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How do these companies perform compared to the USPS? Just knowing that they're privatized without any mention of customer satisfaction, cost, or other comparative metrics doesn't say much about whether it's a good idea. (I don't believe anyone's main contention is that it's "novel")

Sure, but with the amount of wealth and power that they have, it goes beyond lobbying. If there were any sense of the other side getting equal bargaining power, maybe people would be less upset.

What about this video did you find relevant? The case where one individual attacked a plywood barricade with a hammer and was stopped? (Surely not the Andy Ngo digression.) That's not the topic under discussion. People are concerned with federal officers arresting people off the street with no probable cause.

I will have to take a look at that paper. I didn't catch your edit before replying. It would certainly be worthwhile to verify that claim (or not) using the paper's model if I find some time. In any case, I think the underlying point is that these language models serve a purpose, but will not uncover an underlying structure for you or derive something like the phrase structure grammar proposed in Syntactic Structures. I may be extrapolating a bit based on other times I've seen Chomsky discuss this, though.

I wish there were a freely available copy online, I could link, but the passage is at the end of chapter 2 of Syntactic Structures. It's not a footnote, but rather the crux of his argument, I believe:

> "... a structural analysis cannot be understood as a schematic summary developed by sharpening the blurred edges in the full statistical picture. If we rank the sequences of a given length in order of statistical approximation to English, we will find both grammatical and ungrammatical sequences scattered throughout the list; there appears to be no particular relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness. Despite the undeniable interest and importance of semantic and statistical studies of language, they appear to have no direct relevance to the problem of determining or characterizing the set of grammatical utterances. I think that we are forced to conclude that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning, and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure."

I do think it's an important point for people to recognize. Scientific theories don't arise on their own out of large-scale statistical analyses. There is a lot of faith being put in deep learning methods these days, which are great for prediction, but not inference.

I think the more interesting result (and more relevant to Chomsky's point) would be to work in the other direction. If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. This implies something more is needed to distinguish them.

Right. The sentences are both very unlikely to be uttered even though one is grammatical and the other is not, so there must be another factor in play.

It's funny the author wasted energy composing this after admitting he barely knows the origin of the sentence. Chomsky invokes it in "Syntactic Structures" to illustrate that the grammaticality of a given sentence doesn't fully explain the odds of it appearing in a large corpus. "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is another low probability sentence, yet a native speaker couldn't perform these sorts of mental gymnastics to twist some meaning out of it.

What examples do you have in mind when you say this? The main case studies that I see get brought up are Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and the Paris Commune, but the wartime pressures that led to their collapse strike me as much different from the present situation. I think the CHAZ will be an interesting experiment given the context.

And did those arrest and charges come before or after multiple days of protests? At this point the protests have snowballed into a larger frustration over police conduct (and I'm sure other issues), which only gets reinforced with each instance of force being used on those who are assembled peacefully.

Seriously, "any tools"? You are commenting on an article about the use of new surveillance tools like facial recognition software that scrapes Facebook, not a discussion on whether the National Guard should be deployed.

So your point is that this justifies the expansion of the surveillance state? Do you consider all of the protestors responsible for looting? And should we just discount the evidence pointing to the presence of agents provocateurs?

Yes, what a heroic display we're commenting on here. What exactly is your point and how is it relevant to this unsettling video? Just the platitude that not every interaction is necessarily racist?

Having gone through two chapters now, I also feel the need to caution others that the amount of typos in this book is simply jaw-dropping. The conceptual explanations in the text are generally excellent, but it is simply impossible to get through a page without hitting a substantial number of mistakes. I'm left wondering if there are errors I'm not catching on my own that are going to affect my understanding. I really hope a cleaned up second edition is on the horizon (hopefully with answers to some of the in-line exercises).

Thank you! This looks great and surprisingly affordable for an academic textbook. It seems like a lot of the good material for teaching these topics at the undergraduate level has come out rather recently.