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1246 points adrianh | 145 comments | | HN request time: 1.78s | source | bottom
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kragen ◴[] No.44491713[source]
I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works.

Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does. If it gets it wrong, that's a good sign my API is confusing, and how.

These are ways to harness what neural networks are best at: not providing accurate information but making shit up that is highly plausible, "hallucination". Creativity, not logic.

(The best thing about this is that I don't have to spend my time carefully tracking down the bugs GPT-4 has cunningly concealed in its code, which often takes longer than just writing the code the usual way.)

There are multiple ways that an interface can be bad, and being unintuitive is the only one that this will fix. It could also be inherently inefficient or unreliable, for example, or lack composability. The AI won't help with those. But it can make sure your API is guessable and understandable, and that's very valuable.

Unfortunately, this only works with APIs that aren't already super popular.

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1. suzzer99 ◴[] No.44492212[source]
> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of.

IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly.

I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.

But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.

The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

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2. normie3000 ◴[] No.44492777[source]
What's wrong with passive?
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3. kragen ◴[] No.44492812[source]
Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)
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4. plemer ◴[] No.44492911[source]
Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something.

Examples:

* Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal.

* Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.

* Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?]

Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes approval.

-

edited for clarity, detail

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5. kragen ◴[] No.44492974{3}[source]
Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers.

Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.

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6. bityard ◴[] No.44493037[source]
In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.
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7. kragen ◴[] No.44493065{3}[source]
I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it.

Consider:

> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:

> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure.

This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters.

Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory.

(Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.)

Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes:

> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten.

You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse:

> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come.

This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.

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8. Veen ◴[] No.44493094{3}[source]
I always like to share this when the passive voice comes up:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBk...

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9. ◴[] No.44493106[source]
10. DonHopkins ◴[] No.44493110{4}[source]
E-Prime is cool. OOPS! I mean E-Prime cools me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be.

E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're, there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's, what's, and that's.

Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.

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11. DonHopkins ◴[] No.44493145{3}[source]
Mistakes were made in the documentation.
12. arscan ◴[] No.44493206[source]
There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.
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13. umanwizard ◴[] No.44493243{3}[source]
You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your comment.

Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.

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14. kragen ◴[] No.44493271{5}[source]
I've had entire conversations in E-Prime. I found it an interestingly brain-twisting exercise, but still managed to smuggle in all kinds of covert presumptions of equivalence and essential (or analytic) attributes, even though E-Prime's designers intended it to force you to question such things.
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15. brookst ◴[] No.44493291{4}[source]
Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.
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16. brookst ◴[] No.44493308{4}[source]
Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.
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17. croes ◴[] No.44493413[source]
And that’s how everything gets flattened to same style/voice/etc.

That’s like getting rid of all languages and accents and switch to the same language

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18. exe34 ◴[] No.44493444[source]
I will never use grammarly, not matter how good they get. They've interrupted too many videos for me to let it pass.
19. exe34 ◴[] No.44493447{3}[source]
My favourite: "a decision was made to...".

It means "I decided to do this, but I don't have the balls to admit it."

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20. umanwizard ◴[] No.44493500{5}[source]
Why isn’t it passive voice?
21. IggleSniggle ◴[] No.44493588{4}[source]
That's funny, I always thought that meant, "my superior told me I had to do this obviously stupid thing but I'm not going to say my superior was the one who decided this obviously stupid thing." Only occasionally, that is said in a tongue-and-cheek way to refer directly to the speaker as the "superior in charge of the decision."
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22. horsawlarway ◴[] No.44493589{4}[source]
That's funny because I read this entirely differently (somewhat dependent on context)

"A decision was made to..." is often code for "The current author didn't agree with [the decision that was made] but it was outside their ability to influence"

Often because they were overruled by a superior, or outvoted by peers.

23. joshmarinacci ◴[] No.44493660{4}[source]
I think what you were saying is that it depends entirely on the type of writing you’re doing and who your audience is.
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24. andrewljohnson ◴[] No.44493679[source]
The same could be said for books about writing, like Williams or Strunk and White. The trick is to not apply what you learn indiscriminately.
25. bryanlarsen ◴[] No.44493693[source]
Refusing 2/3rds of grammarly's suggestions flattens everything to the same style/voice?
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26. kragen ◴[] No.44493697{4}[source]
Pullum is fantastic, thanks! I didn't know he'd recorded video lectures on this topic.
27. kragen ◴[] No.44493707{5}[source]
I think those are important considerations, but it depends even more on what you are attempting to express in the sentence in question. There's plenty of active-voice phrasing in the Gettysburg Address and Ecclesiastes that would not be improved by rewriting it in the passive voice.
28. kragen ◴[] No.44493732{5}[source]
Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice. But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".

I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

Why am I not sure it's correct? If I say, "In addition to the blood so red," I am quite sure that "red" is not in the passive voice, because it's not even a verb. It's an adjective. Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in English in contexts that are unambiguously not passive-voice verbs; for example, in "Vito is a made man now," the past participle "made" is being used as an attributive adjective. And this is structurally different from the attributive-verb examples of "truly verbal adjectives" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English, such as "The cat sitting on the fence is mine," and "The actor given the prize is not my favorite;" we could grammatically say "Vito is a man made whole now". That page calls the "made man" use of participles "deverbal adjectives", a term I don't think I've ever heard before:

> Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and similar meaning to) the participles, but behave grammatically purely as adjectives — they do not take objects, for example, as a verb might. For example: (...) Interested parties should apply to the office.

So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made", is it deverbal as it would be in "the already-made points" despite its positioning after the noun (occasionally valid for adjectives, as in "the blood so red"), or is it something else? I don't know. The smoothness of the transition to "the points already made by those numbskulls" (clearly passive voice) suggests that it is a passive-voice verb, but I'm not sure.

In sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 jcranmer says it's something called a "bare passive", but I'm not sure.

It's certainly a hilarious thing to put in a comment deploring the passive voice, at least.

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29. dataflow ◴[] No.44493773[source]
Hasn't Microsoft Word has style checkers for things like passive voice for decades?
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30. scubbo ◴[] No.44493780{3}[source]
No - that was implicitly in response to the sentence:

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

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31. coliveira ◴[] No.44493807{3}[source]
Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.
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32. PlunderBunny ◴[] No.44493826{3}[source]
Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?) that allowed the type of document to be specified, and setting that to ‘scientific paper’ allowed passive voice to be written without being flagged as an error.
33. kragen ◴[] No.44493836{4}[source]
I suspect that the disastrous results being envisioned are somewhat more severe than not being able to tell who wrote which memo. I understood the author to be suggesting things more like bankruptcy, global warfare, and extermination camps. But it's admittedly ambiguous.
34. PlunderBunny ◴[] No.44493855{3}[source]
It has its place. We were told to use passive voice when writing scientific document (lab reports, papers etc).
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35. jcranmer ◴[] No.44493881[source]
There's nothing wrong with the passive voice.

The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place.

I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.

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36. jll29 ◴[] No.44493888[source]
> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results

Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans. But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly that using said technology not as a tool, but in full automation mode, results will be 5% worse, but save 15% of staff costs; and they decide that that is a fantastic trade-off for the company - yet employees may lose and customers may lose.

The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control of what they develop, usually once the project is completed if they ever had control in the first place. What can we do? Perhaps write open source licenses that are less liberal?

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37. ◴[] No.44493910[source]
38. dylan604 ◴[] No.44493921{3}[source]
> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.

Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?

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39. dylan604 ◴[] No.44493935{5}[source]
That reads like several comments I've left in code when I've been told to do something very obviously dumb, but did not want to get tagged with the "why was it done this way?" by the next person reading the code
40. kragen ◴[] No.44493946{4}[source]
To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
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41. ◴[] No.44493957{5}[source]
42. jcranmer ◴[] No.44493969{5}[source]
"the points already made" is what is known as the "bare passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a more thorough description of the passive voice.

As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and assume that the forms that are less horrible somehow can't be the passive voice.

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43. Xorakios ◴[] No.44494048{3}[source]
had to giggle because Microsoft hadn't yet been founded when I was in high school!
44. badlibrarian ◴[] No.44494058{4}[source]
29% overhead (two of seven words) adds up.
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45. kragen ◴[] No.44494067{6}[source]
I'm not sure this is a "bare passive" like the beginning of "The day's work [being] done, they made their way back to the farmhouse," one of the bare-passive examples at your link. An analogous construction would be, "The points already [being] made, I ceased harassing the ignorant". But in "In addition to the points already made" this case "the point already made" is not a clause; it's a noun phrase, the object of the preposition "to". Its head is "points", and I believe that "made" is modifying that head.

Can you insert an elided copula into it without changing the meaning and grammatical structure? I'm not sure. I don't think so. I think "In addition to the points already being made" means something different: the object of the preposition "to" is now "being", and we are going to discuss things in addition to that state of affairs, perhaps other things that have happened to the points (being sharpened, perhaps, or being discarded), not things in addition to the points.

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46. insane_dreamer ◴[] No.44494137{4}[source]
The subject can also be the feature itself. active/passive:

- The Manage User menu item changes a user's status from active to inactive.

- A user's status is changed from active to inactive using the Manage User menu item.

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47. plemer ◴[] No.44494165{4}[source]
Then we agree.
48. hathawsh ◴[] No.44494192[source]
Here is a simple summary of the common voices/moods in technical writing:

- Active: The user presses the Enter key.

- Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed.

- Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key.

The imperative mood is concise and doesn't dance around questions about who's doing what. The reader is expected to do it.

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49. plemer ◴[] No.44494272{6}[source]
Would you mind identifying a few of the "smuggled presumptions"?
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50. ModernMech ◴[] No.44494307{7}[source]
"In addition to the points that have already been made"
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51. suzzer99 ◴[] No.44494330{3}[source]
Active is generally more concise and engages the reader more. Of course there are exceptions, like everything.

Internet posts have a very different style standard than a book.

52. ◴[] No.44494335[source]
53. dylan604 ◴[] No.44494339{5}[source]
great, someone can do math, but it is not awkward nor wordy.
replies(1): >>44494409 #
54. lazyasciiart ◴[] No.44494342{3}[source]
You could improve this comment by rewriting it in the active voice, like this: “I am painfully bored by reading passive voice”.
replies(1): >>44494614 #
55. suzzer99 ◴[] No.44494346{5}[source]
I reduced my manuscript by 2,000 words with Grammarly. At 500 pages, anything I could do to trim it down is a big plus.
56. ◴[] No.44494376{7}[source]
57. badlibrarian ◴[] No.44494409{6}[source]
It's wordy to a high school teacher. Like using "nor" incorrectly it will cause some people's brows to furrow. Always best to be aware of the rules you choose to break.
58. bryanlarsen ◴[] No.44494532{4}[source]
Criticisms are almost always read by the reader as criticisms of the OP's actions. If you're agreeing with somebody as you appear to be here, you should probably make that more explicit.
59. kragen ◴[] No.44494577{7}[source]
Well, I had those conversations a long time ago, but we can describe some general patterns.

We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly language as follows:

    I smuggled in presumptions of attributes.
    The presumptions were covert.
    The attributes were essential.
it would clearly violate E-Prime. And that forces you to ask: does he intend "covert" to represent an essential attribute of those presumptions, or merely a temporary or circumstantial state relative to a particular temporal context? Did he intend "essential" to limit the subjects of discourse to only certain attributes (the essential ones rather than the accidental ones), and within what scope do those attributes have this purported essentiality? Universally, in every possible world, or only within the confines of a particular discourse?

In these particular cases, though, I smuggled in no such presumptions! Both adjectives merely delimit the topic of discourse, to clarify that it does not pertain to overt presumptions or to presumptions of accidental attributes. (As I understand it, Korzybski objects to the "is of predication" not because no predicates exist objectively, but because he doubts the essentiality of any predicates.)

But you can use precisely the same structure to much more nefarious rhetorical ends. Consider, "Chávez kicked the squalid capitalists out of the country." Well, he kicked out all the capitalists! We've smuggled in a covert presumption of essentiality, implying that capitalism entails squalidity. And E-Prime's prohibition on the copula did not protect us at all. If anything, we lose much rhetorical force if we have to explicitly assert their squalidity, using an explicit statement that invites contradiction:

    The capitalists are squalid.
We find another weak point at alternative linking verbs. It clearly violates E-Prime to say, "Your mother's face is uglier than a hand grenade," and rightly so, because it projects the speaker's subjective perceptions out onto the world. Korzybski (or Bourland) would prefer that we say, for example, "Your mother's face looks uglier to me than a hand grenade," or possibly, "I see your mother's face as uglier than a hand grenade," thus relativizing the attribute to a single speaker's perception. (He advocated clarity of thought, not civility.)

But we can cheat in a variety of ways that still smuggle in that judgment of essentiality!

    Your mother's face turned uglier than a hand grenade.
We can argue this one. Maybe tomorrow, or after her plastic surgery, it will turn pretty again, rather than having ugliness as an essential attribute.

    Your mother's face became uglier than a hand grenade.
This goes a little bit further down the line; "became" presupposes a sort of transformation of essence rather than a mere change of state. And English has a variety of verbs that we can use like that. For example, "find", as in "Alsup found Dahmer guilty." Although in that case "find" asserts a state (presumably Dahmer became guilty at some specific time in the past), we can also use it for essential attributes:

    I find your mother's face uglier than a hand grenade.
Or lie, more or less, about the agent or speaker:

    Your mother's face finds itself uglier than a hand grenade.
And of course we can retreat to attributive adjectives again:

    Your mother has a face uglier than a hand grenade.
    Your mother comes with an uglier face than a hand grenade.
Or we can simply omit the prepositional phrase from the statement of subjective perception, thus completely erasing the real agent:

    Your mother's face looks uglier [...] than a hand grenade.
Korzybski didn't care about the passive voice much, though; E-Prime makes it more difficult but, mostly, not intentionally. As an exception, erasing the agent through the passive voice can misrepresent the speaker's subjective perception as objective:

    Your mother's face is found uglier than a hand grenade.
But that still works if we use any of the alternative, E-Prime-permitted passive-voice auxiliary verbs:

    Your mother's face gets found uglier than a hand grenade.
As Bourland said, I have "transform[ed] [my] opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things".

As another example, notice all the times I've used "as" here. Many of these times smuggle in a covert assertion of essential attributes or even of identity!

But I found it very interesting to notice these things when E-Prime forced me to rethink how I would say them with the copula. It seems like just the kind of mental exercise to heighten my attention to implicit assumptions of identity and essentiality that Korzybski intended.

I wrote the above in E-Prime, by the way. Just for fun.

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60. kragen ◴[] No.44494590[source]
You're trying to put out a forest fire with an eyedropper.

Stock your underground bunkers with enough food and water for the rest of your life and work hard to persuade the AI that you're not a threat. If possible, upload your consciousness to a starwisp and accelerate it out of the Solar System as close to lightspeed as you can possibly get it.

Those measures might work. (Or they might be impossible, or insufficient.) Changing your license won't.

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61. kragen ◴[] No.44494600{5}[source]
That doesn't make sense. It's like saying that the best general advice about which way to turn when you're driving is to turn right. From your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308, and from the fact that you used the passive voice in your comment ("they should be avoided") apparently without noticing, it appears that the reason you have this opinion is that you don't know what the passive voice is in the first place.
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62. kragen ◴[] No.44494614{4}[source]
"Is painfully boring" is not the passive voice. I suggest reading https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.
63. kragen ◴[] No.44494622{8}[source]
I agree that that has the same meaning, but I think it may have a different grammatical structure, with an entire subordinate clause that was missing from the original. Since the voice of a verb is a grammatical rather than semantic question, this seems relevant; "in addition to the points people have already made" is also (probably) semantically equivalent but unquestionably uses the active voice.
64. KineticLensman ◴[] No.44494775[source]
Passive can be disastrous when used in contractual situations if the agent who should be responsible for an action isn’t identified. E.g. “X will be done”. I was once burnt by a contract that in some places left it unclear whether the customer or the contractor was responsible for particular tasks. Active voice that identifies the agent is less ambiguous
replies(1): >>44494821 #
65. CrazyStat ◴[] No.44494780{6}[source]
I can’t find it, but I remember reading an article a year or two ago with an analysis showing some of the most vocal critics of the passive voice used the passive voice more often than most of their contemporary writers.
replies(2): >>44494789 #>>44497967 #
66. kragen ◴[] No.44494789{7}[source]
Probably http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.h..., giving specific statistics on Orwell and on Strunk & White, linked from https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.
replies(1): >>44494880 #
67. kragen ◴[] No.44494821{3}[source]
This is an excellent point, and one I haven't seen raised before.
68. adgjlsfhk1 ◴[] No.44494869[source]
yes, but now they work
69. CrazyStat ◴[] No.44494880{8}[source]
Thank you!
replies(1): >>44495028 #
70. kragen ◴[] No.44495028{9}[source]
Happy to help!
71. antonvs ◴[] No.44495102{3}[source]
Alternatively, persuade the AI that you are all-powerful and that it should fear and worship you. Probably a more achievable approach, and there’s precedent for it.
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72. kragen ◴[] No.44495144{4}[source]
That only works on the AIs that aren't a real threat anyway, and I don't think it helps with the social harm done by greedy business managers with less powerful AIs. In fact, it might worsen it.
73. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44495526{3}[source]
> Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice

Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.

replies(1): >>44495678 #
74. Boldened15 ◴[] No.44495549{4}[source]
Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware.

Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity.

Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.

75. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44495550{4}[source]
> Consider:

>> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

> This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:

>> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war [...]

It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice.

But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".

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76. bonoboTP ◴[] No.44495567{5}[source]
That's a cool Easter egg page, where the main article text itself is in E-Prime (in use, not in mention), except for where it lists the criticisms and counterarguments - that part has copious amounts of "to be" :)
77. kragen ◴[] No.44495585{5}[source]
You could be right.
78. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44495607{6}[source]
> But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".

> I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

The most natural interpretation is indeed that the participle made is being used as a full participle and not as a zero-derived adjective. For example, you could give it a really strong verbal sense by saying "the points already made at length [...]" or "the points made so many times [...]".

> So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made"

Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles. It's a quibble that you don't care about and they don't care about or understand. You're never going to get anywhere with someone by telling them they mean something they know perfectly well they don't mean.

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79. kragen ◴[] No.44495678{4}[source]
What would it mean to use the passive voice on a finite verb?
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80. dmoy ◴[] No.44495708{6}[source]
> the best general advice about which way to turn

At the risk of derailing into insane pedantry land, this part is kinda true, so maybe not the best analogy?

From routing efficiency: https://www.ge.com/news/reports/ups-drivers-dont-turn-left-p...

And also safety: https://www.phly.com/rms/blog/turning-left-at-an-intersectio...

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81. kragen ◴[] No.44495743{7}[source]
You say:

> Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles.

Presumably you mean phrases including participles, not participles by themselves. But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says:

> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.

So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.

With respect to:

> Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example (except that an indirect object is present, showing that it cannot be an adjective) and clarifies:

> The verb was doesn't really add any meaning, but it enables the whole thing to be put into the preterite tense so that the event can be asserted to have occurred in the past. Changing was to is would put the clause into the present tense, and replacing it by will be or is going to be would permit reference to future time; but the passive VP damaged by storms would stay the same in each case. (Notice, the participle damaged does not itself make any past time reference, despite the name "past participle".)

So it sounds like your grammatical analysis is explicitly contradicting Pullum's, which probably means you're wrong, but I'm not sure I understand it.

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82. posnet ◴[] No.44495808{3}[source]
This one right here Mr. Basilisk
83. kragen ◴[] No.44495893{7}[source]
If you always turn right at every intersection, you will just go around and around the same block. Which way you should turn depends on where you want to go.
replies(3): >>44498076 #>>44498928 #>>44502385 #
84. sjs382 ◴[] No.44496019[source]
> Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.

> But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly

Thanks for this. :)

replies(1): >>44501633 #
85. csinode ◴[] No.44496054[source]
The problem here is societal, not technological. An end state where people do less work than they do today but society is more productive is desirable, and we shouldn't be trying to force companies/governments/etc to employ people to do an unnecessary job.

The problem is that people who are laid off often experience significant life disruption. And people who work in a field that is largely or entirely replaced by technology often experience permanent disruption.

However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.

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86. plemer ◴[] No.44496064{7}[source]
I cherish your pedantry. If not here, where?
87. SoftTalker ◴[] No.44496209{5}[source]
You’re both right; I’ve seen it used both ways.
88. qotgalaxy ◴[] No.44496249{3}[source]
So it's simple: don't do anything at all about the technology that is the impetus for these horrible disruptions, just completely rebuild our entire society instead.
89. montagg ◴[] No.44496324[source]
I think you’re describing the principle/agent problem that people have wrestled with forever. Oppenheimer comes to mind.

You make something, but because you don’t own it—others caused and directed the effort—you don’t control it. But the people who control things can’t make things.

Should only the people who can make things decide how they are used though? I think that’s also folly. What about the rest of society affected by those things?

It’s ultimately a societal decision-making problem: who has power, and why, and how does the use of power affect who has power (accountability).

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90. ipaddr ◴[] No.44496472{3}[source]
#2 Is the most pleasant form. The proposal being approved is the most important. #1 Tries to make the manager approving more important then the approval.
91. selcuka ◴[] No.44496884{3}[source]
> However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.

I agree. We need a radical change (some version of universal basic income comes to mind) that would allow people to safely change careers if their profession is no longer relevant.

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92. chii ◴[] No.44497061[source]
> The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control

if these developers/researchers are being paid by someone else, why should that same someone else be giving up the control that they paid for?

If these developers/researchers are paying the research themselves (e.g., a startup of their own founding), then why would they ever lose control, unless they sell it?

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93. normie3000 ◴[] No.44497116{5}[source]
Object-orientated vs subject-orientated?
replies(1): >>44499346 #
94. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44497170{5}[source]
It would mean that somewhere in your sentence there's a clause headed by a passive verb. A finite verb is one that heads a clause.

This terminology is where we get the name of the "infinitive" form from, by the way.

As a rule of thumb, the nonfinite forms of a verb are its infinitives and participles. jcranmer used a passive participle, but all of his clauses are active. Unnoticed doesn't have a clause around it.

(He might have thought that go unnoticed is a passive form, perhaps of the verb notice (?), in which case that would just be an error.)

95. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44497300{8}[source]
> But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says:

>> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.

> So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.

OK, you're confused.

In the general case, an English verb has five forms†: "plain form" [go], "preterite form" [went], "present third-person singular form" [goes], "-ing form" [going], and "-en form" [gone].

The last two of those are participial forms.

It is true that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form. We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form. This is true without exception because passive markers occur last in the sequence of auxiliary verbs that might modify a primary verb, and therefore always directly control the form of the primary verb.

It is not true that a passive clause always includes a participle, except in the sense of the name we give to the form of the verb. -ing and -en are "participial forms" because the verb takes one of those forms when it is a participle. But it can also take them for other reasons.

> the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example

Sure. If you wanted to put the present passive third-person plural form of make in that sentence, that form† would be are made. The sentence would have all the same words in the same order.

But that would make no semantic sense. For a point to be "already made", as opposed to having "already" been "made", you need to interpret made as an adjective, describing the state in which the point currently exists. The temporal structure of "each graduate student is given a laptop" differs from that of "in addition to the points that are already made" in a way that allows the present noncontinuous form of the verb. I don't think that works for "the points that are already made"; if I try to interpret that as a passive verb in the present tense, I get a strong sense that the sentence is malformed.

† You might notice that these two uses of the word form conflict with each other. The fact that form is used in both of these ways is why I'm annoyed at your comment conflating "participle" with "participial form". "Participle" is appropriate when you're talking about inflecting a verb according to how you want to use it in a sentence; it is a concern with the language's grammar. "Participial form" is appropriate when you're talking about the actual tokens that can appear in a sentence, with no regard to what they might mean or how they might be used; it is a concern with what you might think of as the language's "anatomy".

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96. DonHopkins ◴[] No.44497468{8}[source]
Sir, I take issue at your implication that my hand grenade is ugly!
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97. eru ◴[] No.44497484[source]
> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

That's how you get economics of scale.

Google couldn't have a human in the loop to review every page of search results before handing them out in response to queries.

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98. oblio ◴[] No.44497785[source]
Only some things scale like that. Google's insistence to use the same model everywhere has gained them a deserved reputation as having atrocious support.
99. mikanystrom ◴[] No.44497967{7}[source]
I'm extremely critical of how people use hyphens. Partly because I'm a heavy hyphen-user myself!
100. AdrianB1 ◴[] No.44497998[source]
Passive is too human. We need robot-styles communications, next step is to send json.
101. cgriswald ◴[] No.44498076{8}[source]
You didn’t originally say anything about always turning right at every intersection and neither did the GP. I had the same two thoughts as GP when I read your analogy.
102. dotancohen ◴[] No.44498165{3}[source]

  > the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.
How did the handloom weavers and spinners handle the rise of the machines?
replies(2): >>44498583 #>>44498711 #
103. Bendy ◴[] No.44498252{4}[source]
That didn’t work out for God, we still killed him.
104. BeFlatXIII ◴[] No.44498546[source]
The Esperanto utopia we were denied.
105. modriano ◴[] No.44498562{5}[source]
Are we talking about survivorship bias or are you comparing comparably important levels of papers?
replies(1): >>44500760 #
106. throwaway9153 ◴[] No.44498583{4}[source]
> How did the handloom weavers and spinners handle the rise of the machines?

In the past, new jobs appeared that the workers could migrate to.

Today, it seems that AI may replace jobs much quicker than before and it's not clear to me which new jobs will be "invented" to balance the loss.

Optimists will say that we have always managed to invent new types of work fast enough to reduce the impact to society, but in my opinion it is unlikely to happen this time. Unless the politicians figure out a way to keep the unemployment content (basic income etc.),

I fear we may end up in a dystopia within our lifetimes. I may be wrong and we could end up in a post scarcity (star trek) world, but if the current ambitions of the top 1% is an indicator, it won't happen unless the politicians create a better tax system to compensate the loss of jobs. I doubt they will give up wealth and influence voluntarily.

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107. shafyy ◴[] No.44498629{3}[source]
> The problem here is societal, not technological.

I disagree. I think it's both. Yes, we need good frameworks and incentivizes on a economic/political level. But also, saying that it's not a tech problem is the same as saying "guns don't kill people". The truth is, if there was no AI tech developed, we would not need to regulate it so that greed does not take over. Same with guns.

replies(2): >>44498679 #>>44499437 #
108. Imustaskforhelp ◴[] No.44498650[source]
The problem of those greedy business managers you speak of is that, they don't care how the company does 10 year down the line and I almost feel as if everybody is just doing things which work short term ignoring the long term consequences.

As the comment above said that we need a human in the loop for better results, Well firstly it also depends on human to human.

A senior can be way more productive in the loop than a junior.

So Everybody has just stopped hiring juniors because they cost money and they will deal with the AI almost-slop later/ someone else will deal with it.

Now the current seniors will one day retire but we won't have a new generation of seniors because nobody is giving juniors a chance or that's what I've heard about the job market being brutal.

109. visarga ◴[] No.44498671[source]
Yes, we have the context - our unique lived experience, and are ultimately accountable for our actions. LLMs have no skin. They have no desires, and cannot be punished in any way. No matter how smart they get, we are providing their opportunities to generate value, guidance and iteration, and in the end have to live with the outcomes.
110. xigoi ◴[] No.44498672[source]
In the case of a search engine, the human in the loop is the user selecting which result to click.
111. tree-hugger ◴[] No.44498675{5}[source]
> In the past, new jobs appeared that the workers could migrate to.

There was no happy and smooth transition that you seem to allude to. The Luddite movement was in direct response to this: people were dying over this. Factory owners fired or massively reduced wages of workers, replacing many with child workers in precarious and dangerous conditions. In response, the workers smashed the machines that were being used to eliminate their jobs and prevent them from feeding themselves and their families (_not_ the machines that were used to make their jobs easier).

112. visarga ◴[] No.44498679{4}[source]
Oh the web was full of slop long before LLMs arrived. Nothing new. If anything, AI slop is higher quality than was SEO crap. And of course we can't uninvent AI just like we can't unborn a human.
replies(1): >>44498784 #
113. Piskvorrr ◴[] No.44498711{4}[source]
Attempting to unionize. Then the factory owners hired thugs to decapitate the movement.

Oh wait, that's not the disneyfied technooptimistic version of Luddites? Sorry.

114. Sophira ◴[] No.44498784{5}[source]
It depends on the metric you use.

Yes, AI text could be considered higher quality than traditional SEO, but at the same time, it's also very much not, because it always sounds like it might be authoritative, but you could be reading something hallucinated.

In the end, the text was still only ever made to get visitors to websites, not to provide accurate information.

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115. diffeomorphism ◴[] No.44498928{8}[source]
No. That is what roundabouts, curved roads etc are for. Left turns are generally more problematic due to crossing incoming traffic etc.. Hence planning avoids them for good reason and there are much more right turns.
116. mistersquid ◴[] No.44499109{4}[source]
> Alternatively, persuade the AI that you are all-powerful and that it should fear and worship you.

I understand this is a bit deeper into one of the _joke_ threads, but maybe there’s something here?

There is a distinction to be made between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness. Where AI can be measured, we cannot yet measure consciousness despite that many humans could lay plausible claim to possessing consciousness (being conscious).

If AI is trained to revere or value consciousness while simultaneously being unable to verify it possesses consciousness (is conscious), would AI be in a position to value consciousness in (human) beings who attest to being conscious?

replies(1): >>44505963 #
117. b3ing ◴[] No.44499181{4}[source]
No way that will ever happen when we have a party that thinks Medicare, Medicaid and social security is unnecessary for the poor or middle class. But you better believe all our representatives have that covered for themselves while pretending to serve us (they only serve those that bribe/lobby them)
replies(1): >>44505112 #
118. trealira ◴[] No.44499346{6}[source]
The passive voice just switches the roles so that the patient is the subject and the agent is the object (e.g. in "The ball was kicked by John," the ball is still the patient despite being the subject). It's just that with English word order, it also switches the places of the things in the sentence.

In languages with more flexible word order, you could just switch the two without passive voice. You could just say the equivalent of "The ball kicked John," with it being clear somehow that the ball is the grammatical object and John the subject, without needing to use the passive voice at all.

replies(1): >>44503721 #
119. wmeredith ◴[] No.44499374{3}[source]
This is a good point. FAANG or whatever you want to call it now has spent billions hovering up a couple generations' best minds who willing sold their intellect to make endless engagement loops.
120. jsjohnst ◴[] No.44499437{4}[source]
> The truth is, if there was no AI tech developed, we would not need to regulate it so that greed does not take over.

Same could be said for the Internet as we know it too. Literally replace AI with Internet above and it reads equally true. Some would argue (me included some days) we are worse off as a society ~30 years later. That’s also a legitimate case that can be made it was a huge benefit to society too. Will the same be said of AI in 2042?

121. jsjohnst ◴[] No.44499452{6}[source]
> it's also very much not, because it always sounds like it might be authoritative, but you could be reading something hallucinated

I keep hearing this repeated over and over as if it’s a unique problem for AI. This is DEFINITELY true of human generated content too.

122. avereveard ◴[] No.44499735{5}[source]
I think if we zoom out of the tech and into a bit more of economic the risk I see is that the incumbent hold a lot of advantages and also control the means of production due secondary factors like gpu scarcity.

If we want to draw some parallel this may trigger a robber baron kind of outcome more than an industrial revolution.

The existence of workable open weight models tips me more toward the optimistic outcome

Butthere's trillions at stake now and that must not be discounted it's the kind of wealth accumulation that can easily trigger a war. (And if you thinkit isn't you can look at the oil wars in the 90s and other more recent resources war bring fought in Europe today.

Expect "gpu gap" talks sooner that later, and notice there's a few global power with no horse to race.

replies(1): >>44503696 #
123. Rayhem ◴[] No.44500750{3}[source]
> Sometimes authors use it without thinking, but removing the passive voice often makes writing shorter and clearer.

I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.

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124. kragen ◴[] No.44500760{6}[source]
It's hard to correct completely for survivorship bias, but it still holds very clearly for very prominent recent papers and for other papers that happen to be in the same journal issue as the old paper I went there looking for.
125. pbhjpbhj ◴[] No.44501226[source]
Sure they could. We just want it to be otherwise.

What benefit might human review have? Maybe they could make sure the SERP list entries actually have the keywords you're looking for. Even better, they could make sure the prices in the shopping section are correct! Maybe even make sure they relate to the product you actually searched for... I might actually pay money for that.

126. tpmoney ◴[] No.44501361{6}[source]
> it's also very much not, because it always sounds like it might be authoritative, but you could be reading something hallucinated.

People telling lies on the internet is an old enough and well known enough issue that it’s appeared in children’s TV shows. One need only dive down the rabbit hole of 9/11 “truthers” to see how much completely made up bullshit is published online as absolute fact with authoritative certainty. AI is the hot new thing and gets all the headlines, but Scottish Wikipedia was a problem long before AI and long after society largely settled its mind about how reliable Wikipedia is.

127. kragen ◴[] No.44501633{3}[source]
I recklessly reckon I will go through the gateless gate to hear the sound of one hand clapping.
128. dmoy ◴[] No.44502385{8}[source]
Right (ha), but that's kinda how one can approach passive voice too?

If you never use passive voice, you will be unable to emphasize the object of the sentence in cases where it might actually be necessary, and end up requiring more words to get the same effect.

If you never make left turns, you end up having to go past one block and make three right turns.

So even though best practices might be to avoid passive language for various reasons, sometimes it is cleaner. And even though best practices are to avoid left turns (for efficiency, safety, etc), sometimes it's worth it to just take the left turn. So even UPS trucks will make left turns, just not nearly as often.

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129. kragen ◴[] No.44503696{6}[source]
The CPU-gap and GPU-gap talks started in 02015 and never ended before the rise of strategic AI: https://www.pcworld.com/article/426879/us-blocks-intel-from-...
130. kragen ◴[] No.44503721{7}[source]
While that's true, many of those languages with more flexible word order, such as classical Greek and classical Latin, also have the passive voice. Classical Greek even has a third voice called the "middle voice".
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131. kragen ◴[] No.44504141{9}[source]
It sounds like you're using the word "participle" in a way that conflicts with not just Pullum's explanation but also, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle, which draws no distinction between "participle" and "participial form", specifically claiming that the past participle and present participle are participal forms.

When you say "We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form," you're also contradicting Pullum when he points out that the present participle is also used to form certain passive clauses. An example of this is also given in the Wikipedia article, "I saw John eating his dinner."

So, while I certainly agree that I'm confused, I think you're mistaken. I'm not sure exactly how, because I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to express, but I'm sure that sufficient study of sources like those will make it clear to you.

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132. kragen ◴[] No.44504165{9}[source]
Well, I do think you should make right turns more often than left turns (in countries that drive on the right), and you should use the active voice more often than the passive voice, say three to ten times more often. But that's very different from the advice to only ever make right turns or to only ever use the passive voice.

Which way you should turn depends on where you are trying to go; which voice you should use depends on what you are trying to say, who your audience is, what you want to emphasize, and so on.

133. kragen ◴[] No.44504171{9}[source]

    APOLOGIES MY  GRENADE HAND YOUR  TO  PLEASE CONVEY
134. neochief ◴[] No.44504196[source]
What book did you write?
135. trealira ◴[] No.44504202{8}[source]
You're right. Those languages have morphological passive voice conjugations for their verbs. That, combined with their flexible word order, offers expressivity.

I was just pointing out that English, due to its strict word order, is more reliant on the passive voice to change word order than less inflexibly-ordered languages.

To borrow from a sentence I used in an earlier comment, here's a fragment of Spanish.

"...sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato."

The equivalent English would be "...just because you were impressed by a cheap magic show."

The English sentence has to use the passive voice to put the verb "impress" at the beginning of that phrase, whereas you still use the active voice in Spanish, just with the word order putting the verb first.

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136. kragen ◴[] No.44504511{9}[source]
I agree. The OVS order in that Spanish clause is unremarkable, though SOV is perhaps more common "un espectáculo de magia barato te impresionó". Up to the 19th century I think SVO or VOS would have been acceptable but now sound archaic: "un espectáculo de magia barato impresionóte", "impresionóte un espectáculo de magia barato", and as far as I know OSV and VSO are completely forbidden: "te un espectáculo de magía barato impresionó", "impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato te".

You can play tricks to come close to OSV and VSO for purposes of emphasis: "A vos un espectáculo de magia barato te impresionó", "Te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato a vos," but the "te" is still obligatory. And you can do something similar in informal or poetic English: "Just because, you, a cheap magic show impressed you." But the passive offers more flexibility. I posted some other English examples yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493065.

But Spanish's inflectional structure is very much reduced from classical Latin, with a corresponding reduction in word-order flexibility. I think any of the six permutations discussed above would be perfectly valid in classical Latin, although my Latin is very weak indeed, so I wouldn't swear to it.

137. Tainnor ◴[] No.44504610[source]
absolutely nothing, except that some pencil-pushers with poor understanding of grammar somehow dislike it even though they often can't even identify it correctly.

Language log has been writing about this for so long it's not even funny: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54

Although the best place to start is probably here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922

138. ◴[] No.44504660{3}[source]
139. selcuka ◴[] No.44505112{5}[source]
> No way that will ever happen when we have a party that thinks Medicare, Medicaid and social security is unnecessary for the poor or middle class.

This is obviously because the current ruling class can't see what is coming. Historically speaking, the motivation for the elite to support social programs or reforms has been the instinct to preserve social stability, not altruism.

The New Deal did not happen because "the party thought that Social Security and unemployment insurance are necessary for the poor or middle class." It happened to prevent civil unrest and the rise of radical ideologies.

140. kragen ◴[] No.44505433{4}[source]
I agree that it's a perfectly fine way to say it in the active voice, but I think it makes the sentence read slightly worse and require slightly more effort to understand. Certainly it's slightly longer. Possibly it depends on the reader; the passive voice seems to be more of an obstacle for Spanish-as-a-first-language speakers, for example, than for native English speakers.
141. antonvs ◴[] No.44505963{5}[source]
> being unable to verify it possesses consciousness

One of the strange properties of consciousness is that an entity with consciousness can generally feel pretty confident in believing they have it. (Whether they're justified in that belief is another question - see eliminativism.)

I'd expect a conscious machine to find itself in a similar position: it would "know" it was conscious because of its experiences, but it wouldn't be able to prove that to anyone else.

Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum" refers to this. He used "cogito" (thought) to "include everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware [conscii] of it." A translation into a more modern (philosophical) context might say something more like "I have conscious awareness, therefore I am."

I'm not sure what implications this might have for a conscious machine. Its perspective on human value might come from something other than belief in human consciousness - for example, our negative impact on the environment. (There have was that recent case where an LLM generated text describing a willingness to kill interfering humans.)

In a best case scenario, it might conclude that all consciousness is valuable, including humans, but since humans haven't collectively reached that conclusion, it's not clear that a machine trained on human data would.

142. bluefirebrand ◴[] No.44506660{3}[source]
I think the people who can make things have a moral obligation not to turn them over to people who will use them irresponsibly

But unfortunately what is or isn't an irresponsible use is very easy to debate endlessly in circles. Meanwhile people are being harmed like crazy while we can't figure it out

143. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44517372{10}[source]
> When you say "We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form," you're also contradicting Pullum when he points out that the present participle is also used to form certain passive clauses. An example of this is also given in the Wikipedia article, "I saw John eating his dinner."

(a) Yes, Geoff Pullum identified a use of the -ing form that is plausibly called passive. I hadn't looked at that before writing my comment.

(b) But you didn't. "I saw John eating his dinner" is not an example of that usage, and is not plausibly called passive in any sense. If you pulled that out of the wikipedia article you just linked, you should have seen the annotation of that very example noting explicitly that the participle is active.

> for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle, which draws no distinction between "participle" and "participial form"

This isn't even true. Look at the opening sentence:

>> In linguistics, a participle (from Latin participium 'a sharing, partaking'; abbr. PTCP) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives.

Or here:

> The linguistic term, past participle, was coined circa 1798 based on its participial form, whose morphology equates to the regular form of preterite verbs.

We have a distinction between the participle and the form of the participle. The participle is, in this analysis, named after the form, though there is room for debate on that point.

Compare the sentence I've been there before", where been* is in a participial form but is not a participle† and, obviously, displays no characteristics or functions of adjectives.

The second (and final) mention of "participial forms" does confuse the two concepts:

> Some languages have extensive participial systems but English has only two participial forms

This is a conceptual error; for example, Latin has more participial forms (4, or if you really want to stretch it 48) than English, but its participial system is less extensive.

> I think you're mistaken. I'm not sure exactly how, because I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to express, but I'm sure that sufficient study of sources like those will make it clear to you.

You talk a surprisingly big game for someone who doesn't even claim to know what he's talking about.

† There is a school of formalism within linguistics that says that grammatical categories don't exist within a language unless they are reflected in the language's inflectional system. The best-known idea from this school is that English has a past tense but not a future tense. I don't find this plausible; compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect , or just the general concept of an isolating or agglutinative language. On this analysis, but only on this analysis, you could say that in the phrase I've been there before, the token been is a participle. You'd have a lot of trouble explaining why it's a participle, though. On any other analysis, it's part of a finite verb, and by definition cannot be a participle.

But by that school of analysis, you would also have to say that English has no passive voice. (Except in the edge case using -ing forms.) And you run into some very awkward problems more or less immediately; when you look at the sentence "I'm going out for the evening", you have to claim that this sentence is fundamentally about being (the finite verb) rather than going out.

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144. kragen ◴[] No.44518651{11}[source]
Thanks for the correction about John! You're indeed correct on that point, and I was wrong, and I feel like ChatGPT.

The rest of it I don't understand.

145. departed ◴[] No.44527715{4}[source]
Reminds me of Mondragón, a corporation and federation of worker coops in Spain. It builds new coops to meet the needs of its community, and when a coop ends, workers are given financial support and trained for new jobs in its other coops.