RugnirViking

> Have you ever actually spoken to young Europeans about this

I can't emphasise enough that I am not only literally a young european, living with a young european partner, with a young european social circle, but I also exist in the real world and not in reddit. I have lived here in denmark for coming up on 10 years.

Yes, I know some extremely online people who have learned better english than danish and talk about noticing a decline in their danish skills. Those few who spend all their time online, on reddit and the like. It's definitely a type, one that by my estimation skews male, autistic, and introverted. Prime hacker news demographic type thing :)

I get it, for you as a linguist its remarkable that this could happen, that people could exist that lose their native tongue or learn another to a higher proficiency of that of the country they live in. We do live in unprecedented times.

However I do not think it is universal, or a majority of young people - I also know many more people who have better knowledge in Danish than in english. It is explicitly on issues of politics, business, science, law, etc that people prefer to speak in danish with me because they do not know the words in english, including at meetup groups dedicated to those things.

> the expectation

Your expectation, imposed upon yourself. I get it, I was embarassed too. It's really not that serious, you can be bad at stuff publicly. Nobody is advocating following people around forcing them to teach you something, but you can still have a great time with people with whom share no language in common. Speaking anything at all just makes things more fun, and people are way more willing to help than you think.

It's just not rude to go to a foreign country armed only with a1 duolingo and a prayer. It's a lot less rude than going there and only speaking english to everyone you meet... Yes even in denmark, even to young people.

As I have gotten better at danish I have had many more young people (the majority of my friend group and social experienced given I went to university here) express that they would prefer to speak to me in danish than the other way around. They were, by default, always making themselves a little uncomfortable, feel a little slower, seem less educated for the sake of communicating with me, because I gave them no other option. Now that I give them the option of switching to a context where I seem like a fool and they are the master, they are happy to take it.

"poor person" it's literally their job. We're talking about such a minor inconvenience, on par with someone asking to pay with cash instead of card, or taking a moment to think about what they want to order. Again, you're asking them to speak their own native language in the country where it is spoken. They serve people in that language all day. Including old farmers that come in with difficult to understand accents, who speak slowly. They are free and welcome to say so if theyre that desparate to speak in english...

I also know Danish people who prefer to speak in english. If I were speaking to them for hours at a party, and they voiced that request, I would oblige. But avoiding trying to speak danish in denmark because of the fear some danish people would be annoyed or even offended without ever asking them is utter insanity.

You say you have travelled the world for language practise, but how did you manage that if you refused to speak the language for fear of somehow offending or inconveniencing people by speaking in their language. Why was it any different from just staying home and reading websites in your target language?

the person said that there were too many samey harnesses and they couldn't see why or which to choose and you thought you'd fix that by adding another to the pile?

the problem in my opinion comes down to a sort of poor "theory of mind" on the part of agents at our current moment.

The AI is really bad at guessing what its reader already will know. Not just before reading, but also from reading the text. This means that it so often explains things that don't need explaining, and emphasizes things that don't need emphasis.

It's not Y but X. except no sane person would ever think it was Y, and it was clear to everyone it is X already (or X is not a widely understandable thing in the first place, or the AI hasn't established a satisfying reason for why this distinction isn't important, or or or).

This is, I think, due to a combination of training on human feedback rewarding surface level good text (people marking preference on their 300th answer of the day are not trying to understand whatever point the agent is making they're just seeing whether it seems like it knows what its talking about) combined with later training by automated grading systems (other llms) that always have perfect context - if I also went and read all the code the agent referenced, read all of its 12 paragraph answers in gave at every turn of this back and forth conversation, knew all the files on the hard drive and had read all the diffs it made, then yeah it would be fine to assume some of the things it does, but I don't do that when im talking with my boss, because he asked me to do it so he doesn't have to understand everything, and he expects me to surface important stuff and minimise other stuff in a sensible way

for both you and the sibling comment, I think these are hypotheticals. I hestate to call you guys out but on some level I think its rationalisation for being afraid of embarassment - I literally live in denmark as a foreigner and am learning the language. You can just say you want to practise a little, its not that hard.

You: hej må jeg have... et varm chokolade?

Them: of course, will there be anything else?

You: hvis det er okay jeg ville gerne øve mig på dansk *smile* åbenbart har jeg virkelig brug for det

Them: selvfølgelig! det kommer til... fem-og-halvfems kroner. Sidder i ind, eller ude?

If you don't explicitly say that you are trying to practise then yeah, they are going to default to whatever makes the interaction go smoother. Everyone does that, all the time! But people are generally pretty supportive of another person trying to learn. And of course, people aren't going to assume you think they can't speak english if you say you're practicing (it's not hard to smile and say how lovely you think the language is or whatever.

In general waitstaff and service workers deal with people being indecisive, slow, speaking with confusing dialects, speech impediments all day long. It is not an imposition to work through an imperfect language - and its pretty much the only way anyone ever gets good at a language.

I also get the impulse to be a little jealous of those natural born sunny extroverts who find it easy to do this. For me it does require pushing through a little discomfort, and often I wouldn't if I were busy doing something else. But it's 100% my own discomfort, not the other person. Being asked to hold a conversation in your own native language is not a chore

> "highest ever" among some specific arbitrary demographic isn't very meaningful

It's meaningful if you do actually happen to be of that demographic. It's no longer arbitrary then, sure, but I do care quite a lot if something bad is affecting men because I'm one of those.

Not only that, but many of the people I care most about in the world are men too ! probably a bit over half!

Also, how specific is "middle aged men"? thats a huge portion of society - I'd have understood your point if this was about like, people employed as painters in texas. But this has such a huge N, alongside a relatively unambiguous test (I trust reporting of these statistics more or less)

Reads like a diary entry. I sympathise, I just wish there were some conclusion the piece could come to, some action I could take or insight I could gleam. But nope, its just another soul trapped in the torment matrix.

(to be clear, there is good reason there is no call to action: a big part of the horror of all this is that there is no clear thing anyone can do)

perhaps consider what motivates a person to read comments on a forum like hacker news. Or indeed, post on such a forum.

There may be reasons other than self promotion

presumably this is somewhat analogous to telling the newbie to go and fetch the tartan paint, or pedal powered wheelchair and the like.

More of a go away and do this thing that will take a long time because we don't want to deal with you at the moment?

> try to order in languages I don’t speak

why not? I guarantee it's less offensive than you think to be bad at a language but try anyway. I get the desire to avoid embarrassment - it's something I find really difficult to push through, but you've gotta do a whole lot of speaking badly to speak well, and people are generally very appreciative of someone earnestly trying.

If you met someone in person struggling to speak english, would you be offended? or would you be collaborative like "lets figure this out together"

something about metrics and targets. When I got my first programming job, one of the reasons they hired me, apparently, was because I knew what components I had in my PC at home. If they had published the question beforehand and everybody knew to study it, it would no longer have made sense to use that question as a filter. You want the people who knew this stuff anyway, with no expectation of reward

not your keys, not your crypto

not your hardware, not your keys

not your chips, not your hardware

not manufactured in house, not your chips

not your designs, not manufactured by you

not designed by you personally, not your designs

ad infinitum. To be truly secure, you must first learn to survive alone in the wilderness and smelt tin

it seems to me there must be at least some temperature gradient, but I imagine it could be sharper or shallower than on earth. Thus an egypt like equator and a milan like pole (or near to pole at least) seems plausible

I'll suggest more focus on performance, testing, and observability.

Human understanding + quality/maintainability is where the money is at. Learn to make those things with agents.

I don't think engineers will truly go extinct, though there may well be less of them. I think the recent discussion around "AI usage is a skill" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063427 captures my feeling - there are things to learn, and likely will continue to be, to get the best out of these tools. That means some people will be paid to do it. See to it that you are one of those

all the artcraft apps have mcp servers that are just a port on your local machine with an api so theyre very scriptable. Ive been doing a ton with them to test them out, including with deterministic scripts driving them

What would more habitable than earth even mean?

Some guesses: Easily breathable atmosphere + liquid water + pleasant temperatures. Predictable weather? Mediterranean climate year round across whole planet? Entire world spanned by archipelagos, no continents (naturally condusive to smaller localised community building?) No native plants but rich soil for growing whatever plants we choose? Abundant sunlight with gentle constant breeze but few strong winds or storms? No volcanic or tectonic activity?

I'd say no pathogens but they'll come with us regardless.

> Which one is more at risk of having the wipe-out and cost levers: your FOSS language/compiler or your paid third party LLM?

Neither is likely to go away. I do not expect it will ever be difficult to access an LLM in the forseeable future, barring massive legislation + enforcement to entirely ban them (I can run several capable coding models locally)

Nor is it likely that for developers at most companies will not have access to at least some LLM of comparably intelligence to those we have today (more advanced models may be restricted or too expensive) - right now large parts of the world economy are retooling to expand ai inference volume, not decrease it

This seems like "what if you don't have a calculator!" - and like with a calculator, there are benefits to learning things without the tool aid of course, n(including developing a sense for when things are wrong) but professionals are using the right tools for the job

Do you think its likely ?

this isn't meant to be some snippy remark by the way, id love to hear if it has major problems or bugs. I just haven't encountered any yet

this is absolutely it. the only recipe to make a car that becomes iconic is make it different/recognisable then sell a lot of it, for cheap (really cheap. No, cheaper. Cheaper than that) to students/artists. nostalgia will do the rest

the sort of people doing this security posture definitely are not up to date on the latest security news...

It would take something truly monumental to make a local supermarket owner even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.

maybe! but the linked paper doesn't show that

I deal with bugs frontier models made literally every day, and people are making specs. You have the escape that "maybe they weren't proper specs" but this is a no true scotsman fallacy.

We have a continuous process of updating skills, specs etc to try and avoid all these bugs they write, give them context about why its the wrong thing to do.

This process is actually a lot of work, continuous, and can likely continue indefinitely.

I've used it for a few things, mostly making form fillable pdfs with designcraft. Seems pretty cool. Have you?

> A patent has always told everybody exactly how to re-create your magic.

This is the theory, yes. Have you ever tried to actually do this? They are never written by engineers, and are much more focused on being as vague and broad as possible to be as useful a legal weapon as they can.

Patents are rarely even useful in reverse engineering, let alone enough on their own

some kinda system running the linked page through pangram and then putting the result in a small font next to the submission time would be perfect I think. A small font to keep the idea that such things may potentially hold value while satisfying those who aren't interested. Nobody has to argue about it themselves then because it's unambiguous, and everyone can filter them out if you choose.

I can't intuit, it would take me an hour or two to figure out the right "deterministic script". Hence why i'd like a robot to do it, while also being able to ya know, actually do it

Why the random swipes? This is a really interesting topic that doesn't deserve this kinda treatment. Reasonable people disagree on the concept of intellectual property (though most agree the west's current iteration has serious problems)

No? It's like saying "why bother doing maths, a calculator can figure out the solution to any question you have if you just put the right equation in" there might be more to maths, it turns out. Most of it lying inside of finding "the right equation"

The usefulness of UML is highly reliant on the names you choose. And current LLMs are really, really bad at naming things. "The collector's refresh cycle has a bug: when the cache hydrates, the Cartesian grouping is misaligned" type nonsense - it absolutely will name a class "CartesianMisalignmentHandler" if you let it, good luck understanding what that is on a UML diagram