Which is considered a Really Bad Idea because tags aren't immutable, so there's absolutely zero guarantee that it'll point to the same commit a few months from now.
The GitHub Actions ecosystem found out the hard way, through some rather high-profile compromises. They hotfixed it by adding "immutable tags" to their platform, and are now working on adding a lockfile to... easily reference a commit hash.
Part of the effect of spending time around other people is that you get to know them, discover which ones aren't creepy, and develop connections with them. And, over the age of 25, the personal connection starts to matter more and more for people than "Are they hot or not?"
The job-getting paper ceases to be meaningful if it no longer verifies competence. If it merely verifies the ability to prompt an LLM then nobody will pay a premium for people have it, and then nobody will pay to obtain one.
You mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?
The solution is probably a trash bag with a mini forklift compatible lift rings, an optical center mark, a ratcheting closure, and make a raspberry PI do the computing millions of dollars of tooling to make a robot compatible trash bag but it might be worth it, deploy the bean counters!
Plumbing is kind of a hard job, definitely not fun for anyone above middle age. And given it will pay minimum wage, I think I'd just take a life of leisure instead.
Sure, but that is today. When AI decimates the knowledge fields, a whole lot of people are going to be looking at different career options. There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.
> There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.
And the worst case downward spiral will involve not only a surge in supply but a drastic drop in demand to go along with it.
All of those previous "knowledge workers" scurrying for the trades not only become more labor supply, but without their cushy jobs they will no longer be able to afford to hire trades people to prop up the demand side.
Apologies, I'm with you. I was speaking to the hypothetical, not trying to suggest it is inevitable. I think it is uncertain how this plays out, but I am an optimist and I think it ends up a net positive.
It is very plausible that LLMs never get to 100% replacement for knowledge workers and the winners will the people who use both, leaving behind the people who thought all they needed to do was cut costs by doing existing workloads without humans. It remains to be seen if the constraint on quantity of knowledge work was the people or the work.
It remains to be seen, but a reasonable argument against this is found in the progression of chess AI engines. After Kasparov was beaten there was still a period where the best humans working with machines were still better than the machines on their own. Eventually (around 2020 I think?) this was no longer the case, having even the best humans on Earth in the loop was a net negative. There are reasonable arguments against this, but I've found them mostly unconvincing.
> Why would it not? The economic incentives make it inevitable.
Citation needed. Again, I wanna emphasize that I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying that it's not a given that it will.
There is very little sign that current models can do anything but (at best!) augment most knowledge workers (with some exceptions). And there are very reasonable open questions about whether it's economically, and ecologically, sustainable to continue development at anything near the current pace. There is, in fact, plenty of indicators that even the current SoTA is the result of a financial overexertion.
I'm not talking about manufacturing. I am talking about raw materials for chips, battery cells, etc. You can't be sovereign if you have the capability to build something but don't have the resources to build it
If your electricity usage isn't growing like crazy, existing batteries can simply be recycled to make new ones.
What chips are you talking about?
Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
Electronic chips in wind turbines, hydro stations, etc.. Believe it or not but all of these use chips...
> Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
I am not holding renewables to it. The person I was responding to made the erroneous claim that you would be sovereign with renewables. "Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue." I am just pointing out that most countries wouldn't actually have sovereignty and would still be reliant on other countries.
I am the one holding the consistent standard since I believe most countries wouldn't be sovereign regardless of them using fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
No one meets the ImJamal Standard of Sovereignty. It's completely useless.
Might as well go with the source of energy that pollutes the least and allows you to be import-free for the longest amount of time - solar, wind, and batteries.
So you think oil and coal doesn't use electronics?
They use exactly the same stuff. Nearly all power generation is just spinning magnets, obvious exception is PV. There are no particular electronic components you need for wind turbines that you don't also need for a coal or gas fired power plant. Everything uses electronic control systems.
Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
We did have electronics in 1900: Kirchoff's circuit laws date from 1845, the first semiconductor device (crystal detector) is from 1874 and the first vacuum tube is from 1904. What we didn't have is transistors and the miniaturization technology that gave us integrated circuits and microprocessors.
The conversation was clearly about more modern electronics since I was talking about rare earth minerals which were not used in the devices you are talking about.
You are able to drill and burn oil along with transmit the electricity without technology that requires rare earth minerals which are the electronics I was referring to.
You were able to drill and burn oil without modern technology. These days, pretty much all those easily accessible wells are drained and the only oil left is in harder to access wells that you'd never even find without modern technology. That's why we're fracking and messing around with oil sands and building offshore oil rigs etc.
We also had windmills long before we had electricity. And the west has plenty of rare earth deposits, despite the name they're not actually that rare. They're just expensive to refine and the refinement process causes a lot of pollution. China does it cheaper, polluting itself in the process and that's why we don't do it. If they were to stop giving us access to these minerals we could restart our own production. It's not just used for electronics by the way, it's also used for magnets which are a key component in electric motors/generators, so without rare earth minerals you're not generating electricity regardless of having oil.
That rule isn’t universal though. “I go to the dentist every year” doesn’t imply that I particularly care about a specific dentist (or, case in point, about the specific dentist).
“This was a nice evening” is also difficult to characterize as not caring about which evening it is. As are books titled “An Introduction to XYZ”, where both the authors and the readers will probably care about the specific book.
> I'm going to the bank, the shop, the dentist, the pool - I have a regular one in mind and you may well also know which one I mean.
Well, that would work for many uses of the, but it's definitely not a correct explanation here. If I have no idea where the bank is, I'll still describe myself as going to "the bank". I could tell you that "I'm going to the bank", go out and get in my car, and then look up where a convenient bank is. This has to be viewed as idiomatic, or as "the bank" being an abstract task-based location rather than a concrete physical location.
“Care” may not be the correct word, but in those examples the difference is whether you are referring to a specific instance, or any instance of a group. When you say “I went to the doctor,” you did in fact go to a specific doctor (or “I will go to the doctor” meaning you will go to one). It would be equally valid to say “I went to a doctor”, it’s just less specific.
I believe it is food for thought — would one ever say "this was the nice evening"?
Here it only sounds OK if you make the adjective stronger ("this was the nicest evening", though you'd probably avoid "nice" in this case and go with "best", "most amazing"...), or drop the adjective altogether ("this was the evening").
So nuance is that you might have many nice evenings, with this being one of — but what if you do not, and all are actually terrible except for this one? I guess with proper pronounciation of "THE nice", it can still work (we already talked about nice evenings and not-nice ones, so it'd be "this was the nice one"), but it'd be pretty awkward.
Absent any context, “the nice evening” sounds strange because no one really expects there to be only one nice evening.
However it can makes sense if the surrounding context supports the idea of only one nice evening.
Grammar rules are generally about the surrounding context which allow us to leave out superfluous or repeated information and still be understood. Things sound strange when that missing information can’t be deduced from context.
This is because "a"/"an" mean "one". The stress generally is on it meaning "[any] one", but in your example "a" is used for its numerical meaning instead; the sentences "I have a son" and "I have one son" are interchangeable in this instance.
Well, on that note: the construction “I went to the store” has always felt wrong to me as a native speaker. People say it even when that store lacks definiteness in context (ie the listener has no reason to know which one you mean). At the very least, it counts as a separate usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.
Edit: Here's a frustrating HN thread where someone tried to claim it makes sense, but it turned out his argument hinged on "well obviously all native English speakers regularly go to some store, right?" Screw the homebound.
I think the usage falls into this group:
"The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",
When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to. Friends and neighbours would have also have known up to fairly recently, when people still mostly walked for groceries and such to the few small stores nearby and made friends with people who lived close.
So, I'd say it's a bit of a colloquial hold over from walking times and construction taking a listener into confidence.
It is common for someone to say, for instance, "I need to go to the store" even if they don't have any particular store in mind.
A prescriptivist pedant might insist that this is incorrect, and they should instead say "I need to go to a store", but in my judgment as a native speaker, the version with "the" is more idiomatic, and the version with "a" sounds stilted.
Third time: I'm not imposing some kind of prescriptivism, and I know that it's common. You're not bringing in any new information here. I'm saying it deviates from the usual pattern of using "the" when the noun has definiteness.
To repeat another part of my initial post, it's like the use of "the" in "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". It's clearly a different usage/meaning/sense of "the" -- in fact, most other languages use a different word for that sense. (German uses je ... desto.) It would be very dubious to explain all uses of "the" as "oh its when the noun has definiteness". It wouldn't cover that case, and it wouldn't cover (the typical use of) "I went to the store".
I am agreeing with you that "the" in "I went to the store" does not necessarily imply any specific instance of the noun, and is a grammatically distinct use of the word.
Some of the statements (by other people) in this conversation are wrong, based on applying a school-style oversimplified explanation that doesn't really match English usage.
Usually, the mall, the store, the gas station in a story are habitual known places for the people telling you these stories, and they are implying that. In other cases, it is being used as an idiom that imply something habitual, common, run of the mill.
Again, they do it even when those prerequisites don’t hold. And your second sentence is agreeing that it’s a different usage than the normal definiteness.
I see this as consistent with other replies stating that The is something specific in a group, and A is an indeterminant one of many.
How can this be in your example? When I am saying "I went to the store", I am really saying "There are a group of locations that I could have gone. E.G., the car dealership, the bank, the museum, the store, or the office. I went to the store".
That's not how definiteness works otherwise -- it's always for a case where the other party would know which one you mean. This "selecting out of possible other choices" protocol is not a thing.
Beyond that, there are cases where you absolutely are referring to a specific one, but use a/an.
"Our house has a pool" for example. There is a very specific pool being referred to, but it's sufficiently indirect that "the" would never be used here without radically changing sentence meaning.
The reason you say "our house has a pool" is not that you're not referring to a specific pool. It's that the pool you're referring to is not already present in the conversational context, and it needs to be introduced. A(n) performs that introduction.
If you refer to that same pool without introducing it, it will still be marked for definiteness - compare my pool, my house's pool, or the pool at my house. But your example sentence doesn't work that way.
(Note that the three phrases I listed are all bare noun phrases that can't stand as sentences. Note also that if you used one of those phrases when your listener wasn't already aware that you had a pool, they might feel that you "moved too fast" in the conversation, assuming that they knew about your pool when they didn't.)
You can use "the" in the original sentence just fine if the pool had been established earlier, like with planning a pool party. Then the pool is the pool that you'd be using, and not simply a pool that will be found at some point in the future.
Because you are referring to a specific one of each, even if a listener doesn’t necessarily know which specific one, they know that you know.
In the case of your example the listener assumes you mean whichever specific dentist you are currently seeing. That fact that you may choose one randomly each time is an exception.
"I go to the dentist every year" implies that you have a usual dentist or some sort of stable routine or plan vs "I go on a trip every year" which implies the journey is yet to be selected/defined from a multitude of options.
So I feel the rule isn't always taken literally, but the vs a is selected based on whether something is up for consideration/substitution rather than something that's well defined and specified.
the doctor, the cinema, the dentist, etc imply there's one family connection you use, or it's the local place everybody uses. "The" specifies "the one" everybody uses.
I'm guessing saying 'a' doctor would've looked at the role as an abstract concept. "To be a doctor would be wonderful" vs "to be the doctor would be wonderful".
I guess it's language clinging on to a sense of community.
Maybe it must be considered from the perspective of the speaker. He may have a particular dentist in mind when he says "the dentist" and maybe the listener not having privy to it may not be relevant.
And he may be saying "a" about the word "nice" instead of about the word "evening".
Note: This is just my opinion and an attempt at trying to make sense of it. Purely subjective take as I usually refrain from making purely opinion based arguments.
No matter how much we try to make objective statements, they are never based on "full, provable truth", and are thus opinions. Conversing with other humans is exchanging opinions based on their own previous knowledge. Thus no need to — when conversing with non-malicious people — state that your opinion is, in fact, your opinion. I appreciate it for what it is, and if I am curious about the basis for it, I will inquire more.
All of the above is in my opinion, but I never state that and assume a good faith reader will take it as such (here for demonstration purposes only :)).
So in short, thanks for your opinion, and I agree this is the largely the basis for choosing between an indefinite and definite article, also opening them up to inquiry ("I am going to the store" — "oh, which one?"; compare to "I am going to a store" — "what are you getting?").
I appreciate your good faith, the suggestions, and your elaboration on them.
For context, extensive coding over two decades has ingrained in me the habit of explicitly disambiguating my statements of machine-executable logic expressed in natural language from personal guesswork and opinions.
I should integrate your suggestion and try not to explicitly qualify my guesswork. Using passively implied qualifiers in the structure of my opinion pieces would be a step in the right direction.
"Chocolate ice-cream is the best" is very clearly not an (attempt at) objective statement and needs no qualifiers. Only if the reader really wants to be malicious, they can question even that too: what do you base that on? how many ice-cream types have you tried? is there a study confirming preferred taste among a large population? is it cultural and has that been tested? ...
"In my opinion, based on roughly 60 ice-cream flavors I have tried in my life, and having tried chocolate flavor in at least 50 different places, I find that the taste of chocolate ice-cream on average is the best tasting ice-cream regardless of my mood, fullness or place of production and variety of 'chocolate' used" makes for a very boring conversation — except sometimes when you are making a go at it :)
Nope! Because "the" also refers to a class/category which is essentially the opposite of indicating a particular member.
For instance, "the bald eagle is native to North America".
There is also "The" in names; The Beatles, The Great Lakes, The Bahamas, The Bronx, ...
The role of "the" depends on context: how was the subject treated in previous sentences in the conversation.
"I see a bald eagle out of the window. The bald eagle is huge!"
In this second sentence, there is no way that "the bald eagle" could refer to the class of bald eagles, because the previous sentence introduces the topic of the sighting of a bald eagle. It refers to that one.
If "the bald eagle is huge" appears out of the blue, not preceded by any discussion of any eagle, that tends to bring in the class interpretation.
I learned the above through Japeanese. A similar thing happens with the は (wa) topic particle; I realized that "the" works in a similar way in that regard.
That much is obvious and everyone learns it like on the first week of English learning, of course. It’s the various cases where that simple rule doesn’t apply that are difficult.
"I play the piano"
And then there are those cases where you actually use neither!
I see this as consistent. When you say "I play the piano" you are really saying, "There are many instruments – banjo, trumpet, clarinet, and piano. I play the piano". Saying "I play a piano" is also correct. But the inference is that you are referring to one particular piano.
In the sentence "There is a piano in the lobby" you are saying "There are many objects in the lobby. Among them is a piano, one of many in the world".
Instruments are interesting when it comes to articles. I'm wondering if it's a leftover for when people would play in orchestras.
> What do you play (in the orchestra)?
> I play the piano (in the orchestra).
Using 'the' here feels quite formal, as if you belong to something, or it's a career choice.
> Play any instruments?
> ah, I play guitar (casually)
> Yes, I play the guitar (for a band, or at least I larp as doing so)
When it comes to 'a/an', we should assume that there's an element of randomness, or irrelevance as to which one precisely.
> What you doing tonight? Playing guitar
> What you doing tonight? Playing a guitar
> What you doing tonight? Playing the guitar.
The second option doesn't sound natural interestingly, as 'tonight' in the question implies there's a plan. Playing 'an' instrument, therefore, comes off as more spontaneous; playing 'any' instrument which just happens to be there.
Most people here aren't experts in the underlying technology. But they do work with it regularly and are interested in the latest developments in the tooling.
(If you haven't seen it, you might think I'm joking. I'm not, and it's an amazing film.)
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