A motto for programmers: "Tuere usorem, data, veritatem"
koas.dev
koas.dev
I do NOT want to be "protected".
(sarcasm, obviously)
Since we're talking about "doing more things with a piece of software than [users] could do without it", well, living with 10% of the features at 1000x of the price would typically still fit those criteria. Since this is exactly where most companies would like to go after establishing market-dominance, yeah, I think we do want to be protected.
Whether any dev or group of devs could realistically push back against the forces at work in the org or the wider economy here is a separate question of course.
Big tech is putting inside our heads that users shall be protected by removing control from them and that's detrimental. This gatekeeping is not protection, it's dystopia.
Protect can be taken as in "Protect the user from bad decisions", or as in "Protect users' freedom" [1], which would completely go your way. I understood protect as "make the user your first priority".
I'm happy with being protected. I'm not happy with my control being removed. It may look like the first implies the second, but it should not and we need to fight against this idea. This leads to (tech!) people here on HN believing their restricted mobile ecosystems are good for them and their parents.
[1] (edit:) another commenter suggests "protect their interests", which nails it for me.
Very few mottos can withstand literal dissection. For that matter, many phrases have entirely different meanings than if they were read as normal words.
Words bend to the context, and by associating a motto with the ideal it is proposed for, it quickly becomes its own context.
"Protect the user, their data and the truth!", if you say it loudly, comes across to me like something the Three Musketeers would exclaim. If they were programmers, about to enter the forest of dark patterns, risking their lives for the users they know, and those they will never meet.
Love it. All subjective of course.
They'd keep saying that until they lost a hand, arm, leg to the big swirling mass of metal.
People on hn would do well to stop giving cover to such disastrous pretenses.
> I do NOT want to be "protected".
to which you replied:
> Installing an encrypted chat app,
on a thread about developers making sure that user data is safe.
I want to install an app, I don't want to scout around and make a value judgement to see if its going to steal all my data. In the same way that victorians had to work out if the local baker is cutting cheap flour with chalk or worse[1].
we are "qualified" to make that value judgement, the vast majority of people outside of this forum are not. This means that the longer we let predatory spyware run our ecosystem (lets be honest, most of the "internet" is paid for by google, facebook and apple et al) the longer we ingrain in people to expect to be exploited.
The solution is not only opensource, because frankly thats even more user hostile. (oh you lost your entire history? lol you should have done x,y,z and not pressed the "make it awesome" button, as if you'd read the code you know its in. alpha) The solution is as "the people" to demand safe software. This won't happen because the current tech giants are the only reason why US GDP is growing.
The solution is tackling the tech behemoths. But that wont happen with current US system.
My Latin is too poor for this, but Google suggests "usorem potestatem da, data protege".
Further, I'm not sure if the infinitive was the best choice of verb form. It feels to me more applicable as an imperative (thou shalt...), so I think it should be dilige (present imperative) or diligito (future imperative). I don't know Latin well enough to judge which of those two it should be.
May it help spread the spirit, with which I completely agree. Kudos for aiming this.
So something like:
Custodi usorem, custodi data, custodi veritatem.
Usorēs, data et veritas primum
Users, data and truth first.
And actually first in the sentence structure (in both languages).
(edit: I had initially used prima - neutral plural nominative for primus (adj.) to target the three subjects, which I don't know if it's right, but using the adverb feels better. I don't do Latin though)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
"Tueor" in this context sounds very weird to me -- more "oversee" or "watch" than "protect." 'custos' is, to my ear, the idiomatic noun for "protector," and that noun sounds appropriate in this context. "defendo" (a verb meaning 'defend') would probably be more appropriate if we want to insist on using a verb.
"Usor" is nonsense -- literal, actual nonsense. It isn't Latin. To my ear it sounds like a misspelling/solecism for "uxor," which means "wife." It sounds kind of like an Aristophanic immigrant/hick character's mangled Greek translated into mispronounced Latin.
"Data" means "gifts," literally "things given." It has no connection whatsoever to 'data' in our sense.
"Veritatem" sounds almost liturgical (or Neo-Latin?), completely out of place, given the intended sense. That is, it sounds like a metaphysical or religious concept -- not something "factual" or "correct," as seems to be the intended sense, but rather "the goddess truth." One does not protect (or keep watch over) a goddess. Or one does at one's great peril (in myth at least), unless one is an actual religious functionary, a priest or priestess, in which case you probably do watch over the god, just because in temples the divine objects associated with a god/goddess and venerated were often themselves called "the god/goddess."
The very idea of a "user" is, in every phase of Latin that I know, gobbledygook. There's no translation for it. It makes as much sense as "haver" would make to us ("haver of what?"). Maybe "emptores" (buyers)? Sort of?
"Data," in our sense, too, sounds wrong to me as a concept in Classical Latin -- too disembodied for effective, accurate translation. Maybe 'cognoscenda,' "that which is to be known/understood," would come close to the intended sense and still be somewhat idiomatic.
"Vera" or "verita" sounds, to me, like the right language for the idea of "something true."
And like I said, "defendo" sounds like the right verb.
The omission of conjunctions sounds as abrupt, curt, and pompous in Latin as it does in English: "guard the user, the data, the truth." Only Sallust and Tacitus get to write this way.
So maybe we could correct it to something like "defende emptoresque cognoscendaque veraque?" No, actually, I take it back. That sounds deranged and wrong, kind of like the raving you might hear from one of the street-corner prophets in Life of Brian. Protecting those things makes no sense, and even the grouping of those three concepts in a single list makes no sense. It sounds like the product of a disordered, unhealthy mind.
They explicitly put a humble disclaimer that they don't actually understand Latin.
What you see as "belief that the world needs to hear their thoughts" might be "willingness to share".
It's nice that people engage with the unknown (here, Latin). That's how one learns. There's also nothing wrong with sharing this process. The result is obviously wrong here, and I would have been too shy to put it in the title of a blog post, but this doesn't have dramatic consequences.
We are far from tech bros arrogantly imposing their shit tech to the world here.
I wish Hacker News had policies that squash this kind of post before it can reach the front page. Nobody needs to read some guy's clueless thought diary, and the oxygen these submissions consume on HN are stolen from better pieces of writing that actually deserve attention.
Generally I try not to contribute to the web's tendency to stoke primitive, violent emotions, like anger, fear, and hate, but sometimes I care more about fighting the internet's ugly, dangerous tendency to 'democratize' by letting bad ideas and ignorance spread, choking out the fewer, smaller, less charismatic people who know what they're talking about (I'm not referring to myself). Unlike most programmers, I'm quite sure the world would largely be a better, more just place without the 'open' culture of the internet.
This intrigues me a bit. In particular, what do you mean by the 'open' culture of the internet? Is there more to that than the "dangerous tendency to 'democratize' by letting bad ideas and ignorance spread" you mention earlier?
Regarding the elitism: I'm not a free-speech absolutist; I don't prize individual, positive freedom over negative freedom (Most Americans do); and I'd prefer for gatekeepers largely to restrict and control the levers of cultural power. The internet, as a market-driven radical democracy, demostrates all of radical democracy's worst excesses and vulgarity, especially its tendency to vest power in charismatic charlatans skilled in stoking the primitive, violent emotions I mentioned above.
Regarding 'open' culture: Jaron Lanier, father of VR, has written extensively on this. He'd be a much better ambassador for his ideas than I can be, and I recommend his books, essays, and interviews in the strongest possible terms.
Lanier makes a strong case that the free-and-open culture of the internet ("information wants to be free") -- exemplified, for instance, in Napster, open source, and the practice of not putting up paywalls on news websites -- has been overwhelmingly negative and destructive. To take a few examples: it has largely destroyed music as a viable career; it has cheapened information, because somethings that's free has no value; it has led directly to the advertising-driven hellscape that the internet has become; and it has served only to augment the power of the already powerful, because only the rich are in a position to marshal the kinds of resources that one needs in order, quite literally, to mine data and find profit in it. Lanier has also been a major critic of the AI craze.
Related to both of these: I'm a strong believer that the interconnectedness of the internet is dangerous, unsustainable, and by itself causing the US to drift towards the cultural and political equivalent of a nuclear meltdown, in the form of something like a fascist takeover. Connecting everybody on the internet has produced, I think, something like a feeling of cultural and political claustrophobia. People are going crazy because they're sharing mental space with too many other people.
Anyhow, that's probably more than enough, and I'm not sure it's entirely cogent or coherent. Thanks for the interest!
Honestly, that didn’t occur to me at the time; I just wanted to have a version of the motto in Latin because I loved how the phrase that inspired the article (which, of course, was not created with AI) sounded. Now I can see the problem and apologize for not having shown more respect for the language.
You didn't disrepect the language. You're nothing like this clueless vandal, who did disrespect it and should have known better.[0] :D
Really, I wasn't railing against you personally or anything you did. And I shouldn't have turned the conversation in that direction in my last comment or two. Correcting the Latin was actually a delightful, fun exercise, and I meant only to rail against AI itself, which is infecting everything (and always, it seems to me, to the detriment of the infected).
Latin doesn't need any more respect than it's already gotten. It has probably already received too much. And it's fine to play with words, share, and ask for feedback. My hypomanic agitation (no joke) isn't your fault or your responsibility, and your response to my unhinged screed shows a generosity, patience, and kindness that I think you should be proud of. If my mind weren't buzzing this way, my comments would have been more playful, less critical.
Cheers, friend.
> II. Repeated, que . . . que.
> A. Both ... and (not in Cæs., once in Cic.; v. Zumpt, Gram. § 338), co-ordinating,
To my ear it sounds more emphatic, formal, and annunciatory than singular -que, so it feel appropriate in the context of a guiding dictum/apophthegm.
[0] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
Data is the past participle of the verb "do". It doesn't necessarily imply that usage.
I do agree that the construction is weird though, in particular the infinitive.
(Edit: I just realized why. It's because the action "tueor" describes has a strongly physical connotation. It's as though the author wrote "clean/wash the truth." You don't watch (in tueor's sense) an abstract concept; you 'watch' (tueris) something physically manifest. Using tueor this way is how you'd talk or write about a god, not a concept.)
"Tuere" isn't an infinitive. It's the second person singular present imperative active of the deponent 'tueor.' As a deponent, it has only passive-voice forms, which have active-voice sense, so (edit: infinitival) 'tuere' isn't a valid form, because it's the present infinite active, a form that a deponent verb by definition can't have.
Edit: "data" in this usage would mean "gifts." That is the idiomatic meaning of the fourth principal part of the verb when it's used in the neuter plural. This isn't debatable. It's Latin 101 basics, almost certain to appear in the very first set of exercises and vocab lists that any beginning Latin student will encounter (and it's certain to be the answer to a question on your first vocab quiz). See here[0], esp: 'Part. perf. sometimes (mostly in poets) subst.: dăta , ōrum, n., gifts, presents.'
[0] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
> It has no connection whatsoever to 'data' in our sense.
This is wrong. There is an etymological connection, which means that 'data' in our sense is derived from the sense 'that which is given.' My point, badly stated, was that the word in this sense is no longer Latin. It doesn't translate directly back into Latin. You'd need to use a different work in order to capture the sense that the word takes in English.
Yes, I know the author added a disclaimer:
> PS: I don’t know any Latin, ChatGPT did the translation for me, so there may be some mistakes.
But there aren't just "some mistakes". The Latin is essentially nonsense. The closest meaning I can draw from that phrase is:
"Protect wife, given things, truth."
That's barely coherent, let alone proper Latin. Is "usorem" even a word?
Of course, it's your blog and you're free to post what you like. But I'd hope the HN community would be more discerning. Imagine if someone posted an article with nonsense Fortran code generated by ChatGPT, adding a note like:
"PS: I don’t know Fortran, ChatGPT translated this Python to Fortran for me, so there may be some mistakes."
If the Fortran didn't even compile, would we still upvote it? I doubt it.
And really, why write nonsense Fortran when you could just write clear Python, Go, or Rust that the community very well understands? Likewise, why attempt fake Latin when you can just write plain English, which most people here understand?
But apart from this aspect, I suspect the whole idea / approach pleases / feels good and that's what gets upvoted.
edit: the HN post is flagged now, so… xD
Google basically had primum non nocere as a motto and we all know how that ended.
Programming—as opposed to medicine—has very little in terms of a relation to Latin (which shows clearly when TFA had to use ChatGPT to translate the motto to it), and a lot to English. It may not sound as cool, but the message is clear and I can relate to that.
Very early on, we were given a sample of a translation into Latin by Google, with the assignment to list dumb grammatical mistakes that Google had made.
I think this was to cause anyone who had the idea of using Google to help with homework to abandon THAT idea pretty quickly!
It's not a good idea to use Google to translate into Latin.
That said, I think it’d be “Tuere utentis, datum, et verum”… “data”, IIRC, would imply plurality.
Incidentally, if you have three hours to spare on some casual Lambda Calculus introduction, I always think [1] is a fun watch.
Valid but only partial since it only describes one value.
If we're going to nitpick (which we obviously are!) then maybe "data" doesn't quite have for same implication in latin ("given things") vs English ("information"). Although it actually works quite nicely in the phrase as "given things".
Main/most-helpful source: https://nxg.me.uk/note/2005/singular-data/
You can agree with it or dismiss it. You can tell yourself you're doing it when you're not. It doesn't say how to do anything.
Compare with "Accountants don't use erasers", which instructs how to protect data and the truth.
That question has 'plagued' philosophy since its inception.
Good post to make us think, thanks for posting.
why would programmers be the gatekeepers of truth?
We make tools. Those tools should serve everyone equally. We are not some special technorati or caste. There is no special privilege inherent to the knowledge to drive the machine. We line up blocks one after another, feeding something in one end, to pop out the other. That's it. You aren't some Ubermensch, mandated to draw the line of who needs protection from what. You're a human being with a light board.
You want a motto? Make useful things. Gift them to the trustworthy. Teach your art. But remain vigilant against the pernicious. Evil will use our tools as surely as the good ones will.
P.S. databases are the root of all evil.