Comment by chantepierre
1 day ago
I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y".
A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.
1 day ago
I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y".
A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.
I wonder if this is a "loan idiom" from a non-English-speaking culture.
> Det är ingen ko på isen – “There’s no cow on the ice” (Sweden)
https://bigthink.com/high-culture/idioms-around-the-world/
Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion.
A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project
Wise man say: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single tractable beachhead.
It was true at Normandy, anyway.
Thanks. This is the first time I encounter the word "beachhead", and googling a bit made me indeed saw something related to an invasion. But I was so annoyed by the claudeisms that I closed the tab and just asked it to rephrase instead of trying to make another step towards its vocabulary.
The art of rhetoric and human communication involves knowing your audience, and when using idioms and metaphors, you choose those which are shared in common to be immediately recognizable and impactful.
When I was 19, I had a psychologist who employed a lot of baseball idioms. "We'll touch base next week..." and although I am not a baseball fan, my father is, and we're all Americans, and so the baseball references were well-understood by his audience of one.
When an LLM starts going off about a "tractable beachhead" that behavior indicates that it's unaware of its audience, and also ignorant of how to put together a human idiom. That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation, and also explainable by dudes on Hacker News, but that wasn't the point of the comment.
The point is that the LLM's audience wasn't a veteran of D-Day in WWII, and even with an understanding of what those words mean individually, neither he nor I recognized "tractable beachhead" as a meaningful idiom for speakers of standard English.
> That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation
I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.
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It's a shame that LLMs took off at the exact same time humanity entered it post-literate phase.
There's a scene in the movie Clifford, starring martin short. "I just need you to talk to me like a real human boy! You can't do it, can you???"
"...the load bearing seam is the self referential spin. Superstition compounds throughout your entire pipeline."