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1246 points adrianh | 46 comments | | HN request time: 1.55s | 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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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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normie3000 ◴[] No.44492777[source]
What's wrong with passive?
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1. 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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2. kragen ◴[] No.44492974[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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3. Veen ◴[] No.44493094[source]
I always like to share this when the passive voice comes up:

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

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4. DonHopkins ◴[] No.44493110[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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5. kragen ◴[] No.44493271{3}[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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6. brookst ◴[] No.44493291[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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7. exe34 ◴[] No.44493447[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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8. IggleSniggle ◴[] No.44493588[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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9. horsawlarway ◴[] No.44493589[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.

10. kragen ◴[] No.44493697[source]
Pullum is fantastic, thanks! I didn't know he'd recorded video lectures on this topic.
11. coliveira ◴[] No.44493807[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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12. dylan604 ◴[] No.44493921[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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13. dylan604 ◴[] No.44493935{3}[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
14. ◴[] No.44493957{3}[source]
15. badlibrarian ◴[] No.44494058[source]
29% overhead (two of seven words) adds up.
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16. insane_dreamer ◴[] No.44494137[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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17. plemer ◴[] No.44494165[source]
Then we agree.
18. plemer ◴[] No.44494272{4}[source]
Would you mind identifying a few of the "smuggled presumptions"?
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19. dylan604 ◴[] No.44494339{3}[source]
great, someone can do math, but it is not awkward nor wordy.
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20. suzzer99 ◴[] No.44494346{3}[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.
21. badlibrarian ◴[] No.44494409{4}[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.
22. kragen ◴[] No.44494577{5}[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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23. kragen ◴[] No.44494600{3}[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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24. CrazyStat ◴[] No.44494780{4}[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.
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25. kragen ◴[] No.44494789{5}[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.
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26. CrazyStat ◴[] No.44494880{6}[source]
Thank you!
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27. kragen ◴[] No.44495028{7}[source]
Happy to help!
28. Boldened15 ◴[] No.44495549[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.

29. bonoboTP ◴[] No.44495567{3}[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" :)
30. dmoy ◴[] No.44495708{4}[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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31. kragen ◴[] No.44495893{5}[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.
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32. plemer ◴[] No.44496064{5}[source]
I cherish your pedantry. If not here, where?
33. SoftTalker ◴[] No.44496209{3}[source]
You’re both right; I’ve seen it used both ways.
34. ipaddr ◴[] No.44496472[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.
35. normie3000 ◴[] No.44497116{3}[source]
Object-orientated vs subject-orientated?
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36. DonHopkins ◴[] No.44497468{6}[source]
Sir, I take issue at your implication that my hand grenade is ugly!
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37. mikanystrom ◴[] No.44497967{5}[source]
I'm extremely critical of how people use hyphens. Partly because I'm a heavy hyphen-user myself!
38. cgriswald ◴[] No.44498076{6}[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.
39. diffeomorphism ◴[] No.44498928{6}[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.
40. trealira ◴[] No.44499346{4}[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.

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41. dmoy ◴[] No.44502385{6}[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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42. kragen ◴[] No.44503721{5}[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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43. kragen ◴[] No.44504165{7}[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.

44. kragen ◴[] No.44504171{7}[source]

    APOLOGIES MY  GRENADE HAND YOUR  TO  PLEASE CONVEY
45. trealira ◴[] No.44504202{6}[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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46. kragen ◴[] No.44504511{7}[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.