Everyone is sticking ads everywhere now.

I swapped supermarkets the other day because Tesco’s search now has several sponsors at the top of every search - and they’re weird keyword matching that doesn’t even work so you get nonsense products.

Search for ‘mint’ and you get 2 rows of toothpaste. Who searches for toothpaste by typing ‘mint’? Of course it’s bloody mint flavour. I want some actual mint.

A while ago I made an algorithm to swap the gender in fairy stories.

(Genderswappedstories.com)

And I found another English weirdness trying to swap between his/him and her/hers.

Him always swaps to her

Eg it was him - it was her

But his can swap to her or hers

It is his -> it is hers

It is his thing -> it is her thing.

And her can also swap to him or his

It was her -> it was him

It was her thing -> it was his thing

And hers always swaps to his.

So hers and him are the only completely predictable - and they don’t even mean the same thing!

I had to write a very in-depth algorithm to work out the type of words surrounding the words - if they are nouns, adjectives etc - in each sentence to correctly guess the swaps. But even after that some were unpredictable due to word order keeping the important words apart. all I could do 100% reliably was to flag the ones that might be ambiguous to check. Of course now I could just get an LLM to check it!

Can anyone explain why this happens?

> Can anyone explain why this happens?

Historically speaking, it seems to have been due to two independent coincidences:

• The falling together of object pronoun her and possessive her seems to date back to Old English, where the genitive and dative cases were both hire. I’m unsure how this originated, but they seem to be separate in Frisian (the closest relative of English) and were reconstructed as separate in Proto-Germanic, which suggests that it was due to regular sound change in the evolution of Old English.

• Later, it seems like the third person possessive pronouns were derived by adding ’s to the corresponding genitive forms (which ended up as the possessive determiners). So her became hers, but it had no effect on his, since that already ended with an ⟨s⟩.

Thus we end up with the paradigm of:

    |   | subject | object | poss pronoun | poss determiner |
    |---+---------+--------+--------------+-----------------|
    | M | he      | him    |             his                |
    | F | she     |       her             | hers            |

Thank you!

Holdovers from showing the case (function in the sentence) of pronouns with inflection, which has mostly vanished from English, but not completely. The "mostly" just means we get extra confusion from different cases having ended up with the same form (as in the two different meanings of "her" below).

"It was him -> it was her" -- both are direct objects (at least as you're using them here--once upon a time the correct English would have been "it was he -> it was she", since the verb "to be" is not a transitive verb, but that seems to have gone out of fashion).

"It is his -> it is hers" -- both are possessives, but they're not directly modifying anything (they refer to "it", but the verb is in between).

"It is his thing -> it is her thing" -- both are possessives, but now they are functioning as direct modifiers of "thing", which is a different usage.

I don't know if there is a fully specified algorithm for determining these things, and even if you got one that worked in English, I don't think it would map very easily to any other language, because English is such a hodgepodge of things cherry picked from various languages over the centuries.

Thank you!

Well soon realise it hacked that website and added that log.

The problem is those two people are in conflict not collaboration.

If the expensive person is still better at getting what _you_ want from a contract then it’s always worth doing that.

There’s a reason lawyers are so expensive to begin with - they do very complicated stuff with very expensive consequences if done badly.

It's probably somewhat of a zero sum game. Both sides lawyers have AI tools which probably just keeps them on a level playing field rather than actually making anything cheaper or faster.

I spoke to a very very high up corporate lawyer specialising in tech - so knows Ai is real. And they said AI contracts are the bane of their existence. They’d rather you arrive with no idea what you want than a contract partially written by AI. They said it usually takes longer with an AI starting point than starting from scratch.

I was thinking the exact same thing!

Just as a counterpoint to this.

I was having ankle pain and had one of these gait analyses and also had inward pointing knees and got some shoes to correct it - and it helped loads! Much less knee pain and my ankle feels lessy achey too.

So don’t trust all sales people - especially if feel fine already. But if you have an issue it really can help.

Weird to think we are currently living in the ‘unlimited free Ubers because you recommended a friend or 2’ phase of this new technology.

Imagine if running fable costs you what it actually costs to run fable. A lot of vibe coders (and just proper software engineers) are gonna be very sad if that comes to pass.

This is what I’m not getting - we’re spending more than the global gross sales of all software on the planet on AI, how much more software needs to be sold and for how much more to recoup?

The economics only make sense if they can replace a huge number of workers with AI.

But that reminds me of the story of the union rep telling Ford: “good luck getting your machines to buy your cars”

(Fyi Ford took note and started paying his workers enough that they’d buy his cars)

You are assuming a fixed 0-growth economy. The economics can work if the economy grows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_growth

How can it work if people don’t have jobs though? Where do they get their money to pay for anything?

Also the economy can grow and still leave everyone completely screwed except rich owner classes.

It looks cool but I just can’t be that bothered to engage with something that contains so little of a human’s input.

If one wants human attention, one must put in human effort

Head, hand and heart are all required to make something worthwhile.

I have the same gripe and I think it’s just simply that when you are used to being able to just write code, everything else feels like it’s in the way.

Visual coding is a pain to change and move around quickly. It’s just clutter ultimately - if you know how to actually code.