Wobbles42

Surely consumers can easily obtain these rights by simply sticking to smartphones manufactured in the EU, right?

Web space is a heck of a lot cheaper than LLM tokens are.

The solution to this problem is to start creating forums and getting agents to post to them as much as possible.

It's a war of attrition and should be easy to win.

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.