https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation

The poster is saying that a case can wear out and be replaced without damage to the phone. You can let the case take all the damage, then get a new one. But if you let a phone take all the damage (even if it's a tougher phone), you can't remove that damage.

That aside, I think there's a lot more complexity than you're presenting. The issue is who gets to benefit from what work.

As hackers, we build cool things. And our ability to build cool things comes in large part from standing on the shoulders of giants. Free and open sharing of ideas is a powerful force for human progress.

But people also have to eat. Which means even as hackers focused on building cool things, we need to get paid. We need to capture for ourselves some of the economic value of what we produce. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for what you create.

Right now, there is a great deal of hacker output the economic value of which is being captured almost exclusively by LLM vendors. And sure, the LLM is more amazing than whatever code or post or book or lyric it was trained on. And sure, the LLM value comes from the sum of the parts of its source material instead of the value of any individual source. But fundamentally the LLM couldn't exist without the source material, and yet the LLM vendor is the one who gets to eat.

The balance between free and open exchange of ideas and paying value creators a portion of the value they create is not an easy question, and it's not anti-hacker to raise it. There are places where patents and other forms of exclusive rights seem to be criminally mismanaged, stifling progress. But there's also "some random person in Nebraska" who has produced billions of dollars in value and will never see a penny of it. Choosing progress alone as the goal will systematically deprive and ultimately drive away the very people whose contributions are enabling the progress. (And of course choosing "fair" repayment alone as the goal will shut down progress and allow less "fair" players to take over... that's why this isn't easy.)

Record companies have in fact, for decades, been going after sites for showing lyrics. If you play guitar, for example, it's almost impossible to find chords/tabs that include the lyrics because sites get shut down for doing that.

But no, nothing is sacred. Not only that, from a historical perspective, the current pace of language change is shockingly slow because of the impact of media. It would not be at all unusual for a word like drop to move entirely to a new metaphorical meaning causing other words to have to fill in the gap. In German, you "let fall" something. Even if anything was sacred, "drop" would be far, far from sacred. It is very easy to replace.

(The closest thing to sacred is words for familiar, every day objects and people. "Mama" is pretty nearly universal, for example. But even so, we literally don't even know where the word "dog" came from, so no, nothing is sacred.)

There are many many examples if you search (or even better, read the book!), but here are a few:

"silly" originally meant something more like "blessed"

"fear" meant "danger", referring to a thing feared, not the feeling

"nice" meant "foolish" and literally comes from roots mean "not knowing"

This kind of change in meaning is very, very normal. This is just how language works. I really think you will enjoy the book. The author is very easy to read and covers a ton of linguistic ground.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312250

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

This really isn't a word game; it's a trivia game, and if you like trivia and know pop culture, I can imagine it would be fun. But I don't like trivia or know pop culture, so it was just random guessing and experiencing the insanely aggressive negative feedback for being wrong over and over (would definitely tone that down).

Sorry, but not for me. Best of luck with finding your target users! Nice design work and name.

Non-verbal responses can only happen in 1) an existing conversation with 2) a small group.

Likes often happen 1) in place of conversation and 2) within a large group.

A like could be given drive-by by any of your 1000 connections at any with no other engagement. That is nothing like "uh huh" and head nods. In fact, if someone outside your small group conversation interjects an "uh huh" randomly while walking past, it's a bit rude.

But if I could see the occasional (low frequency) update on things in their life or interesting to them... I could maybe see an opportunity to reach out for a real conversation about something of mutual interest.

Imagine you're suddenly teleported to a party with a hundred people you know and like but aren't super close to. How do you join a conversation? I mean, if it was people you were really close to, you'd just go up and talk to someone. That's group chat / SMS. But if it's more aquaintence level... one of two things probably happens: You overhear something that you're interested in and connect on that, or you randomly drop in various conversations at a surface level until something clicks.

That's what I'm after. Conversation that naturally flows from a spark. You don't need that with your closest friends, but you don't need a social network to keep up with your closest friends either. I imagine social networking as the tool to provide ongoing sparks for real direct interactive conversations on an occasional but ongoing basis with people you aren't close enough to to just call/text.

Friends *can* give non-verbal cues in real life that they are interested (nodding, laughing, etc.), but likes are very much not like those non-verbal cues. Non-verbal cues only work in a very small group. There is no non-verbal cue that works to show interest in the context of "any of your friends" in real life. Emoji reactions in the context of a back-and-forth chat could work as non-verbal cues, but again, those are very different from drive-by likes with no additional engagement.

In this hypothetical social network, if you post something and no one responds to it or engages with it in any way verbally, you would be encouraged to do the same thing you would do in real life if you kept trying to talk about something in a group of friends and no one engaged with it verbally... find something else to talk about (or find a different group for that topic).

The goal is very much to mirror the experience of talking to your friends, but facilitated in a way that makes it more asynchronous and scalable (within the limit of your actual real life connections).

There are a lot of people in my life I would love to stay better connected with, but maintaining a direct chat can be difficult (what to say) and it doesn't always make sense to put people in group chats because the group might only make sense to me (people I used to work with that I actually like, for example). If I could post about what's going on in my life, what I'm working on, what I'm into right now, etc. and have my real-life friends opt-in to an actual conversation about that... well then it's much easier to stay in touch. I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing. If we aren't mutually talking to each other, we aren't engaging as friends no matter how much they may like it. They're just my audience if they have nothing to say back.

Sorry I didn't have time to make this shorter. My goal isn't to convince anyone of anything, just to share a perspective that might be interesting to you, OP or anyone else building something "social". You might sum it all up with the question: What if social media tried to be as much like real life friendship and as little like "influencing" as possible?

So fix these problems.

1. No followers. Mutual connections only. Put a strict limit of 1000 connections in place to enforce this. No one actually has a mutual connection with more than 1000 people. This only hurts people trying to gain an audience. Heck, make it so if you haven't read someone else's posts in a year, they stop seeing yours. Do whatever it takes to prevent one-to-many connections.

2. No public content. No one wants the whole world to read their conversations with their friends. The only reason you would want that is if you want to build an audience.

3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

4. No newsfeed. Don't reward people for never shutting up. Maybe a chronological list of *friends* by most recent update and click into that to see all their updates.

5. No algorithm. Give people tools to find what they want to see; don't try to decide for them.

6. No re-post, no share, no forward, etc. Content lives in one place only, the account of the person who posted it, and it is only visible to who they said it should be visible to.

There are some interesting ideas here but it feels like it's lacking a driving force pushing the game forward. It seems like the players can just keep rearranging their pieces in their own area refusing to engage and risk capture. Retreat seems to often be a sensible strategy.

Perhaps this is most similar to chess but in chess if your opponent just moves back and forth you can easily line up an unstoppable attack while they are messing around. It's unclear here how to avoid the situation where the opponents just dance around each other making sure they never get captured.

Could also compare to Stratego where there just isn't anywhere to retreat to, forcing players to engage.

Other abstracts like go and Othello are always adding pieces to the board so there's no way to stall or slow play the game.

Most existing formats are really bad for at least one of these. Tables in JSON have tons of repetition. XML doesn't have a clear and obvious way to do maps. Almost anything other than XML is awkward at best for node trees.

Confetti seems to cover maps, trees, and non-nested lists really well, which isn't a combination any other format I'm aware of covers as well.

Nested lists and tables seem like they would be more awkward, though from what I can tell "-" is a legal argument, so you could do:

    nestedlist {
        - { - 1 ; - 2 }
        - {
            - { - a ; - b }
            - { - c ; - d }
        }
    }

I think a table could be done like JSON/HTML with repeated keys, but maybe also like:

    table name age favorite-color {
        row Bob 87 red
        row "Someone else" 106 "bright neon green"
    }

In any event, I love seeing more exploration of configuration languages, so thanks for sharing this!

My number 1 request is a parser on the documentation page that shows parse tree and converts to JSON or other formats so you can play with it.

I think that captures what keeps me off social media.

I enjoy a good ordinary conversation with my friends and aquaintences, but social media won't let you have that. Every post, no matter how unserious and innocuous, is a valid target for competition or outright abuse/taunting/mocking/shaming/threatening, which I suppose Aristotle didn't encounter often enough to put on his list.

This is covered in (among many other places) the introduction to the Wikipedia article on sign language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language

Training a neural net to calculate sines is like the math equivalent of using an LLM to reverse a string. Sure, you *can*, but the idea only makes sense if you don't understand how fundamentally solvable the problem is with a more direct approach.

It's always worth looking if mathematicians already have a solution to a problem before reaching for AI/ML techniques. Unfortunately, a lot of effort is probably being spent these days programming some kind of AI/ML to solve problems that have a known, efficient, maybe even proven optimal solution that developers just don't know about.