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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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I've been ruminating about this lately; my linguistics hot take is that even with arbitrarily advanced translation ability, you still run into the irreducible complexity of language, that fundamentally limits what you can do with manipulation of language alone.

For example, take the sentence "Rather than take for granite that Ace talks straight, a listener must be on guard for an occasional entre nous and me… or a long face no see". This sentence is fundamentally and logically, impossible to fully translate into any other language regardless of how good of a translator you are.

You must either translate it literally (hence losing any semantic meaning), translate the semantic meaning (hence losing the literal meaning), or translate via using malapropisms in the destination language (hence losing both the literal and semantic meanings).

In a similar way, vibe coders really like that Claude can "read their mind" when they put in a prompt and get back lots of code, and there's no denying that LLM's are getting better and better at writing lots of code when you give them natural language prompts.

What we are all now learning in software engineering is that some of the time, it actually doesn't matter how Claude decides to translate your natural language prompt as long as the symbols on the other end produces the desired result; but of course, no matter how good your translator is, there is fundamentally irreducible complexity when translating between languages, and it is impossible to verify that Claude translated your full intent without actually being able to understand both languages.

In this sense, Dijikstra puts it well when he states that "instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege".

In fact, the scaling laws paper actually predicts this as well; cross-entropy loss decreases as a power law with the model size, dataset size, and compute, but the loss is also bounded by the irreducible entropy of the language that comes to dominate as you pump in ever more parameters, data tokens and compute.

I don't doubt that universal translation isn't an incredible feat of human ingenuity, that it's not going to revolutionize much of how humans work and live. But the more I use LLM's and encounter all manner of these little alignment problems, I feel like it's this irreducible complexity inherent to language that is ultimately going to define the ceiling of what LLM's are capable of.

There’s an old joke about the optimal user interface: a single button labeled “do what I want.”

But the more I use LLM's and encounter all manner of these little alignment problems, I feel like it's this irreducible complexity inherent to language that is ultimately going to define the ceiling of what LLM's are capable of.

People laughed and laughed, but little did they know that in the end, Stephen Wolfram gets the last laugh.

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