As you know, flowing water always takes the shortest route. And in fact, sometimes, the shortest route is determined by the water itself. In this, there is a great resemblance to the human thought process.

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Sometimes we don't need words. But words need us. If we ceased to exist, words would have no function, don't you agree?

Expect disappointment and you will never get disappointed.

Random train of thought - ironically (or appropriately) enough derived from bouncing some philosophy around with ChatGPT:

I've long realized that the Turing Test makes humanity biased towards systems that can communicate in human text. If a new intelligence comes to us that can't communicate in English (which for better or worse is the modern "lingua franca") many folks won't be able to recognize it as intelligent.

But this reflects an assumption that basic intelligence would precede the ability to speak. You see this in Asimov's story "Robbie": the nanny robot is a delightful companion, physically graceful, emotionally expressive, but mute... and the new fangled talking robot has so much machinery to deal with the language that it sits immobile, taking up a whole room.

But here's the thing: human language isn't just the test for LLM - it's the power source! There is so much intelligence imbued in the training corpus; I hold to the idea that what's most important is the relations and interactions and thus the context things make for each other, and the (shifting) mathematical landscapes that an LLM chat traverses is so rich with those that it powers the novel problem solving abilities we see.

So language isn't just the measure of smarts, it's the cognitive structure the smarts are built out of. Interesting watching language evolve in our lifetimes.

One example is "blog"... the old shortening of "weblog". For me, that's always referred to the entire site, so I might talk about "a piece on my blog". Over time a second usage has become more common where "a blog" refers to a single article, e.g. "I just wrote a blog, tell me what you think".

I'm a descriptivist and understand that language evolves for reasons that aren't always clear or logical to me, but I dislike how blog's change is generating ambiguity. I guess you can always say "blog site" for the whole collection and "blog article" or "blog piece" for a single thing, but it's frustrating.

Compare that with "compute" as a noun, as in "all this AI is taking a hell of a lot of compute". At first I disliked the usage, but I came around to seeing it as more concise than "computational power" (and as a buzzword is more inclusive of some more techie details)

Finally, some Gen-Z/Alpha usage watch: the word "nonchalant" is gaining some new shades of meaning. To Gen-X and older, nonchalance is almost always a positive thing (actually now that I see that written... that might reflect something about Gen-X's infamous checked-out-edness)

But I'd say historically nonchalance has is more often than not an admirable thing - calm, controlled, relaxed, approachable.

Now there's a newer shade of it that sometimes (but not always) points to it as performative, a front people put on so as to seem less engaged / concerned than they are. (There is also a fun backformation of "chalant" as the opposite.)

Like for both nonchalant and chalant, there's the idea that sincerity is probably better. If you're actually relaxed, that still can be a good form of nonchalant, and if you're buzzing with excitement, let your chalant flag fly. But I find it interesting that the younguns have added a layer to what was formerly an unalloyed good (old folks would have to mark someone as being "deceptively nonchalant" or similar.)