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The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon
- kalaksi 1y agoA classic, for sure. The page is still there: https://groups.google.com/g/shibboleth-users/c/EjvS2Cgio6c https://groups.google.com/g/shibboleth-users/c/EjvS2Cgio6c
- reedf1 1y agoMy 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".
- lordnacho 1y agoWhen 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.
- oh_my_goodness 1y agoWow, "pull weather" ~ "suck wind".
- tclancy 1y agoAnd “suck wind” is a US English idiom for being out of breath.
- lithocarpus 1y agoLiterally pulling the weather inside by breathing. Same as sucking wind. It may be an idiom but it's one where the literal meaning fits.
- mallowdram 1y agoAll 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.
- nyeah 1y agoThat appears to be meaningless. Please explain without using language.
- mallowdram 1y agoIf 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.
- the_af 1y agoI'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.
- mallowdram 1y agoI'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/1cXtU97SCjxaHCrf8UVeQGYajatFQ_MU69MBDmIFe58I/edit?usp=sharing 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.
- gjm11 1y ago"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. [EDITED to add:] I see that this has got some downvotes, but I'm having trouble figuring out why. If you read this and didn't like it, I'd be very grateful if you let me know what problem(s) you see. Thanks! (Of course maybe it's just random drive-by haters, but more likely there's something it would be useful for me to know. Maybe something I wrote is wrong, in which case I want to know. Maybe to some readers it looks like I'm insulting the person I was replying to or something, which wasn't at all my intention and if that's going on then I should probably clarify or apologize or something. I dunno.)
- Timwi 1y ago> I see that this has got some downvotes, but I'm having trouble figuring out why. If you read this and didn't like it, I'd be very grateful if you let me know what problem(s) you see. Thanks! Sure thing, I'll try. Your comment does not contribute to the discussion. It appears that you completely missed the point the comment you replied to made. The point was that “used to” has no inherent meaning and would seem odd to someone who is very new to English, and your response was just to explain what it means. You argue that it's not actually that odd but then basically prove how odd it is by highlighting how much obscure/obsolete knowledge is required to fully explain it.
- gjm11 1y agoHuh, interesting. For what it's worth[1], here's how I see the same matters: [1] Which may not be much; I will in no way be offended if you don't care. I didn't miss that the person I was replying to said that "used to" is odd and confusing. I wasn't arguing that "used to" isn't odd (still less that it isn't confusing for novice English-speakers -- it certainly is). I was arguing that it's a different kind of odd from e.g. "at trække vejret" in Danish, and (to me, but evidently not to you!) I think it's an interestingly different kind of odd, which is why I thought it was worth pointing out. I wasn't attempting to "explain what it means", which obviously the person I was replying to already knows. I was attempting to explain why it means what it does. (In particular, it isn't true that "used to" has no inherent meaning[2]. It really is a past tense of "use", and while the specific meaning it's a past tense of is largely dead you can still, if you squint at it, see how it's of a piece with the other meanings of "use".) [2] Except in so far as no word has inherent meaning. Evidently, none of that came across the way I intended (or, perhaps, it came across fine but I misjudged how interested anyone else might be in the history): I should probably either have been more explicit or not bothered at all :-).
- jodrellblank 1y ago> "In German, to breathe is just a verb: atmen" There's an interesting rabbit hole to go down for English words from Latin "spirare" - to breathe, and how it connects air and breath of life, spirituality. We get respiration (re-spire, re-breathing), inspire (blowing on something, figuratively breathing life/fire into it), expire (breathing out the last breath of life), spirit (a vital substance of life), conspire (to breathe together, speak similar thoughts). https://www.etymonline.com/word/respire https://www.etymonline.com/word/respire https://www.etymonline.com/word/inspire https://www.etymonline.com/word/inspire https://www.etymonline.com/word/spirit https://www.etymonline.com/word/spirit etc. Words that were almost literal Latin that are now more figurative English based on a sort of French / medieval version of the Latin version. [edit: just remembering that the rather Germanic and plain "Breathe on me breath of God" used to give me the image of someone going "huuuhhh" on their spectacles before polishing them. The next bit is "till all this earthly part of me Glows with thy fire divine" so it is supposed to be exciting and soul-sparking. I only feel the poetic imagery of "fill me with life, blow on the embers of my soul, oh life giving wind-deity", through Romance *spire* words not Anglish *breath* words. "inspire my spirit(2) through respiration, you spiritual spirit(1)"]
- BizarroLand 1y agoInspiration, also!
- unmole 1y ago> In German, to breathe is just a verb: atmen If you want to go down the Proto-Indo-European rabbit hole, the Sanskrit word for soul is atman.
- wvbdmp 1y agoOf course, the association between moving air and the supernatural is not constrained to latin but seems to be pretty universal. The connection between breath and life is obvious, and so we have god “breathe life into” Adam’s still lifeless clay form. But even at the very beginning of Genesis, god himself is described in hebrew as a “wind” or “breath”. I’m sure many more and older languages feature these conflations, and the jews probably carried them over from earlier semitic cultures.
- otikik 1y ago> "I used to eat meat". In Spanish (from Spain), someone who "eats both meat and fish" is an expression for someone who is bisexual.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoEats both tuna and sausage?
- willvarfar 1y agoFrom 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNYcVuO-PoE :D
- zoom6628 1y agoIdeas: 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
- kqr 1y agoAuthor here. I really like that interpretation. How would you like to be credited for it?
- morpher 1y agoCould it be "command line flag"?
- yorwba 1y ago龍旂 is the dragon flag of Chinese emperors. https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%AB%9C%E6%97%97-658618 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 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.
- oulipo2 1y ago"Please apologize for your stupidity" Lol
- danparsonson 1y agoLaughed so hard that I cried the first time I read that XD
- zoom6628 1y agoThat's an XKCD comic in the making ;-)
- brazzy 1y agoI 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.
- wrsh07 1y agoI think there's a chance you're correct, but my gpt translation^ has him saying "please email me directly" ^ Hello, Mr. Matsumoto. This is Nate. Google Translate is incompetent and vulgar. (LOL) Please email me directly. You can write in Japanese. I intend to help you. See you,
- thaumasiotes 1y agoCan you explain why Nate's request identifies him as ネート [Neeto], but is signed off "Neito"?
- aetherson 1y agoIn katakana you lengthen the "e" sound with a dash-like character, but in hiragana you lengthen it with an "i" character, and most romanization schemes follow the hiragana and write the long e sound as ei.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoThanks!
- scythe 1y agoIt 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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> It seems possible that "dragon" might be a corruption of "daemon"? Why? Those aren't similar concepts. There's no connection between them.
- zoom6628 1y agoDragon used as part of a phrase to describe some demons. So a poor translation tool maybe would see daemon as misspelling of demon and render "dragon". More wild speculation for the curious :-)
- rcxdude 1y agoThis puts me in mind of 'English as she is spoke', a hilariously inaccurate English phrasebook written by a Portuguese man who didn't speak much, if any English and instead probably used a French-English dictionary to translate a Portuguese-French phrasebook into a Portuguese-English phrasebook. It includes such well-known 'Idiotisms and Proverbs' as 'to craunch a marmoset'
- conartist6 1y agoWell..? And..? How does one craunch a marmoset?
- zoom6628 1y agoWith great care !
- layer8 1y agoPrevious discussion from almost exactly 15 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719396
- zharknado 1y agoI’ll play! Chat thinks it’s a kana segmentation error in a list of possible hypothesized problems/causes that get mis-rendered as literal nouns, such as “XML風, 設定方法, 処理の流れ / 処理流” such that roughly “XML style” -> “-style” -> “wind”, “setting method” -> “-method” -> “pole”, “processing flow” -> “-flow” -> “dragon” (Note that XMl, setting, and processing are just examples to illustrate.) The LLM assures me that “Japanese writers often end diagnostic questions with a compact list of possible causes (A、B、Cでしょうか？).” Its final verdict: “very likely the English “wind, pole, dragon” = MT literal translations of a compact Japanese list such as 〜風、〜法（方法）、〜流 (-style, -method, -flow). The pattern, repetition, and the fact they appear at question ends all support this strongly.”
- rdiddly 1y agoIt feels to me, without any external substantiation and without knowing anything about shibboleth, that "insult to father's stones" might refer to an error raised by calling code or a parent process, in protest of a condition caused by called code or a child process. Stones could be an overly literal translation of "steps." So something about the child process "insulting" the execution (steps) of the parent? Oh and someone downvoted that. I love this site and all you wonderful people.
- kapitanjakc 1y agoI've had that thing bookmarked in my machine for quite some time now. Whenever I open it, it gives me a good laugh.
- utilityhotbar 1y agoThe triplet of wind, pole, dragon appears multiple times in the same order, so is possibly a single phrase that has been broken up into three parts by Google Translate. In error reports that I have seen, the second line would usually convey something about the user's system. For example: > Minecraft installer keeps crashing, I'm using a Macbook pro 2014. (...) Based on that, if I had to guess "wind" is actually a coercion of the katakana ウィンドウ into ウインド based on simple pattern-matching, then translated into "wind". I'm sure you can guess where this is going... that's right, ウィンドウ is "Window/Windows" (for an example of how it is used as tech terminology, see https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%89%E3%82%A6 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3...). Typing ウィンドウ into google search also autocompletes with ウィンドウ 10 , ウィンドウ 11 (this should be easy enough to guess). Then the whole thing can be read as > When I try to install the runtime it throws an error. Does this happen a lot on Windows [Version]? I tried two, three times and it throws an error [Error] > That's not the exact error but it's about right. Is the full error in the runtime log? [Something]? Is this a problem with the JSP error handler on Windows [Version] when you install the runtime? Or maybe I just got something wrong with the runtime? Otherwise I subscribe most to @brazzy 's point about this possibly just being a joke or a prank with multiple layers of machine translation. Still, this doesn't exactly seem like a big newsgroup so I don't see why someone would go to the effort.
- oerdier 1y agoThis kind of translation problem is the focal point of Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 5 episode 2, "Darmok" (1991). I watched it for the first time after somebody referenced it, as I did just now, as an example of this kind of problem. Despite my knowing the point of the plot beforehand, I found the episode was still interesting. I wish I could mention this episode here for language enthusiasts to enjoy without revealing the main plot point (that idioms in languages are hard to translate). Shaka, when the walls fell. But I think the very act of mentioning it in a thread on this topic does so unavoidably. Temba, at rest.