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I am a Jew. Free Palestine!

If you’re going to be doing this what style guide are you using? Why did you choose that one? Why is it the most useful option? You’ve made an entire account about enforcing apostrophe usage but don’t have any sources or explanation to back it up on your bio.

I thought it would be fun to try 90’s since that looks more appealing than '90s. We don’t use this ’ to cut off preceding symbols in anything other than 'twas which also looks wrong.

Then I thought It was useful that you were doing this because imposing whatever the current most used trend for apostrophes would help facilitate communication between the greatest number of English readers and writers. It would be democratic even.

Then I realized I had no idea what the current most used trend for apostrophes even was and without any sources no way of knowing if your style was anything resembling that. (I like 90s now btw.)

So then I looked up who even made grammar anyway and it turns out a lot of people but a couple individuals stand out.

https://www.wordgenius.com/who-actually-created-all-these-grammar-rules/Xr0yWBPAJQAG8w-n

The First Grammarian

Modern English grammar can be traced back to William Bullokar, a printer from the 16th century. Back in 1586, Bullokar wrote the Pamphlet for Grammar, which we now know as the first English grammar resource. His grammar resource compared English to Latin. He also created a phonetic 40-letter English alphabet, addressing the 40 different phonetic sounds he identified. His goal was to increase literacy in England and make it easier for foreigners to learn the language.

Robert Lowth is one of the more notable grammarians who built upon Bullokar’s work. He wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar in the late 18th century, and this book formed the groundwork for many other grammarians as they standardized English grammar.

Lowth’s book became known as one of the first examples of prescriptive grammar, or one establishing the rules for how grammar should be used. By contrast, descriptive grammar simply explains how people actually use grammar.

Creating a System

Lowth wasn’t the only one who tried to standardize grammar. Many others preceded him and many more followed. British schoolmistress Ann Fisher was the first published female grammarian and an early user of an all-purpose pronoun. She wrote A New Grammar in 1745, shortly before Lowth’s work came on the scene, and her book was released in 30 editions over 50 years. Fisher’s work was one of the first to detail modern grammar practices, many of which are still in use today.

That all being said, what’s the style guide or grammar reference book every English writer on lemmy should refer to?

Wrong to who? You?

*in the 90’s

This is meaningless gatekeeping imposed by older people on younger people. If you were a child in the 90’s you were a 90’s kid. The validity of your lived experience doesn’t depend on your current ability.

By OP’s reasoning people who no longer remember their childhood no longer count as a kid for their decade. Eventually everyone will be dead and then according to the OP no one will have lived either.

I remember watching Power Rangers and Barney in the 90’s which I was born. Take that meaningless distinction.

Bots could be used to spam LLM comments, but users can effectively act as a manual bot with a LLM assisting them.

There really is no LLM detector yet.

Unless the prompter goes out of their way to obfuscate the text manually, which sort of defeats the purpose, they tend to be very samey. The generated text would stand out if multiple users were using the same or even similar prompts. And OPs stands out even without the admission.

edit: to clarify I mean stand out to the human eye, human mods would have to be the ones removing the comments

The issue is the scale. One comment can be fact checked in under an hour. Thousands not so much.

Also, it’s not purely about accuracy. I want to be having discussions with other humans. Not software.

Thanks for bringing this up to the group, I appreciate it! edit: typo

I’ve got three arguments for you on why you should make a rule against LLM comments, even those publicly marked as AI. And I’m going to refer to AI as LLM because large language models are what we are dealing with here.

First, LLMs aren’t a reliable source of information, especially for recent events. They regurgitate training data based on weights calibrated during training. These weights are used to create results that, especially for numbers, can look accurate for the topic but still be the wrong number. For recent events, they will lack the relevant data because it won’t have been in the data set they were trained on. So until that data is added in, the LLMs are giving an answer to something they don’t know, for lack of a better phrasing. These are commonly known limitations of the LLMs we are discussing.

If people start using LLMs to argue then the comments sections are going to be filled with pages of made up LLM garbage. LLMs will generate more misinformation than anyone can keep up with to debunk. Especially when misinformation could do the most damage like in the weeks leading up to the special election this November 4th in California.

I find it unlikely that all of the statistics listed, without sources, by the LLM are accurate. But regardless of that, if a user was to respond by taking that comment and putting it in a LLM it’s not likely that the LLM would be able to keep those numbers consistent. These errors would compound the longer the discussion went on between two LLMs.

At best this all wastes peoples’ time and lemmy becomes an extension of the misinformation LLM machine. At worst this becomes an attack vector for bad actors. Bad actors fill up comment sections with LLM discussions that promote one view point and bury the rest. Knowing the comments are LLM generated doesn’t solve these problems on its own.

Second, we shouldn’t want to automate thinking. Tools are supposed to save time while retaining agency. My laptop saves me the time of having to send you a letter in the mail and having to wait for the response. My laptop doesn’t deny me agency when it does this. I get to decide what I value and how that is communicated to you. The LLM saved OP’s time, if all OP wanted was text that looks correct at a glance, but it removed OP’s agency to think.

Facts and data, purportedly accurate, are assembled into a structure to deliver a central point, but none of that is done with the agency of OP. It’s not the OP’s thoughts or values being delivered to any of us. It’s not even a position held for the sake of a debate. This is the LLM regurgitating the position it received in the prompt in the affirmative, because that’s what the LLMs we have access to do. Like shouting into a cave and getting the echo back out.

We aren’t getting what we want faster with LLM content, we are being denied it. The LLM takes away our ability to have a discussion with each other. Anyone using an LLM to think for them is by definition not participating in the discussion. No one can have a conversation, argument, or debate with this OP because despite OP having commented OP didn’t write it. For lack of a better analogy, I might as well have a discussion with a parrot.

What are we doing on this website if we are all going to roll out our LLMs and have them talk to each other for us? We can all open two windows, position them side by side, and copy and paste prompts back and forth without needing a decentralized social media website as the middle man. The goal of social media and lemmy is to talk to other people.

Third, do you really want to volunteer to moderate LLM content? ChatGPT prose gets repetitive and it can never come up with anything new. I would not want to be stuck reading that all day.

The first country to adopt LLMs for everything is the one that will collapse first. This is a race where the winners never start and at best stop before they reach the end.

It turns out that there is a lot of profit in making the world a worse place.

Off by one error I could believe if the articles are displayed through an array and not a purely plain text in a div. Off by two error I think not.

5 8 7 2 4 1 6 3

Poking at a person’s insecurities can be one of the best ways to deal with bigotry and hatred. So very much exhaust.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/25671921

We reached that point awhile ago. I’ve made a meme about it. It will be in my posts.

No amount of hardship or things getting worse will make people wake up. People will unironically think they aren’t working enough if they’re before retirement age and if they’re after retirement age they will say something like ‘I did everything right, but I have no money’. They have an existing framework to view their material conditions thanks to neoliberalism.

This must be corrected if we want people to adopt socialist and progressive ideas. We have to educate people if we want to make things better. There is no way around it. Now we have to educate people during a fascist dictatorship.

That video is the best source that I’ve seen that summarizes the relevant points. It’s also the first source I’ve found on the history of neoliberalism. The video is well researched and had an interview with an expert on the topic. So not only is it a highly relevant video to our discussion, it should be shared widely as it is an efficient way to educate people on neoliberalism. It’s also relatively recent so not everyone will have seen it yet.

Many people, if not most people in America and probably the West at large grew up partially internalizing these neoliberal ideas. But many of them don’t even know the name of the ideology let alone where those ideas come from. You argument initially did not seem to recognize neoliberalism as a political ideology. This is a common misconception I see all over lemmy. This gap in education must be corrected as neoliberal ideas are what have lead us to the current fascist regime. And even if we defeat this MAGA dictatorship, we will still need to contented with this pervasive neoliberal thinking when attempting to implement socialist and progressive policies.

Besides the European-American divide where conservatives are referred to as liberal in Europe and progressives are referred to as liberal in America there are actual misconceptions. One being Marxist-Leninists and many other leftists call anyone to the right of them liberals. In addition people conflate classical liberals, neoliberals, neoconservatives, and fascists as the same ideology.

Not being able to identify these ideologies will make people rhetorically ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst. Neoliberals and fascists have their own ideas that need to be countered with arguments that address those ideologies’ actual positions. What we have currently is people resulting to name calling, calling everyone a liberal, which isn’t a persuasive argument.

And yes, the US education system needs an overhaul. But its underfunding is an intentional part of the Republican strategy. An uneducated populace is easier to control. We need to fund our education system in the US and the government in general. In order to fund the government we have to get money out politics, which means taking control of the source of wealth from the owner class. In order to convince people that’s necessary we need them to understand neoliberalism is a sales pitch for the scam that is late-stage capitalism.

That’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Sharing this video is a small thing anyone can do to contribute to that. And what a lot people seem to fail to understand is that whether or not there is a peaceful revolution or violent revolution this work will still need to be done. There’s no shortcut for educating people.

The answer was to replace capitalism, an extractive economic institution, with socialism, an inclusive economic institution. And yes, it would have taken a lot of political will, which is why I argue it would have been hard, but not impossible. I’ve been arguing this with several users in parallel. If you want to see my argument in full it’s in my comment history.

What’s important is, now that the bomb has gone off and we have fascism, we still need to replace capitalism with socialism. But in addition we also have to defeat a fascist dictatorship on top of that. So now it’s even harder.