back
41 comments
> The obsession with AI (and other vapourware) in our industry ... fuelling the hard-right — who coincidentally are very much using AI.

Is it useless or not? If it's vapourware, why would you care if the other side uses it? If the far right is using it successfully, then by definition it is not vapourware, right?

Because the output from LLMs drowns everything else. So if people use it to drown actual discussions yes, it's useful for that. Everyone else though, has to suffer.
I think that's aligns with what GP is saying: if one is going to say people are using it, even if for things you don't like, then choosing to call it vapourware in the same paragraph is a confusing use of the term.

In a charitable reading I think the author was meaning something along the lines of "fails to be as useful as made to sound on things I think are worth valuing but very useful for things I think are slop" but chose a different meaning term by mistake.

LLMs are purported by their creators to have a different use (advancing of human knowledge, genuine artificial intelligence, etc) than drowning discussions online. The fact that people can find some uses for bad technology does not make it less of a failure or, those goals less hot air.
Again, the issue is the term "vapourware" does not refer to software which one considers bad, misguided from its original goals, or a failure.
It fits for software that has not reached its creators stated goals. LLMs are not AI and have not improved lives for any human, outside of making some people rich.
I'd disagree the definition fits that situation as vapourware is for software which is still unobtainable, not software which is available but the reviews and feature coverage suck vs the advertisement hype. Are we able to talk about that definition further before we dive into talking about your views on LLMs?
As someone who uses LLMs every day for general questions/brainstorming, more efficient coding, and building a product used by doctors to improve their documentation (saving them hours per week and freeing them to interact with their patients more personally), I would like more of this hot air please. Would you begrudge disabled people their new assistants? Language learners their translators? I could go on.

LLMs have some very important downsides, and I fully agree that they are dangerous, but we should dispel the notion that they don't have positive use cases. That leaves the benefits on the table, while the bad actors will continue with their destruction anyways.

Anyway, my original point was indeed just about the semantics of the word "vapourware", which if I'm interpreting the author correctly, would be better replaced with "malware" (not that I agree with such a stance).

Why should I care if someone else builds and uses the torment nexus?

Because I’m among those being tormented!

I think you misinterpreted my comment as "LLMs are good" which is a different conversation.

My point is: you can't say LLMs are a dangerous tool and call them vapourware at the same time. It's a contradiction in terms.

As a non-native English speaker: why is there a comma in the title?
Apparently it is a stylistic choice to add a pause, acceptable in informal or rhetorical writing, though grammatically incorrect.

Like: "I'm getting fed up of making the rich... well, richer".

The problem with using this as an analogy is that the commas attach to the interjection "well," not to the words "rich" or "richer." Remove the "well" and you should remove all the punctuation around it.

"I'm getting fed up of making the rich... richer" might be grammatically ok in informal text, but a comma is definitely wrong.

It’s not wrong if it’s commonly used and commonly understood
Of course it is. Doing a wrong thing a lot doesn't make it less wrong. Over time maybe its "wrongness" will change the way language naturally changes over time.

But today, it's wrong.

That change has already occurred. What are you waiting for?
Its wrong
I think a lot of English speakers use commas to emphasize a pause in speech. I don’t think a comma was needed. I think the author was slightly mixing up the relative clauses and appositives rules with commas. Source: native speaker, North America

EDIT: I like qwertox’s answer best

It's a stylistic choice and probably not strictly correct
Personal choice of the author. It would be grammatically correct without the comma.
it's not grammatically correct but reflects a pausing speaking style to avoid confusion generated from repeating the same word twice in a row, and also to emphasize the repetition (a thing becoming more of a thing after already being that thing). (others are telling you whether it's correct per textbook rules or that it's purely stylistic but not why it's used in practice and what it conveys)
There are “close” and “open” styles of comma usage. “Open” has been ascendant for the last few decades (it began to rise in the early 20th century, but wasn’t firmly dominant until later). It’s less precise and expressive, but “cleaner”.

Source: Garner’s.

Because native English users don't follow a style book. As much as English teachers in school want pupils to be prescriptivists in academic contexts, native English communication (writing/speaking) is better understood using a descriptivist lens.
Native English speakers don't know how to use commas, so they throw them anywhere they want to have a pause.
There aren't fixed rules, even to the degree to which there are such rules for other grammatical questions in English. Much of comma usage comes down to preference.

I think part of why we've shifted so strongly against their use is because if you leave it up to taste, as had previously been common, most people make poor choices.

It's funny because even as we've moved away from prescriptivism, the "rules" around comma usage have tightened and people have gotten quicker to call a given previously-common usage incorrect.

There are rules around comma usage that are up to taste (eg the Oxford comma), and people get very dogmatic about these rules for bad reasons. There are also times when usage of a comma is incorrect according to all the known rulesets for English grammar. This usage is in the latter category.

The notion that a comma is any sort of pause fell out of favor in written English in the 1800's and thankfully hasn't been back (see the second amendment as to why "a comma is a generic pause" is a bad idea). You would have to be the loosest form of descriptivist to say that this usage is close to correct, and I would question whether you would accept any grammar rule at all at that point. Many people use run-on sentences and many don't capitalize the start of sentences in very casual text, even though these are widely (universally) accepted rules.

I like the aesthetic of its usage in this case and find it makes the sentence read easier. It eliminates even temporary ambiguity about part-of-speech for the final two words. It stands in for a clarifying word like "become".

To the extent it's "incorrect", it's in that it generated this discussion at all.

I completely disagree with you and find the comma misplaced in a jarring way. It interrupts the flow of thought for me in a negative way: much more than a brief pause, it places a marker that the syntax of "richer" isn't fully bound to the previous words. There's also no ambiguity in the last two words without the comma.

I think if the author wanted a "pause the sound while keeping the syntax flowing" mark, the ellipsis (...) would have done the trick much better. In my opinion, though, this sentence did not merit any pause between "rich" and "richer" since there's nothing surprising about that word.

> Native English speakers don't know how to use commas, so they throw them anywhere they want to have a pause.

Like with any language, there are wildly varying levels of literacy. Many native English speakers know how to use commas, and many others don't. I think that shades from using them grammatically (most literate), to using them ungrammatically as a generic pause, to not using punctuation at all.

sounds like they know how to use commas, then
Second amendment jurisprudence says otherwise. Billions of dollars spent on litigating three commas.
Progressive movements have giant amounts of funding. Every big business in the US and mostly in the UK as well are donating to various Progressive causes. Loads of Progressive people are fairly rich tech workers. Most of Hollywood are Progressive. Kamala Harris took over the previous presidential candidacy from Joe Biden and raised $1.4bn in a very short amount of time, twice what Trump got.

That's why the joke is Progressive YouTubers are sponsored by Amazon and Google, and Conservative ones are sponsored by Freedom Water and other budget right wing brands.

In western politics, there are various definitions of the word "progressive". The definitions that include Kamala Harris are mostly used by right-wing Americans.

How much corporate funding did Bernie get?

Why do you think capital supported Kamala? Especially in hindsight?

And your joke about left vs right sponsorship of streamers has a very soft underbelly, which, if you don't know about it yet, kind of tells the whole story right there.

> In western politics, there are various definitions of the word "progressive". The definitions that include Kamala Harris are mostly used by right-wing Americans.

No, Kamala Harris had some pretty extreme "Progressive" positions such as open borders.

> And your joke about left vs right sponsorship of streamers has a very soft underbelly, which, if you don't know about it yet, kind of tells the whole story right there.

I don't see the point of insinuation. Make a point, or leave it, please. Doing this is just a waste of time.

> No, Kamala Harris had some pretty extreme "Progressive" positions such as open borders.

What benefit do you gain from outright lying like this?

Hackernews is not the place for political arguments. That's not just a suggestion, it's a rule. I noticed somebody used an ambiguous word in a way that, IMO, was not quite correct, and it is an interesting word so I clarified the technicality, and mea culpa, I probably dipped into actual politics too far. Let's get back to building stuff, yes?
Kamala Harris's voting record is extremely progressive. Nevermind the subjective approximation of her policy positions as the Democrat nominee, which was watered down as she tried to garner broader support compared to her 2020 primary run.

>The Voteview project (now based at UCLA) has, since the 1980s, employed the roll-call votes cast in Congress to locate all senators and representatives on a liberal-conservative ideological map. These data and methods have been utilized by academics in thousands of peer-reviewed books, book chapters and journal articles. Although no method is perfect, there is a general consensus within the academic community that the NOMINATE methodology employed by the Voteview project and its close cousins represent the gold standard.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4816859-kamala-harris-i...

You can look at the data yourself: https://voteview.com/data

And its not shocking right? She represented California, which is obviously one of, if not the most, liberal state in the country.

This places her on a spectrum where the farthest left you can go is the most left leaning US Democratic senator, which is not very "progressive" in the context of western politics as I mentioned in my last comment.
Yeah, exactly. When someone like Bernie Sanders talks about the economy and big corporations today, they sound a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was a full-on capitalist and proud of it, and definitely would not have been understood as a "leftist" at the time. He believed the USA government's job was to act as a strong, firm check against the worst tendencies of capitalism (like monopolization), but only so that capitalism could function at its best. There were many at the time who did not believe capitalism was really the way to go, though! Just look at organizations like the IWW, and the various worldviews that were sympathetic to the rise of the USSR just a few years later. Hell, one of the people who ran against Teddy Roosevelt was Eugene Debs, a socialist who got more than an insignificant number of votes.

But 100+ years later, a Teddy Roosevelt-esque understanding of government and capitalism is the furthest left USA politics can imagine.

s/Democrat nominee/Democratic nominee/g

or

s/Democrat nominee/nominee for the Democrats/g

"Democrat" is a long-used general US political slang to refer to an individual member of the Democratic Party (or to refer to a collective of individual members if used as the plural "Democrats"). In the past few decades right-wing commentators have made frequent improper use of the slang to refer to the official party, partly due to its easy association with negative words such as "autocrat" and "plutocrat", resulting in the common misuse of the slang. However, there is no such thing as the "Democrat Party" or "Democrat nominee".

The people you need to be watching are the ones who have given up on ever having anything material.