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1257 points adrianh | 15 comments | | HN request time: 2.095s | 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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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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1. umanwizard ◴[] No.44493243[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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2. brookst ◴[] No.44493308[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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3. umanwizard ◴[] No.44493500[source]
Why isn’t it passive voice?
4. kragen ◴[] No.44493732[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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5. jcranmer ◴[] No.44493969[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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6. kragen ◴[] No.44494067{3}[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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7. ModernMech ◴[] No.44494307{4}[source]
"In addition to the points that have already been made"
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8. ◴[] No.44494376{4}[source]
9. kragen ◴[] No.44494622{5}[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.
10. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44495607{3}[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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11. kragen ◴[] No.44495743{4}[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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12. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44497300{5}[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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13. kragen ◴[] No.44504141{6}[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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14. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44517372{7}[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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15. kragen ◴[] No.44518651{8}[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.