[HN Gopher] The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon
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The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-09-25 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (entropicthoughts.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (entropicthoughts.com)
| kalaksi wrote:
| A classic, for sure. The page is still there:
| https://groups.google.com/g/shibboleth-users/c/EjvS2Cgio6c
| lordnacho wrote:
| When you're native at a language, you often don't realize that
| you're using an idiom. By that I mean when you use an expression
| that means something different to what the literal words mean.
|
| Here's one I was thinking of the other day. In German, to breathe
| is just a verb: atmen. But in Danish, it's an idiom: at traekke
| vejret. If you just found the straight dictionary definition of
| "at traekke" you would find "to pull". "Vejret" is the weather.
| So if you didn't know that bringing the two together meant to
| breathe, you would end up being confused.
|
| It gets worse if the idiomatic phrase has grammatical
| significance. "I used to eat meat". If you only just learned a
| bit of English, you would wonder what "to use" in past tense
| meant that had to do with the rest of the sentence. Or perhaps
| you would theorize that a word was left out (eg using a fork to
| eat meat). But you'd be completely wrong, since what it actually
| means is that I stopped eating meat, though I had done so for a
| period in the past.
|
| My guess is that Japanese is far enough away from English that
| early translating software couldn't figure out these kinds of
| things. By contrast, I've never had modern LLMs write anything
| that didn't seem native, presumably because they are complicated
| enough to absorb the knowledge from the training data.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Wow, "pull weather" ~ "suck wind".
| tclancy wrote:
| And "suck wind" is a US English idiom for being out of
| breath.
| mallowdram wrote:
| All words are metaphors, now add Western languages are agentic,
| Japanese is not. The problem CS ignored in language is that the
| arbitrariness in language leaves remarkably unmappable spaces
| between metaphors. In a way, LLMs are magic acts that expose
| language's Oz like tricks. Scaffolding idiomatic expressions
| inside that initial mess only reveals the trick's problem
| further.
|
| Literal words don't mean anything specifically unless they have
| a context, which is idiosyncratic.
|
| LLMs never are able to resolve the double whammy of lexemes and
| the conduit metaphor paradox. That's how they need constant
| specific supervision. They're babblers that have no idea what
| they're saying.
|
| Coders can't debate this, this is the inherent problem to
| language that generative and NLP waves away in a sleight of
| hand trick. Study the initial conditions to language folks:
| language doesn't really mean anything.
| nyeah wrote:
| That appears to be meaningless. Please explain without using
| language.
| mallowdram wrote:
| If you understand the nature of language fully, then its
| ultimate function is to refute itself. In other words, all
| our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually to specific
| signals.
|
| To make that simpler, each statement in any existing
| language is about replacing language.
| the_af wrote:
| I'll try to say this as politely as I can: I think this
| is a bot account.
|
| Not only your two posts above read like word-salad, I
| went through your comments history and almost every
| comment of yours reads like this (except maybe a couple).
|
| If so, could you maybe stop your experiment? I wasted
| time trying to parse your comment as if it was generated
| by a human.
| mallowdram wrote:
| I'm not a bot, I'm a neurobiologist with a start up
| that's about replacing the symbolic. and I'm pretty
| stunned at how inert CS is regarding language. You can
| find plenty of typos in my posts, and they're not all
| about this, they're about myth, causality, the symbolic.
|
| To accuse a human of being a bot is really poor manners.
|
| Far from word salads, they are based in deep theories
| from empirical demonstrations that words are our most
| fundamental illusions. If you want the deep research we
| use internally (about 100 citations) start here.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXtU97SCjxaHCrf8UVeQG
| Yaj...
|
| I suggest that CS has little ability to debates the
| scientific reality of language if posters are going to
| complain scientific statements that are defined and
| defendable are word salads.
|
| That's a warning CS hasn't done its homework.
| the_af wrote:
| > _I 'm a neurobiologist with a start up that's about
| replacing the symbolic_
|
| What's your startup? What are your publications? That
| Google doc link is more word-salad and random quotes and
| citations.
|
| What on earth is a "start up that's about replacing the
| symbolic"?
|
| > _If you understand the nature of language fully, then
| its ultimate function is to refute itself. In other
| words, all our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually
| to specific signals. To make that simpler, each statement
| in any existing language is about replacing language._
|
| This is word salad, for example. You're not trying to
| "make it simpler", you're trying to obfuscate (or it's
| just random).
|
| > _That 's a warning CS hasn't done its homework._
|
| What's a "CS"?
| mallowdram wrote:
| I don't disclose affiliations here, that's the beauty of
| HN. I get to keep my anonymity to explore.
|
| A start-up that replaces the symbolic engages with
| specifics in signals in the record (animals, entoptics,
| onomatopoeia, calendrical signs, action-syntax externals,
| cinematic action-glyphs) and figures out what
| representations veer referential and offers
| concatenation.
|
| The idea that language refutes itself is as old as the
| pre-socratics. I won't go into the detailed history here,
| but there are 1000s of reference for this statement. I'll
| use Cassirer's, which is pretty succinct.
|
| ..at some point a direct contact must occur between
| knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves
| from all these interpretations - if we above all succeed
| in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true
| essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find
| ourselves face to face with the original perceptions..
|
| Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
|
| Freeing ourselves from the veil of words is theoretically
| equivalent to language's ultimate function is to refute
| itself.
|
| CS is computer science.
|
| btw it's clear the drive to encapsulate in plain English
| was and is the achilles heel to CS, coders are forced to
| finger point using characterizations of "word salad" at
| scientifically complex theories and analytic ideas.
| nyeah wrote:
| Commenter says language carries no meaning. Why discuss?
| (How would you discuss?)
| mallowdram wrote:
| Ask Gemini
|
| The idea that "language has no meaning" highlights the
| arbitrariness of language, meaning there's no natural,
| necessary connection between a word's form and its
| concept. The relationship between a word and what it
| signifies is a result of social convention and agreement
| within a linguistic community. For example, the sound of
| the word "dog" does not intrinsically resemble the animal
| itself; rather, we've all agreed to associate those
| sounds with the canine creature.
| ghc wrote:
| While it could be a bot, I have a more charitable take.
| The comments mostly appear quite similar in structure to
| certain academic writing I've had to edit in the past --
| specifically proposals written by non-native English
| speakers at the graduate or post-doc level. Academic
| jargon usually has precise vocabulary conveying a
| specific meaning with lower ambiguity than standard
| English. If the majority of your time is spent using
| those terms, you may default to using them
| conversationally when speaking English even in casual
| settings. This makes you especially hard to understand
| when you also make simple grammatical errors and use
| punctuation in an unnatural manner (for English).
| mallowdram wrote:
| I'm an American, don't discuss what you don't understand.
| the_af wrote:
| > _While it could be a bot, I have a more charitable
| take._
|
| Before you allow yourself a charitable take, please go
| read this person's comments history. I really mean it, a
| couple make sort-of sense but if you go around the mark
| when their username was green, you'll see what I mean.
|
| I assure you I did not jump to conclusions.
|
| Also, now that I think about it: "mallowdram"?
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| It's more likely someone who has studied the philosophy
| of language and structure - someone who reads
| Russel/Wittgenstein/Derrida.
|
| Reducing everything you don't understand to "must be a
| bot" seems uncharitable.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Reducing everything you don 't understand to "must be
| a bot" seems uncharitable._
|
| That seems a non sequitur.
|
| I didn't say I didn't understand this person, I said
| their comments are word salad and full of logical
| disconnects. You'll see, for example, the first reply
| bears almost no relation to TFA nor to the comment they
| were replying to. Then, when pressed, they responded with
| obfuscation. They reply with variations of "language
| refutes itself" and links to google docs with a salad of
| links that bear no relevance to the topic at hand. They
| claim to be researchers in a startup but when pressed,
| they backpedal into anonymity. That's... not a good sign.
|
| There's plenty I read that I don't understand, and I
| don't assume it was written by an LLM. Most of it
| predates LLMs!
|
| But surely you sometimes read stuff you suspect was
| written by an LLM?
|
| PS: the commenter directly used AI (Gemini) in this
| response, with no semblance of relevance to the comment
| they were replying to (except responding to keywords,
| exactly what an LLM would do):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374270
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Perhaps it's only "wordsalad" to you because you have a
| different set of academic experiences.
|
| If you've read something like Ricoeur's The Rule Of
| Metaphor, their initial comment makes more sense I think.
| the_af wrote:
| Maybe! But I think the implicit netiquette is that when
| one is posting in a public forum, one should strive to
| make the message clear and avoid obfuscation [1].
|
| To be 100% honest, what drew my attention to the initial
| comment is that _I thought it was joke_ about the TFA:
| responding to an anecdote about cryptic machine
| (mis)translation with some LLM-generated mumbo jumbo!
| Alas, it seems not to be the case.
|
| [1] though, I suppose, if one is trying to make the point
| that "all language refutes itself"...
| mallowdram wrote:
| <<You'll see, for example, the first reply bears almost
| no relation to TFA nor to the comment they were replying
| to. Then, when pressed, they responded with
| obfuscation.>>
|
| The reply deals _directly_ with both the article in
| question and the post heading this thread. Neither get at
| the cause of the confused translation. My post provides a
| direct channel past idiomatic expression into the source
| pf all language mistranslation, that words are arbitrary,
| and particularly what sabotages exchanges between Western
| agentic language and Eastern nonagentic languages
| (Chinese, Korean, Japanese - each with their own peculiar
| forms of non-agency.
|
| If you don't understand a statement, then ask questions.
| If you think it's obscure, then detailed questions. If
| you understand it, then probably very bad protocol to
| accuse anyone of being a bot. In any case, this is a
| protocol network, each exchange is negotiable. If you
| want to participate, do it in good faith and keep the
| outlook rosy, _avoid characterization: you are not a
| mindreader._ One thing is clear here, there 's a very big
| divide in here between the intellectually curious, and
| the intuited pretenders who seem to have only a
| background in pseudoscience and folk science/psychology
| who are posing as scientific thinkers. Some of you may
| have extensive math backgrounds, but this is not enough
| to parse theory and demonstration in the linguistic and
| neuroscientific fields. Keep your minds open.
|
| If you need some background that goes into the statement,
| I'd do some research, here's a section of the citations
| from Nisbett's Geography of Thought that delineate how
| distinct Eastern and Western perception and language are:
|
| Gentner, D. (1982) Why are nouns learned before verbs:
| Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In S.
| A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language Development: Vol. 2 Language
| thought and culture. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Gentner, D.
| (1981). "Some interesting differences between nouns and
| verbs." Cognition and Brain Theory 4, 161-178. Imai, M.,
| and Gentner, D. (1994). "A cross-linguistic study of
| early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic
| influence." Cognition 62, 169-200. Ji, L., Peng, K., and
| Nisbett, R. E. (2000). "Culture, control, and perception
| of relationships in the environment." Journal of
| Personality and Social Psychobgy 78, 9 Masuda, T., and
| Nisbett, R. E. (2001). "Attending holistically vs.
| analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of
| Japanese and Americans." Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi,
| I., and Norenzayan, A. (2001). "Culture and systems of
| thought: Holistic vs. analytic cognition." Norenzayan,
| A., Smith, E. E., Kim, B. J., and Nisbett, R. E. (in
| press). "Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive
| reasoning." Norenzayan, A., and Kim, B. J. (2002). A
| cross-cultural comparison of regulatory focus and its
| effect on the logical consistency of beliefs. Unpublished
| manuscript, University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
| B.C. Norenzayan, A., Choi, I., and Nisbett, R. E. (2002).
| "Cultural similarities and differences in social
| inference: Evidence from behavioral predictions and lay
| theories of behavior." Personality and Social Psychology
| Bulletin 28, 109-120. Peng, K., and Nisbett, R. E.
| (1999). "Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about
| contradiction."
| gjm11 wrote:
| "Used to" isn't actually a weird metaphorical thing.
|
| To "use" can mean (though in most contexts this meaning is
| obsolete) to do something regularly or habitually. So "I use to
| do X" means "I am in the habit of doing X", and "I used to do
| X" means "I was in the habit of doing X". The implication that
| you don't do it any more is a Gricean thing -- if you were
| still doing it you'd say "I use to do X" rather than "I used to
| do X".
|
| Nowadays no one uses "use to" in the present tense and no one
| is thinking of the above when they use "used to" in the past
| tense. But that's where it comes from.
|
| [EDITED to add:] I see that this has got some downvotes, but
| I'm having trouble figuring out why. If you read this and
| didn't like it, I'd be very grateful if you let me know what
| problem(s) you see. Thanks!
|
| (Of course maybe it's just random drive-by haters, but more
| likely there's something it would be useful for me to know.
| Maybe something I wrote is wrong, in which case I want to know.
| Maybe to some readers it looks like I'm insulting the person I
| was replying to or something, which wasn't at all my intention
| and if that's going on then I should probably clarify or
| apologize or something. I dunno.)
| Timwi wrote:
| > I see that this has got some downvotes, but I'm having
| trouble figuring out why. If you read this and didn't like
| it, I'd be very grateful if you let me know what problem(s)
| you see. Thanks!
|
| Sure thing, I'll try. Your comment does not contribute to the
| discussion. It appears that you completely missed the point
| the comment you replied to made. The point was that "used to"
| has no inherent meaning and would seem odd to someone who is
| very new to English, and your response was just to explain
| what it means. You argue that it's not actually that odd but
| then basically prove how odd it is by highlighting how much
| obscure/obsolete knowledge is required to fully explain it.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Huh, interesting. For what it's worth[1], here's how I see
| the same matters:
|
| [1] Which may not be much; I will in no way be offended if
| you don't care.
|
| I didn't miss that the person I was replying to said that
| "used to" is odd and confusing. I wasn't arguing that "used
| to" isn't odd (still less that it isn't confusing for
| novice English-speakers -- it certainly is).
|
| I was arguing that it's _a different kind of odd_ from e.g.
| "at traekke vejret" in Danish, and (to me, but evidently
| not to you!) I think it's an _interestingly_ different kind
| of odd, which is why I thought it was worth pointing out.
|
| I wasn't attempting to "explain what it means", which
| obviously the person I was replying to already knows. I was
| attempting to explain _why_ it means what it does.
|
| (In particular, it _isn 't_ true that "used to" has no
| inherent meaning[2]. It really is a past tense of "use",
| and while the specific meaning it's a past tense of is
| largely dead you can still, if you squint at it, see how
| it's of a piece with the other meanings of "use".)
|
| [2] Except in so far as _no_ word has inherent meaning.
|
| Evidently, none of that came across the way I intended (or,
| perhaps, it came across fine but I misjudged how interested
| anyone else might be in the history): I should probably
| either have been more explicit or not bothered at all :-).
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _In German, to breathe is just a verb: atmen_ "
|
| There's an interesting rabbit hole to go down for English words
| from Latin "spirare" - to breathe, and how it connects air and
| breath of life, spirituality. We get respiration (re-spire, re-
| breathing), inspire (blowing on something, figuratively
| breathing life/fire into it), expire (breathing out the last
| breath of life), spirit (a vital substance of life), conspire
| (to breathe together, speak similar thoughts).
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/respire
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/inspire
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/spirit
|
| etc. Words that were almost literal Latin that are now more
| figurative English based on a sort of French / medieval version
| of the Latin version. [edit: just remembering that the rather
| Germanic and plain " _Breathe on me breath of God_ " used to
| give me the image of someone going "huuuhhh" on their
| spectacles before polishing them. The next bit is " _till all
| this earthly part of me Glows with thy fire divine_ " so it is
| supposed to be exciting and soul-sparking. I only feel the
| poetic imagery of "fill me with life, blow on the embers of my
| soul, oh life giving wind-deity", through Romance *spire* words
| not Anglish *breath* words. "inspire my spirit(2) through
| respiration, you spiritual spirit(1)"]
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Inspiration, also!
| otikik wrote:
| > "I used to eat meat".
|
| In Spanish (from Spain), someone who "eats both meat and fish"
| is an expression for someone who is bisexual.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Eats both tuna and sausage?
| reedf1 wrote:
| My total guess is that "The wind, a pole and the Dragon" is some
| kind of idiom that means something like "Starts strong and then
| fizzles out".
| willvarfar wrote:
| From the title this put me in mind of the "draco standard", a
| dragon head mounted atop a pole that wailed in the wind which
| Roman cavalry used when they charged into battle.
|
| Yeah I know it's completely different, but HNers will enjoy
| discovering this rabbit hole so let me lead onwards: Time Team
| reconstructed one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNYcVuO-PoE :D
| zoom6628 wrote:
| Ideas: Wind = Feng is shorthand for custom or style Pole = Ji
| limit or point Dragon = Long Qi flag
|
| So my take would be asking if there are JSP
| settings(defaults,limits, flags) that interact With the runtime.
|
| My 2c.
|
| For the record the original question is much more enjoyable :-D
| kqr wrote:
| Author here. I really like that interpretation. How would you
| like to be credited for it?
| Timwi wrote:
| Please read the other response to the comment before blindly
| copying it...
| kqr wrote:
| I read it all. I don't expect anyone to have the definitive
| answer. I'm aware I'm only picking up wild speculation.
| morpher wrote:
| Could it be "command line flag"?
| yorwba wrote:
| Long Qi is the dragon flag of Chinese emperors.
| https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%AB%9C%E6%97%97-658618 A computer
| flag is huragu (furagu).
| https://jisho.org/search/%E3%83%95%E3%83%A9%E3%82%B0
|
| Going from huragu to Long Qi is no less weird than going from
| English "flag" to "dragon."
|
| Feng and Ji are Simplified Chinese. The corresponding
| Japanese characters are Feng and Ji and they don't connect to
| defaults or limits in software either. Now it's of course
| possible that Song Ben Wu is not Matsumoto Takeshi (Song Ben
| *Wu ) but instead Song Benwu (Song *Ben Wu ) and the original
| message was in Chinese, but that doesn't explain the curious
| word choice either.
| danparsonson wrote:
| I seem to remember in the original thread (I am that old) that
| another poster identified this as a mistranslation of 'try,
| catch, finally' and the post overall was talking about throwing
| (vomiting) exceptions. I don't have a reference for that though
| sadly!
|
| (edit: never mind, I see the original is linked there already.
| Please apologise for your stupidity!)
| oulipo2 wrote:
| "Please apologize for your stupidity" Lol
| danparsonson wrote:
| Laughed so hard that I cried the first time I read that XD
| brazzy wrote:
| I strongly suspect the post was a joke, perhaps deliberately
| mangled by machine-translating it not just once but multiple
| times between different languages.
|
| Note that in the original thread, there was someone who requested
| (in Japanese) to repeat the question in Japanese, and was
| ignored.
|
| Trying to reverse engineer the translation errors when you know
| zero Japanese is absurd.
|
| I'm only semi-fluent in Japanese, but none of it makes sense to
| me. "Runtime" (in the computing-related sense) in Japanese is Shi
| Xing Shi , or one might use the English word tansliterated to
| Kana, rantaimu, but there is absolutely no connection from either
| of those to goats.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| I think there's a chance you're correct, but my gpt
| translation^ has him saying "please email me directly"
|
| ^ Hello, Mr. Matsumoto. This is Nate. Google Translate is
| incompetent and vulgar. (LOL) Please email me directly. You can
| write in Japanese. I intend to help you. See you,
| scythe wrote:
| It seems possible that "dragon" might be a corruption of
| "daemon"? Under this assumption, it isn't too hard to figure that
| "pole" might actually mean "poll". Perhaps when the CS jargon was
| initially translated into Japanese, somebody slipped up and used
| a homophone.
|
| It appears that the user is dealing with an error that occurs
| intermittently with shibboleth, an SSO interface. If some daemon
| is polling some kind of thing in a way that triggers an error, it
| would probably seem to happen at random.
| rcxdude wrote:
| This puts me in mind of 'English as she is spoke', a hilariously
| inaccurate English phrasebook written by a Portuguese man who
| didn't speak much, if any English and instead probably used a
| French-English dictionary to translate a Portuguese-French
| phrasebook into a Portuguese-English phrasebook. It includes such
| well-known 'Idiotisms and Proverbs' as 'to craunch a marmoset'
| layer8 wrote:
| Previous discussion from almost exactly 15 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719396
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