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Embeddings are underrated (2024)

(technicalwriting.dev)
484 points jxmorris12 | 1 comments | 12 May 25 15:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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kaycebasques ◴[12 May 25 15:41 UTC] No.43964290[source]▶
Hello, I wrote this. Thank you for reading!

The post was previously discussed 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42013762

To be clear, when I said "embeddings are underrated" I was only arguing that my fellow technical writers (TWs) were not paying enough attention to a very useful new tool in the TW toolbox. I know that the statement sounds silly to ML practitioners, who very much don't "underrate" embeddings.

I know that the post is light on details regarding how exactly we apply embeddings in TW. I have some projects and other blog posts in the pipeline. Short story long, embeddings are important because they can help us make progress on the 3 intractable challenges of TW: https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/challenges.html

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_bramses ◴[12 May 25 21:47 UTC] No.43967786[source]▶
> Discoveryness. Even if the needed content exists, it’s hard to guarantee that users will find it.

I'm curious as to what you'll think of the UX layer I applied to embeddings for public perusal. I call it "semantic scrolling" since it's not searching exactly, but moving through the cluster by using <summary>/<details> as a tree.

[1] is a single starting point (press the animated arrow to "wiki-hole") and [2] is the entire collection (books, movies, music, animations, etc.)

[1] - https://www.sharecommonbase.com/synthesize/1009?id=1009 [2] - https://www.sharecommonbase.com/

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1. kaycebasques ◴[13 May 25 00:52 UTC] No.43968799[source]▶
Cool. I kinda grok the idea of semantic scrolling but I'm having trouble seeing it in action in the site. I think it would be useful in cases where I want to become an expert in a given topic and therefore I want to peruse lots of related ideas and create the possibility of serendipitous new neural connections. As for technical documentation, usually people want to find certain information as quickly as possible so that they can get on with their work, so I don't think semantic scrolling would be a good fit on most docs sites. I.e. they won't have the patience to semantically scroll in order to find the info they need.