Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be gaining any by this move.

That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their public image is as bad as it can get.

Meanwhile, search was better in the past and is at this point the best it's going to be.

Enshittification comes for all things.

Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.

Welding is peculiar in that becoming a professional welder takes a great deal of time and effort (and probably some talent that I don't have), but becoming a terrible welder can be accomplished by anyone in a couple of weekends, and there is great utility in being a terrible welder. Well worth the investment of a couple hundred dollars and a couple weekends.

With LLMs there is now much more utility in being a terrible programmer too. A couple of weekends yields real return on the effort now.

With that said, if it is a hallucination (and it sounds like it was), it's one of the more interesting ones I have encountered. It almost has the shape of a good idea.

Blade and handle material has certainly changed over the years, but I think good arguments about how relevant that is could be made both ways. They remain handled cutting tools, used in the same general way, for the same general purposes (though as you posted out, some use cases have gone away). Basically anyone from any of these periods would recognize a knife from any other, and be able to pick it up and make immediate use of it for all their normal knife related purposes.

To be clear though, I am now siding with the clankers and arguing for a hallucination. It's an interesting thing to think about, but it sounds like it's not an established concept in any way shape or form.

Searching for information is inherently an adversarial process. You want your attention in one place, other actors in the system want it in another. Any solution that doesn't suck will need to be aware of this.

Design features tend to persist.

The phrase/idiom "the purpose of a system is what it does" maps best to situations where a multiple decisions within a system make little sense when viewed through the lens of the stated purpose, but make perfect sense if the actual outcome is the desired one.

It is an invitation to analyze a system while suspending the assumption of good faith on the part of the implementors.

I would agree that "boiling milk" and "boiling oil" are very unlikely to get separate words, unless one of them happens to be an extremely common thing that people encounter a lot and that has special practical implications.

Milk might be a special case, in that it essentially is just water with some other stuff dissolved. It is to water as salt water is to water... but more so.

My guess would be that the single word might get pressed into service like "ice" does, but I think we'd have to find languages that include this word and survey native speakers. It could vary.

Nearly everyone encounters boiling water in everyday life, but do most people ever see other liquids boiling, even once, and especially during the historical periods that shaped our current languages? If not we might be getting into something like technical language, where daily life lines up poorly and terms and jargon get formalized.

I wonder if the connotative association is exactly what we are trying to capture here though, and if those other phrases also fit in at the "separate words but slightly special" end of the spectrum.

There is meaning being communicated in all of those phrases that would be obvious to most or all people who are embedded in the language and culture where they are used, and which transcends the definitions of the individual words themselves.

It seems that there are several axis here -- how explicit is meaning, how atomic, how literal, how substitutable are the individual words -- and all vary continuously.

That might all seem needlessly pedantic for the question of "should it warrant a dictionary entry", but if you are trying to extract all information encoded in a verbal exchange, they might be useful concepts.

At the same time, I am having intuitive issues seeing "hot dog" as an idiom, vs just an ordinary noun. It certainly seems to follow noun rules, and fit into speech as one.

I don't know for sure that it's NOT an idiom though. I could just be wrong here, and have intuition in need of calibration.

The decision makers who are the target audience for these metrics value "objective" data. They value the appearance of being quantitative, but lack the intellectual tools to distinguish between quantitative science and pseudoscience with numbers bolted on.

That's modern bureaucracy in a nutshell.

Our metrics for judging the quality of academic information are also the metrics for deciding the success of an academic's career. They are destined to be gamed.

We either need to turn peer review into an adversarial system where the reviewer has explicit incentives to find flaws and can advance their career by doing it well, or else we need totally different metrics for judging publications (which will probably need to evolve continuously).

We assume far too much good faith in this space.

"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.

They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.

If we are talking engineering, the term steam generally implies water vapor that is at or above the saturation temperature.

In every day usage they are usually drawing a distinction between visible and invisible water vapor, usually caused by the presence of liquid droplets, with "steam" being essentially "fog", but hotter.

I suspect the answer isn't binary, but it's interesting to think about.

This "sixth sense" phenomenon seems to pop up a lot. Crosswords are a great example. The sense some people are getting for detecting LLM output might be another.

Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?

It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.

Dictionaries are also language specific. We don't necessarily expect a 1:1 mapping of words between languages. I have personally always wondered if this subtley shapes thoughts in different languages as well.

We could have a similar debate about whether common suffixes and prefixes should be regarded as individual words.

Much like "planets" don't really exist as a separate natural object, words don't really exist in natural languages. They are artificial concepts, and therefore we will always have edge cases.

I would argue that it is still a useful discussion, as it sheds light on the nature of language (or of celestial bodies), even if the definitions defy the same rigour as mathematical concepts.

The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon.

We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability.

"Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Saturday night can retain some of the original meaning following substitution, whereas hot dog almost deserves a hyphen.