morganf

Woooow. That makes me feel... old.

u/orf

That was the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I laughed so much.

Thank you for sharing.

100% this.

AI is magical for working with multilingual people in multilingual contexts.

I think and write in English, but I have to operate a lot at complex levels in Spanish, so I do the thinking and writing in English and have AI translate it.

As a writer, it pains me to see my own writing, when I read it back in Spanish, sound like AI.

But there's not much I can do about it, considering hiring a personal human translator for every little thing and who can write in a unique way in Spanish to mimic the native equivalent to my style is overwhelmingly unaffordable and too slow for the every day translation type work.

It's a language-nerd joke he made. You have to know some Latin basically or enough Latinate roots. Those are the Latin-ish words for, in the same order: moon earth sun stars. So it's obvious in the sense of, it's increasing in size (assuming stars is the collection of all of them while the sun is just one of all the stars or one example of its parent category).

"We're slowly auctioning off our sovereignty in exchange for quick shortcuts to every tech company."

Slowly?

This is such a good comment I wish I could upvote you 10x. I actually laughed outloud at your comparison to religious fundamentalists haha

Hahahahahaha

I appreciate the humor and musical knowledge

And I'm surprised that your joke didn't get more laughs or comments on HN. There is life outside of screens ;)

I'd define it as the web until the time that Facebook truly took off and conquered the hearts and minds of so many (that was the first huge shot in the losing war of the old web). For example, a key part of the old web was what used to be called the "blogosphere", and the blog's height was those final years before FB (in the ascendancy) and the first years of the FB era (descendancy).

I read some of his older posts and came to the same conclusion.

How so?

Yeah, growing up in New York it was the reverse of these.

Hahaha! I love the list! Lots of professions have methods to send messages that simultaneously speak to various different audiences (while the bigger audiences don't know there are also other audiences as well, who will derive other meanings from the same message). The world is an interesting place full of surprises - and even to smart people, the text or image you are seeing might have meanings invisible to you, since you're not the intended audience for the secondary meaning.

In my line of work, we convert words to numbers, and we have a codex that defines meanings for the numbers; that way, we can write publicly but (in making sure we choose words that, when converted to numbers, convert to numbers that have the second meaning we want) our public writing will only be understood on this second level with this second meaning only by those who use this system and codex. It's something like a form of real/human language cryptography: write for the world to see but only those who know the key will see what we're also saying to them. This was traditionally very hard to do for anyone who didn't grow up in a family that did this naturally from when they were kids. And I vibe-coded tools to make it easy. It's been amazingly helpful and worth its weight in gold :)

I agree strongly with that comment you are quoting.

It means (at least in my interpretation): different people think differently; a great salesman thinks very differently than a great software developer. And the AI wave is trying to force lots of everyday normal employees (who may or may not be good at their jobs already) to think and act like software developers. A great salesman may literally not have the type of mind where we can turn what he does into "processes" and "documentation" like we need to do to make agents. Most humans, by far, don't think in a "process" sort of way, and trying to get them to do so is a path towards disaster on many levels.

This is why most AI digital transformation is failing. Making a creative artist or a salesman or a chef or account manager or whatever into "one of us" (a someone who thinks explicitly about process-itizing everything etc) is, the fallacy of.... well, to use an old Yiddish expression: "if my grandma had balls, she'd be my grandpa." (Sorry for the vulgar image.) It's asking people to be a completely different type of person than they are, and that almost never succeeds.

I've done a lot digital transformation (pre-AI) and my approach was always to not try to change people, but to have a small group of smart process-oriented thinkers go into teams and work hand in hand with them to turn what they do into processes.

PS: all this is said as someone who loves AI and is a huge fan and has invested heavily in it.

I think you mean "seizing". "Ceasing opportunities" means the precise opposite of what I think you intend to say.