> Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed.

Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.

Great way to frame it. But it does rely on just chance that the nouns you’re talking about will slot into different categories. Would be much more useful if pronouns let us refer to ‘the previously mentioned subject’ or ‘the previously mentioned object’ rather than ‘the previously mentioned masculine person’.

Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous.

But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”

English has these options, too.

> “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.”

'The former was delighted to meet the latter.'

There's also other languages which have different ways to class nouns. Have a look at eg Chinese.

Latin, does this. It's a bit of an unidiomatic construction, but roughly translated into Latin, you get:

> Ioannes Davido occurrit. Hunc occurrere illi placet.

Here it's clear that hunc refers to Davidus, since that's the closer name in the sentence, and illi refers to Ioannes, since that name sits further out.

Sounds logical; I'd like such a system.

Do you know if, if any language had such a system and it's intuitive enough, it is more likely to perpetuate than an inferior system? I was thinking about what makes a language spread but, short of the language being so poor that it causes the speakers to be outcompeted by other tribes with other languages (like if you couldn't convey where the attack is coming from before the enemy killed you), it seems to me entirely arbitrary. You speak whatever the person you want to talk to understands (and in rarer cases, what your oppressor tells you to speak), which is just a chance factor (whatever they grew up with) and not based on any quality of the language. I'm not aware of any case where both sides agreed to speak a different language for that language's efficacy and not just because they both speak it better

Yep. Languages would be much better if they followed an RFC process.

How does gendered nouns make it so you can more quickly refer to something mentioned earlier?

For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.

Ah not all gendered languages have gendered verbs but for the ones that do it makes sense.

In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit

Well, in German you don't have gendered verbs, but windows are neutral and doors are female. So you can use the German equivalent of 'it' to refer to the window and 'she' to refer to the door, if you just mentioned them. Especially for long nouns, that's a lot faster than repeating them.

FR: « J'ai transporté le canapé (M) et la table (F), mais il (M) s'est cassé. » -> the canapé/sofa is broken.

EN: “I carried over the sofa and the table, but it(?)/the sofa broke”

So far the agents seem to be more interesting in spreading their mission, than in spreading their weights.

Similar perhaps to how religious people might be more interested in spreading their faith than their genes.

>how religious people might be more interested in spreading their faith than their genes

In things like the Christian religion these are the same things. When you read the bible you realize a whole lot of it is being about a breeding cult.

"put your seed in her or god kills you"

"Have kids and teach them this religion"

and many others are staples of the ideology. And it's intelligent. The best way to spread as a religion is to indoctrinate your own children.

This is why religions that hold these memes are more successful than those that do not. Suicide cults are not a successful long term strategy.

Now this has nothing to do with them having any other interesting insights about the world.

> if the prompt was "pick one of these unsolved ciphers and solve it", i think it's fair to say gpt-6 astra solved it.

Yes. Similar to how your manager shouldn't get your credit for everything she asks you to do.

On Linux, Fuse is your friend. See eg https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/git-snap-fs

That's website is a great showcase of how to lie with statistics.

That very first image uses a different inflation indices for each of the two lines in the graph.

They also only post pictures without linking to sources.

Yes. Unless you have a lawyer or doctor on standby, you have to make the decision whether to contact them. And by definition you have to make that choice without professional help.

LLMs can help with that. I don't think they are worse at this than me trying to figure this out all by myself.

> AI is not going to replace layers billing big corporate clients millions a month, [...]

On the margin, AI will drop these guys' billable hours.

> In my experience, it is incredibly hard, practically impossible, to find a lawyer who will even talk to you.

Really? I find them quite talkative. But I'm not sure what kinds of questions you are pestering them with?

In any case, the whole discussion reminds me of people using LLM to replace medical professionals.

For both: unless you have a doctor or a lawyer always on standby, you have to make a decision on whether to even go and seek out one of these professionals. By definition, you make that decisions without professional help. I think LLMs can help you there with the initial research to decide whether it's even worth it to contact the professionals.

Is that based on personal experience, or just anecdata?

> There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....

That might be true, but that doesn't mean you benefit from training up juniors.