• Crazyslinkz@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    It’s a star trek reference to a certain race that spoke only in phrases, can’t think of the word.

    Edit: I can’t articulate early in the morning.

    “Crazyslinkz without coffee”

    • teft@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Everyone speaks in phrases, even you. The tamarians are noted for speaking in allegories.

    • UserFlairOptional@lemmynsfw.com
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      3 months ago

      More of a “only speak in cultural memes” thing. We all speak in phrases mostly.

      “I am feeling alarm at the moment of realization that every warrior I am commanding may be killed by the enemy who has prepared for our assault with deadly guile.” This complex and specific meaning might be encoded as “Ackbar above Endor when the Death Star struggled.”

      The whole thing is a bit queationable with the whole “how can they say things without some sort of language independant of their cultural memes to encode those memes within.” That part never made sense to me.

      • ProfessorPeregrine@reddthat.com
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        3 months ago

        I think this is why LLMs work, and some research backs this up. Humans actually don’t create new phrases for unique situations very frequently. Much or even most of what we say is existing word chunks stuck together.

        For example, look at this sentence. It communicated what I intended, but it is just a small idea conveyed with a standard text requiring no thought to generate. It could have easily been “Peregrine, with self reflection,” or something. Memes are a more obvious example of this.

        At some point in that imaginary culture maybe they just abandoned the original language since they could adequately communicate using only shared story references. Whether that part is realistic for an advanced technology culture maybe requires suspension of disbelief.

        For a more sophisticated take on this, there is a similar story inside of the Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe that asks some interesting questions. In that case, the language is specifically limited to ideologically-approved tracts in order to limit what the populace can think about, so as to be easier to control. However, the story told might be subversive.