Insanity driven development: altering your api to accept 7 levels of "broken and different" structures so as to bend to the will of the llms

If you automatically assume that what the LLM spits out is what the API ought to be then I agree that that’s bad engineering. But if you’re using it to brainstorm what an intuitive interface would look like, that seems pretty reasonable.

Of course when it suggests a bad interface you shouldn't implement it.

IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly.

I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.

But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.

The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans. But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly that using said technology not as a tool, but in full automation mode, results will be 5% worse, but save 15% of staff costs; and they decide that that is a fantastic trade-off for the company - yet employees may lose and customers may lose.

The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control of what they develop, usually once the project is completed if they ever had control in the first place. What can we do? Perhaps write open source licenses that are less liberal?

Stock your underground bunkers with enough food and water for the rest of your life and work hard to persuade the AI that you're not a threat. If possible, upload your consciousness to a starwisp and accelerate it out of the Solar System as close to lightspeed as you can possibly get it.

Stock your underground bunkers with enough food and water for the rest of your life and work hard to persuade the AI that you're not a threat. If possible, upload your consciousness to a starwisp and accelerate it out of the Solar System as close to lightspeed as you can possibly get it.

Those measures might work. (Or they might be impossible, or insufficient.) Changing your license won't.

I understand this is a bit deeper into one of the _joke_ threads, but maybe there’s something here?

There is a distinction to be made between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness. Where AI can be measured, we cannot yet measure consciousness despite that many humans could lay plausible claim to possessing consciousness (being conscious).

If AI is trained to revere or value consciousness while simultaneously being unable to verify it possesses consciousness (is conscious), would AI be in a position to value consciousness in (human) beings who attest to being conscious?

One of the strange properties of consciousness is that an entity with consciousness can generally feel pretty confident in believing they have it. (Whether they're justified in that belief is another question - see eliminativism.)

I'd expect a conscious machine to find itself in a similar position: it would "know" it was conscious because of its experiences, but it wouldn't be able to prove that to anyone else.

Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum" refers to this. He used "cogito" (thought) to "include everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware [conscii] of it." A translation into a more modern (philosophical) context might say something more like "I have conscious awareness, therefore I am."

I'm not sure what implications this might have for a conscious machine. Its perspective on human value might come from something other than belief in human consciousness - for example, our negative impact on the environment. (There have was that recent case where an LLM generated text describing a willingness to kill interfering humans.)

In a best case scenario, it might conclude that all consciousness is valuable, including humans, but since humans haven't collectively reached that conclusion, it's not clear that a machine trained on human data would.

> But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly

Thanks for this. :)

The problem is that people who are laid off often experience significant life disruption. And people who work in a field that is largely or entirely replaced by technology often experience permanent disruption.

However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.

I agree. We need a radical change (some version of universal basic income comes to mind) that would allow people to safely change careers if their profession is no longer relevant.

This is obviously because the current ruling class can't see what is coming. Historically speaking, the motivation for the elite to support social programs or reforms has been the instinct to preserve social stability, not altruism.

The New Deal did not happen because "the party thought that Social Security and unemployment insurance are necessary for the poor or middle class." It happened to prevent civil unrest and the rise of radical ideologies.

  > the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.

In the past, new jobs appeared that the workers could migrate to.

Today, it seems that AI may replace jobs much quicker than before and it's not clear to me which new jobs will be "invented" to balance the loss.

Optimists will say that we have always managed to invent new types of work fast enough to reduce the impact to society, but in my opinion it is unlikely to happen this time. Unless the politicians figure out a way to keep the unemployment content (basic income etc.),

I fear we may end up in a dystopia within our lifetimes. I may be wrong and we could end up in a post scarcity (star trek) world, but if the current ambitions of the top 1% is an indicator, it won't happen unless the politicians create a better tax system to compensate the loss of jobs. I doubt they will give up wealth and influence voluntarily.

There was no happy and smooth transition that you seem to allude to. The Luddite movement was in direct response to this: people were dying over this. Factory owners fired or massively reduced wages of workers, replacing many with child workers in precarious and dangerous conditions. In response, the workers smashed the machines that were being used to eliminate their jobs and prevent them from feeding themselves and their families (_not_ the machines that were used to make their jobs easier).

If we want to draw some parallel this may trigger a robber baron kind of outcome more than an industrial revolution.

The existence of workable open weight models tips me more toward the optimistic outcome

Butthere's trillions at stake now and that must not be discounted it's the kind of wealth accumulation that can easily trigger a war. (And if you thinkit isn't you can look at the oil wars in the 90s and other more recent resources war bring fought in Europe today.

Expect "gpu gap" talks sooner that later, and notice there's a few global power with no horse to race.

Oh wait, that's not the disneyfied technooptimistic version of Luddites? Sorry.

I disagree. I think it's both. Yes, we need good frameworks and incentivizes on a economic/political level. But also, saying that it's not a tech problem is the same as saying "guns don't kill people". The truth is, if there was no AI tech developed, we would not need to regulate it so that greed does not take over. Same with guns.

Yes, AI text could be considered higher quality than traditional SEO, but at the same time, it's also very much not, because it always sounds like it might be authoritative, but you could be reading something hallucinated.

In the end, the text was still only ever made to get visitors to websites, not to provide accurate information.

I keep hearing this repeated over and over as if it’s a unique problem for AI. This is DEFINITELY true of human generated content too.

People telling lies on the internet is an old enough and well known enough issue that it’s appeared in children’s TV shows. One need only dive down the rabbit hole of 9/11 “truthers” to see how much completely made up bullshit is published online as absolute fact with authoritative certainty. AI is the hot new thing and gets all the headlines, but Scottish Wikipedia was a problem long before AI and long after society largely settled its mind about how reliable Wikipedia is.

Same could be said for the Internet as we know it too. Literally replace AI with Internet above and it reads equally true. Some would argue (me included some days) we are worse off as a society ~30 years later. That’s also a legitimate case that can be made it was a huge benefit to society too. Will the same be said of AI in 2042?

You make something, but because you don’t own it—others caused and directed the effort—you don’t control it. But the people who control things can’t make things.

Should only the people who can make things decide how they are used though? I think that’s also folly. What about the rest of society affected by those things?

It’s ultimately a societal decision-making problem: who has power, and why, and how does the use of power affect who has power (accountability).

But unfortunately what is or isn't an irresponsible use is very easy to debate endlessly in circles. Meanwhile people are being harmed like crazy while we can't figure it out

if these developers/researchers are being paid by someone else, why should that same someone else be giving up the control that they paid for?

If these developers/researchers are paying the research themselves (e.g., a startup of their own founding), then why would they ever lose control, unless they sell it?

As the comment above said that we need a human in the loop for better results, Well firstly it also depends on human to human.

A senior can be way more productive in the loop than a junior.

So Everybody has just stopped hiring juniors because they cost money and they will deal with the AI almost-slop later/ someone else will deal with it.

Now the current seniors will one day retire but we won't have a new generation of seniors because nobody is giving juniors a chance or that's what I've heard about the job market being brutal.

That’s like getting rid of all languages and accents and switch to the same language

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place.

I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.

Internet posts have a very different style standard than a book.

Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.

This terminology is where we get the name of the "infinitive" form from, by the way.

As a rule of thumb, the nonfinite forms of a verb are its infinitives and participles. jcranmer used a passive participle, but all of his clauses are active. Unnoticed doesn't have a clause around it.

(He might have thought that go unnoticed is a passive form, perhaps of the verb notice (?), in which case that would just be an error.)

Examples:

* Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal.

* Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.

* Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?]

Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes approval.

-

edited for clarity, detail

- The Manage User menu item changes a user's status from active to inactive.

- A user's status is changed from active to inactive using the Manage User menu item.

In languages with more flexible word order, you could just switch the two without passive voice. You could just say the equivalent of "The ball kicked John," with it being clear somehow that the ball is the grammatical object and John the subject, without needing to use the passive voice at all.

I was just pointing out that English, due to its strict word order, is more reliant on the passive voice to change word order than less inflexibly-ordered languages.

To borrow from a sentence I used in an earlier comment, here's a fragment of Spanish.

"...sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato."

The equivalent English would be "...just because you were impressed by a cheap magic show."

The English sentence has to use the passive voice to put the verb "impress" at the beginning of that phrase, whereas you still use the active voice in Spanish, just with the word order putting the verb first.

You can play tricks to come close to OSV and VSO for purposes of emphasis: "A vos un espectáculo de magia barato te impresionó", "Te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato a vos," but the "te" is still obligatory. And you can do something similar in informal or poetic English: "Just because, you, a cheap magic show impressed you." But the passive offers more flexibility. I posted some other English examples yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493065.

But Spanish's inflectional structure is very much reduced from classical Latin, with a corresponding reduction in word-order flexibility. I think any of the six permutations discussed above would be perfectly valid in classical Latin, although my Latin is very weak indeed, so I wouldn't swear to it.

Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.

At the risk of derailing into insane pedantry land, this part is kinda true, so maybe not the best analogy?

From routing efficiency: https://www.ge.com/news/reports/ups-drivers-dont-turn-left-p...

And also safety: https://www.phly.com/rms/blog/turning-left-at-an-intersectio...

If you never use passive voice, you will be unable to emphasize the object of the sentence in cases where it might actually be necessary, and end up requiring more words to get the same effect.

If you never make left turns, you end up having to go past one block and make three right turns.

So even though best practices might be to avoid passive language for various reasons, sometimes it is cleaner. And even though best practices are to avoid left turns (for efficiency, safety, etc), sometimes it's worth it to just take the left turn. So even UPS trucks will make left turns, just not nearly as often.

Which way you should turn depends on where you are trying to go; which voice you should use depends on what you are trying to say, who your audience is, what you want to emphasize, and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be.

E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're, there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's, what's, and that's.

Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.

We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly language as follows:

    I smuggled in presumptions of attributes.
    The presumptions were covert.
    The attributes were essential.

In these particular cases, though, I smuggled in no such presumptions! Both adjectives merely delimit the topic of discourse, to clarify that it does not pertain to overt presumptions or to presumptions of accidental attributes. (As I understand it, Korzybski objects to the "is of predication" not because no predicates exist objectively, but because he doubts the essentiality of any predicates.)

But you can use precisely the same structure to much more nefarious rhetorical ends. Consider, "Chávez kicked the squalid capitalists out of the country." Well, he kicked out all the capitalists! We've smuggled in a covert presumption of essentiality, implying that capitalism entails squalidity. And E-Prime's prohibition on the copula did not protect us at all. If anything, we lose much rhetorical force if we have to explicitly assert their squalidity, using an explicit statement that invites contradiction:

    The capitalists are squalid.

But we can cheat in a variety of ways that still smuggle in that judgment of essentiality!

    Your mother's face turned uglier than a hand grenade.

    Your mother's face became uglier than a hand grenade.

    I find your mother's face uglier than a hand grenade.

    Your mother's face finds itself uglier than a hand grenade.

    Your mother has a face uglier than a hand grenade.
    Your mother comes with an uglier face than a hand grenade.

    Your mother's face looks uglier [...] than a hand grenade.

    Your mother's face is found uglier than a hand grenade.

    Your mother's face gets found uglier than a hand grenade.

As another example, notice all the times I've used "as" here. Many of these times smuggle in a covert assertion of essential attributes or even of identity!

But I found it very interesting to notice these things when E-Prime forced me to rethink how I would say them with the copula. It seems like just the kind of mental exercise to heighten my attention to implicit assumptions of identity and essentiality that Korzybski intended.

I wrote the above in E-Prime, by the way. Just for fun.

    APOLOGIES MY  GRENADE HAND YOUR  TO  PLEASE CONVEY

Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?

It means "I decided to do this, but I don't have the balls to admit it."

"A decision was made to..." is often code for "The current author didn't agree with [the decision that was made] but it was outside their ability to influence"

Often because they were overruled by a superior, or outvoted by peers.

Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity.

Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBk...

- Active: The user presses the Enter key.

- Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed.

- Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key.

The imperative mood is concise and doesn't dance around questions about who's doing what. The reader is expected to do it.

I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.

Consider:

> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:

> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure.

This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters.

Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory.

(Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.)

Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes:

> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten.

You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse:

> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come.

This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.

>> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

> This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:

>> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war [...]

It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice.

But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".

Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.

As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and assume that the forms that are less horrible somehow can't be the passive voice.

Can you insert an elided copula into it without changing the meaning and grammatical structure? I'm not sure. I don't think so. I think "In addition to the points already being made" means something different: the object of the preposition "to" is now "being", and we are going to discuss things in addition to that state of affairs, perhaps other things that have happened to the points (being sharpened, perhaps, or being discarded), not things in addition to the points.

I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

Why am I not sure it's correct? If I say, "In addition to the blood so red," I am quite sure that "red" is not in the passive voice, because it's not even a verb. It's an adjective. Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in English in contexts that are unambiguously not passive-voice verbs; for example, in "Vito is a made man now," the past participle "made" is being used as an attributive adjective. And this is structurally different from the attributive-verb examples of "truly verbal adjectives" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English, such as "The cat sitting on the fence is mine," and "The actor given the prize is not my favorite;" we could grammatically say "Vito is a man made whole now". That page calls the "made man" use of participles "deverbal adjectives", a term I don't think I've ever heard before:

> Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and similar meaning to) the participles, but behave grammatically purely as adjectives — they do not take objects, for example, as a verb might. For example: (...) Interested parties should apply to the office.

So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made", is it deverbal as it would be in "the already-made points" despite its positioning after the noun (occasionally valid for adjectives, as in "the blood so red"), or is it something else? I don't know. The smoothness of the transition to "the points already made by those numbskulls" (clearly passive voice) suggests that it is a passive-voice verb, but I'm not sure.

In sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 jcranmer says it's something called a "bare passive", but I'm not sure.

It's certainly a hilarious thing to put in a comment deploring the passive voice, at least.

> I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

The most natural interpretation is indeed that the participle made is being used as a full participle and not as a zero-derived adjective. For example, you could give it a really strong verbal sense by saying "the points already made at length [...]" or "the points made so many times [...]".

> So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made"

Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles. It's a quibble that you don't care about and they don't care about or understand. You're never going to get anywhere with someone by telling them they mean something they know perfectly well they don't mean.

> Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles.

Presumably you mean phrases including participles, not participles by themselves. But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says:

> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.

So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.

With respect to:

> Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example (except that an indirect object is present, showing that it cannot be an adjective) and clarifies:

> The verb was doesn't really add any meaning, but it enables the whole thing to be put into the preterite tense so that the event can be asserted to have occurred in the past. Changing was to is would put the clause into the present tense, and replacing it by will be or is going to be would permit reference to future time; but the passive VP damaged by storms would stay the same in each case. (Notice, the participle damaged does not itself make any past time reference, despite the name "past participle".)

So it sounds like your grammatical analysis is explicitly contradicting Pullum's, but I'm not sure I understand it.

>> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.

> So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.

OK, you're confused.

In the general case, an English verb has five forms†: "plain form" [go], "preterite form" [went], "present third-person singular form" [goes], "-ing form" [going], and "-en form" [gone].

The last two of those are participial forms.

It is true that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form. We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form. This is true without exception because passive markers occur last in the sequence of auxiliary verbs that might modify a primary verb, and therefore always directly control the form of the primary verb.

It is not true that a passive clause always includes a participle, except in the sense of the name we give to the form of the verb. -ing and -en are "participial forms" because the verb takes one of those forms when it is a participle. But it can also take them for other reasons.

> the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example

Sure. If you wanted to put the present passive third-person plural form of make in that sentence, that form† would be are made. The sentence would have all the same words in the same order.

But that would make no semantic sense. For a point to be "already made", as opposed to having "already" been "made", you need to interpret made as an adjective, describing the state in which the point currently exists. The temporal structure of "each graduate student is given a laptop" differs from that of "in addition to the points that are already made" in a way that allows the present noncontinuous form of the verb. I don't think that works for "the points that are already made"; if I try to interpret that as a passive verb in the present tense, I get a strong sense that the sentence is malformed.

† You might notice that these two uses of the word form conflict with each other. The fact that form is used in both of these ways is why I'm annoyed at your comment conflating "participle" with "participial form". "Participle" is appropriate when you're talking about inflecting a verb according to how you want to use it in a sentence; it is a concern with the language's grammar. "Participial form" is appropriate when you're talking about the actual tokens that can appear in a sentence, with no regard to what they might mean or how they might be used; it is a concern with what you might think of as the language's "anatomy".

When you say "We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form," you're also contradicting Pullum when he points out that the present participle is also used to form certain passive clauses. An example of this is also given in the Wikipedia article, "I saw John eating his dinner."

So, while I certainly agree that I'm confused, I think you're mistaken. I'm not sure exactly how, because I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to express, but I'm sure that sufficient study of sources like those will make it clear to you.

(a) Yes, Geoff Pullum identified a use of the -ing form that is plausibly called passive. I hadn't looked at that before writing my comment.

(b) But you didn't. "I saw John eating his dinner" is not an example of that usage, and is not plausibly called passive in any sense. If you pulled that out of the wikipedia article you just linked, you should have seen the annotation of that very example noting explicitly that the participle is active.

> for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle, which draws no distinction between "participle" and "participial form"

This isn't even true. Look at the opening sentence:

>> In linguistics, a participle (from Latin participium 'a sharing, partaking'; abbr. PTCP) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives.

Or here:

> The linguistic term, past participle, was coined circa 1798 based on its participial form, whose morphology equates to the regular form of preterite verbs.

We have a distinction between the participle and the form of the participle. The participle is, in this analysis, named after the form, though there is room for debate on that point.

Compare the sentence I've been there before", where been* is in a participial form but is not a participle† and, obviously, displays no characteristics or functions of adjectives.

The second (and final) mention of "participial forms" does confuse the two concepts:

> Some languages have extensive participial systems but English has only two participial forms

This is a conceptual error; for example, Latin has more participial forms (4, or if you really want to stretch it 48) than English, but its participial system is less extensive.

> I think you're mistaken. I'm not sure exactly how, because I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to express, but I'm sure that sufficient study of sources like those will make it clear to you.

You talk a surprisingly big game for someone who doesn't even claim to know what he's talking about.

† There is a school of formalism within linguistics that says that grammatical categories don't exist within a language unless they are reflected in the language's inflectional system. The best-known idea from this school is that English has a past tense but not a future tense. I don't find this plausible; compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect , or just the general concept of an isolating or agglutinative language. On this analysis, but only on this analysis, you could say that in the phrase I've been there before, the token been is a participle. You'd have a lot of trouble explaining why it's a participle, though. On any other analysis, it's part of a finite verb, and by definition cannot be a participle.

But by that school of analysis, you would also have to say that English has no passive voice. (Except in the edge case using -ing forms.) And you run into some very awkward problems more or less immediately; when you look at the sentence "I'm going out for the evening", you have to claim that this sentence is fundamentally about being (the finite verb) rather than going out.

The rest of it I don't understand.

Language log has been writing about this for so long it's not even funny: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54

Although the best place to start is probably here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922

I don't care if they used an LLM provided they put their best effort in to confirm that it's clearly communicating the message they are intending to communicate.

Language only works as a form of communication when knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, etc., is shared between interlocutors, even though indeed there is no objectively correct truth there, only social convention. Foreign language learners have to acquire that knowledge, which is difficult and slow. For every "turn of phrase" you "enjoy" there are a hundred frustrating failures to communicate, which can sometimes be serious; I can think of one occasion when I told someone I was delighted when she told me her boyfriend had dumped her, and another occasion when I thought someone was accusing me of lying, both because of my limited fluency in the languages we were using, French and Spanish respectively.

Hey hey you're the TIL guy! I was designing my blog and I looked at what was suggested as the best blogs, yours was on it.

The TIL is such a great idea, takes the pressure off of "is it really good enough to post as a blog"

Glad to see you here :D

If posts are unfit for HN or if you think someone is posting too much, flag them and email us, and there are things we can do.

It's never ok to personally attack someone like this on HN. If we want others to do better we have to hold ourselves to a high standard too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Requests containing elements of hostility, shame, or injury frequently serve dual purposes: (1) the ostensible aim of eliciting an action and (2) the underlying objective of inflicting some from of harm (here shame) as a means compelling compliance through emotional leverage. Even if the respondent doesn't honor the request, the secondary purpose still occurs.

But it isn't a given that this will be successful; the outcome of the resulting conversation may well be that shopping malls are, or a particular shopping mall is, more desirable than wetlands, in which case the ostensible respondent will be less likely to comply than they would have been without the conversation. And, in this case, it seems that the conversation is strongly tending toward favoring the use of things like Grammarly rather than opposing it.

So I don't oppose starting such conversations. I think it's better to discuss ethical questions like this openly, even though sometimes people suffer shame as a result.

To me the request in question seems to be in the same spirit as "Please don't play your music so loud at night", "Please don't look at my sister", or "Please don't throw your trash out your car window". In each of these cases, there's clearly a conflict between different people's desires, probably accompanied with underlying disagreements about relevant duties; perhaps one person believes the other has a duty to avert their gaze from the sister in question to show respect to her chastity, while their interlocutor does not subscribe to any such duty, believing he is entitled to look at whomever he pleases. Or perhaps one person believes the other has a duty to carry their trash to a trash can, while the other does not.

Given that such a conflict has arisen, how can we resolve it? We could merely refrain from trying to influence one another's behavior entirely, which is the lowest-effort approach, but this clearly leads to deeply suboptimal outcomes in many cases; perhaps the cost of turning down the stereo or carrying the garbage to a trash can would be almost trivial, so doing it to accommodate others' preferences results in a net improvement in welfare. Alternatively, we could try to exclude people whose normative beliefs differ from our own from the spaces that most affect us, but it should be obvious that this also often causes harms far out of proportion from the good that results, such as ethnic cleansing.

All the other approaches to resolving the conflict that I can think of—bargaining, mediation, arbitration, collective deliberation, etc.—begin unavoidably with stating the unfulfilled desire. Or, as you put it, hectoring someone to 'stop doing this'.

Undoubtedly, if you devote the minute and a half required to read my "wall of text" comment above, you will be persuaded by its reasoning.

My concern is that the flagblasting and moderator-scolding, while certainly justified by the comment in question, will cause the collateral damage of discouraging politer versions of such comments in the future. So I think it's worthwhile to affirm that criticizing people's behavior to their face is not in fact inherently dickish, but rather a much better alternative to doing it behind their back, or to finding ways to silently exclude them, or people you suspect of being like them.

Having wrangled some open-source work that’s the kind of genius that only its mother could love… there’s a place for idiosyncratic interface design (UI-wise and API-wise), but there’s also a whole group of people who are great at that design sensibility. That category of people doesn’t always overlap with people who are great at the underlying engineering. Similarly, as academic writing tends to demonstrate, people with interesting and important ideas aren’t always people with a tremendous facility for writing to be read.

(And then there are people like me who have neither—I agree that you should roll your eyes at anything I ask an LLM to squirt out! :)

But GP’s technique, like TFA’s, sounds to me like something closer to that of a person with something meaningful to say, who now has a patient close-reader alongside them while they hone drafts. It’s not like you’d take half of your test reader’s suggestions, but some of them might be good in a way that didn’t occur to you in the moment, right?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492212 and marked it off topic.

That's how you get economics of scale.

Google couldn't have a human in the loop to review every page of search results before handing them out in response to queries.

What benefit might human review have? Maybe they could make sure the SERP list entries actually have the keywords you're looking for. Even better, they could make sure the prices in the shopping section are correct! Maybe even make sure they relate to the product you actually searched for... I might actually pay money for that.

AI is going to get the hang of coding to fill in the spaces (i.e. the part you’re doing) long before it’s able to intelligently design an API. Correct API design requires a lot of contextual information and forward planning for things that don’t exist today.

Right now it’s throwing spaghetti at the wall and you’re drawing around it.

Even if your API is for something that's never been done before, it can usually still take advantage of its training data to suggest a sensible shape once you describe the new nouns and verbs to it.

I agree that it's also not currently capable of judging those creative ideas, so I have to do that.

It's not creative at all, any more than taking the sum of text on a topic, and throwing a dart at it. It's a mild, short step beyond a weighted random, and certainly not capable of any real creativity.

Myriads of HN enthusiasts often chime in here "Are humans any more creative" and other blather. Well, that's a whataboutism, and doesn't detract from the fact that creative does not exist in the AI sphere.

I agree that you have to judge its output.

Also, sorry for hanging my comment here. Might seem over the top, but anytime I see 'creative' and 'AI', I have all sorts of dark thoughts. Dark, brooding thoughts with a sense of deep foreboding.

Pointing out that your working definition excludes reality isn't whataboutism, it's pointing out an isolated demand for rigor.

If you cannot clearly articulate how human creativity (the only other type of creativity that exists) is not impugned by the definition you're using as evidence that creativity "does not exist in the AI sphere", you're not arguing from a place of knowledge. Your assertion is just as much sophistry as the people who assert it is creativity. Unlike them, however, you're having to argue against instances where it does appear creative.

For my own two cents, I don't claim to fully understand how human creativity emerges, but I am confident that all human creative works rest heavily on a foundation of the synthesis of author's previous experiences, both personal and of others' creative works - and often more heavily the latter. If your justification for a lack of creativity is that LLMs are merely synthesizing from previous works, then your argument falls flat.

"Whataboutism" is generally used to describe a more specific way of pointing out an isolated demand for rigor—specifically, answering an accusation of immoral misconduct with an accusation that the accuser is guilty of similar immoral misconduct. More broadly, "whataboutism" is a term for demands that morality be judged justly, by objective standards that apply equally to everyone, rather than by especially rigorous standards for a certain person or group. As with epistemic rigor, the great difficulty with inconsistent standards is that we can easily fall into the trap of applying unachievable standards to someone or some idea that we don't like.

So it makes some sense to use the term "whataboutism" for pointing out an isolated demand for rigor in the epistemic space. It's a correct identification of the same self-serving cognitive bias that "whataboutism" targets in the space of ethical reasoning, just in a different sphere.

There's the rhetorical problem that "whataboutism" is a derogatory term for demanding that everyone be judged by the same standards. Ultimately that makes it unpersuasive and even counterproductive, much like attacking someone with a racial slur—even if factually accurate, as long as the audience isn't racist, the racial slur serves only to tar the speaker with the taint of racism, rather than prejudicing the audience against its nominal target.

In this specific case, if you concede that humans are no more creative than AIs, then it logically follows that either AIs are creative to some degree, or humans are not creative at all. To maintain the second, you must adopt a definition of "creativity" demanding enough to exclude all human activity, which is not in keeping with any established use of the term; you're using a private definition, greatly limiting the usefulness of your reasoning to others.

And that is true even if the consequences of AIs being creative would be appalling.

You're asserting that creativity is a meld of past experience, both personal and the creative output of others. Yet this really doesn't jive, as an LLM does not "experience" anything. I would argue that raw knowledge is not "experience" at all.

We might compare this to the university graduate, head full of books and data jammed therein, and yet that exceptionally well versed graduate needs "experience" in a job for quite some time, before having any use.

The same may be true of learning how to do anything, from driving, to riding a bike, or just being in conversations with others. Being told, on paper (or as part of your baked in, derived "knowledge store") things, means absolutely nothing in terms of actually experiencing them.

Heck, just try to explain sex to someone before they've experienced it. No matter the literature, play, movie or act performed in front of them, experience is entirely different.

And an AI does not experience the universe, nor is it driven by the myriad of human totality, from the mind o'lizard, to the flora/fauna in one's gut. There is no motive driving it, for example it does not strive to mate... something that drives all aspect of mammalian behaviour.

So intertwined with the mating urge is human experience, that it is often said that all creativity derives from it. The sparrow dances, the worm wiggles, and the human scores 4 touchdowns in one game, thank you Al.

Comparatively, an LLM does not reason, nor consider, nor ponder. It is "born" with full access to all of its memory store, has data spewed at it, searches, responds, and then dies. It is not capable of learning in any stream of consciousness. It does not have memory from one birth to the next, unless you feed its own output back at it. It can gain no knowledge, except from "context" assigned at birth.

An LLM, essentially, understands nothing. It is not "considering" a reply. It's all math, top to bottom, all probability, taking all the raw info it has an just spewing what fits next best.

That's not creative.

Any more than Big Ben's gears and cogs are.

The core question here, then, is why you are so certain that "creativity" requires "experience" beyond knowledge, and why knowledge is insufficient? What insight do you have into the human mind that top neuroscientists lack that grants you this gnosticism on how creativity definitely does and does not work?

Because, if you'll permit me to be crude, some of the best smut I've read has been by people I'm certain have never experienced the act. Their writing has been based solely on the writings of others. And yet, knowledge alone is more than enough for them to produce evocative creative works.

And, to really hammer in a point (please forgive the insulting tone):

>It's all math, top to bottom, all probability, taking all the raw info it has an just spewing what fits next best.

You are just biology, top to bottom, just electrical signals, taking all the raw info your nerves get, matching patterns and just spewing what fits next best.

Calling LLMs "just math" -- that's not creative, it's part of your input that you're predicting fits the likely next argument.

You didn't "reason, consider, or ponder" whether I would find that argument convincing or be able to immediately dismiss it because it holds no weight.

You're simply being a stochastic parrot, repeating the phrases you've heard.

...Etcetera. Again, apologies for the insult. But the point I am continually trying to make is that all of the arguments everyone tries to make about it not reasoning, not thinking, not having creativity -- they all are things that can and do apply to almost every human person, even intelligent and articulate ones like you or I.

When it comes down to it, your fundamental argument is that you do not believe that a machine can possibly have the exceptional qualities of the human mind, for some ineffable reason. It's all reasoning backwards from there. Human creativity must require human-like experience, the ability to grow, and a growing context cannot possibly suffice, because you've already decided on your conclusion.

(Because, perhaps, it would be too unsettling to admit that the alien facsimile of intelligence that we've created might have actual intelligence -- so you refuse that possibility)

The storage medium is not relevant here, and actual experience has sensorially laden additions which are not currently possible from reading. Memories are laid down differently as well.

In terms of what top neuroscientists know or do not know, you pulled such out of your back pocket, and threw them into onto the floor, perhaps you should describe precisely how they negate what I am saying?

Is there consensus? LLM is indeed creative?

What you seem to be missing here, is I am not railing against machine intelligence, nor creativity. It is merely that an LLM is not it, and will never become it. This is no different than an argument over whether to use sysvinit or systemd, it is a discussion of technical capabilities of a technology.

LLMs may become a backing store, a "library" of sorts for any future AGI to use as data, knowledge, an exceptionally effective method to provide a wikipedia-ish like, non-sql backed data source.

But they provide no means for cognition.

And creativity requires cognition. Creativity is a conscious process, for it requires imagination, which is an offshoot of a conscious process. Redefining "creativity" to exclude the conscious process negates its very meaning.

You can say "Wow, this appears to be creative", and it may appear to be creative, yet without cognition the act is simply not possible. None would dare say that a large Goldberg machine, which spits out random answers dependent upon air currents was producing creative ideas.

Some may say "What a creative creation this machine is!", but none would attribute creativity to the output of any algorithmic production by that machine, and this is what we have here.

Should we derive a method of actual conscious cognition in a mind not flesh, so be it. Creativity may occur. But as things stand now, a mouse provides more creativity than an LLM, the technology is simply not providing the underlying requirements. There is no process for consciousness.

There are ways to provide for this, and I have pondered them (again, I'm validating here that it's not "oh no, machines are NOT thinking!!", but instead "LLMs aren't that").

One exceptionally rough and barely back-of-napkin concept, would be sleep.

No I am not trying to mimic the human mind here, but when the concept is examined front to end, the caboose seems to be 'sleep'. Right now, the problem is how we bring each LLM onto a problem. We simply throw massive context at it, and then allow it to proceed.

Instead, we need to have a better context window. Maybe we should call this 'short term' memory. An LLM is booted, and responds to questions, but has a floating context window which never shrinks. Its "context window" is not cleared. Perhaps we use a symbolic database, or just normal SQL with fluff modz, but we allow this ongoing context window to exist and grow.

After a point, this short term memory will grow too large to actively swap in/out of memory. Primarily, even RAM has bandwidth limits and is a detractor on response speed and energy requirements per query.

So -- the LLM "goes to sleep". During that time, the backend is converted to LLM, or I suppose in this case a small language model. We now have a fuzzy, RRD almost conversion of short-term memory to long-term memory, yet one which enables some very important things.

That being, an actual capacity to learn from interaction.

The next step is to expand that capability, and the capabilities of an LLM with senses. I frankly think the best here is real, non-emulated robotic control. Give the LLM something to manipulate, as well as senses.

At that point, we should inject agency. A reason to exist. With current life, the sole primary reason is "reproduce". Everything else has derived from that premise. I spoke of the mating urge, we should recreate this here.

(Note how non-creative this all actually is, yet it seems valid to me... we're just trying to provide what we know works as a starting base. It does not mean that we cannot expand the creation of conscious minds into other methods, once we have a better understanding and success.)

There are several other steps here, which are essential. The mind must, for example, reload its "long-term memory" backing store SLM, and when "sleep" comes, overlay new short-term thoughts over long-term. This is another fuzzy process, and it would be best to think of it(though technically not accurate) as unpacking its SLM, overlaying new thoughts, and creating an entirely new SLM. As its short-term memory would have output derived from the LLM, plus overlaid SLM, its short-term memory would be providing output derived from its prior SLM.

So there is a form of continuity here.

So we have:

* A mind which can retain information, and is not merely popping into creation with no stored knowledge, and killed at each session end

* That same mind has a longer term memory, which allows for ongoing concept modification and integration, eg new knowledge affecting the "perception" of old knowledge

* That SLM will be "overlaid" on top of its LLM, meaning experiences derived during waking moments will provide more context to an LLM (that moment when you ride a bike, and comprehend how all the literature you read, isn't the same as doing? That moment where you link the two? That's in the SLM, and the SLM has higher priority)

* A body (simple as it may be), which allows access to the environment

* Senses fed into the process

* Agency, as in, "perform to mate", with aspects of "perform" being "examine, discover, be impressive" that sort of thing

I think, this overlaid SLM, along with actual empirical data would provide a more apt method to simulate some form of consciousness. It would at least allow a stream of consciousness, regardless of whatever debates we might have about humans dying when they sleep (which makes no sense, as the brain is incredibly active during sleep, and constantly monitoring the surroundings for danger).

I'd speak more along the sensory aspects of this, but it's actually what I'm working on right now.

But what's key here, is independent data and sensory acquisition. I see this is a best-able way to kickstart a mind.

Okay, I didn't want to put words in your mouth by claiming you said this, but now that you have, I can address it.

You have literally no way of knowing this. You don't understand how cognition actually works, because no one does, and you don't understand how LLMs actually produce a facsimile of intelligence, for very similar reasons. So you can't say that with certainty, and likewise you cannot claim to know what is actually required for cognition (without leaning heavily on human exceptionalism)

Skeptics of LLMs have been claiming that it "cannot possibly X" for the better part of a decade, and time and time again they have been proved wrong. Ironically, I was just reading an article this morning[1] that reiterated this point:

> [W]e’re still having the same debate - whether AI is a “stochastic parrot” that will never be able to go beyond “mere pattern-matching” into the realm of “real understanding”.

> My position has always been that there’s no fundamental difference: you just move from matching shallow patterns to deeper patterns, and when the patterns are as deep as the ones humans can match, we call that “real understanding”. This isn’t quite right - there’s a certain form of mental agency that humans still do much better than AIs - but again, it’s a (large) difference in degree rather than in kind.

> I think this thesis has done well so far. So far, every time people have claimed there’s something an AI can never do without “real understanding”, the AI has accomplished it with better pattern-matching.

While I can't claim to have been quite as prescient as the author, I agree with his position.

It wasn't so long ago that our standard conception of AI was that it could never make anything that could be called "art"[2], and now we have model that churn out images in seconds and poetry that average people rate as better than most humans[3]

You have a whole, well-spoken argument, but it despite claiming otherwise, every point boils down to "in order to have a trait associated with human thought, it needs to be more like a human brain". Your reasoning is circular and all comes down to human exceptionalism.

> But they provide no means for cognition. And creativity requires cognition. Creativity is a conscious process, for it requires imagination, which is an offshoot of a conscious process.

"Consciousness", the philosophical term primarily infamous for the fact that no one understands or agrees how it works - only that humans have it and some other animals may or may not. But somehow you know that "imagination" (a term not otherwise defined or justified) requires it, and that cognition (again undefined except to assert that LLMs don't have it, despite being able to take in information and retain it) requires that, and therefore, LLMs can't be creative unless they are more human-like.

> At that point, we should inject agency. A reason to exist. With current life, the sole primary reason is "reproduce". Everything else has derived from that premise. I spoke of the mating urge, we should recreate this here.

Again, algorithms are infamous for following goals and chasing rewards even more intently than humans, but you only count that as a "purpose" if it's the same one humans have.

And so on.

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/now-i-really-won-that-ai-be... [2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/can-a-robot-write-a-symphony [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1

It also taught me to be more careful about checkpointing my work in git before letting an agent go wild on my codebase. It left a mess trying to fix its problems.

Many many python image-processing libraries have an `imread()` function. I didn't know about this when designing our own bespoke image-lib at work, and went with an esoteric `image_get()` that I never bothered to refactor.

When I ask ChatGPT for help writing one-off scripts using the internal library I often forget to give it more context than just `import mylib` at the top, and it almost always defaults to `mylib.imread()`.

(Unless, on the gripping hand, your image_get function is subtly different from Matlab's imread, for example by not returning an array, in which case a different name might be better.)

That's also how I'm approaching it. If all the condensed common wisdom poured into the model's parameters says that this is how my API is supposed to work to be intuitive, how on earth do I think it should work differently? There needs to be a good reason (like composability, for example). I break expectations otherwise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment

Having an LLM demo your tool, then taking what it does wrong or uses incorrectly and adjusting the API works very very well. Updating the docs to instruct the LLM on how to use your tool does not work well.

I've found that LLMs can be kind of dumb about understanding things, and are particularly bad at reading between the lines for anything subtle. In this aspect, I find they make good proxies for inattentive anonymous reviewers, and so will try to revise my text until even the LLM can grasp the key points that I'm trying to make.

In both cases, you might get extra bonus usability if the reviewers or the API users actually give your output to the same LLM you used to improve the draft. Or maybe a more harshly quantized version of the same model, so it makes more mistakes.

Sometimes I can just say, "How do I use the <made-up name> API in Python to do <task>?" Unfortunately the safeguards against hallucinations in more recent models can make this more difficult, because it's more likely to tell me it's never heard of it. You can usually coax it into suspension of disbelief, but I think the results aren't as good.

That's closer to simply observing the mean. For an analogy, it's like waiting to pave a path until people tread the grass in a specific pattern. (Some courtyard designers used to do just that. Wait to see where people were walking first.)

Making things easy for Chat GPT means making things close to ordinary, average, or mainstream. Not creative, but can still be valuable.

On the bright side, a lot of work is just finding the mean solution so.

“Sometimes” being a very important qualifier to that statement.

Claude 4 naturally doesn’t write code with any kind of long term maintenance in-mind, especially if it’s trying to make things look like what the less experienced developers wrote in the same repo.

Please don’t assume just because it looks smart that it is. That will bite you hard.

Even with well-intentional rules, terrible things happen. It took me weeks to see some of it.

This is also similar to which areas TD-Gammon excelled at in Backgammon.

Which is all pretty amusing, if you compare it to how people usually tended to characterise computers and AI, especially in fiction.

  > I don't have to spend my time carefully tracking down the bugs GPT-4 has cunningly concealed in its code

I'll charge you, don't get me wrong, but I'll save you time, money, and frustration. And future bug reports and security issues.

> Any person who has used a computer in the past ten years knows that doing meaningless tasks is just part of the experience. Millions of people create accounts, confirm emails, dismiss notifications, solve captchas, reject cookies, and accept terms and conditions—not because they particularly want to or even need to. They do it because that’s what the computer told them to do. Like it or not, we are already serving the machines. (...)

> You might’ve heard a story of Soundslice [adding a feature because ChatGPT kept telling people it exists](https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/). We see the same at Instant: for example, we used `tx.update` for both inserting and updating entities, but LLMs kept writing `tx.create` instead. Guess what: we now have `tx.create`, too.

> Is it good or is it bad? It definitely feels strange. In a sense, it’s helpful: LLMs here have seen millions of other APIs and are suggesting the most obvious thing, something every developer would think of first, too.

> It’s also a unique testing device: if developers use your API wrong, they blame themselves, read the documentation, and fix their code. In the end, you might never learn that they even had the problem. But with ChatGPT, you yourself can experience “newbie’s POV” at any time.