A motto for programmers: "Tuere usorem, data, veritatem"
koas.devAs a user, I want to be enabled / to be able to do more things with a piece of software than what I could do without it.
I do NOT want to be "protected".
I didn't take "protect" the same way as you at all.
Big tech is putting inside our heads that users shall be protected by removing control from them and that's detrimental. This gatekeeping is not protection, it's dystopia.
Protect can be taken as in "Protect the user from bad decisions", or as in "Protect users' freedom" [1], which would completely go your way. I understood protect as "make the user your first priority".
I'm happy with being protected. I'm not happy with my control being removed. It may look like the first implies the second, but it should not and we need to fight against this idea. This leads to (tech!) people here on HN believing their restricted mobile ecosystems are good for them and their parents.
[1] (edit:) another commenter suggests "protect their interests", which nails it for me.
Ok -- but then the word 'protect' is too ambiguous and overused, and we should find a better one.
Until then, I like "protect". :)
Very few mottos can withstand literal dissection. For that matter, many phrases have entirely different meanings than if they were read as normal words.
Words bend to the context, and by associating a motto with the ideal it is proposed for, it quickly becomes its own context.
"Protect the user, their data and the truth!", if you say it loudly, comes across to me like something the Three Musketeers would exclaim. If they were programmers, about to enter the forest of dark patterns, risking their lives for the users they know, and those they will never meet.
Love it. All subjective of course.
Fair enough, I suppose we can just drop it :-)
You are certainly free to do so. This article isn't a mandate.
That's why it's the developer's responsibility to do it. Because the user won't.
"Protect" can mean whatever the service provider wants it to mean. Such as requiring developer verification for any program you want to install on your own phone.
You don't get it, it's for your own good! The greater good! :-)
(sarcasm, obviously)
I agree. A better choice of word would have been diligere, meaning to value (verb). Value the user, the data, and the truth. Diligere usorem, data, (et) veritatem.
Further, I'm not sure if the infinitive was the best choice of verb form. It feels to me more applicable as an imperative (thou shalt...), so I think it should be dilige (present imperative) or diligito (future imperative). I don't know Latin well enough to judge which of those two it should be.
Empower the user, protect the data.
My Latin is too poor for this, but Google suggests "usorem potestatem da, data protege".
There's a reason some buttons are behind glass and some switches have guards you have to unlock first. You say you don't, but you can't not qualify when, otherwise you're simply wrong.
As long as you can reach the buttons by yourself and don't need to ask big tech's permission, I fully agree that having safeguards for potentially dangerous buttons is a good thing.
The people that operated looms in cotton mills used to say the same thing. A guard would get in the way, It slows me down when I try to do x. "I'm a skilled technician, just let me have access"
They'd keep saying that until they lost a hand, arm, leg to the big swirling mass of metal.
Apples and oranges. Installing an encrypted chat app, a torrent client, or an open source OS stripped of spyware will not mangle my limbs, but big tech and governments are hard at work trying to make these a thing of the past.
People on hn would do well to stop giving cover to such disastrous pretenses.
context:
> I do NOT want to be "protected".
to which you replied:
> Installing an encrypted chat app,
on a thread about developers making sure that user data is safe.
I want to install an app, I don't want to scout around and make a value judgement to see if its going to steal all my data. In the same way that victorians had to work out if the local baker is cutting cheap flour with chalk or worse[1].
we are "qualified" to make that value judgement, the vast majority of people outside of this forum are not. This means that the longer we let predatory spyware run our ecosystem (lets be honest, most of the "internet" is paid for by google, facebook and apple et al) the longer we ingrain in people to expect to be exploited.
The solution is not only opensource, because frankly thats even more user hostile. (oh you lost your entire history? lol you should have done x,y,z and not pressed the "make it awesome" button, as if you'd read the code you know its in. alpha) The solution is as "the people" to demand safe software. This won't happen because the current tech giants are the only reason why US GDP is growing.
The solution is tackling the tech behemoths. But that wont happen with current US system.
Relevant xkcd. https://xkcd.com/327/
Reframing it as "protect their interests" helps. Protect the users from corporate manipulation, from lock-in, from rent seeking, from dishonest practices.
I'm also reading TFA's intent as less about big-brother and info-hygiene stuff, and more about standard enshittification.
Since we're talking about "doing more things with a piece of software than [users] could do without it", well, living with 10% of the features at 1000x of the price would typically still fit those criteria. Since this is exactly where most companies would like to go after establishing market-dominance, yeah, I think we do want to be protected.
Whether any dev or group of devs could realistically push back against the forces at work in the org or the wider economy here is a separate question of course.
Plus res gere
"Do more things"
'Res gestae' in Latin are aren't just 'things done.' The phrase is an idiom meaning "exploits" or "deeds" -- with the implication that there's something notable about them -- e.g. they're worth recording or remembering -- i.e. 'accomplishments.' So 'res gerere' to my ear means something closer to "accomplish" than "do things."
I suppose the Latin phrasing needs to be double-checked, but it's nice to have what we ought to aim expressed to concisely (even in English). I guess the Latin makes it sound more serious and authoritative (but also more cryptic, so it's a double-edged sword to manipulate with caution).
May it help spread the spirit, with which I completely agree. Kudos for aiming this.
Getting into a rhetoric style, rule of thirds can help.
So something like:
Custodi usorem, custodi data, custodi veritatem.
Maybe this?
Usorēs, data et veritas primum
Users, data and truth first.
And actually first in the sentence structure (in both languages).
(edit: I had initially used prima - neutral plural nominative for primus (adj.) to target the three subjects, which I don't know if it's right, but using the adverb feels better. I don't do Latin though)
Yeah this sounds better, the proposed slogan kind of does not smoothly roll off the tongue
> I guess the Latin makes it sound more serious and authoritative
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
This is horrible, horrible spaghetti Latin.
"Tueor" in this context sounds very weird to me -- more "oversee" or "watch" than "protect." 'custos' is, to my ear, the idiomatic noun for "protector," and that noun sounds appropriate in this context. "defendo" (a verb meaning 'defend') would probably be more appropriate if we want to insist on using a verb.
"Usor" is nonsense -- literal, actual nonsense. It isn't Latin. To my ear it sounds like a misspelling/solecism for "uxor," which means "wife." It sounds kind of like an Aristophanic immigrant/hick character's mangled Greek translated into mispronounced Latin.
"Data" means "gifts," literally "things given." It has no connection whatsoever to 'data' in our sense.
"Veritatem" sounds almost liturgical (or Neo-Latin?), completely out of place, given the intended sense. That is, it sounds like a metaphysical or religious concept -- not something "factual" or "correct," as seems to be the intended sense, but rather "the goddess truth." One does not protect (or keep watch over) a goddess. Or one does at one's great peril (in myth at least), unless one is an actual religious functionary, a priest or priestess, in which case you probably do watch over the god, just because in temples the divine objects associated with a god/goddess and venerated were often themselves called "the god/goddess."
Correction:
> It has no connection whatsoever to 'data' in our sense.
This is wrong. There is an etymological connection, which means that 'data' in our sense is derived from the sense 'that which is given.' My point, badly stated, was that the word in this sense is no longer Latin. It doesn't translate directly back into Latin. You'd need to use a different work in order to capture the sense that the word takes in English.
Veritas used to represent abstract truth is not out of place. Obviously it assumes a different connotation in a Christian context ("Veritas vos liberabit" from the gospel of John being the obvious example), but it's not the only usage. See examples here: https://latinitium.com/latin-dictionaries/?t=lsn50557
Data is the past participle of the verb "do". It doesn't necessarily imply that usage.
I do agree that the construction is weird though, in particular the infinitive.
I think we're saying the same thing about "veritas." I'm saying, in essence, that if I ran into this absolutely bizarre expression in a manuscript or papyrus, and I wanted to publish an edition of the text, I might capitalize the "v."
(Edit: I just realized why. It's because the action "tueor" describes has a strongly physical connotation. It's as though the author wrote "clean/wash the truth." You don't watch (in tueor's sense) an abstract concept; you 'watch' (tueris) something physically manifest. Using tueor this way is how you'd talk or write about a god, not a concept.)
"Tuere" isn't an infinitive. It's the second person singular present imperative active of the deponent 'tueor.' As a deponent, it has only passive-voice forms, which have active-voice sense, so (edit: infinitival) 'tuere' isn't a valid form, because it's the present infinite active, a form that a deponent verb by definition can't have.
Edit: "data" in this usage would mean "gifts." That is the idiomatic meaning of the fourth principal part of the verb when it's used in the neuter plural. This isn't debatable. It's Latin 101 basics, almost certain to appear in the very first set of exercises and vocab lists that any beginning Latin student will encounter (and it's certain to be the answer to a question on your first vocab quiz). See here[0], esp: 'Part. perf. sometimes (mostly in poets) subst.: dăta , ōrum, n., gifts, presents.'
[0] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
So you are suggesting the motto actually should translate, "Protect the user, did, and the truth"?
Watch over the user, the given and the truth.
But I prefer your version of the motto.
"do," pronounced with a long o, means "I give" in Latin. 'data' is the perfect-tense, passive participle -- "given" -- in the neuter gender, with plural number: literally "things given," but idiomatically "gifts."
What would be the proper translation of the moto, then ?
Beats me.
The very idea of a "user" is, in every phase of Latin that I know, gobbledygook. There's no translation for it. It makes as much sense as "haver" would make to us ("haver of what?"). Maybe "emptores" (buyers)? Sort of?
"Data," in our sense, too, sounds wrong to me as a concept in Classical Latin -- too disembodied for effective, accurate translation. Maybe 'cognoscenda,' "that which is to be known/understood," would come close to the intended sense and still be somewhat idiomatic.
"Vera" or "verita" sounds, to me, like the right language for the idea of "something true."
And like I said, "defendo" sounds like the right verb.
The omission of conjunctions sounds as abrupt, curt, and pompous in Latin as it does in English: "guard the user, the data, the truth." Only Sallust and Tacitus get to write this way.
So maybe we could correct it to something like "defende emptoresque cognoscendaque veraque?" No, actually, I take it back. That sounds deranged and wrong, kind of like the raving you might hear from one of the street-corner prophets in Life of Brian. Protecting those things makes no sense, and even the grouping of those three concepts in a single list makes no sense. It sounds like the product of a disordered, unhealthy mind.
Do you use -que like that? I thought you add it only to the last item of an enumeration?
Yep! See entry II of Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary for the word:[0]
> II. Repeated, que . . . que.
> A. Both ... and (not in Cæs., once in Cic.; v. Zumpt, Gram. § 338), co-ordinating,
To my ear it sounds more emphatic, formal, and annunciatory than singular -que, so it feel appropriate in the context of a guiding dictum/apophthegm.
[0] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
On the other hand, maybe the original motto really is a perfect motto for programmers. It nicely exemplifies the inadvertantly silly results of the DIY, libertarian, anti-establishment spirit of so many programmers (Who needs experts, knowledge of history, or formal training when you have the internet??) who inexplicably start blogs in the apparent, equally inexplicable belief that the world needs to hear their thoughts on things they know nothing about.
That's quite the uncharitable view.
They explicitly put a humble disclaimer that they don't actually understand Latin.
What you see as "belief that the world needs to hear their thoughts" might be "willingness to share".
It's nice that people engage with the unknown (here, Latin). That's how one learns. There's also nothing wrong with sharing this process. The result is obviously wrong here, and I would have been too shy to put it in the title of a blog post, but this doesn't have dramatic consequences.
We are far from tech bros arrogantly imposing their shit tech to the world here.
It's entirely uncharitable. I don't care about the author's humility. I will spare not one iota of sympathy or empathy for spreaders of AI slop or for the embarrassing naivete of writing a motto in a language one doesn't know and sharing it publicly with the expectation that it's an idea/expression worth discussing. Both deserve to be labeled and treated uncharitably.
I wish Hacker News had policies that squash this kind of post before it can reach the front page. Nobody needs to read some guy's clueless thought diary, and the oxygen these submissions consume on HN are stolen from better pieces of writing that actually deserve attention.
I won't completely blame you, I guess the AI hype needs some deserved hard push back. If that's what will make people realize it's not actually cool.
This thread has made me realize the serious mistake of using AI to translate into Latin, and I understand the frustration of those who have dedicated time and effort to studying it.
Honestly, that didn’t occur to me at the time; I just wanted to have a version of the motto in Latin because I loved how the phrase that inspired the article (which, of course, was not created with AI) sounded. Now I can see the problem and apologize for not having shown more respect for the language.
Please don't apologize. You seem like a wonderful chap -- generous, warm, caring, open -- and you did nothing wrong. I'm just some anonyhmous, cantankerous turd on the internet. People like me are a dime a dozen and not at all worth your effort or concern.
You didn't disrepect the language. You're nothing like this clueless vandal, who did disrespect it and should have known better.[0] :D
Really, I wasn't railing against you personally or anything you did. And I shouldn't have turned the conversation in that direction in my last comment or two. Correcting the Latin was actually a delightful, fun exercise, and I meant only to rail against AI itself, which is infecting everything (and always, it seems to me, to the detriment of the infected).
Latin doesn't need any more respect than it's already gotten. It has probably already received too much. And it's fine to play with words, share, and ask for feedback. My hypomanic agitation (no joke) isn't your fault or your responsibility, and your response to my unhinged screed shows a generosity, patience, and kindness that I think you should be proud of. If my mind weren't buzzing this way, my comments would have been more playful, less critical.
Cheers, friend.
Thanks for this. Yeah, it's partly that. But do I accomplish anything worthwhile by being a total jerk and making a humiliating example of someone who means well? Probably not. I don't feel good after I write a takedown, and when the target reads my comments, I doubt he does either.
Generally I try not to contribute to the web's tendency to stoke primitive, violent emotions, like anger, fear, and hate, but sometimes I care more about fighting the internet's ugly, dangerous tendency to 'democratize' by letting bad ideas and ignorance spread, choking out the fewer, smaller, less charismatic people who know what they're talking about (I'm not referring to myself). Unlike most programmers, I'm quite sure the world would largely be a better, more just place without the 'open' culture of the internet.
> I'm quite sure the world would largely be a better, more just place without the 'open' culture of the internet.
This intrigues me a bit. In particular, what do you mean by the 'open' culture of the internet? Is there more to that than the "dangerous tendency to 'democratize' by letting bad ideas and ignorance spread" you mention earlier?
That comment was an unclear allusion to ideas I've absorbed from Jaron Lanier, plus a bit of my own elitism.
Regarding the elitism: I'm not a free-speech absolutist; I don't prize individual, positive freedom over negative freedom (Most Americans do); and I'd prefer for gatekeepers largely to restrict and control the levers of cultural power. The internet, as a market-driven radical democracy, demostrates all of radical democracy's worst excesses and vulgarity, especially its tendency to vest power in charismatic charlatans skilled in stoking the primitive, violent emotions I mentioned above.
Regarding 'open' culture: Jaron Lanier, father of VR, has written extensively on this. He'd be a much better ambassador for his ideas than I can be, and I recommend his books, essays, and interviews in the strongest possible terms.
Lanier makes a strong case that the free-and-open culture of the internet ("information wants to be free") -- exemplified, for instance, in Napster, open source, and the practice of not putting up paywalls on news websites -- has been overwhelmingly negative and destructive. To take a few examples: it has largely destroyed music as a viable career; it has cheapened information, because somethings that's free has no value; it has led directly to the advertising-driven hellscape that the internet has become; and it has served only to augment the power of the already powerful, because only the rich are in a position to marshal the kinds of resources that one needs in order, quite literally, to mine data and find profit in it. Lanier has also been a major critic of the AI craze.
Related to both of these: I'm a strong believer that the interconnectedness of the internet is dangerous, unsustainable, and by itself causing the US to drift towards the cultural and political equivalent of a nuclear meltdown, in the form of something like a fascist takeover. Connecting everybody on the internet has produced, I think, something like a feeling of cultural and political claustrophobia. People are going crazy because they're sharing mental space with too many other people.
Anyhow, that's probably more than enough, and I'm not sure it's entirely cogent or coherent. Thanks for the interest!
Yes, I believe the Internet is destroying the intersubjectivity humans require for socialisation.
I'm disappointed to see this kind of cringey, ChatGPT-generated nonsense-Latin being posted and upvoted on HN.
Yes, I know the author added a disclaimer:
> PS: I don’t know any Latin, ChatGPT did the translation for me, so there may be some mistakes.
But there aren't just "some mistakes". The Latin is essentially nonsense. The closest meaning I can draw from that phrase is:
"Protect wife, given things, truth."
That's barely coherent, let alone proper Latin. Is "usorem" even a word?
Of course, it's your blog and you're free to post what you like. But I'd hope the HN community would be more discerning. Imagine if someone posted an article with nonsense Fortran code generated by ChatGPT, adding a note like:
"PS: I don’t know Fortran, ChatGPT translated this Python to Fortran for me, so there may be some mistakes."
If the Fortran didn't even compile, would we still upvote it? I doubt it.
And really, why write nonsense Fortran when you could just write clear Python, Go, or Rust that the community very well understands? Likewise, why attempt fake Latin when you can just write plain English, which most people here understand?
I found that particular aspect cringe too, I wouldn't trust ChatGPT to be good at translating to Latin and wouldn't expect it to work remotely well for this. I also wish people refrained from using LLMs at all.
But apart from this aspect, I suspect the whole idea / approach pleases / feels good and that's what gets upvoted.
edit: the HN post is flagged now, so… xD
I like this approach, but as it won't survive one VC pitch, I guess that's that.
Google basically had primum non nocere as a motto and we all know how that ended.
That was marketing material, for the same kinds of folks that believe company guidelines are worth anything, beyond yearly checks on required internal trainings.
Honestly, I like the motto in English: "Protect the user, the data, the truth."
Programming—as opposed to medicine—has very little in terms of a relation to Latin (which shows clearly when TFA had to use ChatGPT to translate the motto to it), and a lot to English. It may not sound as cool, but the message is clear and I can relate to that.
I think it sounds cooler, actually. But I wholly agree with the assessment that there’s really no Latin connection and shouldn’t be forced. Latin isn’t a font! …
I took an intensive first-year Latin class last summer (The Latin Workshop at Berkeley).
Very early on, we were given a sample of a translation into Latin by Google, with the assignment to list dumb grammatical mistakes that Google had made.
I think this was to cause anyone who had the idea of using Google to help with homework to abandon THAT idea pretty quickly!
It's not a good idea to use Google to translate into Latin.
Which is weird, because Latin has a very formal grammar. If a language is usable with Chomsky's production rules, it's latin.
I like “e nihilo, unum”… from zero, one.
That said, I think it’d be “Tuere utentis, datum, et verum”… “data”, IIRC, would imply plurality.
From what I can tell from my knowledge and googling (I did latin in school a long time ago, but full disclusure, was not good at it) data is latin for "given things" so is gramatically correct here in the plural and the accusative case (you want 'given things' not 'given thing').
If we're going to nitpick (which we obviously are!) then maybe "data" doesn't quite have for same implication in latin ("given things") vs English ("information"). Although it actually works quite nicely in the phrase as "given things".
Main/most-helpful source: https://nxg.me.uk/note/2005/singular-data/
Is this a valid decription of the successor function?
Incidentally, if you have three hours to spare on some casual Lambda Calculus introduction, I always think [1] is a fun watch.
This crossed my mind for sure :-)
Valid but only partial since it only describes one value.
Ex* nihilo.
The 'x' is omitted when the following word starts with a consonant. The only places where you're likely to find counterexamples are in poetry, where breaking the rule can be metrically expedient.
Both are accepted. See one of the mottos of the US, "e pluribus, unum".
Ah, I see, thanks.
I don't disagree, but it's useless because it's not instructive.
You can agree with it or dismiss it. You can tell yourself you're doing it when you're not. It doesn't say how to do anything.
Compare with "Accountants don't use erasers", which instructs how to protect data and the truth.
What is the `truth` really?
That question has 'plagued' philosophy since its inception.
Good post to make us think, thanks for posting.
Doctors no longer take the Hippocratic oath, they no longer pledge to do no harm. Its a historical oddity and not something that relates to modern medicine.
cringe, just use english
why would programmers be the gatekeepers of truth?
I see this not as gatekeeping truth, but as an invitation to decide not to help spreading misinformation by working for entities doing it.
A motto for corporate programmers
Disgusting if you ask me. Protect the User? You are the User! Users aren't different than programmers! Right off the bat the God complex so rife in tech shines through! We must protect (this bunch of people, not us) with the power and elevated capabilities we (not they), are allowed to wield. Might as well just call them Lusers and be honest about where the sentiment is coming from. Paternalistic twaddle! You've instantly segregated the base of technology users into a hierarchy, abandoning the egalitarian ethos of the maker.
We make tools. Those tools should serve everyone equally. We are not some special technorati or caste. There is no special privilege inherent to the knowledge to drive the machine. We line up blocks one after another, feeding something in one end, to pop out the other. That's it. You aren't some Ubermensch, mandated to draw the line of who needs protection from what. You're a human being with a light board.
You want a motto? Make useful things. Gift them to the trustworthy. Teach your art. But remain vigilant against the pernicious. Evil will use our tools as surely as the good ones will.
P.S. databases are the root of all evil.
Where to start… At the end of the day all this good will is exercised not by the individual but the corporation, and we all know that all good words and cultures is just facade, at the end money is everything they care about. Sad but true