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 experience working with lower-tech tools has informed a different conclusion. You're not being "helped" to see "wrong" in what you do, you're being cut off. Your generative, creative mode is being inhibited.
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 sometimes the wrong things get made easy.
I didn't make this, but I think it's great:
> That is like asking how we can make our cities better for cars, or our workplaces better for the furniture (emphasis mine)
I love this analogy and am going to use it.
This is a fantastic article. In the end, everything is still, and will always be, about people. We ignore and forget that at our peril.
Thanks!
That’s great, but gegenstand just means object, and that definition of object is part of English, e.g. “The object of having this talk is to learn about how we can do better.”
You don’t hear that said much anymore, but in the 20th century it was said fairly regularly.
Object has "against" in it, that's the ob- part. The other part is "throw". The German comes from the Latin. (Why did they go for -stand instead of a word for throw?)
Once you get into learning German, it’s surprising how many compound words like this are actually direct translations of the Latin or Greek roots of the same English words. Hydrogen = Wasserstoff (water material); television = Fernseher (distance seer) and so on. It’s almost as if they had their own uncleftish beholding moment.
Not necessarily these words, but a lot of these translations stem from linguistic purism:
Your examples are relatively modern, but there is a huge number of compound German words that are calques of French words, Latin words or Greek words, and which have been coined several centuries ago.
For instance: circumstance => Umstand, or depend => abhängen, or expression => Ausdruck, or participate => teilnehmen.
German looks unfamiliar for English speakers mostly because all the words that English has borrowed as such from French or from classical languages have been translated into compound German words.
The rocket fuel for the Me-163 Komet is T-Stoff and C-Stoff. A fuel leak would dissolve the pilot.
Specifically the pilot Josef Pöhs. Unfortunate.
-stand is what is (to something) or what has been established (about something). E.g., Bestand – the totality of what has been established about something, or what is available, etc. So Gegenstand is what has been established as real-world (or in extension also abstract) resistance to our objectives (so that we have to deal with it) – or, as gegen- is also vis-a-vis, what we are facing.
The Latin objectum has a directional vector (figuratively, it's thrown at us), while Gegenstand is much more inert. It's like a world view of active exploration versus a tableau of the world around us.
German is a Germanic language. More specifically, it belongs to the West Germanic language family, which includes German, Dutch, English, Frisian, and Afrikaans. Latin itself belongs to the Indo-European language family. I think that because they have almost the same geographical origin and cultural overlaps, they share many words.
What do you mean the German comes from the Latin?
For instance here: https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/Gegenstand
Gegenstand is in the middle of the page: "lat. obiectum", it says - "translation of Latin obiectum into philosopher-speak".
German has often taken terminology from Latin by translation:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:German_terms_calqued...
A nice example (of many!) is überleben, calqued from supervivere (literally, to over-live).
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 about this because it means there will be more concise and navigable documentation for me to refer to (though I might be slightly offended to be reading the AGENTS.md instead of the README.md, lol)
Aufstand, Unterstand, Verstand, Umstand.
In german we have some of those -stand words.
Abstand, Widerstand, Vorstand, Mittelstand, probably the list can be continued.
Some seem to have an obvious explanation, for other it feels long-sought and more obscure. I would not over-interpret words.
Verstanden!
Wiederstand - resistor
*Widerstand
Wider = gegen (against)
Wieder = noch einmal (again)
Kinda important to get the spelling right in context of "Gegenstand"
Thanks for the correction
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 expected a different word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_P3uwRiimo Also starts with G.
The first half of the essay:
> It happened astonishingly fast; within about five years a knowledge skill that I had completely taken for granted as a basic requisite in an undergraduate was diminished beyond recognition.
Then the second half
> A good way of writing documentation for human beings today will still be a good way to do it in a few years’ time.
Don't these contradict each other? Documentation that worked well for us who grew up pre-Internet is not working well for "web natives".
No, because the first one isn’t talking about writing documentation. It’s talking about knowledge discovery as a learned skill that eroded when web searching replaced how knowledge used to be sought. They actually say: even in the new-fangled domain of web searching, which you would think web natives would be better at, it’s actually people who had learned the skills and techniques of knowledge discovery pre-web who were better at finding what they were looking for. Now, why they think that is the case is a bit harder to grok, having to do with their object-oriented (sorry, sorry) view of understanding/knowledge.
Contrast that with the second quote. Good documentation could be in a dusty book in the library or in a SPA. What makes the documentation good isn’t, however, related to people’s ability to navigate information spaces.
> What makes the documentation good isn’t, however, related to people’s ability to navigate information spaces.
Then what's the point? If nobody can use the documentation properly, then the term "good documentation" is meaningless.
I think the article is saying that good documentation is objective, and is not defined by ease of use. You will ingest this difficult documentation and you will like it, because it is good for you.
You might reasonably ask "in what way".
> this is how documentation is, because this arrangement is part of its integrity, and this is how you must learn to use it and work with it.
The word "integrity" comes up six times. Something about integrity.
Yeah, this isn't something you put your name on. It's something the company pays you to do, to make the product better. Good documentation significantly improves a product. Which means making that information accessible to web natives.
Luckily, unlike web natives, LLM's have read lots of documentation cover to cover. Likely a good way to teach LLM's about your product is to write good documentation.
I find it mildly amusing that the article makes the following point regarding "Gegenstand":
> Objects aren’t just inert stuff – they do something.
...while many words in Germany are just "stuff" (Zeug). A plane is a Fly-Stuff (Flugzeug). A lighter is a Fire-Stuff (Feuerzeug). A vehicle is a Drive-Stuff (Fahrzeug). A toy is a Play-Stuff (Spielzeug). And the list goes on!
I think the difference is, that Zeug can be used as suffix (and you put a verb in front of it), like in Spielzeug (Stuff to play with) and it also has the meaning of Instrument or Tool like in Fahrzeug or Flugzeug.
The article left me with one question: If LLMs use human-written documentation or words, like books and articles, as training data right now (which is obviously the best quality you can get), what will LLMs use in the future? When will we reach the point of no return, where training data is data produced by LLMs (which is obviously of lesser quality)?
BTW, this also kind of works in English: we notice objects around us, because they object to our intentions, just for their inert nature. It's their resistance (German: Widerstand), which brings them to our attention. (Objects are pretty much passive-aggressive. ;-) )
Gegenstand would probably be better translated as “a stand around”.
A “stand against” would be a Widerstand, which also exists.
Update: Interestingly the etymology is really “ stand against”, you always leans something here.
So if an object is “standing against” you could we say it is “objecting” you?
in the middle ages, a matter before a court was called a "thing"
Das Ungeheuer--ogre, monster.
Reinheitsgebot
Just makes me happy.
Not "fahrvergnügen"?
I feel you <3
This is exceptionaly informationaly dense, a classic demonstration of culture, philosophy and language comming together in a susinct, plain , knowable way. Go German!
but stay there!
Fremdschämen is a good one.
My favourite though: Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher. It's one of those things that you never knew you needed.
>Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher
That's not actually what they're called, it's an overly descriptive contrived way to get a long word, like "Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän". Imagine someone in english saying "Ink-to-paper-writing-implement" instead of "pen".
You'd call it an "Eieröffner"(Egg opener) or "Eierköpfer"(Egg beheader).
You are wrong. Faultier FTW.
I always liked "genau", for some reason.
Baumkuchen! (Tree-cake)
Backpfeifengesicht
Gesamtkunstwerk
As a native german, the french Œuvre feels a bit nicer on the tongue.
Banause!
Waschbär is another great one.
Umfahren - because it's one of the few German words that changes meaning based on pronounciation - and in a very important way.
Ach, du lieber zeit!