Someone I know speaks in a reverse tree of sorts which actually does resemble a "weave", they start with various statements about the topic at hand without ever mentioning the topic, and eventually arrive at stating the topic near the end (hopefully). Sometimes I have no idea what they are talking about because they forgot to mention it until the very end when they have merged all their branches.
A sibling and me constructed a con-lang, and we tried reverse polish order where you say the terms before the connectives.
It failed badly. While it's easy to construct sentences that way, it puts immense cognitive load on the receiver. Probably because you don't have any structure in which to put all these terms thrown at you, we reasoned, so we reversed the order to get structure (connectives) first, followed by the terms.
It wasn't better. Turns out, receiving a structure with a bunch of holes to be filled later also results in high cognitive load.
Why? My guess is that the cognitive load mainly comes from the number of unfinished structural connections. To minimize that, you need to transmit a tree in such a way that the terms come as close as possible to the connective. In other words, not bottom or top first, but "side first".
I believe this is why infix notation is so popular. While you parse "A and B" or "X + Y" you never have more than one open connection. When you parse "(+ X Y)" you have two open connections after reading the "+". Five levels deep that begins to matter a lot.
I like the purist lispy idea of operation-first expressions, but I struggle to make my mind actually work like that. If you like clojure-type threading macros, consider that they do something similar to infix notation: they reduce the number of open structural connections during parsing.
That's a fascinating observation. I happen to study Japanese and my first language is English, and the reversed order is often cited as one of the bigger hurdles to language acquisition.
I feel it too, it's a higher context language and I agree that it is probably the fact that you are holding onto more unresolved threads at a time. But perhaps that's just because I didn't grow up with it? I would love to find out.
An interesting observation related to this is that on top of the sentence order differences, things are generally spoken about from the largest concept to the smallest which is different to English as well.
So where we would say "I ate lunch at the park today", in Japanese you might say Today, I at the park ate lunch.
In the second sentence it feels like there is a cliffhanger until we get to the end, the smallest details are often the point of a sentence, and so it's like waiting for the punchline. My brain is on hold until we get there, but in English I must admit I can tune out of a sentence early on and usually get the gist anyway.
Yeah but a callback is just a reference to a previous joke, not a tying together of unrelated points. Does the latter have a name? It seems so hard that I can't remember seeing it much.
I had a professor in a math heavy subject that just started throwing out maths on the blackboard to derrive formula after formula.
It could take 20 minutes until we reach the conclusion, at which point he finally explains what the purpose of the final formula is and why we want it.
I got the habit of reading his book in reverse before the lectures; reading section by section in reverse order from the end. This way the mathematical calculations had a clear goal and were faar easier to follow.
... brilliant maths, but he was fully and utterly incompetent at teaching it. And he had a bit of an ego about how many students fail each year because "they're lazy".
Me and a few friends did deep recaps to de-tangle the explanations using his book, rephrasing it in a easier and shorter format; and he accused us of cheating because our scores deviated from the normal distribution.
All this to say; sometimes clever doesn't correlate well to great with words.... though dont take that as a endorsement of trump.
> “…at which point he finally explains what the purpose of the final formula is and why we want it.”
I can’t learn this way. Great description of some of my instructors. I gravitate towards design and engineering. Goals are first. This sounds like play: “…and this happened, and this happened…” nope. Not me.
My mother-in-law is also a master of 'the weave'. When my wife and I visit she uses it to inform us about every possible happening of gossip and 'important events' . She just needs a key word and then she uses the chance to get all the information out in one stream of thought. (One problem is that she speaks in dialect and also assumes some deep knowledge about my wife's family relations). I often have thought of trying to map the branching. I often assumed that my wife could follow but I found out that everyone seems happy, without any deeper exchange of information.
This reminds a lot of a post here on HN. Someone described a very different way some people talk to each other. If someone else was else was listening in, no sentence and it's response from the other person would seem related at all. But to them that communication is very coherent.
Trying to search that post.
Edit: in the discussion there was a link to a do a YouTube video where to movie characters were playing word badminton with each other.
You might be thinking of the discussion around the weavers and storytellers, which I only just realised the connection between The Weave and weavers.
The idea helps when talking with autistic people who might have quite extreme versions of weaving. A conversation between two weavers is kind of an exchange of blunt facts about their world views, which does sound a lot like disparate unrelated tidbits. In contrast to storytellers, who have a discrete path and story to tell, with a start and a finish.
I talk like this and not sure why. I thought about it a lot over the years and figured that I for some reason need to have a, well, reason to tell a story. And so I tell it not as just a context free snapshot, but a bit more detail to it. And sometimes that resonates with people well, especially when it's something funny, but a lot of times it's too much to ask, especially these days when everyone has a short attention span. Which is fair, I'm the one doing the talking, listening is definitely more challenging.
I think the diagram would be more comprehensible if the branch (topic) name would be shown next to the "New Topic" label, not only at merges. I had to read it from the bottom up the first time to understand what's going on.
It's hard to graph the semantics of a set of arbitrary human statements. It's even harder to work with literal, even intentional non sense.
Humans can indeed make sense. Not to be too Swiftian, but in some countries, children even go to school for it.
For semantic analysis, however, git is just not the right tool. It's a chronological graph that affords diffs. For code.
We need Python NLP and spacy here. But even the best tooling won't get far.
A compiler would abort nonsequential logic and unsatisfied contracts and grammar.
An important business presentation would have structure and facts. Inside the theoretical classroom, a public speech is different from casual, random remarks. Unless the speech is intended for entertainment (e.g. comedy, theatre) or some dark usage, such as propaganda.
From TFA:
> the cyclical pattern of his speeches, little snippets of “the best words” and talking points assembled like a ransom note cut from a magazine
That's funny. I'd like to see you do this more, on more of them. More diagrams! A good source is the introduction he gives at cabinet meetings. Or the way he answers questions with the press. You could compare with his campaign speeches and improvisations.
> Four minutes of the weave was about all I could handle
I wouldn't want to torture the author by force-exposing him more to Trump's inanities. That's already 5x longer than I can stand before the urge to tear my ears off becomes unmanageable.
I hate to be like, "Let's use AI for this" on everything, but this actually does seem kind of like a good thing for AI to do, rather than subject a human to it.
> this actually does seem kind of like a good thing for AI to do
Actually this type of applications should be the killer application of AI.
The extreme analogy is that robot instead of human should explore the nuclear incident of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Now we're trying to build automated analysis of ECG interpretation using AI. In order to interpret standard 12-lead ECG waveforms signal of 5 minutes for Afib detection that's equivalent of 60 minutes duration. For long duration multi-lead Holter ECG it's at least 24-hour, but I think you get the idea.
You can hire cardiologist that interpret the ECG but you probably need sub-specialist cardiologists specializing in ECG interpretation for the best results but only handful of them exist in the world with ratio of 1:100K or 1:1M for experts:populations, depending on where you're living. These expert cardiologist would rather spent the time doing more meaningful exercises for them like pace maker & IPC surgeries, teaching future cardiologists, and having holidays once in a blue moon.Even they can mistake due to human errors and other limitations. Thus this exercise is tailor made for AI.
Reminds me of a flash game (branch) or tool, art or general "thing" perhaps (branch) I suppose it depends how you see it(return)(return) that I cannot not find (branch)such is the state of the modern web(return) (branch) something in the flavour of a Jared Tarbell piece (return) where you could type and the text would be displayed in a spiral in 3D space (branch) there was a way to make a branch a thought (branch) like this (return) and then return to the parent level. but even that wouldn't handle the weave (branch) not sure if that's a good thing or not (return)
I wish people did more testing or at least acknowledged the limitations. I'd expected at list some level of diligence from Dave. This is half-broken in Firefox and looks like a regular nested list in Safari.
I understand it's made for personal use but if it's posted on the public web at least a disclaimer would've been nice.
We act like small models are inconsistent and incoherent, but we rarely point out that it actually matches certain mental states and capacity accurately. We may need to actually see, how would a 0.5B model handle the presidency, because … it could be accurate. Having a super large model simulate these things would not be authentic.
For example, it could be truly true that a developer is roughly as good as a 1.5b model. It could really be true, in which case we’re not valuing these models for their true simulation power (yet). Might be the best interview test, you must generate hand written code that’s better than a small model (or show better judgement).
For the presidency, the current benchmark to beat is GPT2 it seems.
To be representative, the models need a stronger bias towards what the last person they talked to said was the truth rather than what was in their training data.
You're probably thinking about Obama's prepared speeches. A fair comparison would rather involve spontaneous conversations Obama partook in. And yes you would see the same patterns as in Trump's improvised announcement, the pauses, the hesitations, the sudden ruptures to fix unclear anaphora, the pushing and popping of items on the stack of topics, etc...
It's certainly not what is drawing attention to this thread, but Trump's ideas. However we should be aware that transcribing someone's speech with high fidelity 1°) will inevitably make them look dumb 2°) but only because we're not used to do this task, in fact our brains constantly do the opposite, fixing and filtering what we perceive in order to make out what is being communicated. You need some training to do that in fact!
Nonetheless, the author decided to included repair initiators ("uh") but not pauses, because I think he wanted to underline how dumb Trump sounds (pauses do not carry this connotation). This argument was used during the 2012 French presidential election against candidate Eva Joly (a prosecutor) in an attempt to tackle critics about her Norwegian accent on more objective grounds. Moving beyond right-wing gut-driven glottophobia, some people on the left thought they had found reasons to validate this criticism by examining improvised declaration she made during interviews through the filter of written transcription. I can accept this argument only if the author's article is a transcription of a spontaneous monologue (which is impossible of course).
Anyway I stress my point: we underestimate how messed up our actual linguistic production are. We're all too focused on the ideal of written language.
>A new, thought-provoking book on the theory of grammar and language processing, Spontaneous Spoken English is based on the analysis of authentic speech produced in real time. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neurology, and conversation analysis, the author offers a fascinating, easy-to-follow account of why spoken English is structured the way it is. The traditional product-based approach to grammar is given up in favor of a dynamic, speaker-based perspective that integrates language-structural, neurocognitive, and dialogic aspects of speech production. Based on fresh empirical research, Haselow argues that grammatical knowledge rests upon two cognitive principles of linearization called microgrammar and macrogrammar, which are shown to interact in various ways. The book discusses a broad range of speech phenomena under an integrated framework, such as the omnipresence of “unintegrated” constituents (e.g. discourse markers), ellipses, or the allegedly “fragmented” character of syntax, and explains the mechanisms of processing efficiency that guide syntactic planning.
I'm not really convinced. I know that people do speak in a very broken up way but Trump's speech feels very unique, like it's intentionally broken up. It doesn't feel natural at all and I never notice that with other people, even people whose politics I detest.
I feel like you have a pet discovery about "spontaneous spoken English" and now you are seeing it everywhere even when it doesn't apply. Like one of those If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail kind of things.
The focus on the oral aspect of language is in fact what helped linguistics become an autonomous discipline in Europe at the beginning of the previous century.
I think what bugs you in Trump's "speech" is that it looks like a one-sided conversation, and as such, features the kind of structure you'd in fact expect to find in a conversation:
┌ A: "Are you coming tonight?"
│ ┌ B: "Can I bring someone with me?"
│ │ ┌ A: "Boy or girl?"
│ │ │ ┌ B: "What difference does it make?"
│ │ │ └ A: "A question of balance."
│ │ └ B: "A girl."
│ └ A: "That works."
└ B: "Alright, I'll come."
Found this in my copy of Kerbrat-Orecchioni's Les interactions verbales. A bit too heavy to be part of a dialogue in a book, you'd want to edit it, unless of course you're specifically looking for that refreshing touch of orality. And yet those "embbeded", "side sequences" of questions following questions are extremely frequent in everyday's speech. Moving beyond questions of theme (the micro-dependences between interventions in a conversation), the same kind of structures can be shown to exist at a higher level, that of conversation topics (the semantic content of the whole conversation, not the micro-negotiation for requesting clarification for instance): they are not neatly arranged in a hierarchy, can be intertwined, have very long dependence relationships (e.g. "Talking about [this topic we were discussing one hour ago]..."), etc...
So the git structure is not what is problematic with Trump's speech, it is in fact in line with the findings of conversational linguistics. But there is something beyond the mere inadequacy between the format and the role of president.
The conversational yet monologic nature of his speech, the total lack of transition markers, the constant violation of relevance continuity, the parasitic asides for his ennemies, down to the explicit:
>"You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together."
indicate that the needle that ties everything together is himself. Here's the conduct of topical continuity in his speech, the sole coherence point. Illness or strategy ?
Topic management, enunciative processes, and conversational sequences
[...]
Indeed, these processes do not concern only the speaking subject: the topic is expressed for a listener, and its formulation is oriented toward them. In speaking, the speaker immediately positions a recipient in front of them, who becomes a co-speaker (Culioli 1985) and thus directly participates in this construction. From this perspective, the development of the topic depends on the reciprocity of enunciative perspectives, which manifests and materializes in interaction, where the topic does not belong to a single speaker but is collectively constructed, thereby constituting an activity of co-enunciation.
[...]
The participants are sensitive to the question, “Why this, now, addressed to me?” which notably arises when transitions, introductions, or topic recycling cannot be described and analyzed as such. The first analysts of the topic and conversation are therefore the speakers themselves:
1 Roger: I'm gonna blackmail you
2 Al: fuck you
3 Ken: hhh
4 Roger: better not I become pregnant easy hch // hch heh hhhhh
5 Louise: heh hch hehhhh take birth control pills
6 Roger: hehh heh
7 Al: hey Isaw// saw airai neat//joke
8 Ken: the Utile green pills?
9 Al: I went down to the Ports O'Call Village, not to be changing the subject but she brought it up
10 Roger: Not to be change- "I wouldn't change the subject"
11 Al: but where was a birth con- they had a joke shop with a birth control pill and it was made out of styrofoam. put it between you lee- legs'n press very hard
12 Louise: hch hhhhh
13 Al: heh heh heh
(Sacks, 1992, 1:539)
In this example, taken from a transcription of a therapeutic session for adolescents cited by Sacks, Al initiates a new topic in line 7 by linking it to an earlier element mentioned by Louise in line 5. In this way, he uses line 5 as a topical source for his joke, treating “birth control pills” as a previous topic. However, it appears that “birth control pills” is not considered a topic by the participants, which motivates the explicit marking with the phrase “not to change the subject.” What emerges here is the collective production and interpretation of the topic across sequences, which governs what can be described (“accountable”) as a transition, a change, or even a topic abandonment. It is not enough to establish virtual links with preceding elements; these links must also be recognizable and treated as appropriate by the interlocutors—something that an approach focusing on sequential markings must take into account (Mondada, 1995b).
Ok. I didn't say his speech bugged me, I said it was noticeably different to other people's speech.
I understand that speech and conversation branches. That's normal, that's not an issue. What makes it notable is how random the jumps seem to be, the seeming lack of logical connections between them, and the apparent randomness of when they rejoin the main branch, if they ever do.
The examples you show display very predictable stack-like behaviour which is very different to what is shown in the article.
While I understand and agree with your point generally, you have to admit that Trump makes about ten times less sense than any average person, even when you're just listening to him (rather than reading a faithful transcript).
I agree, however thinking you have to use a git-like branch n' merge structure specifically to analyse trump' monologue because he's that crazy, is a mistake. Normal conversations are like this too. See my other reply that hints at the fact that what's problematic about Trump's discourse is the lack of topical continuity structure. That role is carried out by Trump's own ego and it is made possible in proportion that everything and anything, like old roman roads, lead back to Trump. In Lacan 1961-62 course about identity, one can read:
>So, what does the neurotic want to know? I'm slowing my delivery here so you can hear clearly, as every single word is important. He wants to know what is real in that which is his passion – in other words, what is real in the effect of the signifier.
And I think this is exactly what Trump is on about. He wants to see for himself the effect of his own name as he utters it (hence the 3rd person). I don't think he came with that remark about "the weave" by accident. I think it was planned and "discussed" internally as the explicit, self-aware display of madness that would allow him to string this nonsense together, and by uttering it, absolve himself from the toxcicity of his own thought process and make it our problem – thus achieving the roaring effects he sought to find in the very name of Trump in the first place.
I agree with a lot of this, but not with the statement that lots of people are like this. If you plotted the trees for most people, they'd have a few branches, but they'd largely get back to the point after one or two asides. Trump just jumps from topic to topic disjointedly, and then in the end just refers back to the original topic, again disjointedly.
He really isn't anywhere near as coherent as the average person, and I'm not American, so I don't even have a dog in this fight. I've only heard him talk, and I usually can't make out any point at all, which I personally have very rarely encountered with the average person (for the sober ones, at least).
Weave for yourself. Prove it: Post a link to your own public writing anywhere near as bad as this, or admit you'd be ashamed to. I bet all of a sudden you're speechless and won't, because you know you're wrong and I'm right. So instead, explain why you're such a thin skinned boot licker?
There's a difference between writing and speech, and it is rather amazing to see unedited transcripts of extemporaneous speech. Hesitations, "repair" of ungrammatical utterances, abandoning sentences and restarting them, change of topic without clear warning.
There are unusual things about Trump's communication: extreme informality, seemingly not running things past advisors or editors (for both speech and writing), and probably making things a lot more personal than other presidents have done (talking more about himself; talking more about his experiences, opinions, and emotions; talking more about individual friends and enemies). Maybe also a far greater willingness to make digressions, whether personal or not.
Still, I think the prior commenter is right that we can be surprised by how disfluent almost everyone's extemporaneous speech appears when precisely transcribed. This is often hidden because published interviews or speeches in the press are usually extensively edited, so you won't see something like
"And I, um, I said, well you know, I said that we-- we're going to fix this pro--problem, uh, this problem that's been affecting a lot, a lot of people."
Instead, you'll see something like
"And I said that we're going to fix this problem that's been affecting a lot of people."
There was a big controversy about Dan Quayle as vice president and about George W. Bush as president because they both seemed to make a lot of speech errors and misstatements. I think I remember some linguists complaining that the oddities of both Quayle's and Bush's were probably being exaggerated merely because people were paying such close attention but were unaccustomed to seeing carefully transcribed speech. And I think the same is true for Trump's speech, even though he is also flouting various communication norms in both his writing and his speech, sometimes consciously.
Earlier presidents also had more patience for delivering prepared written speeches, from paper or from a teleprompter. For many of their speeches, they were extemporizing less, and when they did extemporize, they were comparatively better at keeping on-topic.
Thank you! I studied linguistics, this is why I'm aware of this reality. I'm asking this because this is HN and chances that your worked on speech-to-texts systems is rather high. I was wondering how this problem is tackled in systems such as Whisper. I haven't used it much, but I definitively noticed that YouTube's transcription model try to strike a balance between transcription fidelity and readability. Sometimes it will elude some pauses & repairs to produce a more streamlined transcription, sometimes it will include them. It's an art I guess, but a model where you could tune this at inference time would be interesting.
This wasn't a conversation between ordinary people like you and me, but a statement delivered to reporters by a sitting US president. So the fair comparison would be to other such statement made by other sitting US presidents.
Oh but it's ok for him as a public figure to do thousands of weaving slanderous hit pieces on everyone else from his bully pulpit, yet you still gleefully leap to his defense, because you hate the same people he does, since you're both thin skinned sociopathic bullies and cowards. Why are you so ashamed to post that under your own name?
Someone I know speaks in a reverse tree of sorts which actually does resemble a "weave", they start with various statements about the topic at hand without ever mentioning the topic, and eventually arrive at stating the topic near the end (hopefully). Sometimes I have no idea what they are talking about because they forgot to mention it until the very end when they have merged all their branches.
A sibling and me constructed a con-lang, and we tried reverse polish order where you say the terms before the connectives.
It failed badly. While it's easy to construct sentences that way, it puts immense cognitive load on the receiver. Probably because you don't have any structure in which to put all these terms thrown at you, we reasoned, so we reversed the order to get structure (connectives) first, followed by the terms.
It wasn't better. Turns out, receiving a structure with a bunch of holes to be filled later also results in high cognitive load.
Why? My guess is that the cognitive load mainly comes from the number of unfinished structural connections. To minimize that, you need to transmit a tree in such a way that the terms come as close as possible to the connective. In other words, not bottom or top first, but "side first".
I believe this is why infix notation is so popular. While you parse "A and B" or "X + Y" you never have more than one open connection. When you parse "(+ X Y)" you have two open connections after reading the "+". Five levels deep that begins to matter a lot.
I like the purist lispy idea of operation-first expressions, but I struggle to make my mind actually work like that. If you like clojure-type threading macros, consider that they do something similar to infix notation: they reduce the number of open structural connections during parsing.
That's a fascinating observation. I happen to study Japanese and my first language is English, and the reversed order is often cited as one of the bigger hurdles to language acquisition.
I feel it too, it's a higher context language and I agree that it is probably the fact that you are holding onto more unresolved threads at a time. But perhaps that's just because I didn't grow up with it? I would love to find out.
An interesting observation related to this is that on top of the sentence order differences, things are generally spoken about from the largest concept to the smallest which is different to English as well.
So where we would say "I ate lunch at the park today", in Japanese you might say Today, I at the park ate lunch.
In the second sentence it feels like there is a cliffhanger until we get to the end, the smallest details are often the point of a sentence, and so it's like waiting for the punchline. My brain is on hold until we get there, but in English I must admit I can tune out of a sentence early on and usually get the gist anyway.
When it all merges, the payoff feels great. I'm a big fan of when it's used in comedy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(comedy)
Yeah but a callback is just a reference to a previous joke, not a tying together of unrelated points. Does the latter have a name? It seems so hard that I can't remember seeing it much.
It's the third beat (final stage) of the Harold, for what that's worth.
https://wiki.improvresourcecenter.com/index.php?title=Harold
I had a professor in a math heavy subject that just started throwing out maths on the blackboard to derrive formula after formula.
It could take 20 minutes until we reach the conclusion, at which point he finally explains what the purpose of the final formula is and why we want it.
I got the habit of reading his book in reverse before the lectures; reading section by section in reverse order from the end. This way the mathematical calculations had a clear goal and were faar easier to follow.
... brilliant maths, but he was fully and utterly incompetent at teaching it. And he had a bit of an ego about how many students fail each year because "they're lazy".
Me and a few friends did deep recaps to de-tangle the explanations using his book, rephrasing it in a easier and shorter format; and he accused us of cheating because our scores deviated from the normal distribution.
All this to say; sometimes clever doesn't correlate well to great with words.... though dont take that as a endorsement of trump.
"As with many books, this one is best read piecewise backwards. In describing the contents, I accordingly begin with Part III."
Intro to one of the maths books I had to reference to do my masters thesis. :)
> “…at which point he finally explains what the purpose of the final formula is and why we want it.”
I can’t learn this way. Great description of some of my instructors. I gravitate towards design and engineering. Goals are first. This sounds like play: “…and this happened, and this happened…” nope. Not me.
It reflects how the maths was discovered, by toying with formulas until something useful showed up. But its an awful way to teach it.
My mother-in-law is also a master of 'the weave'. When my wife and I visit she uses it to inform us about every possible happening of gossip and 'important events' . She just needs a key word and then she uses the chance to get all the information out in one stream of thought. (One problem is that she speaks in dialect and also assumes some deep knowledge about my wife's family relations). I often have thought of trying to map the branching. I often assumed that my wife could follow but I found out that everyone seems happy, without any deeper exchange of information.
This reminds a lot of a post here on HN. Someone described a very different way some people talk to each other. If someone else was else was listening in, no sentence and it's response from the other person would seem related at all. But to them that communication is very coherent.
Trying to search that post.
Edit: in the discussion there was a link to a do a YouTube video where to movie characters were playing word badminton with each other.
Edit: this clip https://youtu.be/swqfFHLck1o
You might be thinking of the discussion around the weavers and storytellers, which I only just realised the connection between The Weave and weavers.
The idea helps when talking with autistic people who might have quite extreme versions of weaving. A conversation between two weavers is kind of an exchange of blunt facts about their world views, which does sound a lot like disparate unrelated tidbits. In contrast to storytellers, who have a discrete path and story to tell, with a start and a finish.
I talk like this and not sure why. I thought about it a lot over the years and figured that I for some reason need to have a, well, reason to tell a story. And so I tell it not as just a context free snapshot, but a bit more detail to it. And sometimes that resonates with people well, especially when it's something funny, but a lot of times it's too much to ask, especially these days when everyone has a short attention span. Which is fair, I'm the one doing the talking, listening is definitely more challenging.
I think the diagram would be more comprehensible if the branch (topic) name would be shown next to the "New Topic" label, not only at merges. I had to read it from the bottom up the first time to understand what's going on.
It's hard to graph the semantics of a set of arbitrary human statements. It's even harder to work with literal, even intentional non sense.
Humans can indeed make sense. Not to be too Swiftian, but in some countries, children even go to school for it.
For semantic analysis, however, git is just not the right tool. It's a chronological graph that affords diffs. For code.
We need Python NLP and spacy here. But even the best tooling won't get far. A compiler would abort nonsequential logic and unsatisfied contracts and grammar.
An important business presentation would have structure and facts. Inside the theoretical classroom, a public speech is different from casual, random remarks. Unless the speech is intended for entertainment (e.g. comedy, theatre) or some dark usage, such as propaganda.
From TFA:
> the cyclical pattern of his speeches, little snippets of “the best words” and talking points assembled like a ransom note cut from a magazine
That's gold!
That's funny. I'd like to see you do this more, on more of them. More diagrams! A good source is the introduction he gives at cabinet meetings. Or the way he answers questions with the press. You could compare with his campaign speeches and improvisations.
> Four minutes of the weave was about all I could handle
I wouldn't want to torture the author by force-exposing him more to Trump's inanities. That's already 5x longer than I can stand before the urge to tear my ears off becomes unmanageable.
I hate to be like, "Let's use AI for this" on everything, but this actually does seem kind of like a good thing for AI to do, rather than subject a human to it.
> this actually does seem kind of like a good thing for AI to do
Actually this type of applications should be the killer application of AI.
The extreme analogy is that robot instead of human should explore the nuclear incident of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Now we're trying to build automated analysis of ECG interpretation using AI. In order to interpret standard 12-lead ECG waveforms signal of 5 minutes for Afib detection that's equivalent of 60 minutes duration. For long duration multi-lead Holter ECG it's at least 24-hour, but I think you get the idea.
You can hire cardiologist that interpret the ECG but you probably need sub-specialist cardiologists specializing in ECG interpretation for the best results but only handful of them exist in the world with ratio of 1:100K or 1:1M for experts:populations, depending on where you're living. These expert cardiologist would rather spent the time doing more meaningful exercises for them like pace maker & IPC surgeries, teaching future cardiologists, and having holidays once in a blue moon.Even they can mistake due to human errors and other limitations. Thus this exercise is tailor made for AI.
Seems really unfair to the AI
Douglas Adams: video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself;
Does not render properly on iOS mobile (iOS 26 beta) https://files.nilsherzig.com/IMG_9236.PNG
Also not on Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/fkaQeIp
Same result on Firefox mobile
only got the working on chrome desktop https://files.nilsherzig.com/screenshots/2025-0831-105623-64...
Oh!!! Thx. This makes way more sense
I should really add some enumeration protection to these image sharing urls haha
https://files.nilsherzig.com/screenshots/IMG_9239.png
The difference between posting an image url without and with a random string in the url.
Blue line is successful requests (people viewing the image I posted), green are unsuccessful requests (people trying to find other files).
Second blue bump is the screenshot with a randomized „hard“ to guess url. First bump the default iOS screenshot name in the url.
A mobile screen is not wide enough anyway!
It's not mobile, it is IE6 era all over again, when sites are designed and work only in one (dominant) browser :(
Works fine on my phone, since it was vertical.
There is a top-to-bottom mode and it works in their editor, not sure about the library: https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/gitgraph.html#top-to-bottom-tb
This would be very useful for understanding business people who answer questions with endless word salad answers.
Reminds me of a flash game (branch) or tool, art or general "thing" perhaps (branch) I suppose it depends how you see it(return)(return) that I cannot not find (branch)such is the state of the modern web(return) (branch) something in the flavour of a Jared Tarbell piece (return) where you could type and the text would be displayed in a spiral in 3D space (branch) there was a way to make a branch a thought (branch) like this (return) and then return to the parent level. but even that wouldn't handle the weave (branch) not sure if that's a good thing or not (return)
Change over time. Get this done for 10y or more back non teleprompted lower edit recordings, chart and compare for some metric
Could we do this to Jordan Patterson? I feel like his branching really needs a git tree view to parse sometimes.
Can git handle recursion?
that depends on what you mean by "can" and "git" and "handle" and "recursion"
This would be interesting to psyhiatrists I believe. If you happen to make the code public I'm very interested (starting my residency soon)
I wish people did more testing or at least acknowledged the limitations. I'd expected at list some level of diligence from Dave. This is half-broken in Firefox and looks like a regular nested list in Safari.
I understand it's made for personal use but if it's posted on the public web at least a disclaimer would've been nice.
works perfectly on my firefox
I thought it worked fine on Firefox, but then I saw the screenshot of what it actually looks like in Chrome (elsewhere in the comments).
Perhaps Sankey diagrams is a better way to visualise
We act like small models are inconsistent and incoherent, but we rarely point out that it actually matches certain mental states and capacity accurately. We may need to actually see, how would a 0.5B model handle the presidency, because … it could be accurate. Having a super large model simulate these things would not be authentic.
For example, it could be truly true that a developer is roughly as good as a 1.5b model. It could really be true, in which case we’re not valuing these models for their true simulation power (yet). Might be the best interview test, you must generate hand written code that’s better than a small model (or show better judgement).
For the presidency, the current benchmark to beat is GPT2 it seems.
> For the presidency, the current benchmark to beat is GPT2 it seems.
You're generous. I would've gone with Eliza, but on second thought that's an insult to Joseph Weizenbaum.
To be representative, the models need a stronger bias towards what the last person they talked to said was the truth rather than what was in their training data.
An AI could generate them automatically and visualize the contradictions.
I talk like this. It’s an ADHD thing. All RAM no HDD. Just swap file thrashing like it’s 1999.
*made famous by Donald J. Trump
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Also most likely lost the 2024 election (plenty of irregularities).
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Do you reckon you could take some of Obama's speeches and do the same thing as this with comparable results?
You're probably thinking about Obama's prepared speeches. A fair comparison would rather involve spontaneous conversations Obama partook in. And yes you would see the same patterns as in Trump's improvised announcement, the pauses, the hesitations, the sudden ruptures to fix unclear anaphora, the pushing and popping of items on the stack of topics, etc...
It's certainly not what is drawing attention to this thread, but Trump's ideas. However we should be aware that transcribing someone's speech with high fidelity 1°) will inevitably make them look dumb 2°) but only because we're not used to do this task, in fact our brains constantly do the opposite, fixing and filtering what we perceive in order to make out what is being communicated. You need some training to do that in fact!
Nonetheless, the author decided to included repair initiators ("uh") but not pauses, because I think he wanted to underline how dumb Trump sounds (pauses do not carry this connotation). This argument was used during the 2012 French presidential election against candidate Eva Joly (a prosecutor) in an attempt to tackle critics about her Norwegian accent on more objective grounds. Moving beyond right-wing gut-driven glottophobia, some people on the left thought they had found reasons to validate this criticism by examining improvised declaration she made during interviews through the filter of written transcription. I can accept this argument only if the author's article is a transcription of a spontaneous monologue (which is impossible of course).
Anyway I stress my point: we underestimate how messed up our actual linguistic production are. We're all too focused on the ideal of written language.
https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/17211/frontmatter/9781...
>SPONTANEOUS SPOKEN ENGLISH
>A new, thought-provoking book on the theory of grammar and language processing, Spontaneous Spoken English is based on the analysis of authentic speech produced in real time. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neurology, and conversation analysis, the author offers a fascinating, easy-to-follow account of why spoken English is structured the way it is. The traditional product-based approach to grammar is given up in favor of a dynamic, speaker-based perspective that integrates language-structural, neurocognitive, and dialogic aspects of speech production. Based on fresh empirical research, Haselow argues that grammatical knowledge rests upon two cognitive principles of linearization called microgrammar and macrogrammar, which are shown to interact in various ways. The book discusses a broad range of speech phenomena under an integrated framework, such as the omnipresence of “unintegrated” constituents (e.g. discourse markers), ellipses, or the allegedly “fragmented” character of syntax, and explains the mechanisms of processing efficiency that guide syntactic planning.
I'm not really convinced. I know that people do speak in a very broken up way but Trump's speech feels very unique, like it's intentionally broken up. It doesn't feel natural at all and I never notice that with other people, even people whose politics I detest.
I feel like you have a pet discovery about "spontaneous spoken English" and now you are seeing it everywhere even when it doesn't apply. Like one of those If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail kind of things.
The focus on the oral aspect of language is in fact what helped linguistics become an autonomous discipline in Europe at the beginning of the previous century.
I think what bugs you in Trump's "speech" is that it looks like a one-sided conversation, and as such, features the kind of structure you'd in fact expect to find in a conversation:
Found this in my copy of Kerbrat-Orecchioni's Les interactions verbales. A bit too heavy to be part of a dialogue in a book, you'd want to edit it, unless of course you're specifically looking for that refreshing touch of orality. And yet those "embbeded", "side sequences" of questions following questions are extremely frequent in everyday's speech. Moving beyond questions of theme (the micro-dependences between interventions in a conversation), the same kind of structures can be shown to exist at a higher level, that of conversation topics (the semantic content of the whole conversation, not the micro-negotiation for requesting clarification for instance): they are not neatly arranged in a hierarchy, can be intertwined, have very long dependence relationships (e.g. "Talking about [this topic we were discussing one hour ago]..."), etc...So the git structure is not what is problematic with Trump's speech, it is in fact in line with the findings of conversational linguistics. But there is something beyond the mere inadequacy between the format and the role of president.
The conversational yet monologic nature of his speech, the total lack of transition markers, the constant violation of relevance continuity, the parasitic asides for his ennemies, down to the explicit:
>"You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together."
indicate that the needle that ties everything together is himself. Here's the conduct of topical continuity in his speech, the sole coherence point. Illness or strategy ?
https://www.unige.ch/clf/fichiers/pdf/10-Berthoud_nclf17.pdf
Topic management, enunciative processes, and conversational sequences
[...]
Indeed, these processes do not concern only the speaking subject: the topic is expressed for a listener, and its formulation is oriented toward them. In speaking, the speaker immediately positions a recipient in front of them, who becomes a co-speaker (Culioli 1985) and thus directly participates in this construction. From this perspective, the development of the topic depends on the reciprocity of enunciative perspectives, which manifests and materializes in interaction, where the topic does not belong to a single speaker but is collectively constructed, thereby constituting an activity of co-enunciation.
[...]
The participants are sensitive to the question, “Why this, now, addressed to me?” which notably arises when transitions, introductions, or topic recycling cannot be described and analyzed as such. The first analysts of the topic and conversation are therefore the speakers themselves:
In this example, taken from a transcription of a therapeutic session for adolescents cited by Sacks, Al initiates a new topic in line 7 by linking it to an earlier element mentioned by Louise in line 5. In this way, he uses line 5 as a topical source for his joke, treating “birth control pills” as a previous topic. However, it appears that “birth control pills” is not considered a topic by the participants, which motivates the explicit marking with the phrase “not to change the subject.” What emerges here is the collective production and interpretation of the topic across sequences, which governs what can be described (“accountable”) as a transition, a change, or even a topic abandonment. It is not enough to establish virtual links with preceding elements; these links must also be recognizable and treated as appropriate by the interlocutors—something that an approach focusing on sequential markings must take into account (Mondada, 1995b).Ok. I didn't say his speech bugged me, I said it was noticeably different to other people's speech.
I understand that speech and conversation branches. That's normal, that's not an issue. What makes it notable is how random the jumps seem to be, the seeming lack of logical connections between them, and the apparent randomness of when they rejoin the main branch, if they ever do.
The examples you show display very predictable stack-like behaviour which is very different to what is shown in the article.
While I understand and agree with your point generally, you have to admit that Trump makes about ten times less sense than any average person, even when you're just listening to him (rather than reading a faithful transcript).
I agree, however thinking you have to use a git-like branch n' merge structure specifically to analyse trump' monologue because he's that crazy, is a mistake. Normal conversations are like this too. See my other reply that hints at the fact that what's problematic about Trump's discourse is the lack of topical continuity structure. That role is carried out by Trump's own ego and it is made possible in proportion that everything and anything, like old roman roads, lead back to Trump. In Lacan 1961-62 course about identity, one can read:
>So, what does the neurotic want to know? I'm slowing my delivery here so you can hear clearly, as every single word is important. He wants to know what is real in that which is his passion – in other words, what is real in the effect of the signifier.
And I think this is exactly what Trump is on about. He wants to see for himself the effect of his own name as he utters it (hence the 3rd person). I don't think he came with that remark about "the weave" by accident. I think it was planned and "discussed" internally as the explicit, self-aware display of madness that would allow him to string this nonsense together, and by uttering it, absolve himself from the toxcicity of his own thought process and make it our problem – thus achieving the roaring effects he sought to find in the very name of Trump in the first place.
I agree with a lot of this, but not with the statement that lots of people are like this. If you plotted the trees for most people, they'd have a few branches, but they'd largely get back to the point after one or two asides. Trump just jumps from topic to topic disjointedly, and then in the end just refers back to the original topic, again disjointedly.
He really isn't anywhere near as coherent as the average person, and I'm not American, so I don't even have a dog in this fight. I've only heard him talk, and I usually can't make out any point at all, which I personally have very rarely encountered with the average person (for the sober ones, at least).
If we all spoke like this, noone would remark on Trump speaking like this.
Weave for yourself. Prove it: Post a link to your own public writing anywhere near as bad as this, or admit you'd be ashamed to. I bet all of a sudden you're speechless and won't, because you know you're wrong and I'm right. So instead, explain why you're such a thin skinned boot licker?
As the sibling commenter says, normal speech (not delivered speeches) isn't anywhere near as coherent as writing.
Hey don't forget to reply to my detailed comments !
This reply is kind of assuming a lot of bad intent for someone who's just saying that casual speech and reading a prepared speech are very different.
There's a difference between writing and speech, and it is rather amazing to see unedited transcripts of extemporaneous speech. Hesitations, "repair" of ungrammatical utterances, abandoning sentences and restarting them, change of topic without clear warning.
There are unusual things about Trump's communication: extreme informality, seemingly not running things past advisors or editors (for both speech and writing), and probably making things a lot more personal than other presidents have done (talking more about himself; talking more about his experiences, opinions, and emotions; talking more about individual friends and enemies). Maybe also a far greater willingness to make digressions, whether personal or not.
Still, I think the prior commenter is right that we can be surprised by how disfluent almost everyone's extemporaneous speech appears when precisely transcribed. This is often hidden because published interviews or speeches in the press are usually extensively edited, so you won't see something like
"And I, um, I said, well you know, I said that we-- we're going to fix this pro--problem, uh, this problem that's been affecting a lot, a lot of people."
Instead, you'll see something like
"And I said that we're going to fix this problem that's been affecting a lot of people."
There was a big controversy about Dan Quayle as vice president and about George W. Bush as president because they both seemed to make a lot of speech errors and misstatements. I think I remember some linguists complaining that the oddities of both Quayle's and Bush's were probably being exaggerated merely because people were paying such close attention but were unaccustomed to seeing carefully transcribed speech. And I think the same is true for Trump's speech, even though he is also flouting various communication norms in both his writing and his speech, sometimes consciously.
Earlier presidents also had more patience for delivering prepared written speeches, from paper or from a teleprompter. For many of their speeches, they were extemporizing less, and when they did extemporize, they were comparatively better at keeping on-topic.
Thank you! I studied linguistics, this is why I'm aware of this reality. I'm asking this because this is HN and chances that your worked on speech-to-texts systems is rather high. I was wondering how this problem is tackled in systems such as Whisper. I haven't used it much, but I definitively noticed that YouTube's transcription model try to strike a balance between transcription fidelity and readability. Sometimes it will elude some pauses & repairs to produce a more streamlined transcription, sometimes it will include them. It's an art I guess, but a model where you could tune this at inference time would be interesting.
> And I think the same is true for Trump's speech
There are people who take these transcripts and re-enact what he's actually saying, but in their voice.
Doing that makes it immediately obvious that he's a rambling moron.
Not to that extent. Most public speakers try to convey one coherent thought they were working on before.
Trump just rumbles like my granddad
Probably not all. When senility hits? Sure.
We do not all talk like Trump.
Silly “hit piece” for lack of a better term on Trump. Do this with many conversations and you will have multiple branches of topic.
This isn’t a conversation, he is holding a monologue.
holding it underwater
Moronologue!
This wasn't a conversation between ordinary people like you and me, but a statement delivered to reporters by a sitting US president. So the fair comparison would be to other such statement made by other sitting US presidents.
Too much of a coward to post this on your main account, huh?
Won't someone think of the orange felon?!
Oh but it's ok for him as a public figure to do thousands of weaving slanderous hit pieces on everyone else from his bully pulpit, yet you still gleefully leap to his defense, because you hate the same people he does, since you're both thin skinned sociopathic bullies and cowards. Why are you so ashamed to post that under your own name?