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My favourite German word

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Re: My favourite German word

#81

Post by weinzierl »

lukan wrote: post #70
weinzierl wrote: post #69

My favourite German word and the one I miss most in other languages is the ubiquitous "doch" . I love that it can stand alone. To the best of my knowledge there is no word in English with the same function that can be used as a standalone answer. When used in a sentence it usually stands in the middle and nicely sandwiches the criticism. "Ich hab's Dir doch gesagt!" You can put it in front if you want to get straight…

Yeah, obviously I thought about that clip, once you mentioned "doch", but how is it actually in the french original? Is there a french "doch"?

I am curious as well but have no idea. I have the french DVD somewhere but nothing I could watch it with.

EDIT: A quick search says "Non? Si! Oh!" and indeed "si" seems to be pretty much equivalent to "doch".

Re: My favourite German word

#84

Post by justonceokay »

kindkang2024 wrote: post #76

I only knew a few words—Wille and Vorstellung—from The World as Will and Representation by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Wille cannot connect directly to another; it can only be connected through Vorstellung. Some may excel at connecting the Wille behind the Vorstellung, while others do not. But LLMs excel at this; they can grasp the Wille behind almost any text, which is essentially a form of Vorstellu…

Are LLMs not all vorstellung and no wille? The LLM has no drive towards survival or continuity, no more than a building or a poem.

Re: My favourite German word

#85

Post by valenterry »

1718627440 wrote: post #74
valenterry wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umfahren - because it's one of the few German words that changes meaning based on pronounciation - and in a very important way.

One is a shortening of darum herumfahren.

"darum" also sounds like a shortened form. Probably from "da herum"?

Re: My favourite German word

#86

Post by kindkang2024 »

justonceokay wrote: post #84
kindkang2024 wrote: post #76

I only knew a few words—Wille and Vorstellung—from The World as Will and Representation by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Wille cannot connect directly to another; it can only be connected through Vorstellung. Some may excel at connecting the Wille behind the Vorstellung, while others do not. But LLMs excel at this; they can grasp the Wille behind almost any text, which is essentially a form of Vorstellu…

Are LLMs not all vorstellung and no wille? The LLM has no drive towards survival or continuity, no more than a building or a poem.

Hard to say for sure. My personal understanding is that Vorstellung always contains some embedded Wille, as the creator inevitably infuses it. So even if the creator body dies, the creator's Wille could still persist in some form, perhaps lasts for a very long time—like the Wille embedded in the Bible. [The LLM learns all the Wille from humans’ textual Vorstellung.]

> The LLM has no drive towards survival or continuity...

This may be true for an AI Model(LLM) in isolation. But once it's embedded within a real body—say, a robot that can walk, talk, act, and encounter conditions of survival or failure (e.g., like our body)—then the boundary begins to blur.

"Tremble and sin not: examine your own heart upon your bed, and be still."

In many deep nights, I find the mind working exactly like an LLM—one Wille unfolding into words, and then another, each emerging in sequence, shaped into thoughts.

Re: My favourite German word

#87

Post by starkparker »

andyferris wrote: post #15

I have been interpretting the new "we need to write documentation for LLMs!!!" trend to REALLY mean "oh damn, we don't have ANY concise and navigable documentation at all..." (combined with the fact you can't just ignore this fact like when onboarding a human over weeks or months - LLMs have no capability to create long-term memories _except_ to create documentation artifacts to look up later). In the end I'm hopeful…

Yeah, I had a PM raise this concern to me and I pointed out that almost all of the advice for "publishing for LLMs" (using descriptive link text, including context and prerequisites for steps, testing and validating code examples, publishing single-page docs formats, generating consistent structure for documentation types using semantic HTML) was already in our documentation standards for people as an audience, and in several cases enforced by tools like Vale, DocDetective, and in-house CI integrations.

Adding an AGENTS.md was as easy as running our single-page static HTML output through Pandoc with a separate context header section stapled to the frontmatter.

Re: My favourite German word

#88

Post by nicbou »

Doxin wrote: post #48
leecommamichael wrote: post #21

I loved this article. My fiancée recently remarked that she'd been doing more writing on paper because it made her more productive. She theorized that she takes an editor's mindset in the face of WYSIWYG renditions of her spelling mistakes. The same goes for her design work. The industry tools make it too easy to recognize "wrong" as it's happening. That sounds like a singing endorsement of these tools, but our exper…

I've definitely found I'm way faster sketching with pencil than I am digitally. When doing digital sketches ctrl-z is right there . doing it with pencil means getting an eraser involved and it'll never quite get everything. I find myself redrawing the same like like 12 times when doing digital, but only once with a pencil. So there's definitely something about "worse" tools being better sometimes, just because someti…

I also found that the mere UX of a notebook makes me rework my sketches again and again, because I constantly flip through them. This made me learn faster than with unlimited layers and an undo button.

Re: My favourite German word

#89

Post by gerdesj »

cocodill wrote: post #59
gerdesj wrote: post #58

I remember the first time I saw Gewerbegebiet on a street sign whilst out cycling in West Germany with the fam. and thinking: "that's a proper word". It took me a while to learn how to pronounce it. It's not really harder than "industrial estate" but it looked very exotic to me back then. I should also note that "Ausfahrt" is the largest town/city in Germany - its everywhere according to the autobahn signs!

If you have traveled so much in Germany, you may have also met the most famous and widespread street “Einbahnstraße” many times, and probably many times in the same city.

I lived on a couple of one way streets in West Germany. One was horse shoe shaped (it connected twice to the same main road) and was wide enough for two way traffic. Thinking back, there was no discernible reason for EBS. Traffic was minimal.

Paderborn, I think.

Re: My favourite German word

#90

Post by Doxin »

nicbou wrote: post #88
Doxin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've definitely found I'm way faster sketching with pencil than I am digitally. When doing digital sketches ctrl-z is right there . doing it with pencil means getting an eraser involved and it'll never quite get everything. I find myself redrawing the same like like 12 times when doing digital, but only once with a pencil. So there's definitely something about "worse" tools being better sometimes, just because someti…

I also found that the mere UX of a notebook makes me rework my sketches again and again, because I constantly flip through them. This made me learn faster than with unlimited layers and an undo button.

For me having a proper sketchbook only makes it harder to practice. I want every page to be nice. I've found using a block of paper works a lot better. If I really dislike a sketch I can just throw that sheet out, instead of feeling like I've ruined my sketchbook. I rarely actually do throw out a sheet, but having the option seems to make it sting less if I do a bad sketch.

I guess the fact that I've purposefully aimed for a style where I don't rework things influences that. If left to my own devices I will rework a single detail basically forever. Instead I'm forcing myself to use confident sweeping lines. I keep eraser use to a minimum. I ink with a dip pen directly overtop the sketch. With the dip pen especially any touch to the paper is permanent. I color with alcohol markers, again so I don't get stuck trying to get things perfect.

No take-backsies seems to be what works for me. Otherwise I just get stuck polishing turds all day.

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