the most part it works, but sometimes it doesn't.
Like I totally do that because I'm the worst. The most program I know is a little bit of Pearl script doing a little bit of a little bit of Python, and mainly I just like, yeah, but you ran an Exchange struggle of all these crap scripts that I do my little work with, but you ran Exchange, and this is where you and Richard have common
but we both know pain. Oh god, I did pain. But also I got to work with I actually loved like things like Skip or Cisco servers, you know, blocking blocking everything coming in with us, the original iOS. It was just nice. It was just nice just to see all that stuff bounced back and never enter your network. Just watch those logs and you're like, they did it. I did it. All that intrusion not showing up into my networks weak. It is interesting that programmers now are feeling that
existential dread of you know, Chat GPT kind of taking their jobs. You know, you know, it's not just an inflection point, it's I want to emphasize that point about it being a bridge. I've had the good fortune to be on a lot of different bridge points in history. For example, when I worked in newspapers, I bridged the print paste up era where you
actually paste it up the paper and shot it with a camera. But that's how you went to press to the digital era, where you did it all on a you know, a Mac see with a floppy test and PageMaker. And I remember going to the press and there was a guy working in the press room who was very disgruntled that I was taking his job because we were doing it on a Mac and we weren't doing it the old fashioned way.
Were used a line of type machine to output the ages. There was this giant thing that involved chemicals and this weird custom keyboard, and he was very angry about it that his job was gone. You know, there's all of these technological innovations. Somebody's going to do it shifted, but if they can't keep up, it's on them. That's how I feel. Yeah, I mean, I want to have some compassion for Yeah, you're going to need to be retrained. Yeah, but I also believe in the growth model here.
When we brought the web into travel, we eliminated a lot of travel agents, but we actually grew the overall travel travel business so much there's many more jobs than the ones that were eliminated. I just don't think that getting chatchyp Hall to find some code for you to use is that different from you googling it or stackle, stack overflow. It's the same gig. It's just like now you're doing any different context, and I think it are I think
it shifts the low end of the business. It shifts the entry level business, and maybe that's the larger problem those It shifts an entry point for the beginning programmer. How to I enter as a brand new programmer? How do I get my name recognition out there on the different freelance marketplaces. How do I start, and as in a small country, to make a few bocks. If GPT is going to do this for everyone, you know, how do I make a little bit of extra money on the side. I don't
know. There are some people who are going to be cut out and retraining isn't going to solve it for them. Well, and folks have talked about you'll use chap EGPT and your ability to craft requests of that engine. It turns out to be your actual skill, and in the end you have to decide whether or not what they gave you is good or not. Back in the early days of programming, I sort of glibly said, you know, maybe the only job left in the world someday will be programmers. Amber Scott
Stanfield said, yeah, and battery makers. Programmers and battery makers. That's those of you, the only jobs left. Now I'm thinking, you know, proofreaders might be the only job left someday in the literary world. Oh dude, they're being cut in the newspaper business, so I wouldn't even publishing business. I wouldn't even count on that. Really. Oh yeah, yeah, it's it's they're one of the first jobs to be cut in publishing. Yeah. Well it shows, um, it does, it really does.
I can't tell you how many errors I see. And my wife, Kelly, Kelly, my wife is very um attentive when it comes to details, right, and so she can spot, she says. She also says she should be a continuity person on a movie set. M H, same thing, details details. Your coffee cup is in your left hand, that last shot. You moved it to your right hand, putting your arms up not
down. Yeah. Right. But I wonder if we're on a I wonder if we are, have been, and are now accelerating down a path of like a version of yellow journalism, this idea of the quality eventually the you know, yellow journalism was that the time when folks were sensationalizing news back in the in the broadsheet era, and eventually people stopped reading it because it was
garbage and the industry had to change. And I wonder if we're not on that exact path where it's like, hey, quality matters, and eventually people will ignore it because it's garbage. Well, I've sat in on a lot of the future of news panels. There's nothing news people love to talk about more than the future of their business. And this is a this has been a topic for as long as I've been involved in the news business, which
is like thirty years exactly this question. And generally the consensus is, and it has always been, there's not enough division between opinion and news, and there never will be because there's too much money and opinion and the public doesn't know how to separate the two either. When you put opinion at the top of the page or on the chiron at the bottom of the screen, people
still think it's news. But we're talking about an inflection point. This may be part of that inflection point is to say that that we do need to discriminate on these things. It has happened before. I cite the yellow journalism case as a what are the few cases where it did happen. Yeah,
but what I'm saying. What I'm saying is in the last thirty years of all we've seen is the rise of the twenty four hour news channel, which is what eighty percent opinion and twenty percent hard news, eighty percent advertising, ten percent opinion and ten percent news. Yeah, well, and lots of repeating over and over and over again. It's expensive. What do you think of Twitter? Well, God help me. Yeah, we kind of feeling that dread too. I mean, it was such a great language research tool
until these new fees. I guess they're not underway quite yet, but these new fees are now threatening a great language research tool. Yeah, where the geocoding on tweets meant that you could actually do really sophisticated time based, region based database searches. And say this is a term is more common here and less common there um and has been over the last ten years or however long
Twitter has been a thirteen years? How long his Twitter fifteen maybe fifteen m And so now we have longitudinal data and it's fantastic for that, And now that's going to be just thrown in the crapper. Yeah, I'm not. I mean, I'm not convinced. I don't think Twitter is all that important to Elon. Actually, I think he's mostly just trying to get out of the situation he's in, Like, I wonder if we're not going to get back to something, but he blew up the revenue model, so he's just
trying to scrounge around for revenue. Dingdong. Yeah, I agree, what a terrible, terrible waste of time. Yes, it was a good product. Maybe it'll get back there. I don't Yeah, maybe you're right, Maybe it we'll get back there, because ultimately it doesn't bat at the same level as getting people to Mars are inventing the electric car, Like, why are you wasting time out? Yes, I just wish he would spend more time with his family. Yeah, yeah, that that dude needs a friend.
Like in a worse way. I'm just saying, like out of the public eye, he just he needs attention, and he's got all those people who could get him all the attention he ever wanted. Yeah, I think he went off the rails when Grimes left. Like the Elon that was kind of fun. You're the guy who said let's fly my sports car into space like that. Yeah, that was a great elon. And that's when he had he had a significant other around him. That was, you know,
at least something you reflect against this and she's been gone. He's just gotten progressively crazier. Yeah. I don't I don't know enough about his personal life. I just I just know how you know. I'm just trying to focused on the utility of the tool rather than the nature of the man. And the utility of the tool is is decline, especially for a guy like you, like he were saying, a great research tool for language usage. It really is. Look at the work by Jack Grieve if you just type in
Jack Grieves g R I e vee just type in Jack Grieve linguist. He's written some phenomenal papers using Twitter and showing African American English online in British English and just different ways you can track regionality using Twitter. It's brilliant stuff,
just brilliant stuff. Well, and that only works if Twitter is serving as that sort of Piazza model where you have a significant portion of the population's routinely communicating, right, a broad spectrum across all ethnic backgrounds and economic backgrounds and political backgrounds. Right. But if it's going to shift very far right, we're going to lose that. Are there any other tools out there that can that have potential in your mind to be used in the same way someday?
No, No, no, nothing else geocodes like that. It's not online. As far as I know, I've not thought of Twitter as all that special until I hear what you do with Yeah, I'm like, Okay, it's because it's not the product of Twitter is. It's a byproduct, but it's an important byproduct. Yeah, that's right. That A lot of the
work that we do is linguist and mexicographers is based on byproduct. For example, I learned years ago to use Google alerts to track new words because writers, authors, journalists will often tag words that are new to the vocabulary with phrases like also known as are known to police as are referred to by referred to by um chemists as. So that I have like three or one hundred or so expressions, and then following those expressions, is a word is a
new word? Yeah? Possibly a new word? Yeah. I was gonna say, how do you how do you filter for new words? Yeah, but no, it's it's when people are trying to relate that contact for the relation phrases, yeah, and then they'll sometimes define them right, and so you know, it's not very successful. I mean, I could probably automate that if I wanted to hire somebody, But you know, for a while there, I was just reading those alerts and marking down the words that were
new to me also, and it was pretty successful. I found thousands and thousands of words that way. Yeah. I think you also used Google books right to find the in other tools that you have at your disposal, to find the first time word has been scene or a phrase has been seen in print. Yeah, you know, it's always like, as far as we know, you always have to add that shad that caveat as far as we know. Yep. These days, I more often use archive dot org.
Yeah, because they have done they have a grant great new search engine by the way that it allows date range searches. And although the OCR is kind of iffy because it uses I think a modified version of tess iact, which is way better than it used to be, but it's still not perfect and it often depends upon script recognition, which isn't that great, so sometimes it will misrecognize, for example, of Cirillac as another language. But it's pretty
good. I just found in an old um website that I used to run and started in nineteen ninety four, Carling Carey's VB homepage. It's where I first ran across you back in the day. Yeah, but what I'm talking about is the books portion of archive dot org, and that's where the gold is. The wet portion, the books portion of Archive, That's where the gold is. Yeah. If you're going to donate money on Internet Resource stone it to archive dot org. Yeah, I do. I give. It's
not a lot, but I give them like twenty five a month. Wow. That's nice because I make such a huge use of this side. And then there's a few software projects like since I use OCR and I PDF pretty regularly, so sometimes I'll download something that I don't think was OCR very well there, and then I'll run OCR my PDF on it, which is great script just wonderful. It's got tests iact on the back end. It's Python
based. You throw a PDF at it, tell it which languages the it should OCR with, and it just wonderful things like de skewing and some a little bit of contrast correction. Just fantastic, Just kind of a nice front end for tests direct to handle some of the real common cases. So it converts some PDF to PDF. Just fantastic, beautiful. Yeah. Why do new words emerge? I mean, I can think of a few reasons, but I like to hear your version of that. Well, in your business.
You know why they emerge? In the tech business, You get a new product. It doesn't is a new problem, and that new problem has a name, right, It's often a silly name like zing boing or something. Well, what I'm talking about For example, if we oh, speaking of Elon Musk, what did he create upstairs in the sky? He created mum starlink starlink? What is starlink? When you see all those satellites together,
it's a mega constellation. Right, So that's a new word because he created something that didn't exist before a mega constellation, and so you're you're creating new terms to describe new things. Yeah, often it is, and it's easier with nouns, and it's easier when you're not creating new senses for verbs, those are much harder, or new senses for words, those are much harder to come across and to notice. But but generally, it's about the
advancement of ideas, culture, people. It's about things changing, and that's when the language has to change too. I learned so many great terms from listening to yours, like your show, like voluntold is a great one, has been volun told. Anybody who's worked in the military knows that way.
That's a great word and it doesn't require explanation. You know. So many of our three letter acronyms TLAs are just so baffling to people who don't who aren't in the business, that we have to constantly stop and define what what we're talking about. Yeah, we put a show in the can this week that you'll hear in a couple weeks. Martha and I talked with a caller who was telling us about working with Aussie's people from Australia, and he was
talking about how mysterious their language was at first. And so sometimes the language changes just because you have this natural friction with other groups of people, so you you pick up how they speak, you know, and it becomes part of your speech. So language change is about osmosis, you know, growth between different groups of people having to accommodate each other. Accommodation is a real big part of new language, an adoption of other people's speech or adoption of
their ways of living. So, for example, on the border between Brazil and all the Spanish speaking countries around it, there are varieties of language no as Portugnol, which is a mix of Portuguese and Spanish, but they're different depending on which border you're at. They're each one of them has kind of created a new crayle, you know, just like the varieties of Spanglish and spoken along the Mexico US border are a little different. So Miami Spanglish is
different from Texas Spanglish. Yeah, just because the English brushing up different kinds of Spanish. They've just they're varied when you're banging against different cultures. Like if you think about the northern countries in the northern side of Brazil, like Surinam and Guyana. They've got some strong French influences too, exactly. Yeah, it's the same reason that the cabe Quaff wrench is different from say, uh, I don't know Martinique French, and they're going to Caribbean for sure.
The other thing I wanted to say is like in the tech world, so the jargon of say, people who work in cloud services versus people who do front frontline support. They're both in tech, but they're different flavors of tech, so they're going to have some overlap, but they're still gonna have different lingo. They might have different lingo for the same stuff. You know, how they talk about customers for example, or how they talk about service
calls. Yeah. Yeah, I'm still not convinced that what's happening with the large language models is going well enough that it's going to continue. We may we may be thrown into a winter like where I think the whole Live with byng was a pr play. I think that the most important part of the case, that what stimulated all this was one hundred million users signing up for chat GBT. You think it's a money grab, Yeah, well, I think I always think it's a money grab. I think it's a pr play.
I think byng was in the single digits of use as a search engine, and then chat gpt comes along and we now have evidence, you know, they've made posts of things talking about they had been tinkering with a language model attached to a search engine for a couple of years. They weren't happy with it. It wasn't good enough. And then chat gpt comes out, signs up one hundred million users in two months. They're like, that's more people that are using bing. Let's put it out there. And then Google
freaks out and takes the bait. I wonder how long it's going to be before Amazon Alexa has that sort of contextual memory that it does not really currently have. Now, I don't know. Alexa has turned out to be a real money sync for Amazon. It's something like ten billion dollars put into it, and it looks like a failing portion of their business. Well all of those voice bots all the same time. I mean, it's coming into twenty twenty three where we have a threat of an economic downturn. I don't know
we actually have a we have a threat of one. It's a very stylish or tech companies to lay people off and so forth. They're clearly scrutinizing their businesses and wanting and signally they're going to cut things that aren't working. And both Google Home and their voice device and Amazon Alexa both were supposed to make money and didn't to the tune of billions, and so they're saying they make it noisy. I don't know if they've actually done anything, but they've made
noises about winding it down. Yeah, exactly what I've been reading, because from my perspective as somebody who hosts a radio show and podcasts, I'm always interested in how many listeners can tune into my show on those devices. And it's incredibly hard to make it happen, Yeah, because they're Unfortunately. My show is called Away with Words, and there are a zillion songs, and other podcasts either have episodes or portions of their programming called Away with Words.
Yeah, and the wrong thing comes Dude, we have a podcast it starts with a period. Oh God. It's really hard that anyway, And it's surprised a number of people create new shows constantly called Away with Words without checking to see if there's another show already called that. People are just do not think yeah, yeah, it's not good for them either. I mean, so no, I find it. You have to be very explicit with the
one who starts today. You have to say, play the latest episode of the podcast Away with Words with Grant Barrett and Martha Parnett, and then it will But yeah, people don't do No, they don't do that because speech is supposed to be easy. I would say it's supposed to be efficient. I'm supposed to be able to say very little and you know, and you or should understand what I'm talking about. How far do you think we are from the way it works in movies or Star Trek to speaking to the computer
and having it all be understood. I think we can't even see our way there right now because we don't have real understanding coming from the machine of intent or any of those things. I think it's almost like we're in the same space that Tassel is with the autopilot. You've made something that feels like it should exist. It has science fiction context, so people want to believe exists, and so you ignore how very broken it actually is. Right, That's
exactly you put it into. So the words that I was trying to say, that's exactly how I feel about it, And I wonder if it won't be thrown into a winter because it deserves to me. I like that ex question too. Thrown into a winter where it just everything chills for a while. Yeah, put it on ice. It's kind of like what happened with electric cars. Electric cars were big at the beginning of the automoile ears automobile
era, and how long did they lay in the deepres? Yeah, for decades and then they you know, a little a little poke up in the eighties, in the seventies when with the oil crisis, and then they went away again, and a little poke up in the nineties, and then it went away again. People in the crazy billionaire showed up. People gonna yell at me for saying lay instead of lie. Just so you know, here you go. But I grant you know, it's contextual to us because of
the artificial intelligence winters, right raise. Artificial intelligence first comes up the fifties with Martin Minsky working for the military. They get some stuff to work, but their promises are way out of scope and so winter. Then it reappears as the expert systems in the seventies and they build these thirty thousand dollar computers and sold several thousand of them. But that's about it. Winter then in the nineties with the decision tree systems and deep Blue and so forth, and
playing chess, and it can't get further than that winter. And then it comes up again in the twenty eleven's with Jeffrey Hinton's model and an image net and vision recognition systems, and that's what we're the tail into this right now. Hinton's now saying, here comes another winter. But you know the big
change now is we have the clouds. So with this huge amount of compute hanging around and companies highly motivated to find work for their cloud, clouds are full arranging the kicker to all this open AI stuff and jatchebetween all these things all consume cloud. I have a story for you, Grant. Do you remember a program back when we were all young called Eliza. Yes, I played with Eliza. I had the MAC version. Yeah, yeah, the
Rogerian psychotherapist. You basically would ask it a question and it would answer with a question that contained parts or was triggered by your question. Yes. Yeah, you can still find it online. Yeah, I'll include a link to an online one, so you would say a sentence that included my brother, right, and so picked up on those keywords and said, tell me more about your family. And my first experience of this was, oh, my
god, it's brilliant. It's a genius. But here's the thing. The guy who wrote that originally wrote it as a goof against the term artificial intelligence to prove that it wasn't intelligent. It was simply doing a lookup of keywords and responding with responses appropriate for those keywords. And everybody, kind of including me as a kid, I was blown away by this, and I actually rewrote it in visual Basic a long time ago, and I think I think
I might have even done an online version of it. But but I was just fascinated by it. You know, from a consumer standpoint, it looked like magic to me. Yeah, people want to believe these things exist, right between peridolia and anthropomorphization, Like we're looking for faces and we cast humanity on things that aren't you. I'm not the first to say this, but we are terribly bad at pattern matching, and we just think we're fantastic. Yeah right, the pattern we matches. I'm a genius, but I am,
Yeah, but in your case, we're making an exception. But no, I'm not. I always say that like I'm somewhere in the middle, just a little bit above average. So the well beg Yeah, and and the other thing we know about humans is when they don't understand something or there's ambiguity, we make stuff up. Yeah, and we're scared and we're scared. Yeah, yeah, we make stuff up and it always blames someone but us. Right, So go read a book or a bunch of books.
Yeah, let me ask you guys a question while I have here. What do you what are you working on? What do you what do you do besides this podcast? Well I could tell you if well, first of all, Richard's working on a book about the history of dot net. Okay, Microsoft's you probably know what dot net is. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Well I only have the like open source version of it installed. But yeah, right, so it goes back to being a Windows only product back in the two thousands and went all the way through tablets and phones and open source. And he can tell you more about that. But I'm basically, um a web developer, and I've got a couple of YouTube videos series one on Blazer, which is there the state of the art web UI technology, and
another one on Maui, which is their mobile technology. So i'm my job is essentially to come up with good examples of how to use this stuff every week, do some research, write some code, and then do a video about it. So i'm this is my wheelhouse. I love it. Oh that's fantastic. I'm working on a book too. It's on the on the words suck, s u c K, suck these there a whole book there. Yeah. Yeah, well it'll be a short one thirty thousand words, but yeah, a mirror and it will be on it'll be like on the
figurative uses of it, like you suck or that sucks. No, no, we have a we have a version of it. That's um a noun. Right, So we went the big suck, right, Well, we turned down the suck and we turn up the awesome in our production, in our production that's yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, Yeah, we have the suck now. Yeah, I will be addressing that now, Yes, turn it down. I appreciate that. Grant. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and keep in touch, will you Yeah, absolutely,
thanks for having me on. This was a great conversation. It's nice to flex the tech brain a little bit. Yeah, and again, you know, it was a really good intersection of all these things and at the right time, I think. So thanks again and we'll see you on the way with words. All right, Thank you, take happy well you guys. All right, byebye. We'll talk to you, dear listener next time on
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