Researching the history of <thing>, find a blog post by a standards body ostensibly authoritative about history of <thing>
Blog post references <book> published in <year> by <people> - it's even linked, amazing!
Click on link, get taken to library of congress archives, to a page about not <book>...a mislink maybe?
Nope, after many minutes of searching, I come to understand such a book never existed, neither did <people>.
Not really sure what I should be taking away from this story.
@sarahjamielewis either it is a human trying to accredit themselves at the risk of being showed to be not only making it up, but also going out of their way to deceive you (malice), or it is an LLM
@sarahjamielewis we know <year> exists, so maybe we need to question whether <thing> is a real thing or not /s
I think I'm coming to accept that there exists a significant portion of humanity for whom words are merely decoration with no underlying purpose or meaning.
@sarahjamielewis “Mere incantations,” as Gore Vidal would say.
@sarahjamielewis as if words are a bunch of lyrics to a song they just need to vibe with without understanding
@sarahjamielewis maybe no underlying meaning but we are all coasting on the tradition that they once had meaning. But purpose? "it means what I say it means, not a bit more, not a bit less.
At best.
At worst, for a significant portion of humanity, words are merely a fraught minefield of lossy compression, that serve more to interfere with and frustrate purpose and meaning than to reveal such.
Which is to say, for a significant portion of humanity, purpose and meaning are only related to words insofar as words are the only game going for attempting hamfistedly to communicate purpose and meaning.
Attempts made all the more frustrating by those of us who insist on words having an underlying purpose and meaning, as that insistence always seems to be how attempts to communicate break down.
If we'd just stop focusing on the words, they believe, we might actually listen to what the words are getting in the way of, is the position of this significant portion of humanity.
@sarahjamielewis given reasons given by the various PhD professors who were protesting the new arXiv policy, I believe that's the only valid explanation.
There are people who generate words for other people who count the words, but there's no actual value exchanged.
Which is kind of a summary of why I dropped out of college so many decades ago, I guess...
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