People say that language is for communication, and every day Hacker News proves these people wrong.
I mean, it’s not just Hacker News, but it’s the place I encounter this phenomenon most often: Somebody will be discussing something, and then somebody else will respond with a short sentence that’s mostly acronyms.
The fascinating thing about these responses is that if you know what the acronyms mean, then what’s being stated is often trivial (i.e., something that everybody who knows what those acronyms mean already knows). And if you don’t know what the acronyms mean, then the sentence is completely opaque.
(Often seen, for instance, when discussing network issues, and somebody responds with an alphabet soup involving acronyms like “BGP”, “AP”, “BMP” and “FRX”.)
So these utterances function two ways: For the people who’re on the “inside”, they’re saying “I know this stuff, like you other smart people…”. For the people who’re on the outside, this expresses “… and you’re a moron”.
I guess that’s a form of communication after all.
But for fun, I just whipped up a new command for Emacs called shr-etla (for obvious reasons) and put it on Microsoft Github. Here we have it in action on a totally random Hacker News comment:
It works by sending the paragraph over to an LLM, and it also tells the LLM what web site it came from. This context is vital, because many abbreviations expand to many, many things, and the LLM needs to know what kind of person it’s trying to decode.
(Googling for abbreviations is usually pretty useless — 74% of the time you get a bunch of other meanings; usually an American company or other that’s been SEO-ing the results. (“SEO” means “Search Engine Optimisation”, which is a form of terrorism.)
Of course, all of this doesn’t help much in many cases:
I guess!?
(caveat accipiens — like all things involving LLMs, this Emacs command is just a toy. The LLM has been instructed to return JSON with the results, and it does so in 99% of the cases, but in some cases it’ll return something else, and then you just have to run the command again. Or it’ll have done something else, like translate things into Kyrgyz; who knows? But that’s just part of the fun.)