Re^4: What's your view on AI coding assistants?

[starX]

yes:

It can only be understood by its original context, in Hamlet.

but:

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

This is something that actors (and directors) of Shakespeare have to deal with in every rehearsal: words meant different things to Shakespeare's audiences than they do to ours, and part of the actor's job is to understand those words (as best as possible) in the context in which Shakespeare meant them, and then to make them meaningful for the living audience hearing them today. So that meaning is constantly created and re-created through shifting contexts and usages.

"Hoist," in the transitive sense "to lift" has been with us for a long time, and is enough a part of modern English vernacular that most people won't have a hard time understanding it, especially thanks to the ubiquity of the metaphor from Hamlet. No translation needed.... except perhaps insofar as "hoist," as Hamlet means it, is itself a metaphor for being blown to bits.

"Petard," on the other hand, was getting to be obsolete in English by the time that Shakespeare used it -- he used obsolete diction somewhat regularly, though we have to speculate at his motives -- and this is something that most people will understand only through an understanding of the metaphor from Hamlet, usually, correctly, in terms of "foiled by his own plan." That being said, I don't think it matters that the audience doesn't know that petard is analogous to a bomb in the modern sense as long as the actor does and can say it meaningfully. And just so, I think LeCun understood the meaning well enough to create a somewhat poetical flourish that makes ChatGPT analogous to Hamlet's engineer's bomb.

Which is my long winded way of saying I agree with you in the strictest technical sense of the specification of language, but not in the sense of language as a practice with everyday uses and customs. But if language as practice did not have power and precedent over language as specification, none of us would have any idea what "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" means.