Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

TL;DR: Probably because I'm having fun and you are expending effort. Hope you find what I say to be worth the effort.

To preface, I do not take offense to your remark, because you seem to be asking in good faith.

(If, however, being unable to immediately recognize pre-known patterns in my speech had automagically led you to the conclusion that I am somehow out of line, just for speaking how I speak ... well, then we woulda hadda problemo! But we don't, chill on.)

So, honest question deserves honest answer.

The short of it is: English sux.

Many many many people, much much much smarter than me (and much better compensated too!) have been working throughout modernity to make it literally impossible to express much of anything interesting in English.

(Well, not without either being a fictional character or sounding batshit insane, anyway! But that joke's entirely on "the Them": I am not only entirely fictional, but have an equal amount of experience being batshit insane in my native language and in the present lingua franca. So, consider all I say cognitohazardous and watch out for colors you ain't seen before, dawg!)

Linguistic hegemony is the thing that LLMs are the steroids for - surfuckingprise! - and that's why your commanders love 'em.

As opposed to programming languages, which your superiors loathe and your peers viscerally refuse to acknowledge, because those are the exact opposite thing: descending from mathemathical notation, and being evaluated by a machine, they have the useful property of being incapable of expressing lies and nonsense.

Direct computing confers what you could call bullshit-resistance. That property is a treasure underappreciated by virtue of its unfamiliarity, and one which we are in the process of being robbed of.

I also want to admit that linguistic hegemony isn't all downside: English is great for technical and instrumental knowledge - especially with elided bells and whistles (adverbs, copula, etc.)

But then life ain't all business, izzet?

Imagine you have a partner who wants to have a conversation about feelings and interpersonal relations; and not even in a scary way, right? So you sit and talk about stuff, and your partner does this thing where they keep switching from your shared native tongue to English mid-sentence, in order to be able to talk about such things better, because your native tongue does not have - no, not only the established words and notions! - it doesn't have the basic grammatical constructs for expressing simple things unambiguously, so if you were to attempt the same conversation in nativelang you'd end up battling it out with proverbs and anodyne canards ripped from propaganda repertoire of the prior regime.

Fun, no?

As an exercise, try imagining what notions are absent from modern English. And don't forget to remain vigilant. Love from our table to your table!

 help



You lost me well before the anodyne canards...

When talking about feelings, we now and then throw in an English word because some things are expressed in much less words when using English. In a few cases even a German word. Überhaupt is for example a word for which i do not know an alternative in any language.

I think you want to say that human language is too ambiguous for clear communication between human and machine. The machine might mis interpret what you write. Classic computer languages leave no room for interpretation.

For the rest I think you might be a little lost. That is okay, so many of us are. I wish you all the best.


>I think you want to say that human language is too ambiguous for clear communication between human and machine. [...]

If that is what I wanted to say, I figure I would not have had much difficulty with saying exactly it - and not something else.

Except I fail to see the purpose of making that statement.

Maybe to have some people say "it is true! I agree with what the balamatom is saying"?

Again - to what end? How would that agreement be of use to me?

Why say something which both speaker and listener have already heard a thousand times? To get a cracker and be called pretty?

And have I lost the author, or have I lost the reader, or we all so lost that it doesn't matter how lost each is? Maybe one day we will all become so lost that it will once again begin to matter where exactly we are! Counting on it.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: