Hacker News Reader

Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

Eh, "modern people problems", kinda like first world problems.

Language has always been a localization of mispronounced and misspelled words. Just think about every word for an item but is just very slightly different across languages. The more modern age (lets say somewhere between the printing press and now) is exceptional as different languages and dialects have absolutely collapsed. Local dialects became regional and mixed. In smaller countries regional dialects became national. In big countries like the US meme words spread quickly across the nation because of things like radio, TV, and now internet.

You were living an a massively privileged position in time and you didn't realize it.

View on HN

Look, i make typos all the time, from juxtaposing letters to omitting words, but I don't assign cultural significance to them.

>but I don't assign cultural significance to them.

That's just what it feels like not to be important.

In older books that persisted over long periods of time and popularity we've seen misspellings of the same word on the same page. These things got copied selectively over time and caused splits in language.

In the modern age quite often these misspellings can evolve into new words and/or memes. It's how language evolves.

At the end of the day it's very difficult to do anything about this at scale without reversing a bunch of technology. Simply put the average person isn't this careful in day to day writing. Yet we ask the average person to create more writing per person than any other time in history. By anecdotal observation I believe that most of these people don't want to shit out zillions of lines of text at all and only feel forced to do this by modern demands. Hence, this is why LLMs quickly took over shitting out zillions of lines of text. The people that were doing it by keyboard before were glad to give it up. The number of people that want to be precise about it is simply very low the same as the rest of history.

So we shouldn’t worry about regressing? This is also true of science, hygiene, human rights, and about a dozen other things we would be alarmed to lose, even if they were only around for people living in a “massively privileged position in time”

Languages evolve. Words are borrowed from other languages, their meanings change, and so do their spellings.

"Entrée" refers to the starter in French, whereas in the US, it refers to the main dish.

"A date" in the sense of a romantic encounter, originates from the English use of "date" in the sense of a calendar date. The word was then borrowed back into French, this time with its English meaning (and is pronounced the same way as in English).

"Connoisseur" is spelled "connaisseur" in modern French, while English kept the old spelling.

"Con" used to be a vulgar term for the vagina in French. Today, it is mainly used as an insult to describe someone as stupid.

>So we shouldn’t worry about regressing?

The question is what can you do about it without becoming an insane authoritarian in the process and probably making things worse?

Progression or regression is not a "you" or an "I" thing, it's a "we" thing. Constant progression isn't much different from constant acceleration, you can't keep producing more energy forever, you eventually hit limits. In societies these limits much more quickly than the limits of the universe. Even maintaining status quo requires energy, so who are you going to get to spend that energy? And at the same time as all of this you still have all the base desires of the human animal. Greed and lust and selfishness isn't going away. The newer generations that didn't experience the terrible times isn't born with the defenses against terrible times like the old generations do, and over time the systems that are needed to protect against bad things fall apart because not enough people understand the costs behind them.

This cycle is as old as humanity itself. I don't think human intelligence is going to get us out of the trap unless we're talking world population scale manipulation or editing of humans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com