There has been rather a lot of doomsaying (and perhaps astroturfing) lately about LLMs as the end of computer programming. Much of the discussion has been lacking nuance, so I’d like to add mine. I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be unemployed in $ARBITRARY_TIME_WINDOW ”, and from the other side flat-out rejections…
The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s…
The idea has been floating around in Linguistics for about a century, that language affects one’s thoughts. Known as linguistic relativity , aka the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this comes in two flavours: the strong version, where language determines and limits thought; and the weak version, where language only influences thought. 1 For human languages, linguists largely agree that the strong version…
TL;DR: Misaligned profit motives. This has been on my mind for a while, and with a couple of things lately stoking my ire (the NFT resurgence, and Signal integrating MobileCoin), I’ve finally pushed myself to put it into words. Before I get started, I want to make one thing clear: although I’m starting from a perspective of cryptocurrency and use some associated language, this post is not about…