How'd you like to listen to dot net rocks with no ads? Easy?
Become a patron For just five dollars a month, you get access to a
private RSS feed where all the shows have no ADS. Twenty dollars a month
will get you that and a special dot net Rocks patron mug. Sign up
now at Patreon dot dot net rocks dot com. Hey Carlin Richard Here,
As you may have heard, NDC is back offering their incredible in person conferences
around the world, and we'd like to tell you about them. NDC Oslow
will be made twenty first through the twenty fifth. Go to NDC Oslo dot
com to register. NDC Copenhagen is happening August twenty seventh through the thirty first.
Go to NDC Copenhagen dot com for more information. NDC Porto is happening
October sixteenth through the twentieth. The early bird discount for DC Porto ends July
twenty first. Go to Eddcporto dot com to register and check out the full
lineup of conferences at DC conferences dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot
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
dot net applications. Whether you're looking to run your apps as serverless functions,
have them running containers, or you require the complete flexibility of virtualized hardware,
you can do it all on Aws. Dot Net toolkits and templates guide you
through Bill and deployment, or you can use your favorite infrastructure as code and
CICD tools including Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions and git labs, CICD loving Visual
Studio vs Code or Rider. There's an AWS toolkit for each of them.
Want to use familiar Microsoft Sequel server databases, you can with the Amazon Relational
Database service, which provides fully managed Sequel server databases, then offer auto manic
scaling failover in snapshots. Once your dot net application is deployed, it can
use any of the over two hundred AWS services to extend its functionality. Interested
in AI, IoT, machine learning, video processing, or transcription, your
dot Net on AWS application can do at all. To learn more, go
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
dot net rocks. Dot net Rocks is brought to you by Franklin's Net and
produced by Pop Studios, a full service audio, video and post production facility
located physically in New London, Connecticut, and of course in the cloud online
at pwop dot com. Visit our website at dt n et r ocks dot
com for RSS feeds, downloads, mobile apps, comments, and access to
the full archives going back to show number one, recorded in September two thousand
and two. And make sure you check out our sponsors. They keep us
in business. Now go write some code. See you next time. You
got a check. Mile Band