On Language

2026.10.04

CLXXII

[Renting Out Your 'Next'; Speak in Abbreviations; Pretentious Poetry; Body Language; Language & Love; Meat Puppets; The Great Separation; Language as Truth]

Thesis: Language is not the only way to communicate, but it’s inherently tied to our perception of & ability to articulate beauty & love &, most importantly for our ability to preserve agency, truth.

[Renting Out Your 'Next']

Writing is thinking. Machines let us take action without thinking. We are still responsible for those actions.

Our decisions & actions, and the decisions & actions of others, may results in either our machines or their machines taking advantage of other men & women.

This has always been a concern, well before the advent of LLMs.

Social media feeds are nothing more than machines to which you relegate your ability to decide what comes 'next'.

This is such a bigger deal than one might think - if next is perpetually decided for you... well, you give up your future, one reel at a time.

I know, I know, I'm being dramatic & apocalyptic; I don't think that going on Facebook is selling yourself as a slave to a machine god algorithm owned by man.

But, it's not a stretch to say that such products are designed so that you're perpetually renting your attention, yourself, to such an algorithm.

I digress - this post isn’t a rant about social media. It’s about quite a lot & a very little at the same time.

Thinking, writing, our use of language to express the inexpressible; there's a bit about rap in here, and some about love, too.

[Speak in Abbreviations]

The Death Grips excerpts might seem a bit trite & extreme; perhaps it becomes prophetic when you realize it was rapped on a track from 2011. I wasn't very sentient then, so I don't know, but it seems like the virus he speaks of wasn't quite as obvious at that time.

I myself have been known to speak in quite unintelligible sentences that are a mix of all sorts of slang.

Why do I sometimes communicate like this? I don't know. You definitely feel like you're on the 'inside' when you have a sub language that only certain people can understand.

I remember how cool I felt in my finance days when I would be having conversations about complex options trading strategies, throwing around jargon like confetti when you blow open a pinata. In retrospect, I’m sure some it was annoying and pretentious.

In some regards, though, it is necessary: saying something like “shorting vol at the money & longing it in the tails” is a useful sentence that actually contains a TON of meaning and belief that would be hard to articulate as succinctly without drowning in jargon.

An observation about LLMs is that if you use slang, they'll immediately copy your jargon and throw it back at you. It's almost like a validation that you're on this one man in group. They also write about famous people as if they know them personally, jumping to first name basis and assuming intentions and personality traits with very limited information.

It makes you feel like you're on the inside.

Some of the less professional jargon can feel like linguistic degeneration, but I'm sure you can also argue it's 'just evolution'.

The thing about evolution, is it's not inherently driven towards something 'better.' A robust view of it is as an optimization function pointed towards survival.

What does it mean for a language to survive, though? This isn't obviously coupled to the survival of our current society, at least not on a short time scale. It's coupled to the survival of the language itself, which might be more related to expanding or contracting it’s complexity in relation to the specie’s capacity for linguistic complexity.

[Pretentious Poetry]

MC Ride from death grips is so interesting to me because the running joke on the internet is that him rapping is like "giving a homeless guy a mic.” But if you look at the lyrics, it feels more to me like you gave Dylan Thomas a mic and he shouted everything he had to say to incredible bass.

Dylan Thomas is one of my favorite poets. He does this cool thing where he mixes words together in a way without a literal definition, but have an intuitive meaning that shines through:

What does it mean for blind eyes to blaze like meteors? Nothing literal I don't think, but you get what he's going for and it's beautiful.

Some of MC Ride's lines are like this, too. There are lots of Biblical, or even Cosmic scale allusions, spoken in now uncommon sentence structures.

This is so interesting to me because if you listen to a Death Grips song without processing the lyrics, it sounds kind of like disoriented, angry shouting. Which, on it's own, is great music for shipping code, but it's somehow better given the nature of the underlying lyrics.

Both him and Thomas show how you can use language more than literally to convey meaning.

[Body Language]

I'm sitting at a different coffee shop to write this than usual.

If you've ever met me in person, you'd be quick to observe than I sit in all sorts of strange positions, oftentimes sprawling out. On booths, a lot of the time, I'll put myself in criss cross apple sauce.

I was doing that at this new coffee shop, and a guy who works there was walking toward me with a look in his eyes and a body language that says, "I'm going to tell him he's doing something wrong."

Perhaps it was a mix of where his eyes were looking, the authority he was trying to convey without having too high of urgency, ample experience on my part of being told to take my feet off items before... whatever it was, I accurately guessed he was going to tell me to take my feet off the bench before he actually said it!

That's not to say that I think me guessing this was impressive, it's really not; the fact that it's not impressive is why it's interesting.

Some communications don't need language.

[Language & Love]

There are some human emotions, like love, that are impossible to convey exclusively with words.

I think this makes sense. Our species has likely felt some version of love for longer than we've had the language function. I'm sure there's an argument that love is 'more' or better now that we have a more complex language to express it & support it, but the underling biological machinery is still there.

There are some things, like a hug, that I don't think language can capture in quite the right way. Or actions in general, like acts of service, or gifts.

You can say, I want to hug you, and this can make someone you care about feel quite good. But I think maybe this reaction is a sort of anticipation or imagining of the hug - the hug itself is obviously much better!

Sacrifices, too, transcend words. Giving resources, time, attention, or doing things for someone that you wouldn't do on your own are all things you can say you’ll do with language, but actually doing them makes the difference. Those words have a stronger impact, too, when there's a track record of actions that convey the emotions the words are trying to capture.

That said, words can still be expressive forms of love themselves, especially when they imply that you’re genuinely thinking about the person.

And then, even beyond that, there's always that deep feeling that you wish you could give or express more than you already have, that question in the back of your mind, "Does she really know how much I love her? What could I do to express it more?"

So maybe, when it comes to something like love, it's not that language feels insufficient. Rather, it might be that everything feels insufficient.

[Meat Puppets]

There's a term going around that I shockingly heard someone wear with pride: He called himself a 'meat puppet'.

This means that he views himself as an intermediary for an LLM. When I send him text, he just sends it to his LLM. When it asks him a question, he sends it to me.

So, what'd you think he decided to do? Well, he just let me talk directly to his LLM instead of him!

This is not SciFi anymore, people are actually doing this.

I think it's weird. I guess, in a way it works? Because now, he doesn't have to do anything except approve decisions?

There's an objective truth here: it's more convenient for me to talk to his LLM than it is for me to message with him if he's just going to dump it into his LLM anyways.

Part of me is shaking my fist at the sky, but at the same time, I can see the other pressure: if it more efficiently gets us both what we want, and we control for the risk... is there a problem?

I could ask who controls the 'thinking machine' he's learning to depend on; but so to, you could ask who controls the 'thinking machine' I write this on? I own it, and the os is open source... but I couldn't make myself another cpu if I needed one...

While it all reeks of a Faustian Bargain, perhaps we've been making such deals since first man traded his fist in for a bludgeon.

[The Great Separation]

I used AI a lot more than usual to code faster this weekend, but I was still 'driving.' It was a quite sprawling project that touched every layer of my app; I would not have been able to cover nearly as much ground as I did without AI.

I still view it as a tool, though. And I view it cautiously, and almost with a fear that it presents a trap, an easy way out of everything that could decay my own capabilities if not used carefully.

People say that there will be a separation: some people will use AI to amplify their output; others will become increasingly dependent and less intelligent because of the tools.

Don't we all think we're going to be the ones to amplify our output? Whose right?

If the code makes me more money, am I defacto right? Would seem to be evidence, not proof.

Is it maybe about treating it, treating all technology, as tool that amplifies your output without compromising your judgement?

But what does that actually mean?

I'd say it should be intuitive, but I've seen far too many people fall into the trap of AI Psychosis: the models output words that convince them they are right and great and the best and correct, when these phrases are meaningless or castles made of sand built on entirely false priors.

I've explained the story of how an LLM & I built a narrative together of this 9 figure company being steered by a PE investor. Then, when I brought up the investor to the CMO, he said something like, "Whose that? Oh, them. Yeah we don't talk about them ever."

I was convinced I was going into that call with a valuable POV. It was bullshit.

Maybe it is as simple as saying you need to preserve your ability to think for yourself. Identify & doubt priors, cross reference everything, ignore empty words not backed by reality. I’m still cautious, and think you should be too.

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[Language as Truth]

Maybe it's this: Language can be used to convey truth. That truth is testable against reality.

When we use words, communicate ideas, we have a responsibility to make sure they're lined up with reality. Even, every once in a while, nonsense words can articulate that for us.

We have to be supremely careful that we don't sacrifice our critical faculties to the machines. If you do, you really sacrifice it to the men who control the machines.

If you don't have a mastery over language, and aren’t on guard to check claims against reality, I think you can be more easily fed lies that sound true but are detached from reality.

Compression of language, abbreviations, these aren't inherently bad; I’m sure they're worrisome when they're an artifact of being forced into a stream of 'next' that you no longer control.

And, what of the musings on love & poetry?

Well, language lets you wrestle with and attempt to articulate the intangible, even if it doesn't always capture what you hope for.

There's beauty in that, too.

Live Deeply,