this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 38 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Hi what the fuck does this mean

[–] oneser@lemmy.zip 7 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

I think the x-axis labels are wrong. Cosine similarity is used to compare vectors in maths. 1 would mean the vectors are going in the same direction and 0 would mean they are going 90° to each other and -1 is opposite.

[–] VoodooAardvark@lemmy.zip 11 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

While it seems you’re on to something with the x-axis, I do not believe that was the question. My interpretation, that I share, is wtf am I looking at? Haha

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 12 points 7 hours ago

I found this, which sheds a little more light on the topic?

[–] starik@lemmy.zip 4 points 7 hours ago

I think it’s a joke about an attempt to formulate the single racial slur that most closely correlates to all slurs at once

[–] starik@lemmy.zip 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

So the x-axis should be the same as the y-axis in this case?

How do you calculate the cosine of a slur? Is that the joke?

[–] OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml 10 points 6 hours ago

No, you just use a standard technique like word2vec.

Basically words are considered similar (and embedded to nearby locations in a high dimensional space) if they are likely to be used in the same context.

And because slurs are used to indicate that you don't like someone, they tend to occur in the same kind of context.

So they're all very similar. This is actual natural language processing being used, but it's a shit post and the graphics aren't very clear.