[peteforde]

Really cool to see my favs show up, but I honestly don't understand what we're actually looking at; the groupings seem very opaque beyond very general themes like sci-fi, startups, biographies, math, physics.

In other words, what are the clustering shapes telling us? Can we dig in based on geography, publishing date, key terms or themes?

Either way, I can't keep the site open for more than 30-40 seconds before it crashes. I suspect that's not the goal!

Is Cryptonomicon the best fiction book, or is the data wrong?

[refulgentis]

There's a sort of regular repeating confusion with embeddings that they're very well behaved in visual dimensions.

IMHO it's a category error that results from tutorials using the king + female = queen example (which, funnily enough, wasn't even true for the original word2vec, if commentary I've read previously here is correct).

Working with them a lot has me picture them more as "a multivariate function that outputs 768 numbers, and was learned by brute force" than "something that sees in 768 dimensions" --- of course, they're both true, but the second interpretation shades more than it illuminates once you're past the very first interrogatory of "so what is this calculating, exactly?"

[nostrebored]

How behaved they are visually depends on what drives variance and what you’re hoping to see. There are certainly some nice properties in some dimensionality reductions, but if you flatten a space of faces it’s less likely that you’ll get the property of “brown hair” as a query embedded in any visually interesting way than actually putting in a face as a query.

More clearly, symmetric retrieval is easier to visualize in a dimensionality reduced space than asymmetric retrieval.

I suspect that some form of multi vector document embedding would be more understandable in the reduced space than this single vector representation.

[pmaze]

The crash was indeed not intended - my mistake! Should be fixed now.

You've got the cluster semantics spot on, to be honest. Broad genres are grouped together, with a tendency for sub-genres to be grouped locally within those.

There is no interpretation of the overall shapes or the global structure, those are more a result of a particular UMAP run than inherent in the data.

Would love to provide different views on it and go more in depth next, thanks for the suggestion.

[peteforde]

IMO, evolution over time is a great place to start.

[jdthedisciple]

> Either way, I can't keep the site open for more than 30-40 seconds before it crashes.

Yup, probably was about to happen to me too, had I not closed it.

CPU fan almost launched off the troposphere about 30 seconds in.

Probably a cluttered bunch of heavily unoptimized ReactJS modules in there (no offense to OP, I know it probably sped up development by 10x at least)

[zamber]

Nope, hug of death is seems:

Failed to load module script: Expected a JavaScript module script but the server responded with a MIME type of "text/html". Strict MIME type checking is enforced for module scripts per HTML spec.

Ad infinitum for a list of a couple .js files with repeating names.

Guess we'll have to come back in a day or two to experience it in it's full glory :).

[pmaze]

Hey, thanks for reporting - this is fixed now. I messed up the static build and some browsers freaked out. By law of showing things publicly, I of course only tested in a browser that didn't. Hope you can give it another chance!