Comment by shoman3003

Back to stories Open in a window
Comment

Comment by shoman3003

English is not my first language; my native language has 28 letters & 6 variations of each letter. That gave my old culture more room to capture different types of thinking patterns, though they were mostly spiritual/metaphysical due to the influence of religion early on the language. That culture was too masculine for example, so they didn't really have many words for complex emotions, unlike French & German.

French & German do have a wide range of emotional language. You can literally express dozens of complex emotional states in 1 word where it would take 2 sentences to express in English. Still, the french/german words invented so far to express emotional states are fairly primitive compared to the actual emotional states we go through each day. There are still hundreds no mapped out, many have no word in any language. Imagine if English had no such word as Grit, Obsession or passion, would you really be able to consider someone speaking English emotionally intelligent?!

An Ai therapist app for example can't really do a good job when many of the emotions the patient feels do not have a word associated with them! which is why a human therapist is still kicking as due to her intuitive detection of that emotional state that needs 2 sentences to describe.

This is just 1 example. Language itself is the #1 limiting factor for how intelligent something can be (artificial or not)! What we call intelligence is the abstract ability to find new patterns in a given environment. An ai playing an alien game is unlikely to win if it were only allowed to define %50 of the objects in the game. Same with humans, if our ancestors didn't map all of the possible objects/emotions/items in the world into language, we can't ever pretend that a digital intelligence can navigate it, it literally has no access to %90 of it.

If we had a language with 50 letters for example, the 2 sentences needed to describe each emotional state (made of a dozen different individual emotions that we have a word for, and some we didn't map yet) would need only 1 word to describe them laser accurate it makes the reader feel the emotion without needing to experience it firsthand.

In a world where a 50-letter language is wildly used by agents, where the digital intelligence is literally able to remember an unlimited number of words - there wouldn't be a need to distort the truth by oversimplifying the thinking process to save memory or to consume less calories. -We can have a word for every type of American to "grand grandparent career" level, not just call someone black American or white American. -We can have a different word for every type of attraction, not call all Love. There is "you make me feel good love", "I like your apartment love", "you can be my future wife love"...e.t.c -We can have a different word for each new startup; a "$5 million ARR startup" is different from a "50M 2-year-old startup". -Each employee would have 1 word that describes their entire career right away to the HR Ai.

Replies shoman3003 · 2026-03-30
Open on HN
Loading the discussion…

Domain filters

Stories from these domains are hidden from every list. Subdomains match too: blocking substack.com also hides danluu.substack.com.

    About YAVCHN

    YAVCHN is a reader for Hacker News and Lobsters, with articles and discussions in separate windows or Classic pages.

    Created by Paul Parks and built with PUDL.

    YAVCHN source code on GitHub

    Help

    Keyboard

    j / k
    Move down and up the story list. The arrow keys scroll whatever has focus.
    Enter
    Read the marked story in the article reader.
    ]
    Read the next story in the same article-reader applet. Back returns to the previous story.
    p
    Pin or unpin the marked story, which keeps it in Pinned.
    n / N
    Move to the next or previous top-level comment in the window in front.
    c
    Collapse or expand that comment.
    f
    Hide or show the story list.
    Esc
    Close a menu or this help.
    Access key m
    Go to the menu bar. Most browsers take it with Alt on Windows and Linux, and Safari with Control and Option.
    ?
    Show this help.

    Windows

    Each story opens in a window holding its article above its discussion; drag the bar between them to share the room differently. A window can be moved by its title bar, resized from any edge, snapped to a half or a corner by dragging it there, maximised, or minimised to the bar at the foot of the page. Use Window > New reader window to open an empty reader, or Story > Open in new reader window to open another reader for the current article. Docked readers keep their articles when you select another story from the sidebar. Minimized readers can be restored and reused for their site. A window's Next story link reads on down the list in the same window.

    A link in a comment or an article to another Hacker News or Lobsters thread opens that thread in a window too. A link to a single HN comment opens the comment above its replies.

    While a story's window is in front, the Story and Discussion menus in the menu bar hold its commands: pinning, Next story, sorting, collapsing every thread, jumping to the first new comment. Each window also remembers where you were in its article and discussion, so a reload, or Back to a story that Next took you past, finds your place again. Closing a window forgets it.

    The whole arrangement lives in the address, so a bookmark or a shared link brings it back, and Back undoes the last change. Moving between Hacker News, Lobsters, their lists, Pinned and Find changes only the list, and leaves the windows open.

    The list

    The pin at the start of a row keeps the story in Pinned, and the cross at its end hides it. Pinned can be narrowed by words in the title, site or author, by source, and to the stories you haven't opened yet, and ordered by when you pinned them, by points or by comments; the filters are part of the address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked. Scroll past the end of the list to load more. Domain filters, in the View menu, hide every story from a site.

    Browsing view

    View > Windowed and View > Classic select the browsing view and save your default in this browser. Window view reuses a reader for each feed. Classic view opens stories and applets as pages. Open as a page and Open in a window are one-off actions that do not change your saved default. Direct page links always open as pages.

    Applets

    The Applets menu in the menu bar holds three tools, each a window of its own. Replies to me takes your Hacker News user name and lists the replies to your last thirty comments and stories, checking again every three minutes while it is open, and marking what is new since you last marked them read. Look up a user opens a profile on Hacker News or Lobsters, with their submissions and recent comments, as a commenter's name in any discussion does; the bar at the top of a profile looks up someone else in the same window, and Back returns to the one before. Who is hiring? filters the posts of HN's monthly hiring threads by the words you type.

    They read only what the sites publish to everyone, so none of them asks for a login, and your user name stays in this browser.

    Find

    Find takes any link and lists every time it was submitted to Hacker News and Lobsters, so you can read each discussion of it.

    About

    YAVCHN never sees your Hacker News or Lobsters login. The discussion is fetched from each site's public API; to vote or reply, follow the link above the discussion, or the arrow beside a comment, to the source's own site. Pins, hidden stories, filters and layout are kept in this browser only.

    Open source: github.com/paulmooreparks/yavchn. Built with PUDL.