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Comment by habitue | Hacker News Reader

Dude, this is an amazing comment. Really points out how it looks when someone us ahead of their time:

  - awkward groping for how to explain things
  - none of the words match how we talk about things now

Algol-68 was clearly so ahead of its time, it's hard to understand anything they're saying. They're in outer space

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Comes up all the time. Steam engine valve gear is a pulse-width modulation motor driver. Number 5 Crossbar, the best electromechanical telephone switch, is a distributed redundant microservices architecture. Western Union Plan-55A, for switching telegrams, is a mail server and forwarder. Each of those, in its day, was unique in its space, with its own terminology and theory. Today we see them as instances of common patterns.

Right now, large language models are in that state. They work, but why they work and why they fail is barely understood. As more systems are developed in that space and adjacent to it, more general understanding may emerge.

   - awkward groping for how to explain things
   - none of the words match how we talk about things now

My life in a nutshell these last few years.

Glad to hear it might not be utter incompetence.

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