With a mentality like that no, you’re not going to get another job.
Job seeking while you’re employed means you have to subjugate the needs of your current employer. When an opportunity calls? You pick up the phone!
You’re the kind of person who is so dedicated to your job that you will have to lose it and then be unemployed before you get a new one. That is absolutely ok. Job seeking while employed takes a ton of energy and might not be worth it to you. Don’t bother then.
All your posts in this discussion is full of straw men and twisting peoples' words. Do better. Not fruitful to have a discussion with you. (Like your ranty assumptions about what kind of person someone is, come on...)
And no, if I were to answer the phone where every spammy prospective idiot is calling me it would be multiple times a day. I don't care.
I know someone who has used this trick to get a pay rise whilst not looking for work.
You wait until your boss is in earshot, get someone to ring you and the walk quickly away from your desk saying "yes, yes I'm still interested... Just a sec".
It might make your boss actually consider the reality of replacing you.
I'm sorry that just comes across as unprofessional, weak and passive aggressive. If someone started doing that on my team I'd take it as part of the case against them not a reason to fight to keep them. Also presumably that's in ear shot of other team members, it's disruptive to team morale. If you are serious about looking elsewhere, make it clear you want to stay but xyz is making you consider other options. Do it in private with the right people. Or say nothing at all.
One day I visited DistroWatch.com. The site deliberately tweaked its images so ad blockers would block some "good" images. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on. The site freely admitted what it was doing. The site's point was: you're looking at my site, which I provide for free, yet you block the thing that lets me pay for the site?
I stopped using ad blockers after that. If a site has content worth paying for, I pay. If it is a horrible ad-infested hole, I don't visit it at all. Otherwise, I load ads.
Which overall means I pay for more things and visit less crap things and just visit less things period. Which is good.
Moreover you don’t even need a 0-day to fall for phishing. All you need is to be a little tired or somehow not paying attention (inb4 “it will never happen to ME, I am too smart for that”)
At $JOB IT actually bundles uBlock in all the browsers available to us, as per CIA (or one of those 3-letter agencies, might've even been the NSA) guidelines it's a very important security tool. I work in banking.
I do that as well. For me it is almost exclusively the case with the news sites.
> If it is a horrible ad-infested hole, I don't visit it at all.
Same.
> Otherwise, I load ads.
There is no "otherwise" for me. I simply do not want to load any kind of ads or "sponsored" content. I see no reason, either moral, ethical or other, to ever do that.
Wouldn’t the Nevada Test Site be much better for this? Huge, government controlled, no major airports or cities, and moreover, already used for this sort of thing.
I switched to Homebrew after years of Macports because Macports required me to laboriously upgrade all the ports with each major macOS update. Homebrew does not require this. I understand the better design of Macports but in the end Homebrew works well enough and saves much time annually without the need for the manual upgrade.
We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary.
Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.
If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. Otherwise the word will not hold its own meaning. For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.
> If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use.
That depends on your goals. If you are writing in your private journal, or a comment on HN, it doesn't matter one bit.
If you want to find commonality with other people it is significantly more efficient, but still not required. It is not like one is born understanding words. They are not passed down from the heavens. They are an invention. When I say 'sloopydoopidydoo' you might not know what I intend by it right away, but the path to figuring it out is a solved problem. Even young children can handle it.
> For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.
Let's put it to the test: I added enums to the programming language I am working on. Tell me, with your dictionary in hand, what do I mean by that?
Here's the thing: According to the dictionary, an enum is something like Go's iota or C's enum. But many people will tell you that Go doesn't have enums — that an enum is what others might recognize as a tagged union. That kind of language evolution happens all the time. So, what do I mean? Am I using the dictionary definition, or the community definition that is quickly gaining favour and will no doubt be added to the dictionary as soon as someone has a chance to update it? Both uses have been widely established in my opinion. In fact, the Swift programming language's documentation even acknowledges both uses and then goes on to explain what it means by "enum" to remove any confusion.
I look forward to seeing if you captured my intent.
Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days.
Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail.
20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.
I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis.
I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again
Words are something made up to express whatever the speaker/author intends them to, so there is really no such thing as correct or incorrect there. A dictionary can hint at the probability of someone else understanding a word absent of other context, which makes for a useful tool, but that is something quite different to establishing correctness.
As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impossible, but we accept the human consensus to be a close enough approximation. With that, verifying 'correctness' to the degree that is possible is actually quite easy through validating it across many different LLMs trained on the human consensus. They will not all hallucinate identically. If convergence is found, then you have also found the human consensus. That doesn't prove correctness — we have never had a way to do that — but it is equivalent to how we have always dealt with establishing what we believe is correct.
It is a fundamental property of the universe. Whether or not it is useful is immaterial. Humans are unable to read minds. They can only make up words and use them as they intend. There is no other way.
Despite your insistence, I think you will find that the human consensus is that it useful. The human consensus is especially biased in this case, I will grant you that, but it seems few humans wish they were bears in the forest. Our ability to so effectively communicate in such a messy, imperfect environment is what has enabled us to be unlike all the other animals.
It might not sound like it should work on paper, but in the real world it does.
Turns out that because we've defined "words" as a thing that means a thing, now there are rules around "language" and "words". So while you're welcome to invent whatever combination of sounds you prefer to mean what you like, those sounds can be "correct" or "incorrect" as soon as other people become involved, because now you've entered into a social construct that extends beyond yourself.
So again your conclusion is technically correct, in a navel-gazing "the universe is what I perceive" sort of way, but counterproductive to use as a building block for communication.
There is no correct or incorrect here, but I will say it looks perfectly fine to me — naturally, as anything goes. I don't understand it. Is that what you are trying to communicate? There are many words I don't understand; even ones used commonly enough to be found in the dictionary. That is nothing new.
Here's the magic: I don't need to understand. Nobody is born with the understanding. Where communication is desired, we use other devices to express lack of understanding and keep trying to convey intent until a shared understanding is reached. I don't yet understand what that means, but assuming you are here in good faith, I eventually will as you continue to work to communicate your intent behind it.
I know computer people who spend their days writing in programming languages that never talk back struggle with this concept, but one's difficulties in understanding the world around them doesn't define that world.
> there are rules around "language" and "words".
If you are trying to suggest that there is some kind of purity test, it is widely recognized that what is often called Friesian is the closest thing to English as it used to be spoken. What you are writing looks nothing like it. If there are English rules, why don't you follow them? The answer, of course, is that the only "rules" are the ones you decide to make up in the moment. Hence why English today is different from English yesterday and is very different from English centuries ago.
this is important, i feel like a lot of people are falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to apply an AI helper in software development. You can adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you. ..or leave it as is.
You're right, though I think a lot of the push back is due to the way companies are pushing AI usage onto employees. Not that complaining on HN will help anything...
Yeah, sure, it can be perceived like that. The message I'm responding to shows a blatant disregard for millenia of scriptural knowledge traditions. It's a 'I have a pocket calculator, why should I study math' kind of attitude, presenting itself in a celebratory manner.
To me it is reminiscent of liberalist history, the idea that history is a constant progression from animalistic barbarism to civilisation, and nothing but the latest thing is of any value. Instead of jumping to conclusions and showing my loathing for this particular tradition I decided to try and get more information about where they're coming from.
If I have a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions, so did Noah Webster when he compiled a dictionary. So did Carl Linnaeus when he classified species. So did the Human Genome Project. I have a pocket calculator, yet I know how to do long division. I use LLMs to learn and to enhance my work. A dictionary is a shortcut to learning what a word means without consulting an entire written corpus, as the dictionary editors have already done this.
Is my use of a dictionary a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions? I don’t think so at all. Rather, it exemplifies how human knowledge advances: we build on the work of our predecessors and contemporaries rather than reinvent the wheel every time. LLM use is an example of this.
The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852):
> ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed
Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comment.)
I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough™ to find me an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish generating a response.)
There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus, but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think actually is an improvement.
> Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses
with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates.
---
Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would be to make one), so here's my attempt to look this up manually.
"Admitting a large number of uses" -> manually abbreviated to "very useful" -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful -> dead end. Give up, use a thesaurus.
Taking advantage of the fact my passive vocabulary is greater than my active vocabulary: no, no, yes. (I've spuriously rejected "multipurpose" – a decent synonym of "versatile [tool]" – but that doesn't matter.) I'm pretty sure WordHippo is machine-generated from some corpus, and a lot of these words don't mean "very useful", but they're good at playing the SEO game, and I'm lazy. Once we have versatile, we can put that into an actual thesaurus: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile. But none of those really have the same sense as "versatile" in the context I'm thinking of (except perhaps "adaptable"), so if I were writing something, I'd go with "versatile".
Total time taken: 15 seconds. And I'm confident that the answer is correct.
By the way, I'm not finding "multifarious" anywhere. It's not a word I'm familiar with, but that doesn't actually seem to be a proper synonym (according to Wiktionary, at least: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous). There are certainly contexts where you could use this word in place of "versatile" (e.g. "versatile skill-set" → "multifarious skill-set"), but I criticise WordHippo for far less dubious synonym suggestions.
'multifarious uses' -> the implication would be having not just many but also a wide diversity of uses
M-W gives an example use of "Today’s Thermomix has become a beast of multifarious functionality. — Matthew Korfhage, Wired News, 21 Nov. 2025 "
wordhippo strikes me as having gone beyond the traditional paper thesaurus, but I can accept that things change and that we can make a much larger thesaurus than we did when we had to collect and print. thesaurus.com does not offer these results, though, as a reflection of a more traditional one, nor does the m-w thesaurus.
So you weren't actually using the thesaurus as a reverse dictionary here. The thesaurus contains definitions, and the reverse dictionary was the search tool built into their website. It would work just as well against a dictionary as a thesaurus.
Importantly to the point being discussed, what you did does not work at all against an actual physical thesaurus book.
If the thesaurus had an entry for "very useful" (as WordHippo does), then yes, it would work against an actual physical thesaurus book. This whole cluster of words is coded into Wiktionary incorrectly – for example, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/utility#Synonyms is a subsection of "Adjective" despite listing synonyms for a sense of the noun:
> (state of being useful): usefulness, value, advantages, benefit, return, merits, virtue, note
where "note" is a synonym of distinction, not utility, and Thesaurus:utility has fewer entries than this. Versatility should be listed in Thesaurus:utility as a related concept.
Paper thesauruses (thesaurai?) won't have prefixes like "very" in their pages.
Furthermore, even if we allow "very useful", that's a far cry from "admitting a large number of uses". The latter requires a search engine to properly map.
Which they've been good at for a while. You could have googled "word meaning admitting a large number of uses" back in 2018 and gotten good answers.
My point is, the tools you've linked to are useful/versatile, but it's not the thesaurus that makes them so useful, it's the digital query engine built on top of the thesaurus.
Even if I don't know the word "versatile", I can go from the phrase "admitting a large number of uses" to the phrase "very useful". The original point I made (before I discovered OneLook Thesaurus) described the effectiveness of a procedure that was just manually looking things up in databases, as one might do in a paper thesaurus. (I could print out Wiktionary and WordHippo in alphabetical order, buy a Cambridge Thesaurus and some bookshelves, and perform the procedure entirely offline, with only a constant factor slowdown.)
They've got that information scattered around a few pages. The Help page says they use (a modified version of) Datamuse for lookup, with Wikipedia, Wiktionary and WordNet providing dictionary definitions. The Datamuse API (https://datamuse.com/api/) uses a variety of GOFAI databases, plus word2vec: it's all pre-2017 tech. OneLook additionally uses https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.02783 for one of its filters (added 2022): more details can be found on the Datamuse blog: https://www.datamuse.com/blog/. https://web.archive.org/web/20160507022201/http://www.oneloo... confirms the "longer queries" support (which you described as "LLM-like") was added in 2016, so it can't possibly be using LLMs; though I'm not sure how it does work. There may be some hints in the OneLook newsletter (e.g. https://onelook.com/newsletter/issue-10/ (10 July 2025?) cryptically notes that "Microdefinitions are algorithmically generated […] they go through a series of automated cross-checks against public domain dictionaries, and the suspicious ones are vetted by humans"), but the newsletter isn't about that, so I doubt there's much information there.
Try making the term as a developer time limited, such as for a two-year period. The developer must actively renew the term. The point wouldn’t be to kick developers out after two years; there would be no limit on renewals and no requirement for approval. Rather, it makes the commitment a limited rather than unlimited one and forces the developer to periodically think: do I still want to do this? Then, passively taking no action causes the commitment to end, rather than the developer having to actively say “I don’t want to do this anymore.” This takes the shame out of it.
I don’t buy half and half cream very often. I did not know that for a basic product they were selling items that aren’t just milk and cream. Ignorance on my part? Sure, but there is over a hundred different things I buy. It would be doing a audit everytime I go shopping.
Even if it says milk the quality still depends on what they fed the cow that produced the milk. How much Palm oil was in the cows diet and what effect does that have on the milk. Even things like was the milk taken from an infected/inflamed utter?
Holy crap people are lazy and entitled. You want your hand held and all the conveniences in the world so you don't have to read a label or buy a vegetable.
Relatedly: wouldn't there be many applications for which ipv4 isn't needed?
For example, Walmart has electronic eink shelf tags they can update remotely. Each one needs a unique address. I wouldn't think it needs ipv4. It doesn't have to connect to the SpaceJam website.
I would think that as time goes by, the number of these new devices would swamp the number of old ones that need ipv4. v4 would still be around and might even seem important to the fogies using web browsers on laptops...meanwhile the street lamp has five ipv6 addresses and no ipv4 ones.
An example of this is Matter, the new industry standard for IoT devices. It uses IPv6 addressing, so if you want your IoT devices bridged onto your LAN, your LAN needs to support IPv6.
I think that when you put most Americans in a jury box, they will learn that whether they vote to convict is their choice. Ask the guy who threw the sandwich.
Job seeking while you’re employed means you have to subjugate the needs of your current employer. When an opportunity calls? You pick up the phone!
You’re the kind of person who is so dedicated to your job that you will have to lose it and then be unemployed before you get a new one. That is absolutely ok. Job seeking while employed takes a ton of energy and might not be worth it to you. Don’t bother then.
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