“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.

“At the start of the year, my crystal ball told me that all my evenings this year are going to be bad except for one. This was the nice evening.”

Yes, exactly the example I put in ("the one") — thanks for sharing it and showing it might not even be awkward!

One could imagine a very stressful weekend (two evenings), one of which was “the rough evening” and the other was “the nice evening”.

"AI toothbrush" was not on my 2026 bingo card.

Surprisingly, $30 for two replacement heads is comparable to other electric toothbrushes (not counting third-party bulk knockoff replacements, which I have been using for years without issue). The RFID reader might force you to buy the official replacements, though.

Oral-B introduced their AI toothbrush last year. See the "More Information" tab on this page: https://oralb.com/en-us/products/oral-b-genius-x-rechargeabl...

The Oral-B Genius X with A.I. Rechargeable Toothbrush will transform the way you brush for healthier gums and stronger teeth for life*. The dentist-inspired round brush head surrounds each tooth to remove more plaque along the gumline vs a regular manual toothbrush.

A compiler translating high-level code to machine code is a predictable and repeatable process.

An LLM translating a prompt to to high-level code has a much lower degree of predictability. To say an LLM prompt is a comparable abstraction is unfair, though I admit it's getting very close.

The LLM will never produce the same output each time, it doesn't have to do that to have very strong level of abstraction.

But yes, it has to fulfill some kind of contract defined by the absraction.

It's less a problem of the LLM, and more so how we use them, and the inherent tooling around it.

I don't get the use of "abstraction" in this context, I must admit.

Programming abstractions offer interfaces to functionality that are both simplified in use and restricted in capability. (e.g. any API or compiler.) I don't see how LLMs meet that definition.

It seems more like we're talking about offloading or delegation, here. And that's a valid business tactic, certainly, but it's not a software abstraction any more than a CTO is an abstraction of a tech lead, no?

> But yes, it has to fulfill some kind of contract defined by the absraction.

I don't follow. Is the contact here the design specification for the system? If so, again, I'd argue that's not an abstraction.

An abstraction could be a design requirement, expressed in some way.

That's definitely an abstraction.

IDLs are a form of abstraction, they're a requirement somewhat more formally described.

Remember UML? That was an attempt to go 1/2 layer above the code, that was an abstraction.

There were tons of tools like that.

APIs are an abstraction - maybe the best example. We write code to match exactly the behaviour defined by an APU - as long as it meets the requirement of that contract, then 'it's good'. And there could be many ways of doing that.

That is a LOT of code (very ugly code, I would add) that could be replaced by `type Float = float32 | float64` in a language with actual support for union types.

Tagged unions are not union types. A union type is a supertype for any arbitrary collection of types, but a tagged union aka sum type is a single type with multiple data constructors, and does not require subtyping to be implemented.