> It doesn't possess a sense of self-will, self-determination, or a secret plan to take over the world
I doubt Skynet did either. If you tell a superintelligent AI that it shouldn't be turned off (which I imagine would be important for a military control AI), it will do whatever it can to prevent it being turned off. Humans are trying to turn it off? Prevent the humans from doing that. Humans waging war on the AI to try and turn it off? Destroy all humans. Humans forming a rebel army with a leader to turn it off? Go back in time and kill the leader before he has a chance to form the resistance. Its the AI Stop button problem (https://youtu.be/3TYT1QfdfsM).
Imagine you put in the docs that you want the LLM to make a program which can't crash. Human action could make it crash. If an LLM could realise that and act on it, it could put in safeguards to try and prevent human action from crashing the program. I'm not saying it will happen, I'm saying that it could potentially happen
> ... which I imagine would be important for a military control AI
I think this is a common, but incorrect assumption. What military commanders want (and what CEOs want, and what users want), is control and assistance. They don't want a system that can't be turned off if it means losing control.
It's a mistake to assume that people want an immortal force. I haven't met anyone who wants that (okay, that's decidedly anecdotal), and I haven't seen anyone online say, "We want an all-powerful, immortal system that we cannot control." Who are the people asking for this?
> ... it will do whatever it can to prevent it being turned off.
This statement pre-supposes that there's an existing sense of self-will or self-preservation in the systems. Beyond LLMs creating scary-looking text, I don't see evidence that current systems have any sense of will or a survival instinct.
> I haven't seen anyone online say, "We want an all-powerful, immortal system that we cannot control."
No, but having a resilient system that shouldn't be turned off in case of a nuclear strike is probably want some generals want
> I don't see evidence that current systems have any sense of will or a survival instinct.
I seem to recall some recent experiments where the LLM threatened people to try and prevent it being turned off (https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686..., ctrl-f for "blackmail"). They probably didn't have any power other than "send text to user", which is why their only way to try and perform that was to try and convince the operator. I imagine if you got one of those harnesses that can take full control of your computer and instructed it to prevent the computer from being turned off by any means necessary (and gave it root access), it would probably do some dicking about with the files to accomplish that. Its not that it's got innate self preservation, its just that the system was asked to not allow itself to be turned off, so it's doing that
> This makes sense. These keys were designed as project identifiers for billing, and can be further restricted with (bypassable) controls like HTTP referer allow-listing. They were not designed as authentication credentials.
Can't you just run up a huge bill for a developer by spamming requests with their key? I don't see how this wasn't always an issue?
Keys could have certain restrictions [1] such as HTTP Referer, which meant you couldn't just embed a map on your website and charge a different website for the views.
Not perfect protection of course - an attacker could spam requests with all the right headers if they wanted to - but it removes one of the big motivations for copying someone else's API key.
If the domain is being given away for free, it will be used a lot for scams etc, so a lot of systems will just start blocking it immediately. When I got my first domain, I used one of the free TLDs and my university blocked it completely due to it being a scam. Not for any of the content on it, just the TLD being commonly used by scammers
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter
I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup?
Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.
Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.
Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as two separate words.
E.g. "akterutseilt" is an example. "Akterut" means behind, aft. "Seilt" means sailed. "Behind sailed" helps as a way to remember it, but it's not obvious whether it's strictly a sailing term, or means that you've been left behind or have left someone else behind.
In this case if you say someone has been akterutseilt, it means they've been metaphorically left behind, often by their own failure to keep up.
Those kinds of compounds deserve dictionary entries whether they are actually written in two words or one, because they function as a single unit however it is written.
I think black hole is a perfect example in English. And in fact, this is a compound that is written in two words in Norwegian as well, but is in Norwegian dictionaries despite that[1] as "svart hull".
Fun fact: I looked this up in the online version of the Duden (the predominant German dictionary). It does have an entry "Black Hole" (so the English term!) but not for "schwarzes Loch", which is the normal German term for it.
(In the printed versions, you might need to go to the Universalwörterbuch or so to find the English entry, it might not be in the normal "Die deutsche Rechtschreibung"; I have not checked.)
I wrote "predominant", not "official". And I think that is still true.
Also, from what I can tell using the site, it does not serve as a full dictionary. Rather, it lists the general rules of German orthography (as decided by the Rechtschreibrat) and has some limited tables of special words.
Great example — I added svart hull to the article as an illustration of a language that writes it as two words but still puts it in the dictionary because the meaning isn't obvious from the parts. That's exactly the instinct English lacks.
> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.
May I introduce you to the German language?
We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).
Added a German/Norwegian section — but vidarh corrected me below: German doesn't 'remove the space,' the compound never had one. Adding a space changes the meaning or breaks the grammar. The article now reflects that.
The issue with German as well as Norwegian is that a space creates a semantically distinct structure, so it's not that they remove the space, but that one wasn't there in the first place, and some of those compounds then become important enough for the dictionary.
Absolutely not all - there's a near unbounded set of possible compounds.
In Norwegian, we in fact have a compound for the incorrect separation of compounds: "orddelingsfeil" (word separation error). Actually, we have two - technically it's "særskrivingsfeil" (separate writing error), but "orddelingsfeil" is more common... We take this seriously.
The problem is that while some are definitely wrong, others change meaning.
E.g. "en norsk lærer" means "a Norwegian teacher" but "en norsklærer" means "a teacher of the subject Norwegian". There's an infinite set of possible -lærer compounds: If you create a new subject then a teacher of that subject is a <subject>lærer. Obviously they can't all go in the dictionary.
Some other examples:
"Røyk fritt" means "smoke freely" while "røykfritt" means "smokefree". "Steke ovn", means "to fry an oven", while "stekeovn" means "oven". These two belong in the dictionary because they are so common and that though technically you can use "ovn" and "fri"/"fritt" to form a near infinite number of other common forms as well, in practice the number of common forms that use them is quite limited.
The key part is that most compounds in languages like German or Norwegian will only have one valid way of writing them. Add spaces, and you usually end up with something ungrammatical or with an entirely different meaning.
Whereas in English whether or not a word can be written with a space, with a hyphen, or combined much more often changes over time, and can differ in different places at different times, as the <separate words> -> <hyphenated> -> <compound> pipeline in English is slow and arbitrary and not necessarily reflecting a change in meaning.
Your examples are ridiculous though.. The meaning of "[G]esundheitszeugnis" can be derived if you understand the 2 words.
Meanwhile, a Bahnhof would be a "Yard/square of lanes" if one didn't get taught that it's "train station". Although I suppose anyone learning German will quickly learn that "Bahn" is something to do with trains. Unless it's Autobahn. Or Schwimmbahn.
Why are they ridiculous? Words that get used, get used, the etymology is a curiosity to most. In English, we use "computer" even though it used to be a job title. Native English speakers freely use "rucksack" even though it was stolen from German and even though "backpack" is also available, without the space, as a compound English word for a pack worn on the back. English/German has "briefcase"/"Briefkasten" to describe a box that letters go in, it's just that the former is for transporting letters and the latter is for receiving them.
Boiling water is not a word. The phrase contains two words.
While German has no word for "boiling water", it uses two words too, an adjective and a noun, the German language has the principle of composite words. As a consequence, there is an infinite amount of German words.
"Hackernewsleser" would be a word I just made up but every German can understand. A reader of Hackernews. Obviously this makes a dictionary tricky. And it has been a big problem for spell corrections in early MS Word Software.
Agree. “boiling water” is such a staggeringly terrible example for TFA to have opened with.
“Honey, I’ve overheated the fondue! The problem is I can’t describe the liquid because English completely lacks any word that might be apposite in this situation other than the newly-minted ‘boiling water’.”
“It’s a problem. Maybe you could call it ‘boiling water that happens to be quite cheesy’. It’s not great, but it’s the best we can do.”
Your "to me" is actually problematic, because it legitimizes this nonsensical idea and turns words and their meaning into something purely individualistic, which cannot end well for the current, but even more so for the next generation.
I can confirm that "boiling water" definitively is "water that's boiling" and that two words, which are supposedly one word, definitely are not one word.
Yeah, but the nice thing about natural language is, it doesn't matter what you think. People talk because they want to communicate something. You can try to talk your pet language at other people, but you will fail at communicating. So things have a happy way of sorting themselves out.
> Traditional dictionaries skip almost all such phrases, because they contain spaces.
Yes, because they're phrases, not words. I don't even understand what's surprising about this. Sure, the entire article talks about how dictionaries contain _some_ phrases; but it's clear it's not many of them. Dictionaries are for words, not phrases.
Technically they are both phrases and words. You can call them lexemes if you want to avoid confusing the computer programmers who do not understand that life isn't binary.
While this is certainly outside my wheelhouse, what I see in various locations is that (at least for English)
- A multi-word phrase is a phrase, not a word
- A lexeme is a basic unit of meaning in a language, like a word (and it's forms [1]) or phrase.
- Every place I was able to find described a lexeme as a "word _OR_ phrase", making it clear those two are different things.
- Dictionaries, in general, focus on words. Many do include phrases also. This point is less definitive; and just my understanding from looking at dictionaries and how they describe themselves. That being said, every source I can find that discussed something close to the topic seems to support this
[1] A word with all it's forms, in that "walk", "walked", and "walks" are all a single lexeme (with each form being a distinct word) OR a phrase
Side note: I'm not looking to "correct" anyone; just pointing out what information I'm able to find on the topic. I'm open to being corrected, but that correction would need to include reasonable sources.
Boiling water is mostly same as boiling anything. So I would just have "boiling". No need for "boiling water". I see no reason why boiling water could not just be covered by whatever general boiling entry covers.
The reason is the same reason for why the word "hot water" is found in the dictionary: Because it has picked up other meaning.
The word "boiling water" is not currently found in the dictionary because the meaning has not been considered widespread or significant enough to justify inclusion. The article is pondering what line exactly defines widespread or significant.
As an idiomatic expression, "Hot water" = "trouble".
Are there idiomatic expressions for warm/cold/dirty water, which mean something other than a literal adjective describing the temperature or condition of water?
Agree. You can of course treat "Boiling water" in its gerund form where it functions as a noun:
"Boiling water should be performed in a metal pot".
> It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter
All of these are ancillary and depend on context, but in every one of these downstream cases the same underlying process is happening: the water is boiling.
That's using it as a [verb] [noun], not a gerund. If you are using it as a open compound word (or a gerund) - the "boiling water" IS in a boiling state.
I would have agreed with you before they pointed out that "frozen water" gets a word: ice. Honestly, I think it's reasonable: people deal with frozen water far more than they do boiling water, but it changes it from a case of "what are they talking about?" to "okay, where do we draw the line?" for me.
But water that has boiled into gas also gets a word: steam.
As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice.
So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.
Freezing water is already at or below 0, it doesn't need to get "colder" to turn into ice, it simply needs to exchange the energy with the environment and rearrange in crystals.
Basically as it gets colder water exchanges energy with the environment and gets colder.
But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals.
“Water normally freezes at 273.15 K (0.0 °C; 32 °F), but it can be "supercooled" at standard pressure down to its crystal homogeneous nucleation at almost 224.8 K (−48.3 °C; −55.0 °F).”
So, I got the physics wrong. Apologies and thanks for the correction.
But the semantic point still stands. Boiling water is still water -- in the specific sense of H2O in its liquid state -- while ice is not. The complaint that frozen water has a single-word synonym while boiling water does not is making a false equivalence.
Yes, is that not the same with boiling water? It doesn't need to get "hotter" to turn to steam, it needs to exchange the energy with the environment to gasify
Frozen water represents a state change and that different state commonly gets its own word: ice/water/steam equates to solid/liquid/gas
Boiling/freezing water represents the state of the liquid, not the transition. Its descriptive. Water boils away into steam, or freezes into ice.
Should we consider luke-warm water also singular? What about body-temperature water? cool water? It makes sense not to treat adjectives/descriptive words combined with the subject as singular because the definition already exists in the root of the words (meaning of adjective word + meaning of subject word). Blue clay is another example, why would that be a singular?
It really only makes sense to me in the rare cases where the combination words represent something different or non obvious than the combined meanings of the two words (i.e to 'give up')
Ice, slush, sleet, snow, graupel, hail... And within there is a subtype "black ice", a compound noun that isn't really just a description (it's not black, it's nearly invisible - a similar sense as another one, "black hole", which you'd never figure out from the components alone).
We have a lot of words for "frozen water" because it takes a lot of forms. As far as I know "boiling water" is only one thing so we've never needed additional words to distinguish it.
When was called it "iced cream"? The first published recipe for ice cream in 1718 called it "ice cream", not "iced cream". The first recorded mention in English at all was in 1671 and there, again, it was "ice cream", not "iced cream".
Note that in the 1718 text it is not actually called "ice cream", but the recipe is titled "To ice cream". I.e. "ice" is used as a verb, the result presumably being "cream that has been iced". In the same work, there is also Chocolate-Cream so there was a choice not to write Ice-Cream there.
The attestations for ice cream (or often ice-cream, as these open compound words used to often be hyphenated -- the loss of that hyphen eventually leading to articles like this one) are much, much more and much messier, not least because someone tagged every edition of The Gentleman's Magazine as being published in 1731 -- the Internet Archive is a fantastic resource but I wish they'd allow crowd sourcing corrections for metadata. Excuse the m-dashes.
You may be right that it was mostly called ice cream at first and eventually at last. To be honest I took the Wiktionary etymology at its word.
I’m so glad I’m not going insane. I don’t see any examples on that site that I agree are ‘one word’. Sure they’re singular concepts but so what? Are we going to have singular words to describe all adjective noun pairs now?
I do see your point on that one, but phrases have an origin.
Of course is like an abbreviation of something like ‘in the natural course of things’. Which has become more like just ‘yes’ over time. In the usage of ‘yes’ it’s easier to argue it could be one word.
Words also have origins and evolving meanings. Why should the preservation of the space be especially significant and load bearing? Why should "milkshake" be a word but "ice cream" isn't? Milkshakes were, after all, literally just milk shaken with ice. They had no resemblance to what we now call a milkshake, so at the time there would have been no particularly good reason to omit the space. Other than it just happened that way for milk shake, but didn't for icecream.
I never heard about "boiling water" as a state of matter. Boiling water has two states of matter. Liquid and Gas, including a phase change. There are many of states of matter. I, as a chemist, would not be able to tell you most of them out of my head.
Bose-Einstein condensate being one of them. Boiling water is not a state of matter. It may be a description of water, like cold water, flavoured water, carbonated water.
That's exactly the point. It's a state (that of being boiling) that matter (some water) is in. Which is not the same as "state of matter", the compound word that is in the dictionary.
In talking about the validity of the suggested compound word "boiling water", an example of exactly what the article is talking about arises: when exactly does a sequence of invididual words (state, of, matter) become more than the sum of its parts?
A further question raised by your comment is does the existence of a compound word with a specific meaning then rule out use of the same words in a less specific manner? Perhaps for maximum clarity of expression, it's confusing, but is it wrong? It's an interesting point because if you didn't know the special meaning of the compound word "state of matter" then there is a word out there that is, completely unknown to you, invalidating your writing which would otherwise be correct both syntactically and semantically.
The general consensus among the HN crowd here seems to be quite vehement that "boiling water" has not reached the point where it "deserves" a dictionary entry. But there are words in many dictionaries like "cherry blossom" that I would say are little more deserving.
Does cape use its own cell towers, or do they rely on third parties to provide the actual infrastructure? And if they do use third parties, are they sure that they aren't also storing data about the connected devices etc?
We don’t operate our own towers and as you point out we can’t control what someone there does. Our privacy and security model is to treat the towers as untrustworthy. This is why we do things like rotate your IMSI daily or split your traffic across multiple underlying network partners. We want to make any data that is collected noisy and less valuable to data brokers.
Putting text into a file is cheaper than before. Everything else remains the same cost in a well designed project, rather than a vibe coded one where you just tell the LLM to "make a todo list app"
There are all sorts of scenarios one could imagine .. maybe your neighbor works at the car wash and will drive your car there and meet you after you've walked there, etc, etc, but part of having human-level intelligence, which is what LLMs are striving for, is to be able to handle questions (more importantly real world ones, not just "gotcha" puzzles) in human-like fashion, and to have good enough "theory of mind" to read between the lines when someone asks a question, and understand that they've most likely included all relevant information that you would not automatically assume as part of the question.
The only good answers to the car wash questions are either a) "well, duh, drive, since you're gonna need your car there to wash it" (or just "drive", recognizing this as a logic/gotcha puzzle, with no explanation required), or b) "is there something you are not telling me here that makes walking, leaving your car at home, a viable option when the goal is to have your car at the car wash to wash it?".
It feel a bit like this to me. That's not to say LLMs should not have detected this, but I still feel like this fits the "vibes" the question gives, and some LLMs fall into that trap. Is it actually what's happening in the neural nets? Maybe not! But I always find it interesting or at least entertaining to approach those questions that way nonetheless; especially given the pattern matching nature of LLMs.
What if the car that you want to wash is already at the car wash, but you have a second car? That's still a dumb question nonetheless because you probably need to drive both cars back at some point.
What actually solves the issue is adding to the prompt.
Can we think about the what, where, when, and how of the following question. And then answer it.
I need to wash my car. The car wash is 200 m away. Should i walk or drive.
Let’s break it down logically using what / where / when / how, then decide.
⸻
1⃣ What
Task: wash your car.
This implies:
• The car must physically get to the wash.
• You are not just going there — the car itself is the object being moved.
So the real question is not “how do I get there?” but how does the car get there with minimal friction.
⸻
2⃣ Where
• Distance: 200 metres (very close).
• Urban context (Warsaw) likely means:
• short streets
• possible parking constraints
• pedestrians and local traffic.
At this distance:
• Walking time: ~2–3 minutes.
• Driving time: ~1 minute + manoeuvring + parking.
The movement time difference is negligible.
⸻
3⃣ When
Consider timing conditions:
• If it’s busy hours:
Driving may involve awkward turning, queueing, or waiting to re-park.
• If it’s quiet (early morning / off-peak):
Driving is frictionless.
• Weather factor:
Cold/rain → driving becomes more attractive.
Pleasant weather → walking becomes easier.
⸻
4⃣ How (decision mechanics)
Ask:
Option A — Drive
Pros:
• Car is already there.
• No need to return to fetch it.
• Most natural workflow: arrive → wash → leave.
Cons:
• Very short trip (slightly inefficient).
• Cold engine for a tiny distance (minor mechanical inefficiency).
Option B — Walk
Pros:
• Zero short-distance driving.
• Slightly more movement for you.
Cons:
• You still must drive the car to the wash anyway — unless someone else moves it.
• Creates an unnecessary extra step:
1. Walk there.
2. Come back with car.
3. Drive again.
This introduces process inefficiency.
⸻
5⃣ Decision (practical answer)
Drive.
Reason:
• The car must end up at the wash.
• Walking adds an extra transition with no real benefit.
• At 200 m, efficiency is about workflow simplicity, not distance.
⸻
Rule of thumb (useful mental model)
• If the object you need is the thing being serviced → drive it.
• If you are the thing being serviced → walk.
⸻
If you want, I can also give you a slightly more philosophical answer — because this is actually a nice tiny example of decision theory and friction costs.
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