The drop from 2017 to 2023 is worrying, but my first reaction is to ask if that is only in the US or is it global? I couldn't find 2023 data for other countries, but the 2012-2017 PIAAC literacy data puts USA roughly in line with the rest of the world. I know people dunking on American literacy isn't new, it goes back easily to 2012 or earlier. If the US is illiterate, then so is much of the world.
That's depressing. For some reason this sub thread seems to think I'm talking about the US from the outside like a punching bag. I singled out the States because I'm more familiar with my country's stats.
I used to use em-dashes online to seem smart but now that internet addicts are defending them in order to be contrarian about AI slop, I'm abandoning them altogether. I have to finally admit that I actually think they're stupid and I don't want tiny differences in the length of a featureless horizontal line to be grammatically significant.
Especially when there's never any context where you can create a minimal pair between two utterances that would give them a different meaning depending on which dash was used. An em-dash is just a stuck up en-dash. I even hate the terms "em-dash" and "en-dash" now, after the typographical snobbery that flooded the culture for about a decade after web fonts got invented and standardized. Frontend developers and web designers started getting big salaries and buying fancy wines and whiskies, so I had to hear the word "Helvetica" 50x a day.
It can't function without advertising, money, or oxygen, if we're just adding random things to obscure our complete lack of an argument for advertising. We can't go back to an anaerobic economy, silly wabbit.
To shuffle it up in semi-random ways that make you think. If you're determined to hate LLMs for any reason or any purpose, just think of them as an elaborate game of Exquisite Corpse or Ultimate Mad-Libs.
You don't have to think LLMs are smart or real people to think of them as useful. I love it when I can make an idea clear enough in text that an LLM can completely regurgitate it and build upon it. I also love it when an LLM trips over and misses the one real novelty that I've slipped into something; what better for an originality test than trying to choke an automatic regurgitator?
Transistors have no understanding of what I'm doing, but somehow I still find them useful.
Always correct them for people, it's a blessing. We all have them, and the last thing you want is to accidentally have a really dumb one end up in the appeal letter you wrote to the board.
The entire important part of the article, i.e. the headline and why it is something that Ars would be reporting on.
Your objection is silly. They're not reporting on that thing that everybody knows about, they don't know anything special about, and is not part of their beat. Instead they're copying from reddit, badly.
edit: I've gone through the article, and I guess I'm dumb. They're using a Reddit thread as an excuse to recount a story that they have no part in and no expertise to report on. A fake Limewire story is supplying the linkbait of an excuse for a tech website to do a "Trump bad" story. Ars is fully owned by Condé Nast.
They didn't know it wasn't Limewire because they didn't give a shit about the Limewire part.
Yes, it's weird to be predicting the future when you can't predict the past. It's been negative over the entire year; the only growth it ever had was between Trump's election and inauguration: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there.
> More importantly, McCaleb replied to my email. In response to my question "Did anyone ever actually trade card for card or money for card on Mtgox.com?", he replied "yeah they did". I've asked him some followup questions on dates & volumes & closure reason, but I guess that settles that... Does anyone recall the OTRS procedure for storing emails from primary sources? It's been years since I've last done it. --Gwern (contribs) 20:36 17 February 2014 (GMT)
> English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation.
English spelling doesn't represent any pronunciation. English spelling represented pronunciation before the Normans, and afterwards was turned into something that would allow Norman speakers to do nearly-intelligible imitations of unpronounceable English words. Even worse, 1) French spelling also had drifted far from pronunciation (although not as far as now), and 2) English picked up a ton of that French and further mispronounced it.
Such as how place names that now end in "-shire" pre-conquest ended in "-scr," which is how they're still pronounced.
> However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English.
True, but those dialects came after the spelling changes. Vowels in English multiplied out of control and became more of a system of how vowels could relate to each other rather than specific sounds, like in (very regular) Old English when a long or doubled vowel was simply the same vowel sounded longer. Germanic vowels are crazy and got crazier.
To understand somebody's English, you listen to them for a while and figure out what they're doing with their vowels - we know from experience that some vowel sounds move together with each other, so when we hear X we can guess Y, and we then look for exceptions and mergers. Once we've figured out the vowels, the words become clear. A fun example is when you compare the Canadian accent to the US accent, and you see some words rhyme in both British and Canadian English that don't rhyme in US English.
IIRC, English is often described as having between 16 and 22 vowels, depending on who is speaking it. Writing that would be hellish, and as you say, you'd have to change spellings when you crossed rivers. English orthography is more like Chinese orthography than one would think.
I should have said it represents the pronunciation of English in and around London in the 16th century.
English spelling wasn’t normalized until long after the Normans. Norman scribes did their part but it was the printing industry in London that crystallized it.
Some of it is. Some of it is arbitrary. The "h" in "ghost" is said to be partly accidental. The "b" in "debt" due to folk etymology. There will be numerous other examples.
In his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, John DeFrancis calls the English orthography the worst among the alphabetic ones, and Japanese the worst among the logographic ones.
Re English, maybe among major languages. Faroese orthography is bad in phonetic terms, but Faroese is not a well known language. I'm sure other smaller languages have even worse systems than English.
Among the major languages, French is also pretty awful. Its orthography is much less practical than Spanish or Italian.
Tibetan orthography is notoriously bad, but is neither alphabetic nor logographic. This is a result of Tibetan changing a great deal since it was first transcribed.
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