There might be boots on the ground eventually given Trump's speech.
>The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission
Iran is hitting back at US bases so it could be related to those risks, rather than a full invasion.
(Crazy idea, maybe the people shouldn’t be left in the dark about their government’s war plans by having a deliberate legislative body debate and vote on it)
It's a sinister statement, but despite everything the U.S. has moved to the region, they didn't move the stuff they would need to move for ground operations.
Seems like it could be problematic in the future since code can't be fixed by humans so the only source of future code for training is unedited Claudeslop.
Just pay another few thousands to fix that bug. When all devs are gone and you only have AI, a small bug to fix will be charged at premium rates by Claude.
He will say: the cost of this big is costing you 100k a year. We will fix for 10k one time fee.
Or they communicate in languages we cannot understand.
Even among human languages the sounds of some languages sound all the same to humans who are not native speakers of that language.
Chinese for example has a million words that all sound like "shi" and other tonal languages like Vietnamese are also indistinguishable to English natives etc. Japanese people treat R/L the same.
Elephants and dolphins have been known to assign unique names for each other.
Octopuses and other cephalopods communicate by changing the color of their skin, EVEN WITH SOME OTHER FISH! BBC's Blue Planet has an episode where an octopus and a grouper fish coordinate via color to trap prey.
Ants and other insects communicate via pheromones and "smell".
Are you seriously going to stick to a human-chauvinistic stance that only we have a "language"?
"For over two decades, Professor Toshitaka Suzuki dedicated his life to studying the Japanese tit — a small songbird native to Japan’s forests. Through years of careful observation and experiments, he discovered something incredible: these birds use grammar-like rules and combine sounds to form meaning, much like how humans use language."
I'm familiar with this case. The "language" of the birds is so profoundly primitive (it's limited to 2 word combos where the meaning is just the meaning of both words). Here's a good blogpost about it.
If we're going to be able to have a meaningful discussion on this, first you will need to provide for me the definition of language under which you're operating.
I mean there are space physicists who don't understand dark matter, etc.
I think this is a "qualia" issue: Like for example biologists can find out what kind of light frequencies the eyes of a mantis shrimp can receive, but we'll never know what it FEELS like to be able to see a zillion times more colors.
You can see this happen with human languages too: Ever walk around in a different country? your brain doesn't even register the sounds other people are making.
It turns out that the fact that mantis shrimp have 12 different color receptors in their eyes means they can see... 12 colors. They can't combine the input from the different color receptors into a spectrum like we and other vertebrates can. Their eyes even perceive different things in different regions of the compound eye. It's a surprisingly limited visual system for all its supposed extra capabilities compared to ours, which to your point makes "seeing like a mantis shrimp" even more inscrutable from our POV.
For anyone else whom the above awnsers absolutely nothing without googling what defines the boundary - A more verbose version of the above comment is that they communicate only simple, situational signals (like warning cries or information for action) and not using a symbolic, rule-governed system capable of abstraction, past and future tense, and infinite combination.
Of course, with all generalizations, this is sort of a lie, but no - whales, chimps and cephapods don't meet the official bar.
This is downvoted, perhaps as a 'lazy dismissal'? But I read the SciAm article and I don't think it actually explained this point.
The finding seems to be that the bouba-kiki effect is not specific to humans and does not depend on experience. And the previously-existing theory is presented like so:
> scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.
The finding is supposed to undermine, or at least challenge, the theory. But why? Is the point just that, if other species also have the bouba-kiki effect but do not have language, the bouba-kiki effect probably doesn't play as important a role as we thought? That seems to be the implication (though the innate/learned distinction also seems to be relevant, and I'm not sure why that is) -- but surely the bouba-kiki effect was never believed to be anything like a sufficient condition for the development of language, was it?
The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.
But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. It's a theory that mistakenly thinks that hard problem in language is coming up with words for objects instead of the actually hard problem of combining words in a systematic way.
> But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language.
Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.
It's hard to find a source for that kind of negative statement.
Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.
I obviously don't know your background but out of the linguists that I know and have met while doing my degrees in linguistics, I don't know of anyone who would say that the kiki-bouba effect is not important — anything, in fact, that challenges the notion that sound-meaning relations are completely arbitrary is interesting because it might give us clues about the origins of language, not to mention that it lends support to other, related hypotheses about sound-symbolism.
I'm not sure what you mean by "not necessary parts of language", but I would love to hear what you think the necessary parts of language are. Not to mention, what is "the difficult part of language" then?
The Bouba kiki effect doesn't challenge the arbitrariness of the sign because arbitrary doesn't mean uniformly distributed. The effect shows that there's a preference between the two but it doesn't contradict the fact that either could be a perfectly fine label.
The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words. Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.
> The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words.
So are you saying that we've got e.g. neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and typology down? Or do you simply mean "interesting to you" when you say "difficult"? Because in my experience, pretty much every subject in linguistics (and most other sciences) is easy if you don't understand it and surprisingly difficult once you start to get a grasp of it.
> Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.
It literally shows a preference best described by sound-symbolism so it most certainly has a bearing on how words are composed. Just because the relation between sound and meaning _can_ be arbitrary, showing that in some cases it's not entirely so is extremely valuable for evolutionary linguistics.
> a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution
This isn't true anywhere in the world except Turkey. Even the second least "evolution believing" country in the world, USA, has 54% of the general public accepting evolution and only 31% believing in creationism, as of 2009.
The mainline opposing view to evolution seems to be that one guy made all living beings over the course of a week. Common brain structures should be even less surprising in that scenario. That'd just be God taking what works and reusing it, either refining it for a more intelligent species or removing parts that are not needed but leaving some of the supporting infrastructure around
After all, lazy engineers are made in God's image /s
Yeah I'm not sure why it's being downvoted, I don't dismiss the study at all (I'm the one who originally posted it!). I just think the scientific reporting on it is very odd. It's an interesting study in terms of what it has to say about innate vs learnt associations.
>scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.
I suppose just working in linguistics, I find this such a fringe and unserious theory. The hard part of language isn't associating sounds with objects (dogs can do that), it's putting those words together to make novel meanings.
Annoyingly, very few of the citations are accessible. But the gist as I understand it is that this challenges various proposed explanations for the Bouba-Kiki effect, for example that it relates to human physiology or has a human-specific neurological basis.
I have never heard of someone returning groceries (unless it turned out to be moldy or something). Definitely not because they were cheaper elsewhere. Surely there would be food safety issues with accepting such returns.
Step into any Walmart and look at the carts in the customer service section full of just-returned merchandise, waiting to be returned to the shelves. You might be surprised with what you see.
amazing reading this thread and realizing just how much HN is disconnected from the reality of majority of people in America. returning food and hitting multiple stores is like a daily thing for several people I know
It's a great joke (and yes, a hilarious thread!), it's $10 in the original joke though so I would say it still works for now (not sure what a banana costs in the US today. Here it's about $1).
"Real users" don't know what electron is, but real users definitely complain about laggy and slow programs. They just don't know why they are laggy and slow.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the arbitrariness of the sign. Arbitrary doesn't mean "random" or "uniformly sampled." The fact there are systematic tendencies among languages in how things are called doesn't negate the arbitrariness of the sign, they could have been called other things. We can also decide to refer to things by another name and we can use any arbitrary name we like! There is no limits on what names we can use (besides silly physiological constraints like having a word with 50 000 consonants). But, of course, there's much more to language than just labels!
For me, the interesting thing in this paper vis-à-vis language is that it shows how much innate structure in cognition must shape our language.
Arbitrariness of the sign is a principle that requires so many epicycles to present as "true" that it's more of a warning against overgeneralization than an insight with any significant predictive power in its own right.
Let's call the arbitrariness of the sign, blinga. Why do you think blinga requires "epicycles"? Blinga makes pretty modest claims: there is no requirement that the form of a sign matches that which it signifies in any way.
So there is censorship, you just think that it is good. That's fine! But you should own the position and justify it on its own terms instead of pretending that it doesn't count as censorship.
Sure but filtering what you say is also a form of censorship. Swinging the term around like it's some form of morality is silly; anyone who isn't for a form of censorship is just a moron and an asshole. Or even worse: a liberal.
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