When you're native at a language, you often don't realize that you're using an idiom. By that I mean when you use an expression that means something different to what the literal words mean.
Here's one I was thinking of the other day. In German, to breathe is just a verb: atmen. But in Danish, it's an idiom: at trække vejret. If you just found the straight dictionary definition of "at trække" you would find "to pull". "Vejret" is the weather. So if you didn't know that bringing the two together meant to breathe, you would end up being confused.
It gets worse if the idiomatic phrase has grammatical significance. "I used to eat meat". If you only just learned a bit of English, you would wonder what "to use" in past tense meant that had to do with the rest of the sentence. Or perhaps you would theorize that a word was left out (eg using a fork to eat meat). But you'd be completely wrong, since what it actually means is that I stopped eating meat, though I had done so for a period in the past.
My guess is that Japanese is far enough away from English that early translating software couldn't figure out these kinds of things. By contrast, I've never had modern LLMs write anything that didn't seem native, presumably because they are complicated enough to absorb the knowledge from the training data.
All words are metaphors, now add Western languages are agentic, Japanese is not. The problem CS ignored in language is that the arbitrariness in language leaves remarkably unmappable spaces between metaphors. In a way, LLMs are magic acts that expose language's Oz like tricks. Scaffolding idiomatic expressions inside that initial mess only reveals the trick's problem further.
Literal words don't mean anything specifically unless they have a context, which is idiosyncratic.
LLMs never are able to resolve the double whammy of lexemes and the conduit metaphor paradox. That's how they need constant specific supervision. They're babblers that have no idea what they're saying.
Coders can't debate this, this is the inherent problem to language that generative and NLP waves away in a sleight of hand trick. Study the initial conditions to language folks: language doesn't really mean anything.
If you understand the nature of language fully, then its ultimate function is to refute itself. In other words, all our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually to specific signals.
To make that simpler, each statement in any existing language is about replacing language.
I'll try to say this as politely as I can: I think this is a bot account.
Not only your two posts above read like word-salad, I went through your comments history and almost every comment of yours reads like this (except maybe a couple).
If so, could you maybe stop your experiment? I wasted time trying to parse your comment as if it was generated by a human.
I'm not a bot, I'm a neurobiologist with a start up that's about replacing the symbolic. and I'm pretty stunned at how inert CS is regarding language. You can find plenty of typos in my posts, and they're not all about this, they're about myth, causality, the symbolic.
To accuse a human of being a bot is really poor manners.
Far from word salads, they are based in deep theories from empirical demonstrations that words are our most fundamental illusions. If you want the deep research we use internally (about 100 citations) start here.
I suggest that CS has little ability to debates the scientific reality of language if posters are going to complain scientific statements that are defined and defendable are word salads.
> I'm a neurobiologist with a start up that's about replacing the symbolic
What's your startup? What are your publications? That Google doc link is more word-salad and random quotes and citations.
What on earth is a "start up that's about replacing the symbolic"?
> If you understand the nature of language fully, then its ultimate function is to refute itself. In other words, all our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually to specific signals. To make that simpler, each statement in any existing language is about replacing language.
This is word salad, for example. You're not trying to "make it simpler", you're trying to obfuscate (or it's just random).
I don't disclose affiliations here, that's the beauty of HN. I get to keep my anonymity to explore.
A start-up that replaces the symbolic engages with specifics in signals in the record (animals, entoptics, onomatopoeia, calendrical signs, action-syntax externals, cinematic action-glyphs) and figures out what representations veer referential and offers concatenation.
The idea that language refutes itself is as old as the pre-socratics. I won't go into the detailed history here, but there are 1000s of reference for this statement. I'll use Cassirer's, which is pretty succinct.
..at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions..
Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
Freeing ourselves from the veil of words is theoretically equivalent to language's ultimate function is to refute itself.
CS is computer science.
btw it's clear the drive to encapsulate in plain English was and is the achilles heel to CS, coders are forced to finger point using characterizations of "word salad" at scientifically complex theories and analytic ideas.
"Used to" isn't actually a weird metaphorical thing.
To "use" can mean (though in most contexts this meaning is obsolete) to do something regularly or habitually. So "I use to do X" means "I am in the habit of doing X", and "I used to do X" means "I was in the habit of doing X". The implication that you don't do it any more is a Gricean thing -- if you were still doing it you'd say "I use to do X" rather than "I used to do X".
Nowadays no one uses "use to" in the present tense and no one is thinking of the above when they use "used to" in the past tense. But that's where it comes from.
I seem to remember in the original thread (I am that old) that another poster identified this as a mistranslation of 'try, catch, finally' and the post overall was talking about throwing (vomiting) exceptions. I don't have a reference for that though sadly!
Going from フラグ to 龍旂 is no less weird than going from English "flag" to "dragon."
风 and 极 are Simplified Chinese. The corresponding Japanese characters are 風 and 極 and they don't connect to defaults or limits in software either. Now it's of course possible that 松本武 is not Matsumoto Takeshi (松本•武) but instead Song Benwu (松•本武) and the original message was in Chinese, but that doesn't explain the curious word choice either.
From the title this put me in mind of the "draco standard", a dragon head mounted atop a pole that wailed in the wind which Roman cavalry used when they charged into battle.
Yeah I know it's completely different, but HNers will enjoy discovering this rabbit hole so let me lead onwards: Time Team reconstructed one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNYcVuO-PoE :D
It seems possible that "dragon" might be a corruption of "daemon"? Under this assumption, it isn't too hard to figure that "pole" might actually mean "poll". Perhaps when the CS jargon was initially translated into Japanese, somebody slipped up and used a homophone.
It appears that the user is dealing with an error that occurs intermittently with shibboleth, an SSO interface. If some daemon is polling some kind of thing in a way that triggers an error, it would probably seem to happen at random.
I strongly suspect the post was a joke, perhaps deliberately mangled by machine-translating it not just once but multiple times between different languages.
Note that in the original thread, there was someone who requested (in Japanese) to repeat the question in Japanese, and was ignored.
Trying to reverse engineer the translation errors when you know zero Japanese is absurd.
I'm only semi-fluent in Japanese, but none of it makes sense to me. "Runtime" (in the computing-related sense) in Japanese is 実行時, or one might use the English word tansliterated to Kana, ランタイム, but there is absolutely no connection from either of those to goats.
When you're native at a language, you often don't realize that you're using an idiom. By that I mean when you use an expression that means something different to what the literal words mean.
Here's one I was thinking of the other day. In German, to breathe is just a verb: atmen. But in Danish, it's an idiom: at trække vejret. If you just found the straight dictionary definition of "at trække" you would find "to pull". "Vejret" is the weather. So if you didn't know that bringing the two together meant to breathe, you would end up being confused.
It gets worse if the idiomatic phrase has grammatical significance. "I used to eat meat". If you only just learned a bit of English, you would wonder what "to use" in past tense meant that had to do with the rest of the sentence. Or perhaps you would theorize that a word was left out (eg using a fork to eat meat). But you'd be completely wrong, since what it actually means is that I stopped eating meat, though I had done so for a period in the past.
My guess is that Japanese is far enough away from English that early translating software couldn't figure out these kinds of things. By contrast, I've never had modern LLMs write anything that didn't seem native, presumably because they are complicated enough to absorb the knowledge from the training data.
All words are metaphors, now add Western languages are agentic, Japanese is not. The problem CS ignored in language is that the arbitrariness in language leaves remarkably unmappable spaces between metaphors. In a way, LLMs are magic acts that expose language's Oz like tricks. Scaffolding idiomatic expressions inside that initial mess only reveals the trick's problem further.
Literal words don't mean anything specifically unless they have a context, which is idiosyncratic.
LLMs never are able to resolve the double whammy of lexemes and the conduit metaphor paradox. That's how they need constant specific supervision. They're babblers that have no idea what they're saying.
Coders can't debate this, this is the inherent problem to language that generative and NLP waves away in a sleight of hand trick. Study the initial conditions to language folks: language doesn't really mean anything.
That appears to be meaningless. Please explain without using language.
If you understand the nature of language fully, then its ultimate function is to refute itself. In other words, all our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually to specific signals.
To make that simpler, each statement in any existing language is about replacing language.
I'll try to say this as politely as I can: I think this is a bot account.
Not only your two posts above read like word-salad, I went through your comments history and almost every comment of yours reads like this (except maybe a couple).
If so, could you maybe stop your experiment? I wasted time trying to parse your comment as if it was generated by a human.
I'm not a bot, I'm a neurobiologist with a start up that's about replacing the symbolic. and I'm pretty stunned at how inert CS is regarding language. You can find plenty of typos in my posts, and they're not all about this, they're about myth, causality, the symbolic.
To accuse a human of being a bot is really poor manners.
Far from word salads, they are based in deep theories from empirical demonstrations that words are our most fundamental illusions. If you want the deep research we use internally (about 100 citations) start here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXtU97SCjxaHCrf8UVeQGYaj...
I suggest that CS has little ability to debates the scientific reality of language if posters are going to complain scientific statements that are defined and defendable are word salads.
That's a warning CS hasn't done its homework.
> I'm a neurobiologist with a start up that's about replacing the symbolic
What's your startup? What are your publications? That Google doc link is more word-salad and random quotes and citations.
What on earth is a "start up that's about replacing the symbolic"?
> If you understand the nature of language fully, then its ultimate function is to refute itself. In other words, all our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually to specific signals. To make that simpler, each statement in any existing language is about replacing language.
This is word salad, for example. You're not trying to "make it simpler", you're trying to obfuscate (or it's just random).
> That's a warning CS hasn't done its homework.
What's a "CS"?
Commenter says language carries no meaning. Why discuss? (How would you discuss?)
I don't disclose affiliations here, that's the beauty of HN. I get to keep my anonymity to explore.
A start-up that replaces the symbolic engages with specifics in signals in the record (animals, entoptics, onomatopoeia, calendrical signs, action-syntax externals, cinematic action-glyphs) and figures out what representations veer referential and offers concatenation.
The idea that language refutes itself is as old as the pre-socratics. I won't go into the detailed history here, but there are 1000s of reference for this statement. I'll use Cassirer's, which is pretty succinct.
..at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions..
Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
Freeing ourselves from the veil of words is theoretically equivalent to language's ultimate function is to refute itself.
CS is computer science.
btw it's clear the drive to encapsulate in plain English was and is the achilles heel to CS, coders are forced to finger point using characterizations of "word salad" at scientifically complex theories and analytic ideas.
"Used to" isn't actually a weird metaphorical thing.
To "use" can mean (though in most contexts this meaning is obsolete) to do something regularly or habitually. So "I use to do X" means "I am in the habit of doing X", and "I used to do X" means "I was in the habit of doing X". The implication that you don't do it any more is a Gricean thing -- if you were still doing it you'd say "I use to do X" rather than "I used to do X".
Nowadays no one uses "use to" in the present tense and no one is thinking of the above when they use "used to" in the past tense. But that's where it comes from.
Wow, "pull weather" ~ "suck wind".
And “suck wind” is a US English idiom for being out of breath.
Ideas: Wind = 风 is shorthand for custom or style Pole = 极 limit or point Dragon = 龍旂 flag
So my take would be asking if there are JSP settings(defaults,limits, flags) that interact With the runtime.
My 2c.
For the record the original question is much more enjoyable :-D
I seem to remember in the original thread (I am that old) that another poster identified this as a mistranslation of 'try, catch, finally' and the post overall was talking about throwing (vomiting) exceptions. I don't have a reference for that though sadly!
龍旂 is the dragon flag of Chinese emperors. https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%AB%9C%E6%97%97-658618 A computer flag is フラグ (furagu). https://jisho.org/search/%E3%83%95%E3%83%A9%E3%82%B0
Going from フラグ to 龍旂 is no less weird than going from English "flag" to "dragon."
风 and 极 are Simplified Chinese. The corresponding Japanese characters are 風 and 極 and they don't connect to defaults or limits in software either. Now it's of course possible that 松本武 is not Matsumoto Takeshi (松本•武) but instead Song Benwu (松•本武) and the original message was in Chinese, but that doesn't explain the curious word choice either.
Author here. I really like that interpretation. How would you like to be credited for it?
Could it be "command line flag"?
From the title this put me in mind of the "draco standard", a dragon head mounted atop a pole that wailed in the wind which Roman cavalry used when they charged into battle.
Yeah I know it's completely different, but HNers will enjoy discovering this rabbit hole so let me lead onwards: Time Team reconstructed one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNYcVuO-PoE :D
A classic, for sure. The page is still there: https://groups.google.com/g/shibboleth-users/c/EjvS2Cgio6c
My total guess is that "The wind, a pole and the Dragon" is some kind of idiom that means something like "Starts strong and then fizzles out".
It seems possible that "dragon" might be a corruption of "daemon"? Under this assumption, it isn't too hard to figure that "pole" might actually mean "poll". Perhaps when the CS jargon was initially translated into Japanese, somebody slipped up and used a homophone.
It appears that the user is dealing with an error that occurs intermittently with shibboleth, an SSO interface. If some daemon is polling some kind of thing in a way that triggers an error, it would probably seem to happen at random.
I strongly suspect the post was a joke, perhaps deliberately mangled by machine-translating it not just once but multiple times between different languages.
Note that in the original thread, there was someone who requested (in Japanese) to repeat the question in Japanese, and was ignored.
Trying to reverse engineer the translation errors when you know zero Japanese is absurd.
I'm only semi-fluent in Japanese, but none of it makes sense to me. "Runtime" (in the computing-related sense) in Japanese is 実行時, or one might use the English word tansliterated to Kana, ランタイム, but there is absolutely no connection from either of those to goats.
"Please apologize for your stupidity" Lol
Laughed so hard that I cried the first time I read that XD