Comment by massysett
20 days ago
We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary.
Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.
This is a great description of how I use Claude.
> Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was.
There was another way: Make one up.
That is what the people you read from/talked to did before relaying it to you.
If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. Otherwise the word will not hold its own meaning. For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.
> If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use.
That depends on your goals. If you are writing in your private journal, or a comment on HN, it doesn't matter one bit.
If you want to find commonality with other people it is significantly more efficient, but still not required. It is not like one is born understanding words. They are not passed down from the heavens. They are an invention. When I say 'sloopydoopidydoo' you might not know what I intend by it right away, but the path to figuring it out is a solved problem. Even young children can handle it.
> For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.
Let's put it to the test: I added enums to the programming language I am working on. Tell me, with your dictionary in hand, what do I mean by that?
Here's the thing: According to the dictionary, an enum is something like Go's iota or C's enum. But many people will tell you that Go doesn't have enums — that an enum is what others might recognize as a tagged union. That kind of language evolution happens all the time. So, what do I mean? Am I using the dictionary definition, or the community definition that is quickly gaining favour and will no doubt be added to the dictionary as soon as someone has a chance to update it? Both uses have been widely established in my opinion. In fact, the Swift programming language's documentation even acknowledges both uses and then goes on to explain what it means by "enum" to remove any confusion.
I look forward to seeing if you captured my intent.
> Now it's always available.
And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)
Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days.
Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail.
20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.
I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis.
I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again
It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary.
The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...
Words are something made up to express whatever the speaker/author intends them to, so there is really no such thing as correct or incorrect there. A dictionary can hint at the probability of someone else understanding a word absent of other context, which makes for a useful tool, but that is something quite different to establishing correctness.
As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impossible, but we accept the human consensus to be a close enough approximation. With that, verifying 'correctness' to the degree that is possible is actually quite easy through validating it across many different LLMs trained on the human consensus. They will not all hallucinate identically. If convergence is found, then you have also found the human consensus. That doesn't prove correctness — we have never had a way to do that — but it is equivalent to how we have always dealt with establishing what we believe is correct.
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Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and we reach the true problem.
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Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.
Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.
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When you use it to lookup a single word, yeah, but people here use it to lookup thousand words at once and then can't check it all.
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Your comment does not align with my experience.
Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
> Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
Which is why we shouldn't be surprised when AI, trained on the collective wisdom of facebook posts and youtube comments, keeping lying to us.
"The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was"
Did you have trouble with this part?
This seems like a hostile question.
Yeah, sure, it can be perceived like that. The message I'm responding to shows a blatant disregard for millenia of scriptural knowledge traditions. It's a 'I have a pocket calculator, why should I study math' kind of attitude, presenting itself in a celebratory manner.
To me it is reminiscent of liberalist history, the idea that history is a constant progression from animalistic barbarism to civilisation, and nothing but the latest thing is of any value. Instead of jumping to conclusions and showing my loathing for this particular tradition I decided to try and get more information about where they're coming from.
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The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852):
> ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed
Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comment.)
I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough™ to find me an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish generating a response.)
There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus, but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think actually is an improvement.
A thesaurus is not a reverse dictionary
Really?
"What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?"
That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).
I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook Thesaurus (https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%2...), and it returned:
> Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses
with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates.
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Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would be to make one), so here's my attempt to look this up manually.
"Admitting a large number of uses" -> manually abbreviated to "very useful" -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful -> dead end. Give up, use a thesaurus.
https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/very_usef..., sense 2 "Usable in multiple ways", lists:
> useful multipurpose versatile flexible multifunction adaptable all-around all-purpose all-round multiuse multifaceted extremely useful one-size-fits-all universal protean general general-purpose […]
Taking advantage of the fact my passive vocabulary is greater than my active vocabulary: no, no, yes. (I've spuriously rejected "multipurpose" – a decent synonym of "versatile [tool]" – but that doesn't matter.) I'm pretty sure WordHippo is machine-generated from some corpus, and a lot of these words don't mean "very useful", but they're good at playing the SEO game, and I'm lazy. Once we have versatile, we can put that into an actual thesaurus: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile. But none of those really have the same sense as "versatile" in the context I'm thinking of (except perhaps "adaptable"), so if I were writing something, I'd go with "versatile".
Total time taken: 15 seconds. And I'm confident that the answer is correct.
By the way, I'm not finding "multifarious" anywhere. It's not a word I'm familiar with, but that doesn't actually seem to be a proper synonym (according to Wiktionary, at least: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous). There are certainly contexts where you could use this word in place of "versatile" (e.g. "versatile skill-set" → "multifarious skill-set"), but I criticise WordHippo for far less dubious synonym suggestions.
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