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Cable News America-criticism? Is that when a gaggle of millionaires complain about either the racists in Middle America/how liberals smell like Europeans? Then someone blurts out, Dangit, We’re Americans, We’ve been slipping these pasts five minutes at being the bravest and most freedom-loving people, God Bless. To roaring or prompted applause.

I don’t understand how having 65–100 keywords localized makes any difference. People can use these kinds of mixed registers for specific niches and it seems seamless to everyone.

What do you know about Bokmål being more prestigious in the past? You don’t respect the other form enough to cognize that it exists.[1] I don’t think that lends itself to a well thought out comparison.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072436


> What do you know about Bokmål being more prestigious in the past?

Having grown up in Norway and seen first hand how it was treated that way.

> You don’t respect the other form enough to cognize that it exists.[1]

I don't like Nynorsk, sure, but that has zero relevance to the point I made, which was if anything a point of contention for those who do like Nynorsk for decades, and a subject of intense activism.

EDIT: You seem to think that I am suggesting that makes one better than the other, or that it should be that way. Neither is the case - there's a reason I wrote "That's thankfully changed". But it was very much the case up until at least the 1980's that Bokmål was treated more favourably than Nynorsk in all kinds of contexts. E.g. companies expecting communication with customers should be done in Bokmål, for example, was an actual thing.


> Having grown up in Norway and seen first hand how it was treated that way.

In Oslo.

> I don't like Nynorsk, sure,

That’s not what respect or disrespect is about.

> but that has zero relevance to the point I made,

No. The relevance is what I stated, in the next sentence that you did not quote.

> which was if anything a

What I questioned was its truthfulness. Not what kind of person would say it.

> You seem to think that I am suggesting that makes one better than the other, or that it should be that way.

I did not state or think that you were making a normative statement.

> But it was very much the case up until at least the 1980's that Bokmål was treated more favourably than Nynorsk in all kinds of contexts. ...

Being used more including being dictated from some top-down direction does not necessarily have anything to do with prestige and could be entirely prosaic.


> What I questioned was its truthfulness

You can question the truthfulness all you want.

It doesn't change the fact that this has been a well established aspect of the language struggle in Norway for well over a century, to the point that when I went to school it was even covered in history lessons.

I'm mystified with how you are ignorant of this. Bokmål has it's origin firmly in being derived from Danish via Riksmål, as based on how the elites spoke.

The spread of Bokmål was a direct consequence of its prestige as a consequence of for a very long time being the favoured written language of the elite, leading to adoption even in areas where the spoken dialect was closer to Nynorsk.


Prestige = elite strata. That answers my question.

This is the home of the writing luminaries that can’t imagine outputting em-dashes by hand.

where is the em-dash key on your keyboard? Yes, I know you can use a shortcut. 99.9% of people don't.

Many editing tools support double or triple hyphen that convert automatically to em dashes. On Android it's trivial to write an em dash (easier than say the percent symbol).

I even have a plug-in that converts some hyphens to em dashes on my blog.

Rendering judgment on someone who published something on their own site without knowing their stack reflects more on you than him.


Level 4 modifier + some key with my custom setup. On Linux in my locale and with an AltGr key you can use Shift+AltGr+hyphen.

You thought I wouldn’t have a reply to that?


> We thought git wasn't the right level of abstraction and decided to tackle things at the PR level instead. Curious to hear your experiences!

The frick is a PR abstraction? Is this a GitHub PR abstraction where the commits are squashed and the PR description is whatever was hallucinated at 5 am? Yes, that’s certainly an abstraction, aka loss of information.

You either have the information stored in the version control database or you don’t. You can curate and digest information but once it’s lost it’s lost.

People layering stuff on top of Git or Subversion makes no sense. Your AI is not so dainty and weak that it cannot write a commit message. And if it can’t then you can recuperate the information that you trashed.


Ah, my feelings exactly, put much more eloquently!

> And if it can’t then you can recuperate the information that you trashed.

Typo: cannot recuperate


“Putting the cuisine back in food”

Looks inside.

Now that we are all eating Soylent it can get a little bland sometime. That’s why we are releasing our international, curated spice package for your Soylent...


AI is so original that it can’t make cliches out of decently-worn phrases and constructions by itself.

It's just following what the prompt says, something like:

fake prompt> To sound smart, use as much literary tricks from LinkedIn Grow Hackers as possible.

If they prompt asked to sound like Strawberry Shortcake, the AI pudding would be full of berry interesting cooking analogies.


The interesting thing is that LLMs sound kind of like LinkedIn Growth Hackers even if you don't explicitly tell them to do that, unless you instead tell them to sound like something else. (And even then, there are still similarities.)

You don’t know what’s going on in the training process.

> "In an Era of…" Opening phrase that stalls before reaching the actual argument.

Always gotta have In This AI Era of Ours. Because even if you fail to convince the reader of the point you ostensibly were trying to make you still get to tediously skull-bang about The AI Era. And it only costs tokens.

> Staccato Burst Three or more consecutive very short sentences at matching cadence.

This is real. It’s not your imagination. AI is here and eating your lunch/AI is psychologically draining/The unemployment lines are unusually long.


Renters are ecstatic as price of commodities are plummeting as house prices go up and up: “distracting myself has never been this cheap”, Anon. says.

People think they can do one-sentence quips to describe how economies work.


This chart tells the story pretty well: to get it down to a quip "some things we want got a lot cheaper, things we need got a lot more expensive"

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-3

The story of this decade is that people think the economy is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder but we quit building single family houses and it got harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in some places like the DC suburbs.


Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can tell you that the products that one uses in a home have gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance.

Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.

Something interesting that touches on both of these topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at how much of household income is spent on housing and food combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the inelastic and luxury goods.


“housing is not tied to labor costs in a significant way”.

~30% of new construction is labor. ~50% of repair is labor.

Have you ever dealt with home repair or building or are you just regurgitating whatever the LLM told you.


> ~30% of new construction is labor.

And what percentage of a house's price is the building?

> ~50% of repair is labor.

And how much does the average home owner spend on repairs a month?

I've been in my current house for almost 3 years. I've had one significant repair that would have cost around 3k. I did it myself but that was the quote. Not too bad.

In places where people are concerned about a housing shortage, the majority of the cost is land.


> In places where people are concerned about a housing shortage, the majority of the cost is land.

This is true in constrained areas like SF bay area. Back when I was digging into real estate economics, I found data on this from HUD, they have a price indicator dataset. https://www.fhfa.gov/research/papers/wp1901

Also look at the Lincoln Institute, they have fantastic studies.

In places like San Francisco, 80% of the value is in the land. In other places, it's 15-35%. The historical national average is about 33% but now it's a bit higher.

Completely different economic rules dominate in constrained areas like San Francisco versus unconstrained areas like Phoenix. But most housing is in unconstrained areas, the constrained areas are expensive elite sections. In most of the country, house prices track construction costs, and the high land prices are effectively economic segregation that weed out antisocial people, causing these areas to be even more desirable and sought after, which raises the bar even higher. All "nice areas" are nice because of gatekeeping, and in the US this is usually high land prices. Traditionally, each city had its own immigration policy, and they would chase out of town people who weren't seen as productive or who were antisocial, and as a result, you would have poor people living on the outskirts of towns.

In places like SF, richer people move in, house prices go up but there is not much change in the population. In other places, more people move in and more housing is built.

A lot of the debate surrounding housing boils down to people imagining a world where SF housing rules applies and thinking this is appropriate national policy, or others looking at national datasets and thinking this would apply to places like SF. Much of housing and land economics seems counterintuitive, for example how cities get less dense over time, e.g. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/pers...

But once you learn how to think about it, it all makes sense.


> And what percentage of a house's price is the building?

Anecdotally like half, depending on the area. Plots of land go for $500k in Boston suburbs and new construction homes go for $1m.


> Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.

A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself.

I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.


> A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”

A further up comment refers to robots picking strawberries.


The top comment is often something that just sweeps across centuries where technology has its own supreme teleology. With supreme confidence.

AI is not a problem because it is AI. It is because of political circumstances.

Think beyond the small worldview where technology and valuation are everything and you are just a pawn. Then you see that a better world is possible. The first step is then to not give up.

The premise here is that AI works well enough to automate the “smart” people jobs. No one but delusional workaholics are afraid that their job will get automated because they cling to the job in itself. So clearly, this is not about the tech itself.

There wasn’t a college boom post-WWII because technology came and demanded it.

> That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.

Take me by the hand, circumstance. I am yours to be swept away.


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