Archive for Language

GPT-3 is publicly available!

I just found out that the amazing text generator GPT-3 was opened to the public months ago! To use it, you need to sign up for an OpenAI account. If you have an account already (for access to DALL-E 2, for example), then you can use that account. If not, it looks like you can […]

On the phrasing of partial election results

A lot of the phrasing around election results uses a sort of shorthand/metaphor that makes it sound like more votes are being cast as time goes on. “[candidate] is catching up.” “[candidate] is ahead for now, but [other candidate] might pass them.” etc. So I think it’s useful to explicitly note that at this point, […]

When you say “people,” who do you mean?

When you’re talking about social-justice issues, and you want to refer to a particular group or kind of people, I recommend being careful to refer specifically to the kind of people that you mean, rather than just saying “people.” (…This note is primarily addressed to people who have relatively more privilege, and especially to us […]

The N-word incident at ACES 2019, part 2

I’m disappointed in the ACES Executive Board’s statement about the incident in which a presenter said the N-word during a presentation at ACES 2019. My post here is a long discussion of the Board’s statement—first my responses to what they wrote, then a description of some things I wish they had said, then a couple […]

The N-word incident at ACES 2019

Content warning for discussion of a white presenter’s use of a racial epithet. (In this post, I’m writing the standard euphemisms in place of the epithets that the presenter spoke aloud.) Last week, I attended the annual conference of ACES, an organization for editors. (Copyeditors, developmental editors, etc.) On the last day of the conference, […]

Yo progreso

My progress in Spanish in Duolingo continues to be slow, largely because every now and then I stop for a couple of months and then I have to go back and re-do a bunch of lessons. But one nice side effect of the repetition is that when I re-do older lessons these days, I’m a […]