How exciting, I get to be the pedant: it’s “stream-of-consciousness,” not “stream-of-conscious.” Conscious is an adjective; there can’t be a stream of it.
On the other hand English is highly imbued with lake of morphological inflection and other explicit lexicalization by grammatical type. So this is really just following the main stream tendency.
I was about to object that the latter is not in fact a noun but was surprised to see that wiktionary lists it as such. However it provides no usage examples and I strongly suspect it is in error.
I think it is occasionally used with "the," i.e. "the conscious" (referring to the conscious part of your body, for example). Adjectives sometimes become nouns this way, like "the poor"
I searched the Corpus of Contemporary American English ( https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ ) for 'conscious_n', which means the token "conscious" with a 'noun' part-of-speech tag.
There are five results. All five of them are tagging errors:
If we scan to get enough info, then model the cells well enough, and have enough computers to run the simulation of the models, then the input-output of the emulation of the brain will be the same as the input-output of the original brain. It will act like it is conscious. [adjective, modifying it]
Well, first we work on working the body together, so that we can go places with both of us conscious. [adjective, modifying both of us]
Lady Bertram looks barely conscious. [adjective, modifying Lady Bertram]
In a few years, he believed, this institution would be needed in Ukraine, as new conscripts became more religiously conscious. [adjective, modifying new conscripts]
It is in this sense that Rahner means that grace is conscious. [adjective, modifying grace]
Examples 3 and 4 are so far from being nouns that they're being modified by adverbs.
It seems safe to conclude that in fact there is no nounal use of the word "conscious".
> Adjectives sometimes become nouns this way, like "the poor"
That isn't actually what's happening in "the poor". The position occupied by the token poor in that phrase can be filled by all kinds of things:
God loves everyone equally. The rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, the sane and the schizophrenic, the possessed-of-billions-of-dollars and the penniless...
Do you want to argue that "possessed of billions of dollars" is a noun?
We can apply our in-passing observation from earlier and contrast the fully-awake with the barely-conscious. Here, as above, it's impossible for conscious to be a noun, because it is being modified by an adverb. And it's... dubious... for barely conscious to be a noun phrase, because it is headed by conscious, which we know isn't a noun.
> Is my impression correct, that in general "the {thing}" is a noun phrase without implying anything about {thing} itself?
Yes, with some minor caveats:
1. Some people prefer to see "the {thing}" as a 'determiner phrase', where 'determiner' is the name for the part of speech to which the belongs. You can call it a 'noun phrase' without losing anything meaningful. 'Noun phrase' is definitely a better term if you're not deep in the technical weeds of grammatical analysis.
2. There are conclusions you could draw about {thing}, but they're more complex than "it's a noun". It's fair to just not talk about them.
3. In language, there are always problems somewhere for any analysis. (Which is why an unbroken chain of transmission can have Latin on one side and French on the other.) I wouldn't even say that a noun phrase with that structure exists at all in an example like "The more you say it, the more I think it". But that particular construction is weird enough that I'm perfectly comfortable saying it's just outside the scope of your qualifier "in general".
Isn’t it an adjective on both? Being conscious because you have consciousness. Otherwise you’re repeating the same thing. I’m happy because I’m happy. I’m pink because I’m pink? Disclaimer: ESL
I think those examples would be "I'm a happy because I'm happy", or "I'm a pink because I'm pink". In both cases you're sort of using an adjective as a noun, at least if you're not overloading it with an actual noun. (e.g., if you invented yourself a term, like calling certain types of people "Happies", etc.)
I’ve never heard that usage, it doesn’t sound right to me. (Relatedly, “an autistic” is generally considered dated / mildly offensive / just incorrect. Better is “an autistic person”, which makes it an adjective again. There does exist the noun “autist” which I do hear occasionally, but not from autistic people as far as I’m aware, so would probably avoid as well.)
> Relatedly, “an autistic” is generally considered dated / mildly offensive / just incorrect.
Is it? I've heard those sentiments about "a person with autism" (and more generally, "autism" as something you have rather than "autistic" as something you are), but not about the term "autistic" as a noun in general. I use "autistic" as a noun a lot, because I don't like to assume that everyone identifies as a person. (Even though doing so is normalized enough that not doing it looks more out of place.)
> There does exist the noun “autist” which I do hear occasionally, but not from autistic people as far as I’m aware, so would probably avoid as well.
In my experience "autist" doesn't necessarily have to do with autism itself, but more specifically the element of "weirdness"/"cringe" that others can have at it; i.e. it's usually used in a self-deprecating way to refer to some sort of weird or deranged behavior (and isn't at all a neutral way to refer to others). Though, most of my exposure to the term is from 4chan/2b2t; in those spaces autism in general is often used as a synonym for mental illness.
I've not heard of anyone not identifying as a person, and I thought I was aware of a good range of identities and subcultures. At least in the UK, using "an autistic" as a noun would have you be heard as someone older and out of touch - perhaps well-meaning, perhaps not, but at least a bit insensitive.
Your report of the meaning of "autist" in some places I think rather strengthens my suggestion to avoid it.
I am otherkin and quite a few of my friends are also otherkin (or alterhuman, very nearly the same thing). There is also therianthropy under the otherkin umbrella, although I've seen that ordering get mixed up a lot. Most of the discourse about it I've seen is from the young/inexperienced.
> Your report of the meaning of "autist" in some places I think rather strengthens my suggestion to avoid it.
Maybe my definition of “person” isn’t quite standard, but I did have otherkin in mind; to me, a person doesn’t have to be human to be a person. My cat is a feline person, or near enough, Commander Data is a (fictional!) person, etc. Practically zero people want to give up their personhood, at least in everyday life, as it’s extremely disadvantageous and unpleasant. It’s in this sense that saying “an autistic person” rather than “an autistic” is much better: however you identify, you’re a person, an individual with rights and worthy of respect, and not a thing that one would only bother identifying with an adjective. A vital part of being a person is having more than one aspect. A lot of racial epithets are offensive for the same reason.
I do know at least one that explicitly doesn't identify as a person, because personhood does not come only with rights but with obligations, expectations, societal treatment and responsibility. I get what you mean (I haven't separated from my own concept of "person" either) but to me it's more inclusive not to require personhood for respect.
Indeed, in Freud the word is _Unbewusstsein_, which is literally more like "being-unconscious," but a more natural English translation would be unconsciousness.
But being 'conscious' of something is being aware of it; your 'subconscious' is the part of your brain 'below' your awareness (although it is true that it's also below your consciousness! So perhaps both would work)
This looks really good. Haven't read in full yet, but I was hoping to see him credit Ben Evans's "Office, messaging and verbs" (2015): "In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person."
Funny that everyone is linking the tools they wrote for themselves to deal with this problem. I am no exception. I wrote one that just lets you write JavaScript. Imagine my surprise that this extremely naive implementation was faster than jq, even on large files.
I’ve always meant to write a post about this. Bun is pretty similar and has the `$` helper from dax built in. In the past I would have used Python for scripts that were too complicated for Bash. But the type system in Python is still not great. TypeScript’s is great: flexible, intuitive, powerful inference so you don’t have to do many annotations. And Deno with URL imports mean you can have a single-file script with external dependencies and it just works. (Python does this now too with inline dependencies and uv run.) Deno and Bun also come with decent APIs that are not quite a standard library but help a lot. Deno has a stdlib too.
You can see in my other scripts in my dotfiles that between dax for shelling out and cliffy or commander.js as a CLI builder, TS is a great language for building little CLIs.
Ugh you're right. There was a new AST-based version control system that came out a month ago and I couldn't remember the name. I asked an LLM what the name was and repeated the answer the LLM gave me without checking (facepalm).
This is a reasonable reaction — pretty sure I felt the same way when I heard about jujutsu's first-class conflicts[0] — but it turns out to be really useful not to be stuck inside an aberrant state while conflicts are in the process of being resolved.
I looked at the repo and couldn’t even find an example, so it can’t be that many of their commits. But also: this is ridiculous. Whether the commit appears as done by Claude or not is a setting you can change. If they turned it off, you’d never even notice.
These are great developers and they’ve built an incredible tool. I use it a hundred times a day. It is very odd and dogmatic to think that because you saw a commit authored by Claude, whatever skills and qualities let them build something so good are now being thrown out.
Can't blame you for not trusting OpenAI, but it seems to me they would gain very little from fucking up uv (or more precisely doing things that have a side effect of fucking up uv), and they have tons of incentive to cultivate developer good will. Better to think of buying and supporting a project like this as a very cheap way to make developers think they're not so bad.
No they don't have incentive to cultivate developer goodwill. They are monetizing replacing developers everywhere. That is the trillion-dollar valuation. They have the opposite incentive.
They are not. A very large proportion of their revenue comes from developers. A large proportion of their marketing and product work is aimed at developers. You have to work really hard to not see this. Just look at what Altman and Brockman tweet about.
All the various APM companies are implementing "Assign to agent" flows. The various foundation model providers will be satisfied getting a subscription for 10% of total comp of a developer, instead of pocketing 60% of the total comp completely replacing them?
The only thing that could prevent this is lack of ability to execute, like how Uber wanted to replace drivers with FSD vehicles.
It's not about what they wish would happen, it's about what they think will happen. In my view they are acting precisely like they believe they will be making a proportion of developer pay by making them more productive rather than replacing developers. I think they understand that the alternative doesn't really work out for them or anyone.
Even if they believe that their systems will eventually tank employment and replace developers rather than augment meant, the fate of Astral doesn't matter at all in that scenario because a) nobody has a job, and b) you can build your own uv replacement for $20.
Could it be that they want developers to use their stuff so they get telemetry and mind share out of it? As a stepping stone for the ultimate goals so to speak?
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