Wobbles42

Being deported if you get fired is a basic job requirement. Keeps people in line.

Americans can't compete with that.

The measure was clearly stated: the life style of that one guy's dad. He's the official consumer well being canary.

I don't really see that happening here.

Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be gaining any by this move.

That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their public image is as bad as it can get.

I keep hearing "this is the worst it's going to be" as if we can expect a monotonic increase in quality and value generation.

Meanwhile, search was better in the past and is at this point the best it's going to be.

Enshittification comes for all things.

This only remains true so long as open weight models lack significant utility.

Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.

Perhaps there will be a lot more people who can write software as well as I can weld metal.

Welding is peculiar in that becoming a professional welder takes a great deal of time and effort (and probably some talent that I don't have), but becoming a terrible welder can be accomplished by anyone in a couple of weekends, and there is great utility in being a terrible welder. Well worth the investment of a couple hundred dollars and a couple weekends.

With LLMs there is now much more utility in being a terrible programmer too. A couple of weekends yields real return on the effort now.

It's an extension of pretending that developer productivity can be measured in lines of code per day, as well as the managerial blindness to the fact that code can have negative value.

Interesting. I am glad you commented. It's nice getting grounding from someone with a real background in the area.

With that said, if it is a hallucination (and it sounds like it was), it's one of the more interesting ones I have encountered. It almost has the shape of a good idea.

Blade and handle material has certainly changed over the years, but I think good arguments about how relevant that is could be made both ways. They remain handled cutting tools, used in the same general way, for the same general purposes (though as you posted out, some use cases have gone away). Basically anyone from any of these periods would recognize a knife from any other, and be able to pick it up and make immediate use of it for all their normal knife related purposes.

To be clear though, I am now siding with the clankers and arguing for a hallucination. It's an interesting thing to think about, but it sounds like it's not an established concept in any way shape or form.

I would agree with all of that.

Searching for information is inherently an adversarial process. You want your attention in one place, other actors in the system want it in another. Any solution that doesn't suck will need to be aware of this.

Bugs get fixed when systems are iterated on. They also tend to be single results from single mistakes, not compound end results of the implementation.

Design features tend to persist.

The phrase/idiom "the purpose of a system is what it does" maps best to situations where a multiple decisions within a system make little sense when viewed through the lens of the stated purpose, but make perfect sense if the actual outcome is the desired one.

It is an invitation to analyze a system while suspending the assumption of good faith on the part of the implementors.

It's a great question, and is tough to answer intuitively without speaking a native language that actually has such a word.

I would agree that "boiling milk" and "boiling oil" are very unlikely to get separate words, unless one of them happens to be an extremely common thing that people encounter a lot and that has special practical implications.

Milk might be a special case, in that it essentially is just water with some other stuff dissolved. It is to water as salt water is to water... but more so.

My guess would be that the single word might get pressed into service like "ice" does, but I think we'd have to find languages that include this word and survey native speakers. It could vary.

Nearly everyone encounters boiling water in everyday life, but do most people ever see other liquids boiling, even once, and especially during the historical periods that shaped our current languages? If not we might be getting into something like technical language, where daily life lines up poorly and terms and jargon get formalized.

I am with you on the literal definition there.

I wonder if the connotative association is exactly what we are trying to capture here though, and if those other phrases also fit in at the "separate words but slightly special" end of the spectrum.

There is meaning being communicated in all of those phrases that would be obvious to most or all people who are embedded in the language and culture where they are used, and which transcends the definitions of the individual words themselves.

It seems that there are several axis here -- how explicit is meaning, how atomic, how literal, how substitutable are the individual words -- and all vary continuously.

That might all seem needlessly pedantic for the question of "should it warrant a dictionary entry", but if you are trying to extract all information encoded in a verbal exchange, they might be useful concepts.

I tend to agree. The definitions overlap perfectly.

At the same time, I am having intuitive issues seeing "hot dog" as an idiom, vs just an ordinary noun. It certainly seems to follow noun rules, and fit into speech as one.

I don't know for sure that it's NOT an idiom though. I could just be wrong here, and have intuition in need of calibration.

This will be a hard argument to make.

The decision makers who are the target audience for these metrics value "objective" data. They value the appearance of being quantitative, but lack the intellectual tools to distinguish between quantitative science and pseudoscience with numbers bolted on.

That's modern bureaucracy in a nutshell.

All of academic publishing has fallen victim to Goodhart's law.

Our metrics for judging the quality of academic information are also the metrics for deciding the success of an academic's career. They are destined to be gamed.

We either need to turn peer review into an adversarial system where the reviewer has explicit incentives to find flaws and can advance their career by doing it well, or else we need totally different metrics for judging publications (which will probably need to evolve continuously).

We assume far too much good faith in this space.

I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life.

"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.

They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.

"Steam" is very definitely the gas phase of water. Water vapor is too. If we are talking about chemistry they are essentially synonyms.

If we are talking engineering, the term steam generally implies water vapor that is at or above the saturation temperature.

In every day usage they are usually drawing a distinction between visible and invisible water vapor, usually caused by the presence of liquid droplets, with "steam" being essentially "fog", but hotter.

Do you think this comes from a gradual internalization of a real linguistic concept? Or it more a familiarity with common (if unspoken) conventions of the puzzle makers?

I suspect the answer isn't binary, but it's interesting to think about.

This "sixth sense" phenomenon seems to pop up a lot. Crosswords are a great example. The sense some people are getting for detecting LLM output might be another.

More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this?

Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?

It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.

There seems to be a lot of overlap between this compound word concept and idioms. Both are largely atomic, defy analysis via individual word definition, and fairly language (and culture or dialect) specific.

Dictionaries are also language specific. We don't necessarily expect a 1:1 mapping of words between languages. I have personally always wondered if this subtley shapes thoughts in different languages as well.

This is a great comparison. We're arguing about the definition of "word", and attempting to expand it to include edge cases where two words with separate meanings have a different atomic meaning when combined.

We could have a similar debate about whether common suffixes and prefixes should be regarded as individual words.

Much like "planets" don't really exist as a separate natural object, words don't really exist in natural languages. They are artificial concepts, and therefore we will always have edge cases.

I would argue that it is still a useful discussion, as it sheds light on the nature of language (or of celestial bodies), even if the definitions defy the same rigour as mathematical concepts.

The difference between phrases and "words with spaces" is addressed.

The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon.

We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability.

"Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Saturday night can retain some of the original meaning following substitution, whereas hot dog almost deserves a hyphen.

A single word for boiling water would be like the single word "slush" we have for ice in water.

It likely could apply to other liquids in the same mixed state, but would be assumed to refer to water (or solutions or colloidal mixtures primarily consisting of water) in common speech.

Water is extremely common, and has anonymously high heats of crystalization and vaporization, so it is the most common example of a mixed phase system and the only one most people encounter in everyday life.

A dictionary is an enumeration of words. A thesaurus is a mapping between existing words.

Every word in a thesaurus belongs in a dictionary.

We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space.

While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system.

This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but it has practical everyday consequences. It's why boiling food works so consistently as a universal cooking option.

You don't need to control the temperature of boiling water, it is an exact temperature that depends only on ambient pressure. As a consequence recipes work by only specifying time, sometimes with a single adjustment for people at higher altitudes.

This is remarkable given the wide variety of containers and heat sources used, and it is used practically by virtually every cooking tradition, even if it's reason for working is not common knowledge.

It shouldn't be surprising it'd acquire a single word as a unified concept.

Are mid level and junior developers being hired anywhere for any reason right now? I don't mean specifically rust developers. I mean software developers.

Neither do most programming languages.

Rust is trying to replace C++ and C in particular. Those languages have specifications.

This.

The world is becoming increasingly more uncertain geopolitically. We have incipient (and actual) wars coming, and near term potential for societal disruption from technological unemployment. Meanwhile social media has all but completely undermined broadcast media as a means of social control.

This isn't about protecting children. It's about preventing a repeated of the Arab Spring in western countries later this decade.

"Think of the children" is the oldest trick in the book, and should always be met with skepticism.

This is the real point that needs to be made.

You can argue that many parents are less than ideal parents, but that is not sufficient to justify having the state step in. You also have to show that the state is less bad.

Decades of data on the foster system strongly suggests otherwise. The state, by any objective measure, is terrible at raising children.

I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a whole other list of confirmations for that decision that I hadn't thought of before.

Thank you for that.