We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
The salesman can cut the car you want from your buying options, or stick conditions on it that will make up for the difference with the other models.
That's what we're seeing with Youtube for instance: your choice is to pay Youtube's price for Premium (litteraly paying to not get bullied), sit through all the ads in the world, or get three strikes after playing the ad-blocking cat and mouse game for long enough.
Of course you're still free to go somewhere else, in a world where even public guides and presentations will often be pushed on youtube only, to alleviate for the bandwidth costs on standard web services.
> The salesman can cut the car you want from your buying options, or stick conditions on it that will make up for the difference with the other models.
My favourite approach to this is to write an email to all dealerships within the radius I’m willing to go, explaining what I want, then “publicly” make them bid for my business in a thread with their peers. I’ve had it work several times now.
Depending on when you look at it, it might be worked around or fully enforced again, it comes and go, but at least Youtube doesn't seem willing to give up that stance entirely.
To note, what u-block is doing to workaround this is far from the trival "just block the ad" behavior, and I expect it to break again (perhaps within weeks ?)
Then the waltz will go on as usual, until the ads are straight baked into the video-feed with the server refusing to serve the rest of the content on a per-client base.
> If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
Sure it does. The salesman may have information you were not aware of. They could even tell you something which satisfies your needs better and is cheaper. Not all salesman are out to screw you, some really care about a happy customer.
I’m reminded of an old Hypercritical episode. If you ever heard John Siracusa, you know he does his research and knows what he wants. Yet when it came time buy a TV, which he had intensively researched, the salesman mentioned plasma and how the tech had improved and it threw a wrench in Siracusa’s whole decision.
The heuristic is that pretty much anyone who is trying to sell you something is out to screw you. They are probably lying, and they are probably trying to get a quick buck from people who don't know better. And when I say anyone, I mean anyone. Youtubers, anyone on TikTok who links anything, advertisements on the web, billboards.
It's not 100% but if you follow the heuristic you save a lot of money and generally have higher quality goods in your life.
The reason we got into this mess is because advertising on the internet broke all the rules. Now lying is de-facto allowed. So then everyone else followed suit to compete. If your competitors are lying, you cannot afford not to lie.
So now all advertisement and sales are compromised and should not be trusted. Even large, previously trusted corporations are running scams in America. Professionals making six figures are acting as con artists. It's unbelievable how fast the situation has deteriorated.
Exactly. People say "Oh, I'm not affected by advertising, and I ignore sales pitches. I am very smart and do my own research!" But what are they researching? Marketing literature! They think they are informing themselves, but in reality, they are just seeking out marketing disguised as impartial facts.
I laugh when people say "I use site:reddit.com to scope my Google searches for product information because I'm getting impartial information from real people."
What car you want to buy is just one tiny part of the transaction. The salesman can and will manipulate you on everything else from price to warranty, from payment schedule to cross-sale rebates, from maintenance subscription to registration fees, from additional options to spare tires.
You're right, they can try to manipulate you on a thousand tiny things. My counter-argument is that at a certain point, it's not worth the mental energy to fight over what amounts to pennies on the dollar.
Anecdotally, when I bought my car recently, they forgot to even offer me the extended warranty they'd planned to push. I find it funny to think it was so minor, even they forgot to care.
Tangential, but I think most extended warranties I've noticed are beneficial. Even last month I was kicking myself for forgetting to extend a 2 year warranty which costs 1/4th the one time repair cost I had to cough up.
Are you sure the extended warranty would have covered it?
I paid for an extended warranty on the first car I ever bought. Turned out it didn't cover any of the things the salesperson cited as good reasons to pay for it, and to maintain the warranty, I'd have to pay the dealer for all maintenance - even oil changes.
That car never needed any repairs, but seeing the list of exclusions convinced me to never pay for an extended warranty again.
I guess I should have specified financial benefit.
You wouldn't pay someone else to insure a common vegetable, because it is so low cost that if it turned out to be bad, you would just buy another one (or have bought extra as your insurance).
When you buy from Walmart/Target/Amazon/Best Buy, they will try to sell you insurance for a $30 toaster or other cheap appliance. Again, most people will not buy this because they will believe the appliance will work sufficiently long or that the warranty process will be too time consuming, or otherwise decide that just quickly replacing the cheap appliance with another is the preferred way to insure it.
The insurance seller is a business and has to earn more than what they pay out for claims (or at least to make payroll if it is a mutual insurance company). Otherwise, they are going to lose money over time and go out of business. If you financially benefit from it, then you are either lucky, or had an information edge over the insurance underwriter.
Of course, if you get peace of mind from buying insurance, and count that as a benefit, then most insurance is beneficial in that case.
That is really not how the insurance seller's business model works.
Think about it this way: on a given year, they are collecting "Sales" amount of money from their pool of customers. For the insurer to make a profit, the amount reimbursed to legit claims simply has to be less than Sales-Expenses that year, which basically translates to having Z customers claims on any given year where Z << NbOfCustomers.
So it's a bit like a Ponzi scheme, whereby you can benefit as a customer if you pay year 1 and get a claim during year 1 or 2 for example, and the insurer can benefit too if many customers pay "a year in advance" (money that can be invested) before having their claims fall on years 2 or 3 (or never).
The customers can earn investment returns just like the insurance seller, so you have to reduce foregone returns from the insurance buyer’s benefit so it ends up canceling out.
>For the insurer to make a profit, the amount reimbursed to legit claims simply has to be less than Sales-Expenses that year, which basically translates to having Z customers claims on any given year where Z << NbOfCustomers.
That inequality does not “basically translate”. Insurance sellers have to exist for multiple years, not just 1 year.
If every single year, “customer claims” are less than the net benefit of customers, which is what I think you wrote although it is hard to interpret, then your “net benefit of customers” includes a non cash component (such as feeling secure)”.
There is never a free lunch, and the insurance business is not at all like a Ponzi scheme (that’s the whole point of actuaries performing calculations…to ensure sustainability without an ever growing income stream).
Insurance seller has to earn at least enough for payroll, so at least some of the premiums go towards that instead of any money received from claims.
Investment earnings cancel out because both the insurance buyer and insurance seller have access to same returns via broad market index funds. I.e. you can self insure and get the same returns on your savings that the insurance seller is going to get if you gave them a premium.
Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be.
The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.
> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people
>> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".
The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times.
It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it.
I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.
The algorithm still can't make me buy or read rage-bait.
Of course the machine will never stop trying. But with results decreasing gradually with time, the human will get discouraged and will turn it off. It happens at places, btw.
I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.
If I were an algorithm-profiling company I would try to anchor my profilings in the real world (what kinds of people I talk to, about what, what kinds of places I visit, what are the opinions of others on me, etc). LLM garbage would be just to draw voluntary participation in potential surveys.
It takes a particularly paranoid and stubborn individual to make the necessary efforts to consider what kinds of profiling could be done with such anchored data, and even more effort to probe it enough to acquire some knowledge on how it works.
I agree that it's currently paranoid to hide your activities so that the algorithm profiling companies see you as several different people, or see the activities of millions as if they're just one... Automated misdirection on the part of the users is, so far, minimal.
But the point of such a company is to sell data on individuals, and a problematic use case for such data is to kill the ones who say things that you don't like. As that becomes cheaper and easier to do I think we'll find that it's not so paranoid to hide.
Maybe the endgame is honesty. Not pretending you're several people, or other convoluted ways of misdirection and disguise.
Just honestly acknowledge that profiling exists, and explicitly work against it.
That should be enough to make any algorithm company that notices something is wrong to trip on its own wires, thinking some more elaborate form of hackery/covertion is being employed.
The likelyhood of some company noticing a single user is quite low though, but if you are able to hook even a single person inside that company using nothing but honesty and no tricks, that is the best trick of all.
My proposal wasn't that individuals should juggle accounts and cookies in a machine-vs-human game of cat and mouse, but rather that we should rewrite the protocols we use to play that game for us. I don't think there's anything dishonest about that--it's just that making computers lie to each other is the honest work of protecting well-meaning humans from malicious humans.
Do you have a different sort of explicitly working against profiling that you had in mind?
I'll criticize things that could benefit me if I think they're manipulative.
I won't do alt accounts even if everyone does it.
I think most surveillance and advertisement relies on social dynamics. I attempt to play the algorithms but not the people. Sometimes it will get misunderstood, and that's fine.
Ah, well I hope that sharing your honest opinion about it turns out to be an effective strategy. But I'm afraid we'll regret not interfering more directly than that.
I think surveillance is very, very advanced. But the active meddling thing is old tricks.
One should consider this combination. You can't lie to some systems, the better strategy is to be honest. You can lie to some systems, but these won't be load bearing, so why do it?
I will also observe back. The active meddling thing, when observed in action, is a source of information. It could be lying to me too, predicting that observability is inevitable and camouflaging it. Of course, I could be predicting that as well (and so on).
Notice how many interesting scenarios exist even if honesty is considered as a viable strategy in a total surveillance hypothetical situation?
> The active meddling thing, when observed in action, is a source of information.
Not if it's done right. If one person views a page the old-fashioned way, caches the DOM, and circulates it peer-to-peer, then whoever is weaponizing that content only has one browser fingerprint to work with, despite there being potentially thousands of users that they wish they could profile.
That's far less information to work with than the thousands of individual requests they would otherwise have to scrutinize.
The honest/dishonest distinction only comes down to whether you're going to try to protect the volunteer who grabbed the page to begin with, or whether you're going to expose them to retribution.
As for the systems you can't lie to, those you can replace with more trustworthy alternatives. This is a lot of work but it's better than suggesting that your peers be honest in ways that will harm them.
So to answer your question, no. None of the scenarios where you let your adversary know that you're working against them, and also let them know how to find and harm you, are interesting strategies for combatting surveillance.
Surveillance exists in support of targeted coercion. We should not make a target of the more honest among us. We need to protect those people most of all.
You need to imagine a surveillance system that you cannot lie to, and cannot avoid or replace. It will be there, no way of escaping it. Sattelites, network monitoring, doesn't matter. Assume it exists.
Anyone in control of such hypothetical systems can act upon the surveillance information to manipulate a target (not only observe it). This could be done in several ways. LLM bots encouraging you to volunteer information, gaslighting, etc.
The load bearing component of such surveillance systems are _not_ these actors (LLMs, bots, etc). It's _the need for surveillance_.
What encourages a society to produce surveillance in the first place? Catching bad guys, protecting people, etc. I'm not saying that I agree with it, it is just that this is the way it works.
Anyone doing shady things is a reason for surveillance to exist. Lying is one of those things, making LLM bots is one of those things. Therefore, to target the load bearing aspect of surveillance, I need to walk in a straight line (I won't deploy LLM bots, create alt accounts, etc). There should be no reason to surveil me, unless whoever is in control is some kind of dictator or developed some kind of fixation on me (then, it's their problem not mine).
I can do simple things, like watching videos I don't particularly like, or post nonsense creative stories in a blog, or just simple things designed to hide nothing (they're playful, no intent). Why does someone cares about what I post in a blog that no one visits? Why does someone care about the videos I watch? If someone starts to act on those things, it is because I'm being surveiled. They're honeypots for surveillance, there's nothig behind them.
With those, I can more easily see whoever is trying to act upon my public information by marking it. They will believe they're targeting my worldviews or preferences or personality, but they're actually "marked with high-visibility paint". In fact, I leave explicit notes about it, like "do not interact with this stuff". Only automated surveillance systems (unable to reason) or fanatic stalkers (unable to reason) would ignore those clear warnings.
This strategy is, like I mentioned, mostly based on honesty. It targets the load bearing aspects of surveilance (the need for it), by making it useless and unecessary (why are you surveiling me? I see how you are acting upon it).
It's not about making honest people targets, it's about making surveillance useless.
I suppose we are. I generally assume that someone, somewhere, has something to hide: something that benefits me if they're allowed to keep it hidden. History is full of these characters, they keep the establishment in check, prevent it from treating the rest of us too badly.
If the powers that be could know with certainty that all of us planned to behave and would never move against them (or could neutralize those who had been honest about their intent to do so), then I think things would be much worse for the common folk than they are now. It's hard not to see your strategy as a path to that outcome.
Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.
David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram.
Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.
> I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.
Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window.
Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the
time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The
expected revenue for this group over a longer period
and with multiple users is 24% lower than for the
average user.
Action: Since 80% of theirs engagements last for at
least 12 hours, ads should be shown and prices
increased only within the first three hours.
He said randomly, which means the opposite of predictable or reliable. Sometimes he won't disengage for years and the algorithm would be non the wiser!
You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.
Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is what makes your "slowest antelope" analogy so much more complex.
An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves.
We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it.
What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.
Sure, a choice to opt out technically exists. But that common argument ignores two things:
First, the massive asymmetry of power involved in making people choose opting in (again and again, to greater and greater degrees).
Second, the fact that unrelated penalties—severe ones—are attached to choosing to opt out, by people and systems who want to discourage this behavior. It’s not like saying “choosing to not eat means you might be hungry”. That’s an intrinsic consequence; it has to happen. It’s not even like “choosing not to eat again and again means you might stunt your growth.” That’s intrinsic too, whether or not it’s intuitive.
No, the penalties we’ve attached to opting out are more like “choosing not to eat means you might go hungry, and also the people with hammers that specifically go after people that don’t eat will break your fingers.”
> We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either.
So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement.
We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why?
There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year.
We've been visited by alien intelligence that is simultaneously fascinating and underwhelming.
The real issue isn't the technology itself, but our complete inability to predict its competence. Our intuition for what should be hard or easy simply shatters. It can display superhuman breadth of knowledge, yet fail with a confident absurdity that, in a person, we'd label as malicious or delusional.
The discourse is stuck because we're trying to map a familiar psychology onto a system that has none. We haven't just built a new tool; we've built a new kind of intellectual blindness for ourselves.
Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code. Our tooling has become so powerful that the pure act of programming is secondary.
It's a world away from when the industry began. There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource. A company was so desperate for programmers that they hired him and Paul Allen as teenagers:
"So, they were paying penalties... they said, 'We don’t care [that they are kids].' You know, so I go down there. You know, I’m like 16, but I look about 13. They hire us. They pay us. It’s a really amazing project... they got a kick out of how quickly I could write code."
That story is a powerful reminder of how much has changed. Writing code was the bottleneck years ago. However the core problem has shifted from "How do we build it?" to "What should we build and is there a business for it?"
>Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code
I think it's credible to say that it was just market demand. Marc Andreessen's main complaint before the AI boom was that "there is more capital available than there are good ideas to fund". Personally, I think that's out of touch with reality, but he's the guy with all the money and none of the ideas, so he's a credible fist-hand source.
If you define good idea to be limited to SaaS, then sure you'll reach saturation pretty soon. But, say, anything that involves hardware could definitely benefit from a little more funding.
Also, he's a VC, but where more funding even in pure software is needed are sustainable businesses that don't have ambition to take over the world, but rather serve their customer niche well.
I think the "more capital than ideas" problem is highly contextual and largely a Silicon Valley-centric view.
There is immense, unmet demand for good software in developing countries—for example, robust applications that work well on underpowered phones and low-bandwidth networks across Africa or Southeast Asia. These are real problems waiting for well-executed ideas.
The issue isn't a lack of good ideas, but a VC ecosystem that throws capital at ideas of dubious utility for saturated markets, while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.
> while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.
I do believe that these also fit the hyper-growth model. It's rather that these investors have a very US-centric knowledge of markets and market demands, and thus can simply barely judge ideas that target very different markets.
This is in tandem with several generations of programming language, tooling, best practices, etc. LLMs haven't suddenly increased people's productivity, improved tooling did.
Back when these tools did not exist yet, a lot of this knowledge didn't exist yet. Software now is built on the shoulders of giants. You can write a line of code and get a window in your operating system, people like Bill Gates and his generation wrote the low level graphics code and had to come up with the concept of a window first, had to invent the fundamentals of graphics programming, had to wait and interact with hardware vendors to help make it performant.
We can almost certainly use 100x as much code as is currently written. There's a ton of throwaway code that, if written, would produce small but nonzero value. Certainly 100x as much code wouldn't produce 100x as much value though. I suspect value per unit of code is one of those power law things.
If you're hiring 16 year olds just because of their ability to write code sounds like you're bottlenecked by writing code. Your comment doesn't clarify why you disagree.
I use my third language, Spanish, every day, and my second, English, for work. On top of that, my partner is a native Portuguese speaker, so I'm passively soaking up a fourth. (I usually reply to her in Spanish, but we watch everything in Portuguese—though this month it's been all Italian, just for fun).
To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English. I think it's because even though I moved to Spain over seven years ago, I never fully immersed myself in the culture. I'm pretty sure I haven't read a single book in Spanish.
I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
Anyway, I can attest that grappling with a language you haven't quite mastered is a daily mini-puzzle that definitely keeps the brain working a bit harder than it otherwise would.
On a side note, I love that LLMs can handle so many languages now. After 17 years of living abroad, I still feel most at ease speaking my native language, Russian, even though my vocabulary is a bit lacking these days for more complex topics. It makes me completely understand why people prefer to receive medical care in their native tongue.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
Isn't that a thing everyone does? I don't have as many languages as you, but when I finally got to the point where I could reliably do what you're describing in Japanese, I felt like I had actually achieved a baseline level of fluency for the first time. The flywheel became self-perpetuating vs. my French, where every sentence is a struggle.
Not asking to be argumentative, btw -- just wondering what's on the other side.
There's another level after fluency (C1), which is near-native fluency (C2). At the level of such mastery you don't feel the need to simplify just to be understood, your utterances now define the language itself as you've achieved the level of the crowd whom the language belongs to in the first place.
P.S. I've typed this out in English after having achieved such unlock.
I would describe it as: natural human languages with native speakers eventually develop a grammatical way to complete the vast majority of incomplete thoughts that speakers tend to have.
So, if you know the entire language, then you can complete your thought. But if you only know the common parts of the language then you may need to start over with a different sentence structure in order to express your thought.
Maybe that maps to C1 vs C2? At C1 you can express your thoughts with occasional backtracking, but at C2 you almost never need to backtrack?
With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
Yeah. That's a level beyond -- You're "fluent" enough that you can break the rules -- but that's partially not about language, but about being perceived to be native. Changing the cultural presumption, so to speak, so that people give you the benefit of the doubt when you're saying something non-standard. I think anyone who attempts humor in a foreign language runs into this wall, hard.
The C1/C2 divide does seem to mix up that concept and the idea of "looking for the right word". I sort of understand what it's getting at, but it's unclear.
I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
> I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly. Now you have two problems:
1. You need to retroactively rephrase your whole sentence to present the same information in a different style, because that's the way this language does it. This works best if you can change the past.
2. You probably don't know the correct thing to say, or you wouldn't have made that mistake to begin with.
> When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly.
Yeah, I get that. Then later, you get to a point where you're largely not translating from your native language at all (i.e. "thinking in X"), and you just can't remember the word in the adopted language, so you need to re-route. Worst case, that ends up kicking you back up to your native language, and you're back to translation, which is like shifting into 1st gear on the highway.
I think my point is (to the extent that I have one) that being able to route around the issue in the second language is itself a fundamental form of fluency. That, plus being able to reliably receive definitions of words spoken in the new language are like the lambda calculus of speech. You can forget words all day long (and, believe me, many older people do!) but still be "fluent" if you never have to fall back to your old language as a crutch.
Anyway, I'm not trying to disagree with the broad notion -- there's clearly a point at which you're grasping around less like a foreign-language person, and more like a native person.
I do that a lot in English because English is so deep and there's a perfect word for everything. Recently I was ruminating on just how many ways there are to say "walk slowly" in English: saunter, meander, stroll, amble, shuffle and I think there were others.
Meanwhile in Chinese earlier I forgot how to say "shallow" so settled for "not deep"
When you spend some time transcribing live, impromptu speech, you'll notice that it often doesn't follow the rules of written grammar; speakers frequently abandon sentences midway through.
For example, in the linked clip[^1], the speaker says:
"uh the European Union uh that's not a US creation that's a you guys creation so don't ex..[abandoned word] the strength of the west [abandoned sentence] and the west is a really I don't know what"
For a moment, she struggles to express herself. Yet, there's a qualitative difference between not knowing what to say because a thought is not fully formed, and knowing what you want to say but realizing you've forgotten the specific word you need. For instance, you might be about to say "cherry," only to find you've forgotten the word and instead say something more general, like "forest fruit (fruta de bosque)," which is still correct but less precise.
That's sub A1 level (per European language classification).
Tho levels are often described and measured by what you are capable of, and not by what you do, or what you like to do. This includes: being able to understand others, and being able to create correct and appropriate text.
> With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
There are several concepts/situations here weaved together, but the two main are:
- artistic intent, playfulness
- inability to speak correctly
The second one is low level, and artistic intent is orthogonal to your level, and transfers from your native language.
(edit: BTW these two are closely related, since both are mostly just using patterns in places where they are not commonly used, and breaking them would be preferred)
It’s just a framework for evaluating how people learning languages stand.
Most native speakers would be hard pressed to be certified as C2 in their own language. I think a lot would fail C1 because they don’t know/use some of their language quirks which would be evaluated. I know for a fact that I can’t properly use some modes and tenses in my native language without a rule book.
Is the 'beyond C2' defined? C2 is the highest possible grade in the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. How would one ascertain that someone is beyond C2, given the lack of generally accepted criteria?
It's just a certification level that is almost meaningless compared to the natural Version of the language. And with some native speakers you honestly wonder why C2 requirements are so sophisticated.
yeesh, "online English." L337 h4xors with uber skillz?
"achieving unlock" is grammatically incorrect (im a native English speaker), if its idiomatic then of course that's different, but I wouldn't put that down as being "fluent," id put it down to be exposed to those specific idioms. It's not just about using the verb as a noun; where is the indefinite article?
If the gp was making a "I can has cheeseburgers?" style joke, then it went over my head, but it clearly is not grammatically correct English just because its used online.
It's incorrect English. If its idiomatic then its idiomatic. But its not a marker of fluency; its a marker of being exposed to a culture which uses those idioms.
It's much more common when you're multilingual, because you think in combination of all the languages you know and you only realize you're missing the specific word when you get to them trying to express the thoughts on the fly.
Sometimes it's not because you're not fluent - it's simply because the concept isn't expressible in the target language with that particular sentence structure you started with.
Typical example is English "I like him" vs Russian "on mne nravitsya" (+- he for me is desirable). If you start saying "I" you're already wrong.
It even happens within one language in highly inflected languages - because you wanted to say one thing, then changed the word to a better - but the sentence structure doesn't work with that new word, so you have to go back mid-sentence or make a grammatical mistake).
Often, looking for word mid-sentence generally is a manifestation of people not thinking in the language they are speaking which for me is the threshold at which you can be considered fluent.
Fluency is a very high level to reach. Most people are merely conversational in the foreign languages they speak and that’s more than enough for most interactions.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
This happens to me even when I speak my native language(s). Once you become multilingual, this is a fact of life.
So much this! During my 20s, English took over a significant chunk of communication. Years later, I mess up noun genders in my native language all the time and developed a strong distaste for formal forms of you/nouns - so much so, that I still dislike these in Greek that I'm currently learning. Although, sometimes it is a fun challenge when you use the wrong gender and scramble to find a matching noun/verb, making my speech kinda weird.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
That happens to me more with my bative language (german) than secondary (english) nowadays.
> To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English
I feel the same, albeit on a much lower level. Somehow Spanish just feels strange to me. For instance, a subject in Spanish often gets placed after the verb in a sentence, so I constantly have to figure out where the subject is: is it before the verb? after the verb? Or there's no subject and the conjugation of the verb implies the subject? I guess it's just a matter of time to get familiar with the verbs and it takes time. Also, listening comprehension is a huge problem for me. Even discerning words from conversations is very challenging. When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. However, I can read simple novels like El Alquimista now, yet I could only understand what was said in Extra at best with a super focus. In contrast, listening to Japanese is much easier for some reason, even though my level of Japanese is way below N5 (equivalent to Spanish's A1).
> When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes.
Friends does some interesting linguistic things. One of my favorite examples:
You told me to go out and be a caterer, so I went! I be'd!
Monica isn't making a mistake there. But I would be very surprised if someone who was just learning the language understood that joke.
Most likely not. That said, I could at least understand enough to enjoy the show. Not sure why understanding Spanish conversation has been so much harder.
German is my third language and this has been exactly my experience - I find it more challenging than English, my second language. I feel like my brain is at 100% when I want to speak German.
however, my kids are soaking up languages like a sponge. we speak Hungarian at home, English and Hungarian with our friends, and they speak both Swiss German and German at school, so they are already trilingual.
I know several families where the parents brings their own language, they speak English as a common language at home and the kids learn German/Swiss German at school, so that makes them... quadlingial?
The phonetic similarity between Russian and Spanish is a huge relief. As a Russian speaker, pronouncing English has always felt like a workout for my mouth; the sounds are completely alien. Spanish, on the other hand, is effortless. It just flows, since I'm using the same phonetic toolkit I grew up with.
Yeah, I have the opposite problem, being a native English speaker living in Portugal - to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do - and they won’t understand a bloody word. It isn’t just the phonemes, it’s the cadence - syllabic vs rhythmic stress. I’ll be like “um galão” and they’ll be like “galão?”, “sim, um galão”, “um… que? Galão?”, “sim,
galão”, “ahhh, um galão!” and I just can’t seem to be understood.
My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am.
German, I have no such problem despite being far weaker at the language imo.
> to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do
I noticed a similar thing listening to many English people trying to speak Spanish. I could hear that the native English speaker pronounced the vowel sounds of a Spanish word incorrectly - but that the English speaker could not tell. Very common if Spanish word learnt from reading and trying to pronounce it as English might. I also hear a similar reading mistake from other countries trying to speak English.
English can have extreme vowel variation - e.g. jokes based on bending vowel sounds to change word meaning. Spanish has a few vowel sounds and they seem very similar in different countries. English accents often change vowel sounds dramatically - so English speakers are not as aware of the importance of speaking vowels correctly. As a New Zealander, our vowel sounds trip up other English speakers.
I'm not sure how we learn to fix it when our hearing or sound formation is incorrect. Someone to incessantly correct one's mistakes does help but that level of patience is hard to find.
I know that I still can't hear or say nasal sounds correctly in other languages.
I think the issue here is that it's hard work for a native English speaker to keep track of the correctness of every single vowel sound because in English so many are elided or become "uh".
Listen carefully to different English accents, or even better try and mimic them.
There's a massive variety of vowel sounds in English: Sydney, Irish, Boston, Indian, etcetera.
English speakers can often hear the differences, and many people can produce the different vowels when mimicking the accents (country, city, person, foreigner).
I did not deny the fact that there is a greater variety of vowel sounds available in English. I merely doubt its explanatory power for the phenomenon you describe. But perhaps I am confused about exactly what that phenomenon is.
Actors and singers do it by hiring a voice coach - someone who doesn't just know the sounds, but can explain how to adjust your mouth muscles to make them correctly.
Most classes and individual teachers won't do that. They'll either think "Eh, good enough for a foreigner" and shrug, or they'll say "That's wrong" and repeat the correct sound at you, which won't fix the problem.
Sometimes changes happen in one language. There is a huge difference between the Received Pronunciation (RP) version of British English that was the standard up to around the early 90s, and the Estuary English that became mainstream after that.
European Portuguese sounds very Slavic; I'm sure Russians have a blast with it. English is a phonetically isolated language, largely due to the Great Vowel Shift. Unlike English, most languages have a closer linguistic relative. This makes English challenging for most people to learn, and it also makes it difficult for native English speakers to learn a foreign language without a heavy accent.
I've always been curious about how the non-English world feels about hearing their language spoken with a strong "English" accent. Dont they just get on with it? As a native English speaker I'm totally unfazed by strongly accented English: Indian accents, Chinese accents, Italian etc. For example Italians rarely pronounce the H in house (presumably because H is silent in Italian). Even twists like unusual word stress patterns or prnounciations are easily figured out on the fly.
I know that Parisians are supposed to be one exception: infamously snooty about visitors speaking French absolutely perfectly. But fpr everyone else, it's 2025 and we live in a world of mass tourism and mass migration. Are the non-English still fazed by English accents and insistent on audible correctness?
Growing up in the US I was similarly comfortable with accents. Having lived ~10 years in China/Taiwan I struggle now. For instance I often can't understand Australians at all. It's completely incomprehensible. British English is a bit of a strain sometimes
Similarly Chinese in China have little exposure to non-native speakers so I often find people can't understand me. While in Taiwan you can use the wrong tones and grammar and people don't have any issues figuring it out
But for instance a lot of local people really struggle with Indian English bc it's seldom used in the media landscape, while for me it sounds natural bc a lot of my colleagues speak it
I don't know that it's necessarily about snootiness. You learn to understand thick accents through exposure, and many countries don't have such a high amount of non native speakers running around as English speaking ones do.
I have a friend who struggled to understand thick Latin American accents. I understand a lot of accents by now well enough, but I somewhat recently spoke to a Nigerian person for the first time in my life and it was a struggle.
I'm not even getting into languages that have a high degree of tonality or homophony going on. That's an entire extra layer of difficulty when your counterparty in the conversation is not fluent.
I am a German native speaker fluent in English and living in Spain for a few years with not much opportunity of learning the language.
I just finished A2 in community college. Many of my classmates were native English speakers or Russians.
Most of them are elderly and Spanish is their first foreign language.
My Spanish is not good enough yet to judge pronunciation, but my impression is, that the russian accent is much more pronounced when beginners speak German or English than in Spanish.
The older Brits and Irish that learned no other foreign language before have a very hard time even realising their English accent.
I just left London, my first time going and as a native English speaker I struggled more with understanding perfect English with a British accent than I ever do with someone who speaks perfect or imperfect English with a heavy accent where English is a second language.
And when I first started working with Indians that were still in India, I had to adjust my speech and slow down a lot because they struggled with my southern accent.
Despite having worked 10x harder at it than I did Portuguese or Spanish. When speaking those two languages, it’s close enough to a correct accent that people often will ask if my family is Latino or Portuguese once they hear that im American or hear my English. This hasn’t happened 5 times but so many, I just assume it will happen now.
However my experience has been different in French, even if it’s obvious I’ve worked very hard at French (C1 now), my French friends are not begging to speak to me in French unless they have limited English skills… just because my pronunciation/cadence/intonation isn’t quite right or even remotely ok, despite having much more immersion in French than those other two languages. French also feels like I’m singing at a concert rather that just conversing.
Just sometimes your culture/brain/ linguistic mix result in happy or unhappy accidents.
Edit I’m sure someone will bring up cultural differences but I have several multilingual friends .. they all say my Spanish is beautiful and nearly to a person criticize my French (in a helpful friendly manner), this is true if they’re Latin American or French. Just seriously it’s a thing, brains are weird.
> So, it was really fascinating that I had the menu gem basically demo working on my laptop in a few hours, and then it took me a week because I was trying to make it do it
Reminds me of work where I spend more time figuring out how to run repos than actually modifying code. A lot of my work is focused on figuring out the development environment and deployment process - all with very locked down permissions.
I do think LLMs are likely to change industry considerably, as LLM-guided rewrites are sometimes easier than adding a new feature or fixing a bug - especially if the rewrite is something into more LLM-friendly (i.e., a popular framework). Each rewrite makes the code further Claude-codeable or Cursor-codeable; ready to iterate even faster.
I am with you on this. I'm very much not sure about rewrites, but LLMs do change the cost-benefit balance of refactorings considerably, for me. Both in a "they let me make a more informed decision about proceeding with the refactoring" and "they are faster at doing it than I am".
I like this reply because it shows the shifting paradigm of hireability. Years ago, software engineers used to be hired just for their coding talent and would be put up with even if they were arrogant and had poor hygiene. With time, we all rebranded as problem-solvers, now required to be good communicators and team players in addition to writing good code. The next evolution is that we will be the ones responsible for a certain area, and how we get it done will be abstracted away.
The article's 'useful vs. valued' distinction is spot on, and for me, it largely hinges on perceived replaceability.
Being a diligent workhorse makes you 'useful' - you're reliably closing tickets. But 'valued' often means bringing innovation or strategic foresight that's harder to replicate.
Sometimes, too much visible grind on routine tasks can almost cap your perceived value. It reminds me of the senior dev whose Jira updates might be terse — like 'Continuing research on core problem' — for days. They're not judged on daily ticket volume, but on the eventual breakthrough or critical insight that unblocks everyone or defines the next big thing. That signals a different kind of leverage and indispensability than just high output.
> like 'Continuing research on core problem' — for days
I've seen these tickets a bunch.
They have two types of authors, the first is the person flailing to accomplish anything and hoping that they can recruit someone else to figure it out or to take it over before they're found out. The second is the person who is failing to communicate what strategies they're using to solve the problem. Neither person is all that valuable, though the second type will at least be useful to someone who will eventually take credit for their work.
Regarding the common analogy about GPS atrophying map skills, I have a slightly different take based on observation and experience. My dad, who learned to drive pre-GPS, struggles to simultaneously drive and follow navigation – it's too much input, too fast. He needs a co-pilot or pre-planning.
For those of us who learned to drive with GPS, however, it wasn't simply about foregoing maps. It was about developing the distinct skill of processing navigation prompts while simultaneously managing the primary task of driving. This integration required practice; like many, I took plenty of wrong roundabout exits before it became second nature. Indeed, this combined skill is arguably so fundamental now that driving professionally without the ability to effectively follow GPS might be disqualifying – it's hard to imagine any modern taxi or ride-share company hiring someone who lacks this capability. So, rather than deskilling, this technology has effectively raised the bar, adding a complex, necessary layer to the definition of a competent driver today.
I see a parallel with AI and programming. The focus is often on what might be lost, but I think we should also recognise the new skill emerging: effectively guiding, interpreting, and integrating AI into the development process. It's not just 'programming' anymore, it's 'programming-with-AI', and mastering that interaction is the next challenge.
I don’t understand this (or all the AI “skills” discourse). This is the most intuitive technology in the history of the world. You literally talk to it in your language and it does what you want! What is there to learn?
(You do need to adjust your communication a little. But you’ve got to do it with every human too. I don’t see how AI is any different.)
Replace AI in your comment with "intern" or "junior employee" and you will quickly realize that it needs a different set of skills. Do you think two different managers can achieve wildly different results with the same team by using different processes and style of communication? That's the value of learning this skill.
I think it is a losing battle. People are energy preserving creatures and we skip paying attention if we can. Because paying attention is effort. Vibe coding is exactly this, low effort development and thus is enticing. Now if we can get away with low effort why shouldn’t we? I am not advocating serious NATO missions to be vibe coded for trajectories, no. When billions are at stake no way. But what if billions are not at stake? What if nothing is? This weekend I added a way to maximise my QApplication app. I just asked Claude code to do it and tested it. It worked. That is all I need for my own app that I use. It’s not that I don’t have any other users but works on my machine is the motto of this specific free and open source app.
>People are energy preserving creatures and we skip paying attention if we can.
Paying attention saves you energy in the long run. In the words of Gus Levy, nothing wrong with being greedy, but there's two types of greed, long term and short term; the latter is stupid.
Of course for a throwaway project it's irrelevant by definition. But the problem is in professional work you cannot get away with low effort, you're just pushing your problems to the back and they'll come back with interest. Vibe coding is simply moving your problems to other people, or to yourself at a later point in time.
Running AI itself is not low effort though, far from it at current efficiency levels it burns way more energy to produce outputs than humans. Setting latest advanced models to think about the problem on your behalf doesn't necessarily make it low effort overall.
Vibe coding is first and foremost moving some of your problems to the AI and that can be suffice even in professional setting where there's a lot of mundane requests, e.g. setting up slack alerts, running simple data transforms or figuring out one-off data analysis. Maintainability is less of an issue on tasks where it can be done from scratch if need be.
If your situation is result-driven and easily verifiable AI-driven solutions are absolutely appropriate.
