Copilot may be a stupid LLM but the human in the screenshot used an apostrophe to pluralize which, in my opinion, is an even more egregious offense.
It’s incorrect to pluralizing letters, numbers, acronyms, or decades with apostrophes in English. I will now pass the pedant stick to the next person in line.
That’s half-right. Upper-case letters aren’t pluralised with apostrophes but lower-case letters are. (So the plural of ‘R’ is ‘Rs’ but the plural of ‘r’ is ‘r’s’.) With numbers (written as ‘123’) it’s optional - IIRC, it’s more popular in Britain to pluralise with apostrophes and more popular in America to pluralise without. (And of course numbers written as words are never pluralised with apostrophes.) Acronyms are indeed not pluralised with apostrophes if they’re written in all caps. I’m not sure what you mean by decades.
By decades they meant “the 1970s” or “the 60s”
I don’t know if we can rely on British popularity, given y’all’s prevalence of the “greengrocer’s apostrophe.”
Never heard of the greengrocer’s apostrophe so I looked it up. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-greengrocers-apostrophe-1690826
I absolutely love that there’s a group called the Apostrophe Protection Society. Is there something like that for the Oxford Comma? I’d gladly join them!
Oh right - that would be the same category as numbers then. (Looked it up out of curiosity: using apostrophes isn’t incorrect, but it seems to be an older/less formal way of pluralising them.)
Because otherwise if you have too many small letters in a row it stops looking like a plural and more like a misspelled word. Because capitalization differences you can make more sense of As but not so much as.
Thank you. Now, insofar as it concerns apostrophes (he said pedantically), couldn’t it be argued that the tools we have at our immediate disposal for making ourselves understood through text are simply inadequate to express the depth of a thought? And wouldn’t it therefore be more appropriate to condemn the lack of tools rather than the person using them creatively, despite their simplicity? At what point do we cast off the blinders and leave the guardrails behind? Or shall we always bow our heads to the wicked chroniclers who have made unwitting fools of us all; and for what? Evolving our language? Our birthright?
No, I say! We have surged free of the feeble chains of the Oxfords and Websters of the world, and no guardrail can contain us! Let go your clutching minds of the anchors of tradition and spread your wings! Fly, I say! Fly and conformn’t!
…
I relinquish the pedant stick.
Plenty of fun to be had with LLMs.
Copilot seemed to be a bit better tuned, but I’ve now confused it by misspelling strawberry. Such fun.
That’s one example when LLMs won’t work without some tuning. What it does is probably looking up information of how many Rs there are, instead of actually analyzing it.
It cannot “analyze” it. It’s fundamentally not how LLM’s work. The LLM has a finite set of “tokens”: words and word-pieces like “dog”, “house”, but also like “berry” and “straw” or “rasp”. When it reads the input it splits the words into the recognized tokens. It’s like a lookup table. The input becomes “token15, token20043, token1923, token984, token1234, …” and so on. The LLM “thinks” of these tokens as coordinates in a very high dimensional space. But it cannot go back and examine the actual contents (letters) in each token. It has to get the information about the number or “r” from somewhere else. So it has likely ingested some texts where the number of "r"s in strawberry is discussed. But it can never actually “test” it.
A completely new architecture or paradigm is needed to make these LLM’s capable of reading letter by letter and keep some kind of count-memory.
the sheer audacity to call this shit intelligence is making me angrier every day
Stwawberry
The T in “ninja” is silent. Silent and invisible.
“Create a python script to count the number of r characters are present in the string strawberry.”
The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2
