6 ms·

I hate to break it to you, but the definition has already changed. It now means to build software exclusively using AI/LLM. It's similar to the whole hacker/cr

I hate to break it to you, but the definition has already changed. It now means to build software exclusively using AI/LLM. It's similar to the whole hacker/cracker debate. Words become defined by the one that has the most influence over the community and sometimes evolve on their own through places like social media.

9rx 1y ago
Words mean whatever the speaker (or author, in this case) defines them as.
- esperent 1y ago
  Words are defined by consensus of the community using them. That's the primary source of semantic meaning. Next one down is dictionary definition (or claim to authority, for example a tweet where the term was first used). But community meaning takes precedence. Authors are free to use a nonstandard meaning but should provide readers with their definition if they want to be understood.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > Words are defined by consensus of the community using them. No. That would make it impossible for someone new to a community to communicate with a community, all while at the same time a community isn't going to accept someone new who isn't communicating. Yet clearly people do join communities. What happens in reality is that everyone accepts that the speaker's definition reigns supreme, and if there is suspicion – absent of a definition – that there is a discrepancy between the speaker's definition and own's own definition, the speaker will be asked to clarify. A speaker may eventually adopt a community's definition, but that doesn't always happen either. Look at the Rust users here. They hang desperately onto words like enum that do not match the community definition. But it doesn't really matter, does it? We remember that when they say enums they really mean sum types and move on with life.
    - esperent 1y ago
      > Yet clearly people do join communities. "Communities" here also have a hierarchy: 1. All speakers of a language 2. Speakers in a region (dialect) 3. Subgroups like teenagers, engineers, gamers, redditors 4. Sub-sub groups like teenagers from a specific school, engineers of a specific discipline, gamers of a certain game x. Personal dialect (idiolect), which is a sub group that exists separately to all of these and is most closely related to family and the friend group you had as a child and teenager. We are all members of many different groups which intermesh, and we seemlessly switch meaning and pronunciation as we do that (code switching). When joining a community, people start at the top (learn French) then move through subgroups. Dictionaries and textbooks are designed to match as closely as possible to the top level community's consensus of word meaning, which, being large, is also the most static. But any language learner will know that textbooks can only get you so far in learning how language is actually spoken day to day. You have to join the community to learn that. The same applies as you go down to dialects and other sub groups. You can learn a bit before you join, but becoming a part of the community, linguistically, can only happen after joining.
- xnx 1y ago
  Isn't it the converse(?)? Words mean whatever the audience understands them as.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    No. A speaker can only speak with words as he understands them. It is impossible to know what other people are thinking. A good speaker will define the words as he speaks (still relying on some baseline shared understanding of the most common words, of course; there is only so much time in the day...) so there is no room for confusion, but in absence of that it is expected that the listener will question any words that show an apparent disconnect in meaning, allowing the speaker to clear up what was meant, to ensure both parties can land on the same page.
    - sampullman 1y ago
      In theory, but in practice the audience understanding is important, and communication doesn't always end up with both sides on the same page. Even more so when it's an author/reader relationship. The reader is free to interpret the book/article/etc. how they want, and if enough agree, it becomes the consensus.
      - 9rx 1y ago
        > but in practice the audience understanding is important Where audience understanding is important than you will definitely go out of your way to ensure that definitions are made abundantly clear and that the audience agrees that they understand. But, in actual practice, most of the time the audience understanding really doesn't matter. Most people speak for the sake of themselves and themselves alone. If the audience doesn't get it, that's their problem. Like here, it means nothing to me if you can't understand what I'm writing.
        afiori 1y ago
        In that case the author is their own audience
- gensym 1y ago
  Quiddity lamp verdant, sempiternal. Dog pulchritudinous chair velleity? Mountain? Scrimshanker butter, petrichor.
  - auxbuss 1y ago
    Verily.
  - afiori 1y ago
    Agreed
- polotics 1y ago
  I live by this rule: The meaning of a message is what has been understood. To each their own, right?
  - 9rx 1y ago
    I live by the rule: If something seems a little off, question the speaker about what they mean. It is likely they are using a different definition than you are familiar with. Accept what they tell you. Their definition is what matters. I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully. To each their own. However, we're all in this together.
    - simonw 1y ago
      Absolutely agree with you on this. I've lost count of the number of times a conversation has been put back on track by realizing that the participants hate working from subtly (or wildly) different definitions of some key term without realizing it.
  - afiori 1y ago
    The parent said that words mean what the speaker wants them to mean, you are saying that words mean what the listener understand them to mean.
- afiori 1y ago
  This is the same as saying that words have no meaning! Under this mental framework why would it be wrong to say that every living human can speak fluent french? How would you even know which language anyone is speaking? Counterproposal: words are a tool for communication and meaning is something we gather from the communication. In this words are no different than hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language. The parties to a communication can only communicate effectively if they agree enough on the meaning of words/gestures/expressions/actions (which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know)
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know You can, however, speak a language you do know even when the listener doesn't know said language. Thus proving that the words spoken are defined by the speaker. It must be that way, fundamentally – as you suggest, you can only speak the language you know. If that tells that words have no meaning, sure. That assertion means nothing anyway.
    - afiori 1y ago
      My main issue with either "the speaker defines the meaning of words" and "the listener defines the meaning of words" is the resulting definition is useless for all practical and theoretical concerns. It is a meaningless meaning of the word meaning. What they are trying to say is "the speaker defines the meaning of words" -> everybody understand things differently and there is no external absolute authority of meaning and "the listener defines the meaning of words" -> people are going to understand their interpretation of what you say, not what you mean Both are useful and important statement people can learn from while "X defines the meaning of words" is meaningless.
      - 9rx 1y ago
        The listener is only a consumer. It cannot define the words. It is not responsible for their use. It interprets, and to be sure misinterprets, the words, but that, while similar, is subtly different. Of course, at this point we're ultimately getting stuck in that nerd thing I spoke of in another comment: "I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully." So, while hilarious, I will break the cycle and ask you to clarify what you mean by "define" so that I can shift to using your definition. I'd have used it from the start but I haven't quite figured out how to read your mind yet, so I as the speaker, unfortunately, was beholden to defining it as I understand it.
smokel 1y ago
Indeed, this is not how language evolves. You can't dictate the meaning of words. Another unfortunate example is the increasingly negative connotation assigned to the word "algorithm".
- dylan604 1y ago
  at this point, those that use algorithm deserve the negative connotation. just like those that use synergy deserved to be mocked. when words are used just for the sake of using the word in word salad text, they quickly lose meaningful intent as the listeners hear them as shibboleths that the speaker is talking out of their arse. bet
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- drfuchs 1y ago
  Similarly, “hacker” used to be positive, until the public at large got ahold of it.
  - cruffle_duffle 1y ago
    They did. But that was back in the 2000s, when nobody really understood the nuance. Today, calling someone a “hacker” to mean “computer criminal” almost feels like a boomer move. We’ve got way better language now: white hat, black hat, script kiddie, scammer (and all its lovely subgenres—pig butchering, refund scammers), phisher, etc. Not to mention whatever we’re calling the folks running dark net markets these days. And while the general public might not know the fine distinctions between these, I think society does get that there’s a whole spectrum of actors now. That wasn’t true in 2000—the landscape of online crime (and white hat work) hadn’t evolved yet. Honestly, I’m just glad the debate’s over. “Cracker” always sounded goofy, and RMS pushing it felt like peak pedantry… par for course. That said, this whole “vibe coding” thing feels like we’re at the beginning of a similar arc. It’s a broad, fuzzy label right now, and the LLM landscape hasn’t had time to split and specialize yet. Eventually I predict we’ll get more precise terms for all the ways people build software with LLM’s. Not just describing the process but the people behind the scenes too. I mean, perhaps the term “script kiddie” will get a second life?
nathan_douglas 1y ago
Isn't that what it originally meant?
- Timber-6539 1y ago
  No. Just read the original tweet from Karpathy.
simonw 1y ago
Given that this conversation is happening on the website called "Hacker News" I was hoping somebody would bring up the hacker/cracker thing!
- dang 1y ago
  It used to be a painfully repetitive flamewar topic but now it feels quaint
- tptacek 1y ago
  I give myself credit for ending this argument, here and everywhere else, for all time, for us and our children and our children's children. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865063
polotics 1y ago
Alright so now I'm good, I will just refer to some of the code I've seen recently as having been produced with "Slopcoding". Totally works kthxbye
jimbokun 1y ago
> I hate to break it to you, but the definition has already changed. The article acknowledges this.
alganet 1y ago
Self-defacing hack-o-tron is self aware! Ideas, ideas are much sturdier. If you change the meaning of something too radically, it has a tendency to snap back.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]

9rx 1y ago

Words mean whatever the speaker (or author, in this case) defines them as.

esperent 1y ago
Words are defined by consensus of the community using them. That's the primary source of semantic meaning. Next one down is dictionary definition (or claim to authority, for example a tweet where the term was first used). But community meaning takes precedence. Authors are free to use a nonstandard meaning but should provide readers with their definition if they want to be understood.
- 9rx 1y ago
  > Words are defined by consensus of the community using them. No. That would make it impossible for someone new to a community to communicate with a community, all while at the same time a community isn't going to accept someone new who isn't communicating. Yet clearly people do join communities. What happens in reality is that everyone accepts that the speaker's definition reigns supreme, and if there is suspicion – absent of a definition – that there is a discrepancy between the speaker's definition and own's own definition, the speaker will be asked to clarify. A speaker may eventually adopt a community's definition, but that doesn't always happen either. Look at the Rust users here. They hang desperately onto words like enum that do not match the community definition. But it doesn't really matter, does it? We remember that when they say enums they really mean sum types and move on with life.
  - esperent 1y ago
    > Yet clearly people do join communities. "Communities" here also have a hierarchy: 1. All speakers of a language 2. Speakers in a region (dialect) 3. Subgroups like teenagers, engineers, gamers, redditors 4. Sub-sub groups like teenagers from a specific school, engineers of a specific discipline, gamers of a certain game x. Personal dialect (idiolect), which is a sub group that exists separately to all of these and is most closely related to family and the friend group you had as a child and teenager. We are all members of many different groups which intermesh, and we seemlessly switch meaning and pronunciation as we do that (code switching). When joining a community, people start at the top (learn French) then move through subgroups. Dictionaries and textbooks are designed to match as closely as possible to the top level community's consensus of word meaning, which, being large, is also the most static. But any language learner will know that textbooks can only get you so far in learning how language is actually spoken day to day. You have to join the community to learn that. The same applies as you go down to dialects and other sub groups. You can learn a bit before you join, but becoming a part of the community, linguistically, can only happen after joining.
xnx 1y ago
Isn't it the converse(?)? Words mean whatever the audience understands them as.
- 9rx 1y ago
  No. A speaker can only speak with words as he understands them. It is impossible to know what other people are thinking. A good speaker will define the words as he speaks (still relying on some baseline shared understanding of the most common words, of course; there is only so much time in the day...) so there is no room for confusion, but in absence of that it is expected that the listener will question any words that show an apparent disconnect in meaning, allowing the speaker to clear up what was meant, to ensure both parties can land on the same page.
  - sampullman 1y ago
    In theory, but in practice the audience understanding is important, and communication doesn't always end up with both sides on the same page. Even more so when it's an author/reader relationship. The reader is free to interpret the book/article/etc. how they want, and if enough agree, it becomes the consensus.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      > but in practice the audience understanding is important Where audience understanding is important than you will definitely go out of your way to ensure that definitions are made abundantly clear and that the audience agrees that they understand. But, in actual practice, most of the time the audience understanding really doesn't matter. Most people speak for the sake of themselves and themselves alone. If the audience doesn't get it, that's their problem. Like here, it means nothing to me if you can't understand what I'm writing.
      - afiori 1y ago
        In that case the author is their own audience
gensym 1y ago
Quiddity lamp verdant, sempiternal. Dog pulchritudinous chair velleity? Mountain? Scrimshanker butter, petrichor.
- auxbuss 1y ago
  Verily.
- afiori 1y ago
  Agreed
polotics 1y ago
I live by this rule: The meaning of a message is what has been understood. To each their own, right?
- 9rx 1y ago
  I live by the rule: If something seems a little off, question the speaker about what they mean. It is likely they are using a different definition than you are familiar with. Accept what they tell you. Their definition is what matters. I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully. To each their own. However, we're all in this together.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Absolutely agree with you on this. I've lost count of the number of times a conversation has been put back on track by realizing that the participants hate working from subtly (or wildly) different definitions of some key term without realizing it.
- afiori 1y ago
  The parent said that words mean what the speaker wants them to mean, you are saying that words mean what the listener understand them to mean.
afiori 1y ago
This is the same as saying that words have no meaning! Under this mental framework why would it be wrong to say that every living human can speak fluent french? How would you even know which language anyone is speaking? Counterproposal: words are a tool for communication and meaning is something we gather from the communication. In this words are no different than hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language. The parties to a communication can only communicate effectively if they agree enough on the meaning of words/gestures/expressions/actions (which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know)
- 9rx 1y ago
  > which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know You can, however, speak a language you do know even when the listener doesn't know said language. Thus proving that the words spoken are defined by the speaker. It must be that way, fundamentally – as you suggest, you can only speak the language you know. If that tells that words have no meaning, sure. That assertion means nothing anyway.
  - afiori 1y ago
    My main issue with either "the speaker defines the meaning of words" and "the listener defines the meaning of words" is the resulting definition is useless for all practical and theoretical concerns. It is a meaningless meaning of the word meaning. What they are trying to say is "the speaker defines the meaning of words" -> everybody understand things differently and there is no external absolute authority of meaning and "the listener defines the meaning of words" -> people are going to understand their interpretation of what you say, not what you mean Both are useful and important statement people can learn from while "X defines the meaning of words" is meaningless.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      The listener is only a consumer. It cannot define the words. It is not responsible for their use. It interprets, and to be sure misinterprets, the words, but that, while similar, is subtly different. Of course, at this point we're ultimately getting stuck in that nerd thing I spoke of in another comment: "I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully." So, while hilarious, I will break the cycle and ask you to clarify what you mean by "define" so that I can shift to using your definition. I'd have used it from the start but I haven't quite figured out how to read your mind yet, so I as the speaker, unfortunately, was beholden to defining it as I understand it.

smokel 1y ago

Indeed, this is not how language evolves. You can't dictate the meaning of words. Another unfortunate example is the increasingly negative connotation assigned to the word "algorithm".

dylan604 1y ago
at this point, those that use algorithm deserve the negative connotation. just like those that use synergy deserved to be mocked. when words are used just for the sake of using the word in word salad text, they quickly lose meaningful intent as the listeners hear them as shibboleths that the speaker is talking out of their arse. bet
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
drfuchs 1y ago
Similarly, “hacker” used to be positive, until the public at large got ahold of it.
- cruffle_duffle 1y ago
  They did. But that was back in the 2000s, when nobody really understood the nuance. Today, calling someone a “hacker” to mean “computer criminal” almost feels like a boomer move. We’ve got way better language now: white hat, black hat, script kiddie, scammer (and all its lovely subgenres—pig butchering, refund scammers), phisher, etc. Not to mention whatever we’re calling the folks running dark net markets these days. And while the general public might not know the fine distinctions between these, I think society does get that there’s a whole spectrum of actors now. That wasn’t true in 2000—the landscape of online crime (and white hat work) hadn’t evolved yet. Honestly, I’m just glad the debate’s over. “Cracker” always sounded goofy, and RMS pushing it felt like peak pedantry… par for course. That said, this whole “vibe coding” thing feels like we’re at the beginning of a similar arc. It’s a broad, fuzzy label right now, and the LLM landscape hasn’t had time to split and specialize yet. Eventually I predict we’ll get more precise terms for all the ways people build software with LLM’s. Not just describing the process but the people behind the scenes too. I mean, perhaps the term “script kiddie” will get a second life?

nathan_douglas 1y ago

Isn't that what it originally meant?

Timber-6539 1y ago
No. Just read the original tweet from Karpathy.

simonw 1y ago

Given that this conversation is happening on the website called "Hacker News" I was hoping somebody would bring up the hacker/cracker thing!

dang 1y ago
It used to be a painfully repetitive flamewar topic but now it feels quaint
tptacek 1y ago
I give myself credit for ending this argument, here and everywhere else, for all time, for us and our children and our children's children. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865063

polotics 1y ago

Alright so now I'm good, I will just refer to some of the code I've seen recently as having been produced with "Slopcoding". Totally works kthxbye

jimbokun 1y ago

> I hate to break it to you, but the definition has already changed. The article acknowledges this.

alganet 1y ago

Self-defacing hack-o-tron is self aware! Ideas, ideas are much sturdier. If you change the meaning of something too radically, it has a tendency to snap back.

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]