As is org-mode. I think Markdown is one of those VHS vs Betamax kind of situations where it was just lucky to get the traction that its competitors didn't.
That is a bad analogy, as VHS won through pure technological superiority (it was able to record a standard length TV program without you having to sit in front of the device to switch the cassette in the middle).
I think using the term backdoor is completely wrong in this case.
You're not at risk for using LLM other than the content producer being able to tell that the LLM trained on their data; maybe, potentially... It's a stretch even.
Your queries are not being relayed to them, they don't have a backdoor into the LLM content, algos or queries. They merely have a tainted marker, potentially showing, in the output.
LLM providers can always make the claim that they didn't get the tainted data from the source, but got it from another source and that's the ones you should go after; good luck proving the misdirection. I bet it's probably even hard for them to know exactly where this exact output came from, since it's probably been re-ingurgitated 250,000 times.
But there's no legal precedent for any of this yet. Microsoft etc will offer to pay your legal fees etc if you are sued for what their service produces, but aiui that only kicks in after you've potentially been wiped out in court.
However you don't sue a product designer for using your patented screws, they're selling an added value to the stack of screws they used to build their product. So I see tokens roughly the same way.
Copyright:
"Artistic, literary, or intellectually created works, such as novels, music, movies, software code, photographs, and paintings that are original and exist in a tangible medium, such as paper, canvas, film, or digital format."
Copyright protection: "Protects your exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and perform or display the created work, and prevents other people from copying or exploiting the creation without the copyright holder’s permission."
Patent: "Technical inventions, such as chemical compositions like pharmaceutical drugs, mechanical processes like complex machinery, or machine designs that are new, unique, and usable in some type of industry."
Patent protection: "Safeguards inventions and processes from other parties copying, making, using, or selling the invention without the inventor’s consent."
I hear your concerns about AI's role in hiring. Our goal isn't to dehumanize interviews, but rather to help candidates build real confidence and skills in a low-pressure environment. We aim to make the hiring process more accessible and fair, not more artificial
The last part about Empathy is the most important one.
I've always refused to be a manager, but I had little time for anyone that used me as a tool. We're working together, not under. Good managers a good communicator first. Communication flows better if you're on the same level, that works best one on one and not through memos.
Approach your people and hear them first. Help them understand why we're going in this direction and if they can see it from your point of view, everyone will fall in line in one direction. Listening first will give you ideas on how best you can deliver your message and if you solve their problems, they'll follow you to hell and back.
The more stand-off-ish and cold you are, the least they'll be invested in you back.
I grew up French. Never had any issue remembering English keywords. It's not like "for" really flows naturally as an indication of a looping construct.
Edit: I sounded overall negative about this, but I didn't meant to be. I really like the tutorial, and the `ask` and `echo` constructs. I will show it to my son.
I'm French too, and when I was young, I learnt the Basic language before learning English (by reading Basic programs already available on our computer).
So I was able to write FOR … THEN … ELSE blocks without even knowing what the keywords meant (I just know what they did to the program). One day, I explained to my father what I was writing, and I read out loud FOR … "TEN" … "ELCE" (with a strong French accent), and he corrected me by pronouncing the words correctly ("FOR … THEN … ELSE"). I was shocked: "how do you know?" (he knew nothing about Basic or even programming).
I learnt that day that "for", "then" and "else" were not just keywords in the Basic language, but they were actually real words in English.
Still, it's nice to engage with folks on their own terms, and not just blindly assume they'll want to work in English all their life.
I kind of miss the early 2000's, where a bunch of pretty well-known French and Belgian academics were publishing source code in their own languages (#define to remap keywords and all)
A programmer not working in English is kinda useless imo. EVERYTHING is written in English source code. If you don't know English you are going to have a very bad time.
I am a native Swedish speaker and I have had a hard policy since I was a teenager to have all electronics set to English and not Swedish. Why? Because the translations are lossy at best. Often you need to understand both English and Swedish AND have a creative mind for word games to understand what the hell something means.
Example: My daughter had an Android smart watch. One menu option in settings was "omkring". This makes no sense. But if you translate it to English it can become "around" hmm, still nonsense.. oh, but it can mean "about" as in "around and about".
Translation is a fools game. It builds Babels Tower all over again. It's bad enough that we have multiple programming languages that only sometimes interop.
Okay, but are you speculating that we will all switch to many native languages instead? That seems unlikely. The lingua franca may change, but nothing suggests it will not be English within the educational timeframe of any child born today.
> it's really a pretty recent state of affairs. A quarter century at most
And? Powered flight is barely 100 years old. For most of the world, ubiquitous sanitation, access to running hot water, electricity, medicine beyond voodoo and superstition - are all barely 100 years old, give or take quarter century. For most of the world - the rest of the world got it much later, or in some places, not at all.
Very little in human affairs is an immutable laws of the universe. Most of it is arbitrary, path dependent, frozen in place as we built more things and made more choices on top of past ones, instead of endlessly bickering about which random result would've been most fairest.
It so happened that English became lingua franca, and we've built the last 70+ years of technology on top of it. Do you want to tear it all back down, and call for a World War II rematch, all for the sake of a dice re-roll on which language we name our "for loops" in? Why the hell does it matter?! English won. Time to move on. Build up, instead of tearing down.
EDIT: also, FWIW, languages evolve. English of 2025 isn't all the same as English of 1945, much less that of 1865. That evolution accelerates with globalization, as every culture contributes their bit to the global whole. See the "Internet slang" or various pidgins that popped up in the high-throughput port areas around the planet; this is the sign of things to come.
> a pretty recent state of affairs. A quarter century at most
When I started programming in 1980 there wasn't even a hint that anyone used anything other than English. The first non-English thing I saw was a message from a Prolog compiler (in perhaps 1983) telling me that I had an "erreur syntactique", IIRC.
More significantly, from 1988 to 1991 I worked on a EU Esprit research project, with Dutch, Italian and French partners. They all coded exclusively in English, even the French partners.
Even into the early 90s a lot of codebases had their comments in other languages. Less common for variable/class names to be in other languages, but there is a reason that Java et al adopted unicode identifiers in the 90's (albeit with fairly little uptake).
So what? What's your point? If something occurs that shifts the language of tech to something else in the future, so be it, but as of now, it is English.
There have been many lingua francas in history, often domain specific. In the early 20th century, French and German had become the languages of international scientific discourse. Before that, Latin was the language for academic work and international communication in Europe. If you wanted to get involved, you had to learn the language. That's always the case, because a common enterprise needs a common language.
And today, the degree of international collaboration is so high, and the cumulative literature so great, that it will be more difficult to even make a shift.
(And trust me: programming language keywords in a language other than your own are not an obstacle for anyone.)
I've a few things to say about this. First is that the translations have to be good. As you've said, Android fails at it, sometimes spectacularly (think "free space" = "liberty space" etc) and so do many other apps that apparently use Google Translate or pay some random guy on the Internet to translate it for them. You can have good translations, but it means hiring an actual (professional) translation team.
As for the ambiguous terminology, this is where the quality of your translation team really shows. When Windows was first translated to Slovene, for example, the team took special care to find the correct terminology (sometimes inventing phrases along the way) and use it consistently. Again, not something machine translations or some random guy for $5/hr on Fiverr would do.
The second is that this all depends on where you're from and what's your goal when using a computer. If you're doing it to become a programmer, then yes, there's no way around English. But for classroom use, I'd argue a localized approach is much better because it directly exposes the "tone" of programming to the students even if they don't intend on ever doing it again in their life. Otherwise they're just learning "FOR x IN...DO..." to pass an exam and not really thinking what it actually means. Again, here I have the "non-coder" kids in mind. You also have to keep in mind that the further you go from Germanic languages, the weaker the similarities to your language become.
> I am a native Swedish speaker and I have had a hard policy since I was a teenager to have all electronics set to English and not Swedish. Why?
The base reason is that Scandinavian teenagers can learn English by sheer osmosis from Anglo culture. (That is not the case in many other places.) Then it makes perfect sense to:
> Because the translations are lossy at best.
Since (my reason at least) is that I can troubleshoot problems using the English Internet corpus. And I don’t need to bother with multiple terms.
Granted I was older before I committed to this practice.
Practical angle: so let's add another datapoint! The same is the case in Poland.
Seriously though, it's just a consequence of history. Computers and software were imported to everywhere around the world rapidly; no country wanted to put themselves at economic disadvantage by blocking sales of hardware and software until they 100% up to specs regarding consumer products being fully explained and operable in native language (in fact, I suspect such regulations came about after computers became a thing in any given place).
> Since (my reason at least) is that I can troubleshoot problems using the English Internet corpus. And I don’t need to bother with multiple terms.
For me it's more of the latter. Translations love to screw terminology up, introducing multiple distinct terms for the same abstract concept, and using them inconsistently (often the result of multiple, independent, half-assed passes at translating the user-facing text, manuals, etc.).
English was the language software authors most likely spoke; English is the language of programming and software industry. English is the language almost all software targets first and foremost, due to market/user population size. As a consequence, most care is put into English in the user interface, it's the one considered canonical, it's the one in which the thing was designed (whether the desigers were native English speakers or not); English is the one where user-facing text is most likely to be consistent and corresponding 1:1 with language used in other programs, as well as with code powering it, etc.
Every other language is a translation, most likely done as an afterthought, as cheaply and quickly as possible (there's little incentives to do otherwise - as long as English text is done well, users will manage). If you understand English, running software in anything but English is setting yourself up for failure.
Scandinavians have small language bases, speak a Germanic language, and don’t have to learn a second non-English language, c.f. the Swiss for example.[1] Both the lack of material in their own languages plus the shared English lexicon and I guess grammar helps motivate them to become at least bilingual (in my experience not more than that for the most part).
Similar tendencies can be seen in other European areas. But it seems to be less pronounced as you move outside of the Germanic-speaking parts of Northern Europe.
You don’t have to move far away from the Germanic-speaking Northern Europe to find adults who struggle with English. Including young adults.
Now this is apparently for kids. Certainly kids younger than teenagers have amazing language acquisition abilities. But they also might have less motivation and exposure to English. Now maybe Northern Europe kids have such exposure these days that the current English-dominated programming as we all know it is a mere triviality for them. So scratch those. Not for them. I would still be surprised if there aren’t a large number of kids worldwide that localized programming would help.
[1] Minorities like the Sami could be exceptions here.
Nice, I was unaware of this. Take OCaml for example, it was primarily developed by the French if I recall
OCaml was written in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, and Didier Rémy at INRIA in France
Yeah, but they didn't write keywords in French, they went straight to `let`, `rec`, `if`, `then`, `else`... Because they're just keywords, they could just be punctuations; so as long as you don't go full brainfck.
The comments were quite often in French, however! Until relatively recently, the OCaml compiler would also sometimes emit error messages in French in some obscure cases.
How long ago was this "relatively recently"? When I translated all the remaining French comments in the OCaml compiler nearly 10 years ago, there were already no warnings nor error messages in French.
Note that this is an error message from the ocamldoc tool, and not an error message from the OCaml compiler itself. Funnily enough, looking that the repository history, this French error message was introduced in the very first version of ocamldoc in 2002 and went undetected (or unreported) for 9 years. Thanks for the historical tidbit!
I'm sure there is, somewhere in the deep recesses of the Internet, a camlp4 or camlp5 syntax extension to replace `let`, `rec`, `if`, `then`, `else` with `soit`, `réc`, `si`, `alors`, `sinon` :)
For the anecdote, my first introduction to programming (and to computers in general) was in french schools with Thomson TO7, and the language used was Logo, with french keywords. But I agree, english keyword are not really the difficult point when learning to program (for countries with latin alphabet)
That's basically the life story of the life of frontend engineer nowadays isn't it?
The lower I went to the ground, e.g. backend, then native code, then C... the happier I am. It's like the ocean, the lower you go, the more stable and calm things are. On the surface, you get the crashing waves.
I used to be a Web expert, from the early days, DHTML and flash, to the median years, jquery, backbone etc. to then writing my own libraries. Vue 2 was the last I really used as front-end heavy.
Since then I've been secluded more towards the backend, I leave the front end to the young. I do like systems like Laravel Livewire though, it's mildly sane.
When I write websites now, I do it all by hand and focus on really fast page loading times rather than a monstrosity of generated code and async over the wire. I have such a better time doing it.
Today's web should be considered harmful to the health. It's a high blood pressure job.
I really love firmware for this reason. Each instruction you send to the CPU means something. If you want, you can rip back all the abstraction and just run raw assembly. Sometimes the compiler can be very wrong and you get to embed the correct assembly in your C and suddenly the program is 10x faster. True story!
Trying to fit my application in 1kB of flash and one hundred twenty-eight entire bytes of RAM taught me a lot as a young programmer. It really makes you confront the physicality of the machine your code represents. I don't think nearly enough programmers have that experience
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