#man-in-space

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Ship: The RMS Titanic

Sentence: 25 to life with possibility of parole after ten years

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Apologies for dropping off and then following from a new account. I had to delete my old blog, and then someone squatted on the original URL.

No worries! I'm glad you're okay!

[misscrazyfangirl321]

I am happy to see you had a positive mental health experience. My asks are open if I can be of use to you in regards to the same—God has given me people when I needed them; now it is on me to do the same.

Thank you!

[socialjusticefail]

I realized something this afternoon.

I am formally trained in linguistics. Much of our data—from the earliest days of Panini describing Sanskrit to the medieval Arab grammarians to the foundation of historical linguistics to Sapir, Whorf, and Boas to the preservation of minority or endangered languages today—comes from some form or other of data scraping, be it by actively going out and looking up things or just existing and listening to what people say as they go about their days. There’s a subfield (corpus linguistics) that’s specifically about scraping data and wringing the information out of it.

I would go so far as to say that without data scraping of one form or another, linguistics as a field would hardly exist. You can’t study language in general from a sample size of one and the best way to learn is immersion, for starters; other than that, you have all the historical documents (whatever their provenance) written in dead tongues and you can figure out how older languages worked by looking at said documents and comparing them to other documents and teasing out the mechanisms.

I therefore cannot begrudge the AI companies for doing what they are doing. From a certain point of view it’s how linguists advance the field (and particularly those working in the field—you certainly can have recourse to informants but, again, learning by immersion is most effective).

This should get some people thinking. It sure got me to think about it. I think there is a way to use AI that is good, but there is a way to use it that is not good.

[misscrazyfangirl321]

I hope I’ve not bothered you with all the activity the past few days…I’ve done enough of that to others. I had the worst breakdown of mine entire life this past week or so, and your posts gave me comfort during these events. Thank you.

No bother! I'm glad I was able to encourage you. Praying for you.

[misscrazyfangirl321]

As you have asked it (to pray for you), so has it been done.

Thank you!

[misscrazyfangirl321]

May I reblog some of your LOTR posts with commentary (or at least hopefully funny remarks)?

Yes, of course!!