Language

Discover the best articles, videos, and resources on Language from around the web. Follow along on Refind to get the most relevant new links picked for you.
9 Best Articles in 2021
The Guardian
A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?The Guardian
5 min read · 2020-09-08 · We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace
artificial intelligence
language
machine learning
OpenAI
DALL·E: Creating Images from TextOpenAI
20+ min read · Jan 5th · We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
artificial intelligence
technology
language
Seth Godin
Why the blockchain mattersSeth Godin
4 min read · May 10th · But first, let’s understand some words… Bitcoin is not the blockchain. If the blockchain is a printing press, Bitcoin is a kind of paper money. There are countless things that one can do with a pri…
language
crypto
blockchain
Most highlighted
The reason the blockchain matters is that it is an agent of change. Just like the transistor and yes, the printing press, when an agent of change shows up, it often leads to shifts that we probably didn’t expect.
Vulture
Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?Vulture
~16 min read · 2020-02-20 ·  Literary critic Molly Young offers a witty dissection of how today’s businesses – especially start-ups, creative firms and online companies – spawn nonsense corporate slanguage and self-deluded gibberish. Young’s keen ear and sharp tongue will provide relief and amusement to anyone who’s endured a meeting replete with nonsense terminology, such as “parallel-pathing, growth hacking, upleveling” and “blitzscaling.” 
language
corporate communications
communication
thisworddoesnotexist.com
neuropsychologism: this word does not existthisworddoesnotexist.com
1 min read · 2020-05-13 · 1. psychiatry or mental illness as distinguished from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other forms of mental disturbance because of the impairment of the normal development of consciousness. 2. a…
language
The New Yorker
The Computers Are Getting Better at WritingThe New Yorker
4 min read · Apr 30th · Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed.
writing
language
Most highlighted
I inputted the text of the first section of “The Metamorphosis” and then pressed a button called Wormhole. The computer composed the continuation.
Brute computational power is why Sudowrite can write like Kafka.
Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed. The changes that are coming are fundamental to every method of speaking and writing that presently exists.
Aeon+Psyche
Argue better by signalling your receptiveness with these wordsAeon+Psyche
8 min read · Oct 4th · All too often disagreements spiral into conflict. Prevent that happening by signalling your receptiveness with these words
relationships
career
language
Most highlighted
In a disagreement, explaining language, such as ‘because’ and ‘therefore’, can be seen as condescending. These kinds of assumptions about the world show a lack of intellectual humility
Similar to eating sugary food or staying up late, the thrill of speaking your mind is immediate, but the long-term costs to the relationship are obscured
MIT Technology Review
OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindlessMIT Technology Review
1 min read · 2020-07-20 · “Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few…
digital life
language
machine learning
builtbywords.substack.com
Writing tools I learned from The Economistbuiltbywords.substack.com
6 min read · Apr 5th · I learned writing from The Economist. Back home, it wasn’t easy to learn English. No one in my social circle was fluent in the language and I couldn’t afford a private tutor. The best I could do was…
writing
language
journalism
Most highlighted
It’s okay to internally admire one’s word choices and sentence structures, but writers should be a little less selfish in their writing, especially nonfiction.
That’s why it helps to rewrite and proofread—with the intentional goal of cutting what doesn’t belong to what you’re trying to say.
Most of the paragraphs in The Economist clearly state their main idea in the first sentence and expand on it in the following ones.
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arrantpedantry.com
I Am Begging You to Learn How Dictionaries Workarrantpedantry.com
4 min read · Nov 8th · It’s a phenomenon as predictable as the tides: a dictionary adds new words or definitions, and then people grouse about those changes, either because they don’t like the new words and t…
language
Most highlighted
A dictionary that contained only the words you already know wouldn’t be a very useful dictionary, would it?
There will always be words that you’re not familiar with, either because they’re not from your generation or from your region, because they’re technical or obscure, or because you simply haven’t run across them before
It’s a phenomenon as predictable as the tides: a dictionary adds new words or definitions, and then people grouse about those changes
VentureBeat
OpenAI rival Cohere launches language model APIVentureBeat
6 min read · Nov 15th · Cohere, which is developing large language models for a range of use cases, has launched its commercial API.
language
Rest of World
Ideas | Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster.Rest of World
4 min read · Nov 18th · The platform must work with communities on the ground to design policies on moderation and be fully transparent about them.
language
Language

9 Best Articles in 2021

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