First off: What is your goal here? My comment was one sentence and wasn't specific to this article. Why are you acting like I said things I never said? But okay I'll try to answer.
> What are your thoughts on the other comments in this chain that claim that the references and citations as they are in the linked post are acceptable?
> Why do you disagree with them?
Which comments in particular are you talking about?
And I mean, the post doesn't have "references and citations" plural that I can see. It has one clear reference. I see two comments defending that reference, and a whole bunch of comments saying that a post like this doesn't need references.
I don't need to disagree with any of those comments. My point isn't about whether a post that lacks citations is "acceptable". I was talking about whether a post could add historical citations without losing momentum, so it could do a better job of fitting into context. A dozen notes sprinkled around about when/where different ideas came from, not just the mention at the very end of what decade arithmetic coding is from and the mention of the 2023 paper.
I will say it's bad that the 2023 paper is described as "arguing that language modeling and compression are two views of the same thing", emphasis in the original. That very much makes it sound like a new idea when it isn't.
I don't mean to pick on you, it's just then just saw a bunch of negative comments on an article I enjoyed reading and found informative, so I picked a few to reply to for clarification of their position.
I'm confused by the comments that seem to imply that the author is taking credit for ideas that they're writing about, as I didn't get that impression from writing in the article at all.
I'm also confused by the idea that they didn't provide enough citations for concepts in a non-academic source. I feel like in the day and age of Wikipedia it should be sufficient to colourize / bold terms like "Entropy coders" or "Huffman Encoding" to indicate to the reader that these are important terms that they can research for more details if interested.
Overall I guess my position on this is that ~80/285 comments on this post are related to whether not this is a good post which I think is far too many. There are slight issues with the post but they aren't worth 80 comments.
Where I replied to wasn't that the author is taking credit but making it hard to get the context for where the ideas came from. (With the one citation implying a very wrong thing about how old that idea is.)
Specifically the comment I replied to suggested it was a style tradeoff but I don't see why you can't do citations in either style. That's all I came here for.
> I'm also confused by the idea that they didn't provide enough citations for concepts in a non-academic source.
It's useful information about how we got here. That's good in any long story about an idea.
> I feel like in the day and age of Wikipedia it should be sufficient to colourize / bold terms like "Entropy coders" or "Huffman Encoding" to indicate to the reader that these are important terms that they can research for more details if interested.
It works to some extent but some of the concepts don't have fancy words for them and then they don't get that searchability.
> ~80/285 comments
Sometimes tangents spark a discussion. I don't think those numbers are an issue. And they're mostly not calling it a bad post, they just have an objection.
> What are your thoughts on the other comments in this chain that claim that the references and citations as they are in the linked post are acceptable?
> Why do you disagree with them?
Which comments in particular are you talking about?
And I mean, the post doesn't have "references and citations" plural that I can see. It has one clear reference. I see two comments defending that reference, and a whole bunch of comments saying that a post like this doesn't need references.
I don't need to disagree with any of those comments. My point isn't about whether a post that lacks citations is "acceptable". I was talking about whether a post could add historical citations without losing momentum, so it could do a better job of fitting into context. A dozen notes sprinkled around about when/where different ideas came from, not just the mention at the very end of what decade arithmetic coding is from and the mention of the 2023 paper.
I will say it's bad that the 2023 paper is described as "arguing that language modeling and compression are two views of the same thing", emphasis in the original. That very much makes it sound like a new idea when it isn't.