A hacker was once a computer enthusiast, and the media made it into a name for criminals who break into other people’s systems.
Decades ago, people started using baud when they meant BPS. Not many technical people back then, but it wasn’t possible to correct the few who made the mistake. Even one top member of the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) said it’s just “baud” now, no matter the real meaning.
(baud = symbols per second. A symbol can transport multiple bits, so a V.32 modem with 9600 bps worked at 2400 baud, 4 bits per symbol.)
GIF is an image format. Multiple frames stored in such a file can get played like a video. But today every video without sound gets called a GIF.
AI is an old term. But today most people say AI but only mean genAI.
It’s even more absurd: There are gamers who demand computer games without AI. WTF?
AI was always part of computer games. Even the early computerized board games. I remember Half-Life fans loving the enemy AI. And I think one of the games in the Wolfenstein franchise had enemies that found cover when shot at. That’s normal, old AI. Not genAI.
If AI is really lost, how do we discuss the thing that was once considered AI?
The hill I’m willing to die on is that “cyber” is short for cybersex, not cybersecurity or cyberspace as appropriated by the military.
care to elaborate?
If you know, you know.
¯\(ツ)/¯
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I got short arms… no need to mock me 😥
It’s certainly been tarnished by LLM-bros coopting the term for marketing/grifting purposes
“Lost?”
None of those terms have been lost. They’ve just come to have a wider definition than before. Language evolves over time as people are exposed to new ideas, words, or terms. As non-technical people begin using the terms, the meaning has an understood meaning to the public that most people use (e.g. AI/genAI), and a technical definition that is still understood by those it is relevant to. It just requires context.
Yes, words have meaning- but words also change over time as the public understanding shifts. Just like the word “literally.” It used to mean something that is/should be interpreted exactly as it is said/written/shown. Now “literally” also means “figuratively,” even within the dictionary.
So, no. It isn’t lost, you just need to give context about what form of “AI” you are referring to.
Now “literally” also means “figuratively,” even within the dictionary.
That’s literally true… Like in the literal sense… STOP WINKING AT ME!
Irregardless isn’t even setting off spell checkers. “Without having lack of regard”, fucking what?
Our language is evolving into useless shit, and I despise people who do not respect language and definitions. “Oh, language is evolving!”
Yeah, velociraptors evolved into chickens: how did that shit work out? /being facetious, before someone with poor language skills happens to be a paleontologist snaps back
irregardless
“Inflammable” means flammable!
It would make more sense if it was written “enflammable”, similar to French.
But both forms are acceptable… meaning in French, you can have “ininflammable”!
You’re fighting the tide. There’s never been a point in time where language had fixed, immutable definitions. It’s always been transient, no matter what you learned, and it’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just how communication and culture work.
I am pretty sure we came up with DEFINITIONS. Now what does that word mean?
I having been fighting a tide of idiocy my entire life, but it doesn’t mean I will drown in it.
Definitions are found, not made. ;)
Objects are found. We define objects. Then we make words. This seems so simple and people seem to want to make it complex.
Eh, I’ve been learning about linguistics and it’s changed my view on the topic.
I think it’s valid to have a visceral hatred for contranyms.
I’m not saying you can’t hate them, but I am saying that all you’ll achieve by that is getting angry all the time.
“Literally” is used as a superlative. The “literally means figuratively” thing tends to refer exaggerations. “I’m literally dying” or “That’s literally hotter than the sun”.
It’s a stand in for “really” which has a double meaning
- Adverb form of “real”
- Expressive form, to convey intensity
But yes, we never “lost” the word. Some online grammar pedants simply refused to accept it as a homonym.
Because both meanings are opposites, literally is a more specialized form of homonym called a contronym. Unlike a contronym such as clip where it’s to tell whether the speaker is talking about clipping things together or clipping stuff off of something based on their use in a sentence, literally and figuratively fit into any sentence the same way. In any case where the speaker’s words could be interpreted ambiguously to be literal or figurative and they add literally to clarify they can’t because someone could mistake their literal literally meaning to be a figurative one.
That means the literal use of literally is functionally lost, and for what? So folks have another way to exaggerate? I don’t care if a language evolves, but if it’s going to I think it should evolve in such a way that expressing certain ideas isn’t lost, especially if there isn’t anything real to be gained. I literally don’t understand why people are so gun-ho to defend using literally figuratively.
Because both meanings are opposites
“really” -> “extremely” is not the opposite of “really” -> “factually”.
the literal use of literally is functionally lost
It isn’t functionally lost any more than “really” has become functionally lost. It’s contingent on context.
“It’s really hot outside” and “He’s really the murderer” have two very coherent and distinct interpretations.
In the same vein, “It’s literally as hot as the sun out here” and “This Christian extremists are taking the Bible too literally” have distinct and non-interchangeable meanings.
But the term has (ahem) LITERALLY been used as an intensifier since 1769. You’re far too late to the party on this debate. It’s LITERALLY been settled for centuries.
How can it literally be settled if people are still arguing about it? Unless you mean figuratively? Good to know people two and a half centuries ago could write poorly.
How can it literally be settled if people are still arguing about it?
Same way people can wave a Confederate Flag 150 years after the war is over.
I didn’t realize people had been shot for not using literally figuratively. Plus one could argue that people waving the Confederate flag 150 years later means the war wasn’t fully finished, but I’m not here to debate politics.
I don’t understand why you compare “literally” to “really”. They’re two different words that are used differently. I really don’t have any problem with using really as an intensifier because it aligns just fine with using it to indicate fact. “It’s really hot outside” -> “The heat outside is real.” “He’s really the murderer” -> “His being the murderer is real.”
But using literally in your example adds absolutely nothing to the sentence. “It’s literally as hot as the sun out here” and “It’s as hot as the sun out here” convey the exact same meaning, except one has an extra word that degrades other uses of it. If your sentence could replace the word “literally” with the word “figuratively” and you would intend the same meaning, you should either use “figuratively” or nothing there at all. That way when the word literally is used there can be no doubt that you mean “in the literal sense.”
Context is rarely given.
And the real meaning is important when the actual work has to be done.
“Allow users to upload and play GIFs.” And now I’m reading old specs from 1987 or try to use an existing GIF library. The boss is angry because he can’t upload his silent movie.
“This site needs AI.” And now I’m happily pruning some trees for the perfect minimax implementation. The manager asks me how many tokens it will need, and I say 0. They become suspicious.
Context doesnt have to be given, it exists regardless of instructions ; it’s your responsibility to infer and understand it, or ask questions if you feel like you’re missing important info
If context isn’t given, in a professional setting- then that is a failing on the person communicating. Again, your examples are cleared up with context. The meaning isn’t gone, there is just more than one definition to those words now.
But there is a general definition. That’s the point isn’t it? Its a bit on the reader to get with that.
For example, if I say something about corn you should know what im talking about immediately. I shouldn’t have to specify the yellow vegetable also called maize just because a thousand years ago the word meant something else.
I’m gonna reuse an old comment here
“literally” being used to mean “figuratively” dates back to 3 years after the word “literally” began meaning “actually”. If this is a hill to die on, you need to use “literally” exclusively to mean “as written in the texts”. Common usage of “literally” to mean “actually” and “figuratively” both date to the 1590s
Yes, we have.
I’m still trying to figure out when “bucket list” came to mean a todo list with a deadline rather than a list of things to do before you die.
That’s not at all what a bucket list is
edit: unclear, my meaning was “a random todo list with a date is not a ‘bucket list’” - to me a bucket list is a list of things to do before you die
a list of things to do before you die.
That is exactly what a bucket list is. It’s a list of things you want to do before you “kick the bucket”.
Correct, we are in agreement. Sorry, my comments intent was “a bucket list is not a dated todo list”
From the employer’s perspective, there is no difference.
figure it out should be on your bucket list
My personal pet peeve on this stuff is the word algorithm. Talk about a word that means something completely different to technical folks than non-technical.
The definition of algorithm is any well defined step by step procedure to solve a problem. To the nontechnical it means specifically an algorithm used by social media to rank and recommend things. Makes reading about social media incredibly eye rolling
I miss leetspeak personally
I’m not sure you’re realizing the difference between enemy AI and generative art AI.
A Citroën 2CV, BMW Z3, and Ford Model T are all cars.
But now when someone says “car”, everyone assumes it’s a Citroën 2CV.
This is the crazy world of “all AI is genAI”.
“guys” now means “all yall”
That’s not new. I think that usage has been around since the 80s or 90s.
Can confirm. Grew up in the 80s/90s.
I work in crypto. No, not “cryptocurrency”.
‘AI’ has been a marketing term since it was conjured in 1956, nothing of value has been lost in it being assimilated by a grift.
Don’t you mean SI?
“GIF” as in giraffe, btw.
You forgot the biggest pronunciation hijack of the century.
I’ve always disliked these short and sweet justifications for one pronunciation over another as there’s a million justifications that can go either way.
Here’s an arguably more more apt example considering it contains every letter from the original acronym: “GIF” as in gift.
In my opinion, go with the one the causes less confusion. There’s already a brand using the “JIF” pronunciation and nothing else using the “GIF” pronunciation so I prefer the hard G pronunciation.
The developers of PNG at least documented the pronunciation right from the start: ping
I still call it P N G
If the inventor of .GIF was a linguist, maybe we would have used his suggestion. .GIF is a file format. JIF is a peanut-butter.
Gerraffe it is.
Some words that begin in gi have a j sound and some have a g sound. There’s no rule. English just be like that.
There’s giraffe and there’s girl.
There’s gibberish and there’s gibbon.
There’s gigantic and there’s gigabyte.
There’s ginger and there’s gingham.
The whole debate on GIF is dumb. Both pronunciations are acceptable. I would say it like gift personally, but there’s no reason to think that gif- has to sound like g vs j. There’s just no rule for it in English.
Now think about “theory”: the popular meaning¹ and the original meaning, the one used in science².
¹ “it’s just an idea”
² “it is proven beyond doubt with the current knowledge”Many people who know the difference between theory and hypothesis say hypothesis when they mean hypothesis.
I think you’re referring to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and super intelligence (SI) or artificial super intelligence (ASI). Both were coined many years ago (~30) to differentiate from AI, which was already being used for much more than the original definition (which was meant to be AGI, or even ASI.)
For all three, GIF, hacker, AI, you just have to accept that language is fluid. Words are co-opted from other places all the time to describe new things. And to be honest, all of those terms have been used for meanings outside their original one for almost as long as they’ve existed, especially on the scale of human language.
I used to lament the term “drone” being used for remote control quadcopters… But the world won, so I have to stop being a nerd about it, and accept that it has a broader meaning now.
And just to note, people don’t just mean genAI when they say AI now. They use AI for everything. You wrote a program to track workouts in a database? Better call it… “AI!”
I’ll still call them UAVs.
But I don’t think the original definition of AI was AGI… can you say more?
AI was coined in the 50’s and was broadly meant to be “a computer that can behave like a human” in terms of reasoning, and self-improvement. It kind of put a name to what Alan Turing was working on with the Imitation Game/Turing Test, which he hinted would require a “learning” aspect.
In Sci-Fi, and generally in computer science, that was what was meant by AI for a long time, maybe with Sci-Fi taking it further into the super intelligence realm (e.g. in Neuromancer), until people started applying the term to smaller research items like math problem solvers, expert systems, machine learning, computer speech and recognition. Once that became more prevalent, AGI was coined.
I don’t think that’s accurate. The earliest AI conferences (in the 50s) were taken up with programs, algorithms and ideas which, today, look incredibly primitive - solvers which could (very slowly, and not practically for anything interesting) solve logic problems if they were posed appropriately. Like a really shit version of a SAT-solver.
Turing wrote that a machine which passed the Turing Test could reasonably be described as a thinking thing. LLMs from several years ago (and in fact, models from years before that) could pass the Turing test, so they are very much the kind of thing he was talking about - yet they are certainly not AGI. As part of his discussion of this, he addressed several possible gaps, including about learning, meaning that something which convincingly passes the Turing test would also, to him, demonstrate some ability to learn.
Early on, “artificial intelligence” was used to describe what we now call AGI, but it was also used to describe all sorts of problems which, at the time, were only soluble by intelligent people - such as machine translation, image recognition, or finding an efficient path through a maze.
Sorry. From your question, I didn’t know you were an expert on CS/AI history. I defer to your wondrous knowledge on the subject to nitpick at what you baited me into talking about in detail.
