> But if you are the kind of person who cries out against this abomination we must warn you that people who go through life expecting informal variant idioms in English to behave logically are setting themselves up for a lifetime of hurt.
“Most Indians [= indigenous Americans] did not know how old they were. They measured time in days, moons, and winters, but they had no weeks, hours, or minutes. On the eve of an important event, when they were afraid they might oversleep in the morning—for example, when a war party discovered an enemy camp and wanted to make sure to wake up and attack it at first light—Indians would drink a lot of water before going to bed.” — Ian Frazier, Great Plains (1989), p. 48.
We (Asian) Indians make a big deal out of beginning and doing important tasks at auspicious times. That wouldn't be possible without some means of measuring time of day even if its not perfect.
Edit: updated for clarity and leaving original comment as is.
Thanks for clarifying that. Considering HN's worldwide readership, I should have anticipated that misunderstanding when I posted the quotation. I have now added "[= indigenous Americans]" above.
My bad. I too should have considered that the term "Indians" is ambiguous and should have looked up the reference book. Thought the title "Great Plains" was referring to plains including the Indo-Gangetic plain.
Is "East Indians" the commonly used name in the US for the people of India ? I've come across "Asian Indians".
Interesting question. My impression from afar (I live in Japan) is that “Asian Indians” and “East Indians” are both used but that just “Indians” is increasingly common, partly because of the growth in the number of people in the U.S. from India and partly because of the growing tendency in recent decades to avoid using “Indian” to refer to native Americans. Wikipedia has a long article on the latter issue:
I have often wondered why it is still acceptable to call Native Americans "Indians".
It is an extremely colonial term, but its used in the country that is the most sensitive about using such terminology. It originates in a marketing term to cover the failure of someone who was, among other things, a slave trader.
On top of that it is ambiguous and often causes confusion, as here, so its not even a useful term.
Grouping people that way in general is barbaric anyway. There's no great answer. "Native American" is a colonial term too. What do they call themselves? It's up to them. Actually, it's up to the individual what they prefer. I don't like being labeled an "American".
> Actually, it's up to the individual what they prefer.
If referring to a group you cannot use a term that all individuals prefer as they will have different preferences. In general certain terms are not used - for example one for black people is never even written out in full by Americans. If one person said "I am fine with being called that" does not mean the rest of us should use it because most people find it offensive.
> I don't like being labeled an "American".
Being called an American Indian (which is necessary to avoid ambiguity) also means you are labeled an American.
"American" is also derived from the name of someone problematic (he even took part in a slaving raid) but that is another issues.
One thing that impressed me about HN when I started participating is how rarely people remark on others' spelling or grammatical mistakes. I myself have been an obsessive stickler about such issues, so I do notice them, but I recognize that overlooking them in others allows more interesting and productive discussions.
While I have never developed software professionally, in the four decades I have been using computers I have often written scripts and done other simple programming for my own purposes. When I was in my thirties and forties especially, I would often get enjoyably immersed in my little projects.
These days, I am feeling a new rush of drive and energy using Claude Code. At first, though, the feeling would come and go. I would come up with fun projects (in-browser synthesizers, multi-LLM translation engines) and get a brief thrill from being able to create them so quickly, but the fever would fade after a while. I started paying for the Max plan last June, but there were weeks at a time when I barely used it. I was thinking of downgrading to Pro when Opus 4.5 came along, I saw that it could handle more sophisticated tasks, and I got an idea for a big project that I wanted to do.
I have now spent the last two months having Claude write and build something I really wanted forty years ago, when I was learning Japanese and starting out as a Japanese-to-English translator: a dictionary that explains the meanings, nuances, and usages of Japanese words in English in a way accessible to an intermediate or advanced learner. Here is where it stands now:
It will take a few more months before the dictionary is more or less finished, but it has already reached a stage where it should be useful for some learners. I am releasing all of the content into the public domain, so people can use and adapt it however they like.
Thanks! The strength of my dictionary, I hope, is how the information on each word is chosen and presented with the needs of English-speaking learners in mind, especially the explanations of meanings, usages, and nuances. Dictionaries that mainly give glosses can mislead learners, as it is rare for the meanings of words to map one-to-one between languages.
Compare the following pairs of entries from TKG and Jisho.org:
While the two from Jisho.org have more information, they do not make clear the important differences between challenge in English and the two Japanese words. Claude, meanwhile, added this note:
‘In English, "challenge" often implies confrontation or difficulty. In Japanese, チャレンジ carries a strongly positive connotation of bravely attempting something new or difficult. It is closer in meaning to "attempt" or "try" than to "confront." ’
The entries for my dictionary are being written one at a time by Claude based on guidelines for the explanations, the length and vocabulary of the example sentences, etc. Those guidelines (which you can see in the prompts and Claude skills in the GitHub repository) were developed by me and Claude with a particular purpose in mind: helping a learner encountering an unfamiliar word get a good basic understanding of what it means and how it is used. In my experience, at least, it is very helpful to get explanations, not just glosses.
The Jisho site does do a good job of linking together a lot of different databases. They are welcome to add links to entries in my dictionary, too, if they like.
I suspect it depends partly on how locked each individual is into a particular type of work, both skill-wise and temperamentally.
To give an example from a field where LLMs started causing employment worries earlier than software development: translation. Some translators made their living doing the equivalent of routine, repetitive coding tasks: translating patents, manuals, text strings for localized software, etc. Some of that work was already threatened by pre-LLM machine translation, despite its poor quality; context-aware LLMs have pretty much taken over the rest. Translators who were specialized in that type of work and too old or inflexible to move into other areas were hurt badly.
The potential demand for translation between languages has always been immense, and until the past few years only a tiny portion of that demand was being met. Now that translation is practically free, much more of that demand is being met, though not always well. Few people using an app or browser extension to translate between languages have much sense of what makes a good translation or of how translation can go bad. Professional translators who are able to apply their higher-level knowledge and language skills to facilitate intercultural communication in various ways can still make good money. But it requires a mindset change that can be difficult.
I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech:
1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutting your contract than it loses in sales.
2. Translation jobs have been replaced with jobs proofreading machine translations, which pays peanuts (since AI is 'doing most of the work') but in fact takes almost as much effort as translating from scratch (since AI is often wrong in very subtle ways). The comparison to PR reviews makes itself.
It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.
After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.
> It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.
Maybe, but it probably requires a very strong and opinionated leader to pull off. The conventional wisdom in American business leadership seems to be to pursue the lowest level of quality you can get away with, and focus on cutting costs. And you'll have to fight that every second.
I don't think that's true at the individual-contributor level (pursing quality is very motivating), but they people who move up are the ones who sound "smart" by aping conventional wisdom.
> After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.
I might give you that "since the late 90s," but there have been significant periods where that wasn't true (e.g. the early mid-90s Mac OS was buggy and had poor foundations).
In other words, AI was used to massively depress wages and lower quality of life of employees while outputting worse results. Which is what is now happening in software.
Thanks for posting that link. Interesting reading, especially the closing:
“I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes.... It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees. Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees.”
I don't, but I sometimes see them used here in Japan. Some small-shop operators use them to add up charges and show the total to the customer. I was recently in the office of a small company, and I noticed that the bookkeeper had a calculator next to a pile of paper (receipts?) on her desk. She also had a computer in front of her with a spreadsheet on the screen.
When I moved here forty-three years ago, it was common to see abacuses used in similar situations. There's still an abacus school [1] not far from where I live, but it's been a long time since I saw one in use.
Back in the (early 1960s?) Isaac Asimov wrote a book on how to do arithmetic calculations in your head. He pointed out that someone who developed that skill could solve problems faster in their head than by reaching for a slide rule, and they wouldn't necessarily be limited to slide rule approximations. Engineers, accountants, etc. would be more productive by being able to do calculations without having to reach for a slide rule or pencil and paper.
[pause for 'slide rule' chuckle]
The same applies to "open calculator app and key the figures in," though. I'm not sure that "user interface" was a thing back when he wrote that, but that's what he was talking about.
That’s one reason the abacus hasn’t been completely replaced by calculators: some abacus users become able to calculate very quickly in their heads by visualizing the changing bead positions. In Japanese the skill is called 暗算 anzan, literally “dark calculation.”
(I'm in the US) I remember being taught how to use an abacus when I was in grade school. Not kidding. I'm not so old that they were used anywhere in real life. I believe the whole point was to teach different ways that calculating can be done. A little horizon expansion.
> Tell the agent your spec, as clearly as possible.
I have recently added a step before that when beginning a project with Claude Code: invoke the AskUserQuestionTool and have it ask me questions about what I want to do and what approaches I prefer. It helps to clarify my thinking, and the specs it then produces are much better than if I had written them myself.
I should note, though, that I am a pure vibe coder. I don't understand any programming language well enough to identify problems in code by looking at it. When I want to check whether working code produced by Claude might still contain bugs, I have Gemini and Codex check it as well. They always find problems, which I then ask Claude to fix.
None of what I produce this way is mission-critical or for commercial use. My current hobby project, still in progress, is a Japanese-English dictionary:
Great idea! That's actually the very next improvement I was planning on making to my coding flow: building a sub agent that is purely designed to study the codebase and create a structured implementation plan. Every large project I work on has the same basic initial steps (study the codebase, discuss the plan with me, etc) so it makes sense to formalize this in an agent I specialize for the purpose.
:-) I feel you. Perhaps I should have ended my post with "Would you like me to construct a good prompt for your planning agent?" to really drive us into the uncanny valley?
(My writing style is very dry and to the point, you may have noticed. I looked at my post and thought, "Huh, I should try and emotionally engage with this poster, we seem like we're having a shared experience." And so I figured, heck, I'll throw in an enthusiastic interjection. When I was in college, my friends told me I had "bonsai emotions" and I suppose that still comes through in my writing style...)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/could-couldnt-care-l...
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/I-COULDN-T-care-...
https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/pardon-the-expression/i-...
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