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A 20-Year-Old Algorithm Can Help Us Understand Transformer Embeddings

Suppose we ask an LLM: “Can you tell me about Java?” What “Java” is the model thinking about? The programming language or the Indonesian island? To answer this question, we can try to understand what is going on inside the model. Specifically, we want to represent the model’s internal states in a human-interpretable way by finding the concepts that the model is thinking about. One approach to this problem is to phrase it as a dictionary learning problem, in which we try to decompose complex emb

‘Skibidi,’ ‘Tradwife,’ and 6,000 Other New Words Are in the Dictionary Now

Before you roll your eyes at the Gen Alpha in your life for using made-up words, you might want to check the latest update to the dictionary. Cambridge University announced that its most recent revisions to the Cambridge Dictionary add 6,000 new words, including a slew of internet-pilled ones like skibidi, tradwife, and delulu. “It’s not every day you get to see words like skibidi and delulu make their way into the Cambridge Dictionary. We only add words where we think they’ll have staying powe

A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering Here's the situation: it's 1984, and you're assigned to write the spellchecker for a new MS-DOS word processor. Some users, but not many, will have 640K of memory in their PCs. You need to support systems with as little as 256K. That's a quarter megabyte to contain the word processor, the document being edited, and the memory needed by the operating system. Oh, and the spellchecker. For reference, on my MacBook, the standard dictio

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering Here's the situation: it's 1984, and you're assigned to write the spellchecker for a new MS-DOS word processor. Some users, but not many, will have 640K of memory in their PCs. You need to support systems with as little as 256K. That's a quarter megabyte to contain the word processor, the document being edited, and the memory needed by the operating system. Oh, and the spellchecker. For reference, on my MacBook, the standard dictio

Show HN: A word of the day that doesn't suck

I’ve long thought that the Word of the Day was a wasted genre. The goal should be to give you words you can use; to enrich your understanding of words you already know; or at least to use words to tell you something neat about the world. Instead, what you usually get is words that will never be used in conversation, held up as curios. Some examples from Dictionary.com’s daily email: thewless, balladmonger, vagility, contextomy. These words are... not useful. I’ve always thought I could do bett

Dictionary.com “devastated” paid users by abruptly deleting saved words lists

Logophiles are "devastated" after Dictionary.com deleted their logs of favorited words that they carefully crafted for years. The company deleted all accounts, as well as the only ways to use Dictionary.com without seeing ads —even if you previously paid for an ad-free experience. Dictionary.com offers a free dictionary through its website and free Android and iOS apps. It used to offer paid-for mobile apps, called Dictionary.com Pro, that let users set up accounts, use the app without ads, and

Compression Dictionary Transport

Algorithms like Brotli compression and Zstandard compression achieve even greater efficiency by allowing the use of dictionaries of commonly encountered strings, so you don't need any copies of them in the compressed resource. These algorithms ship with a predefined default dictionary that is used when compressing HTTP responses. Compression Dictionary Transport builds on this by enabling you to provide your own dictionary which is especially applicable to a particular set of resources. The com