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What Google Translate Can Tell Us About Vibecoding
There has been rather a lot of doomsaying (and perhaps astroturfing) lately about LLMs as the end of computer programming. Much of the discussion has been lacking nuance, so I’d like to add mine. I see claims from one side that “I used
Read more…$LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDERto make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be unemployed in$ARBITRARY_TIME_WINDOW”, and from the other side flat-out rejections of the idea that this type of tool can have any utility.1 I think it best sheds light on these claims to examine them in the context of another field that’s been ahead of the curve on this: translation. -
Orientalism - to Fetish and Back Again
The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work. -Edward Said, Orientalism
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Linguistic Relativity and the Tyranny of the Compiler
The idea has been floating around in Linguistics for about a century, that language affects one’s thoughts. Known as linguistic relativity, aka the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this comes in two flavours: the strong version, where language determines and limits thought; and the weak version, where language only influences thought.1 For human languages, linguists largely agree that the strong version is false, and instead hold to the weak version.
We can propose a mechanism to explain this starting from two premises: humans are capable of abstract thought in the absence of language, and are capable of modifying their languages. From these, we can conclude not only that the strong version is false, but that the relationship appears to flow in the other direction: one thinks an abstract thought, and modifies their language to express it. Thought determines language.
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Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
TL;DR: Misaligned profit motives.
This has been on my mind for a while, and with a couple of things lately stoking my ire (the NFT resurgence, and Signal integrating MobileCoin), I’ve finally pushed myself to put it into words.
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It lives!
I guess I have this site now? I should probably write something for it.
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