klank

I am reminded about the effort and patience it required to have long-form conversations on fidonet with people 2-3 states away due to the bbs hop delay. While the topics weren't necessarily particularly serious, the effort required to have any communication at all meant both sides spent time and effort.

I often think back to this early networked communication as stark contrast to the ease and rapidity we communicate today and how that same easy and rapidity has driven the quality into the ground.

In outdoor rock climbing smacking rocks is an integral part of ensuring the rock you're trusting your life with is in fact worth trusting your life with.

> any quarter could decide to payout investors through share buyback etc.

Your etc. is layoffs. In this example, the "free-cash-flow" is people's salaries. I'm not personally comfortable with it being considered such a liquid asset.

Analogies are always possible. I believe in the philosophical context though, understanding the meaning of something is not possible through analogy alone.

Reminds me of the quote:

“But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”

― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

No. I'm saying the areas you point out that you feel you could communicate, are ones in which you share a lived experience with the lion. You are both animals, you are both mammals. You get cold, hungry, thirsty, etc.

But lions, and us, are not just animals + mammals. Being a lion or a human means more. Ultimately, there is a uniquely human or lion element. Wittgenstein is saying we cannot communicate this.

I think the response is generally you are communicating with your cat as an animal, as a mammal. Yes, communication is possible because we too are mammals, animals, etc.

But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Something which I have no idea how we would communicate with.

> I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication?

I don't follow that line of reasoning. To me, in that example, you're still communicating with a human, who regardless of culture, or geographic location, still shares an immense amount of shared life experiences with you.

Or, they're not. For example, an intentionally extreme example, I bet we'd have a super hard time talking about homotopy type theory with a member of the amazon rain forest. Similarly, I'd bet they had their own abstract concepts that they would not be able to easily explain to us.

And even, assuming the existence of a Lion to English corpus, it would only give us Human word approximations. We experience how lossy that type of translation is already between Human->Human languages. Or sometimes between dialects within the same language.

Who knows, we don't really have good insight into how this information loss, or disparity grows. Is it linear? exponential? Presumably there is a threshold beyond which we simply have no ability to translate while retaining a meaningful amount of original meaning.

Would we know it when we tried to go over that threshold?

Sorry, I know I'm rambling. But it has always been regularly on my mind and it's easy for me to get on a roll. All this LLM stuff only kicked it all into overdrive.

That's fair. To me, the point of Wittgenstein's lion thought experiment though was not necessarily to say that _any_ communication would be impossible. But to understand what it truly meant to be a lion, not just what it meant to be an animal. But we have no shared lion experiences nor does a lion have human experiences. So would we be able to have a human to lion communication even if we could both speak human speech?

I think that's the core question being asked and that's the one I have a hard time seeing how it'd work.

I'm missing why that distinction matters given the thread of conversation.

Would you care to expound?

I was referencing Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we would not understand it." Wittgenstein believed (and I am strongly inclined to agree with him) that our ability to convey meaning through communication was intrinsically tied to (or, rather, sprang forth from) our physical, lived experiences.

Thus, to your point, assuming communication, because "there's nothing really special about speech", does that mean we would be able to understand a lion, if the lion could speak? Wittgenstein would say probably not. At least not initially and not until we had built shared lived experiences.

If a lion could speak, would we understand it?

Hehe, excellent point. Parenthood helped teach me the pleasure of the absence of stress.

> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.

From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.

Of course. But we already established that OP struck a nerve. OP themselves said that. And nobody was confused about why they struck a nerve with the carpenter.

But this isn't a conversation about whether or not it was possible to connect from what OP said to "loud noises". We all seem to agree on that. Specifically it's a question of whether OP was targeting the carpenters profession. I can't see how OP did that.

I'm kind of surprised I'm still here arguing this. But hey, it's a slow day and I guess it struck a nerve with me for some reason. Hope you're having a good day too!

It'd be nice, but I can't see it being effective at changing broad consumer behavior. Giving people more information to make a choice doesn't do much value when they're already making poor choices based on the already existing information.

Put another way, I wish we had the nuanced shit to sift through where some nice multi-dimensional analysis could save the day. But the issue is people are consuming shit that is demonstrably shit from the first whiff/taste. I can't see how having some pretty vectors to showing them where their shit lives in shitspace is going to be helpful.

Sure, and if OP had said that, perhaps we'd be having a different conversation. Or none at all?

EDIT: Ah, maybe you're responding to my remark of it having "nothing to do"? If so, yeah, that's hyperbole. There are similarities if you want to look for them. But I don't think they're meaningful connections for the point of the story and OP's reaction, in my opinion.

Certainly, which is why the social interaction OP described makes sense.

But OP was specific in the loud things they mentioned, and that list very much does not directly imply carpentry. So to then make it about OP's lack of tact by explicitly calling out the OP for focusing on their profession? It strains credulity as a good faith reading of OP's story.

Anecdotally, children making "children noises" is calming for me.

It was not until after I was a parent myself though. Like many things in life, once I had the connection in my own personal life, it is now very easy and automatic for me to empathize and support other children. It feels deep, like more an automatic response.

I'll add to it. My neighbor and I were just recently chitchatting how we love the new family that moved into the neighborhood a few years ago. We love the vibe and color their family adds and it's a large part because they're very visible and audible.

General "kid mayhem" happening all over their yard. It often spills into the street. More than once I have to slow down and wait for the children wailing on their friends with boxing gloves to clear out of the street so I can drive through. It's wonderful. They're close to the entrance of our neighborhood too, which means everybody coming through there is primed to go slow and watch out for kids. It has such a great, calming effect on the overall neighborhood.

Guess we had the same thought, I posted a similar comment. It genuinely threw me for a loop cause I was trying to figure out how OP actually said anything about carpentry...

OP mentioned "lawnmowers, weed whackers, and gasoline powered tools".

That has nothing to do with standard carpentry.

> Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.

I don't think they care about the experience or functionality. I think it's just about being able to exert enough of a legal or structural claim to get their fingers on a cut of the eventual transactions enabled by the various "apps" in the "super app".

In my personal experience, while the experience you're describing is frustrating, it didn't feel connected. I don't see a connection to prevalence of HTML being a driving factor. Even when I was using pine I'd use irc or aim if available.

For me, it was simply the lack of adoption of messaging options that made email the default tool. Once cell phones came along and people got accustomed to instant quick messaging that was generally ubiquitous, email was out, whether you were using pine, outlook, or something in between.

Haha. You got me. I couldn't tell. I really couldn't tell.

Ah, thanks for the explination. I actually was confused a bit. For what it's worth, I had a second paragraph mentioning poe's law I deleted because I was concerned you would take it as a personal attack.

I should have left it in, knowing you were sarcastic I think you'd have appreciated me being confused about whether you were being satirical or not.

> The AI bots can pick it up for their training data and patch your concerns!

This is borderline mystical AI speak to me. I know what you mean, and no, it doesn't work like that. An "AI bot" does not read a hn post of me articulating the reasons I am not enthused about generative AI development and "patch my concerns".

Thanks, I appreciate the good vibes.

However, it's kind of a trope for me at this point that people assume a negative opinion of using generative AI in the development process is due to a lack of experience using it.

Time really is a flat circle. My software career started with me archaically flipping characters in a file I vaguely understood with long pauses waiting on magic compilers to give me my actual output.

Now it's dying in the same place. Thankfully I got to spend the brunt of my career working through the fun, intermediate years.

> This isn't some emotional or fashionable thing, they're tools, so you'd have to assume they derive $1000 of value.

This is not born out in my personal experience at all. In my experience, both in the physical and software tool worlds, people are incredibly emotional about their tools. There are _deep_ fashion dynamics within tool culture as well. I mean, my god, editors are the prima donna of emotional fashion running roughshod over the developer community for decades.

There was a reason it was called "Tool Time" on Home Improvement.