> Russian Empire didn't give the conquered nations the alphabet, but USSR did, as part of supporting local nationalists.
Many languages of Russia got their alphabets already in the late nineteenth century or around the 1906 rebellion. If you look at publications then in Mari, Chuvash, Ossetic, etc. the Cyrillic orthography already has most of the special characters that were used in the Soviet era. (Moreover, many of these languages never had a Latin-alphabet phase.)
But in the USSR, official doctrine required crediting the Bolsheviks with the development of minority-language writing, and it became taboo to mention all the pre-1917 developments. Only around the time of glasnost and perestroika was this era revisited in Soviet scholarship, but many ordinary Russians remained unaware they had been taught a myth.
Your claims elsewhere here about Uzbek are out of date. I have traveled extensively in UZ and, as an OSM mapper, I am constantly looking at signage. There is exceedingly little Cyrillic left in most of the country. So little that when one spots it, it seems a bit of a novelty.
> Maybe the fediverse can (eventually) help? It’s been a while since I looked at it.
The fediverse has been around for well over a decade in some form or another. It never caught on with society enough to make a difference. And unfortunately, the fediverse has now developed such a distinct culture of its own, Highly Online people with distinctive political and social shibboleths, that it even alienates many tech idealists around the world, let alone the general public.
The general public isn't alienated from the fediverse because of its distinctive political and social shibboleths, the general public simply doesn't know that it exists.
As far as the "tech idealists," a lot of them seem to want every space to be 4chan where they can be racist trolling assholes without consequence. And those folks have Nostr.
> People crave human interaction with like minded individuals
I don’t think they crave it enough to make a difference. Even before AI slop, Reddit had made successive changes that led to much less of a feeling of interaction with real, authentic humans who could become your buddies. The UI de-emphasized usernames and hid the sidebars where subreddits could have their own distinct community atmosphere. I hear that now on comment threads, Reddit will even hide a decent number of posts from other users, so that a poster may well be talking into the void.
It is on old-school fora that one can get a sense of actual interaction: with avatars and other personalized touches it’s easy to gradually learn who is who, and there is a culture of longform text where you can actually get a sense of other people’s personalities. But how many people under the age of 35 or 40 are joining those fora that survive? Give people a choice, and it turns out they prefer the dopamine hits of engagement-maximizing commercial platforms, and the smartphone as the default (or sole) interface to the internet with all the death of nuance that spells.
Some definitely enjoy the dopamine hits and get addicted to the doom scrolling. Maybe I am just too old to understand it and the internet is passing me by. Some of us still like conversations like this. Real conversation in a respectful manner even when we question each others viewpoints. The old internet is still there in some places and I'll continue hanging out there as long as it does. While I have great friends in real life, not that many of them are old tech nerds, so the internet is really the only place to talk to like minded people.
The pen-pal phenomenon flourished in a time when letters were exceedingly cheap to send, even internationally. People in the Eastern Bloc seized on such programs for international contacts because sending letters was very accessible even to them.
Fast forward to today, and the cost of sending an ordinary paper letter in my country is now 3€. Lots of people would be reluctant to pay that time and time again, and forget about juggling a large number of pen-pals as people commonly did back in the day.
It makes sense that it flourished when sending letters was cheap, plus it was a very common thing for adults to send letters, so why not add one for fun.
But I don't think a high cost of sending a letter is much of a hindrance if you pay it for social contacts. If you look at having a pen pal as a socializing event, then it's hard to beat how much it costs to go to a bar, concert or sports game etc.
Wow! That's expensive. In the US it's certainly quite a bit higher than it was when I was a kid, but right now stamps cost $0.78 per. I think that's going up a few cents later this year. Just looked it up; in the 90s when I was a teenager, it was between $0.25 and $0.32, so it's grown faster than inflation, but still feels manageable.
Ah, that's true. In the US I think it was a lot more common for penpals to be domestic, given the size of the country (IIRC all of mine as a child were in the US). In Europe it makes more sense that penpals would often be in a different country.
Still, is $1.70 (or even the 3 euros mentioned above) really that much to pay every week or two in order to maintain a meaningful friendship? An espresso drink costs more than that in many places.
Of course, email is free, so I could understand someone preferring to have a penpal relationship that way.
I'm not sure that's universal. I just checked and in my country it's still less than 1 euro, and less than 2 for international. Considering the natural delay in letters reaching people, that's not really a significant cost at all.
The difference between 2 euros and 3 is pretty insignificant. But 2-3 euros for a piece of paper feels big and makes text messages feel like a good deal since they're basically free.
But if letters are just a few cents to send, more people are willing to try it because it's the cost of pocket change that won't even get them a drink from a vending machine.
> The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property.
You’re missing out if you think that. People come from all over the world to hike, bikepack, or van-dwell American wilderness. Since Covid there has been a big boom in ”weekender” routes that Americans can do in their own neck of the woods. And if there’s so much reward in the USA, think about what rewards await in other countries that have even less of a culture of territorialness and privatization.
I do think there’s been some power law concentration since Covid and you can blame Instagram or whatever but still seems like a real phenomenon in my personal experience.
> they might think you're hitting on them (God forbid; nothing could be more evil than attraction)
You can find legions of people, particularly women, who do not want to be hit on unless they already find the other person attractive. Being hit on by an unattractive person may even quality for them as something akin to danger, already along the spectrum towards stalking or assault. Has nothing to do with being terminally online and has been reported since long before there was ever an internet.
> For many others, they're starving for social interaction
HN is an international forum, and while people are reporting increased loneliness in many countries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want attention from strangers. Where I live, a total stranger talking to you in public is annoying; it is strongly associated with foreigners who haven’t learned yet how to behave acceptably within the local culture. What people might be starving for are serious, long-term social bonds, of the kind that used to be common through large extended families, the parish church, team sports, and school friends who stay put and don’t move away. A mere friendly stranger in public could lead to such real bonds only rarely, so rarely that it’s not even worth considering.
> Being hit on by an unattractive person may even quality for them as something akin to danger, already along the spectrum towards stalking or assault.
Just trying to initiate a conversation with someone simply is not stalking nor assault, even if it is perceived that way. Their "perception" is mistaken in this case.
> HN is an international forum, and while people are reporting increased loneliness in many countries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want attention from strangers. Where I live, a total stranger talking to you in public is annoying; it is strongly associated with foreigners who haven’t learned yet how to behave acceptably within the local culture.
I don't know what country you are from, but it is highly probable that even in your culture, public conversations significantly decreased in the past 30 years. Which means that the amount of interactions was higher than it is now, even within the same culture.
> A mere friendly stranger in public could lead to such real bonds only rarely, so rarely that it’s not even worth considering.
The gym example of this article points in the opposite direction, or do you think that gyms in your culture work differently?
It’s their right to decide how they perceive being approached by a stranger. And most of society is going to empathize with them and their feeling of unsafety, not with the stranger approaching them.
> even in your culture, public conversations significantly decreased in the past 30 years
The culture in my country never really had many “public conversations” from one stranger to another. This is something that has been noted by foreign travelers for generations now, at least back to the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries. What has changed are that the substantial family and institutional bonds I mentioned earlier have declined.
> do you think that gyms in your culture work differently?
They definitely do. This has already been mentioned by various people from different countries in this thread.
> It’s their right to decide how they perceive being approached by a stranger.
Okay, I suppose everyone is entitled to their own delusions. But believing that initiating a conversation with a stranger is stalking or assault is just false.
> The culture in my country never really had many “public conversations” from one stranger to another. This is something that has been noted by foreign travelers for generations now, at least back to the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries.
How then do people come to know each other in the first place? Every familiar person has been a stranger at some point.
> They definitely do. This has already been mentioned by various people from different countries in this thread.
I read one of my home country (saying that you would get arrested if you did this) and I assure you it is false.
I am a woman, height is on the shorter side. I want to add my thoughts around this phenomena.
Oftentimes, a stranger coming up to you on the street spells danger, it has nothing to do with how attractive or unattractive they are.
It's hard to explain if you've never been in a woman's shoes, but you feel like prey. A chance conversation can quickly turn into a decades-long stalking event, one never knows. Unwanted attention for women can feel really dangerous, I have often been catcalled/followed when not with my husband (which is infuriating as an adult woman), and have been followed/catcalled on the street from the moment I turned 14, which you can imagine makes strangers coming up to on the street feel loaded.
> You can find legions of people, particularly women, who do not want to be hit on unless they already find the other person attractive.
Tough luck, cupcake. Often you don’t know if she is into you til you approach. Often they are shy. If you keep overthinking this and afraid of being cringe, being filmed or being judged, then your genes will die out and your bloodline will end. But hey, at least you never made anyone awkward and lived a “safe” life. This will sit right with you at deathbed I’m sure.
The Brexit vote was a decade ago and though many mourn the outcome, it’s a bit late to be erecting artwork about it. References to being blinded by a flag now are probably about the particular far-right organizing of the last year or so that employs the English and UK flags in a very particular way. [0]
I don't code (well, I write scripts for my own personal use and use Emacs), but I follow with interest these reports from software developers. Why? Because my profession is similar screen- and keyboard-based intellectual work, and what has come for devs will probably come for many other careers.
It's worth mentioning that one reason LLMs can clean up on coding tasks is because of the volumes of available data. Not only has the world produced copious volumes of code, they continue to produce copious volumes of code, and some code can even be generated synthetically (ie, not from an LLM, albeit at high cost).
Other domains are not like this. There will probably never be enough poetry out there to make an LLM do anything but be a poor imitation of a poet. This data is extremely hard to generate.
Urm, isn't that a terrible example? LLMs are better at poetry and rhyming then most people trying their best...
Also you're thinking with an extremely short time horizon there.
All jobs which are centered around computers will be impacted the same way programming is today in the medium term. It's just a question of time until the data is gathered and tooling is adjusted. Because every company that's currently employing people to do something with software will start to use that data as training material, and a few years later they'll be swallowed along.
So that means eg bookkeeping is still safe... I sincerely doubt it'll be like that in 2035. It'll probably still be somewhat safe in 2030 though
I suspect most industries aren't quiet filled with people like the author though, most people treat their job as... Well, a job.
This is a wild take. Of all things, you think a large language model will be stumped by poetry?
I would wager everything I had that an AI could already win a blind poetry contest, especially if any effort was put into fine-tuning it. Unbelievable effort has been put into optimizing them for coding given the financials; next to none for poetry.
> Taking months off to bum around the hippy trail in the 1960s spending almost half of the average person's salary would have put you in the upper middle class to say the least.
Worth noting that a substantial amount of people doing the overland route were hitchhiking with any vehicle than came along, or were sharing a ride with another westerner who charged less than a commercial bus. The journey was so accessible that Yugoslavs, not a poor nationality but not a rich one either, were a prominent group on it.
French Revolution is largely regarded as a tragedy. It led first to the Terror, and after that a series of new monarchies over the following century.
Revolutions in most countries have generally replaced one faction of the ruling class with a competing faction of the ruling class, with little actual change for the people.
Many languages of Russia got their alphabets already in the late nineteenth century or around the 1906 rebellion. If you look at publications then in Mari, Chuvash, Ossetic, etc. the Cyrillic orthography already has most of the special characters that were used in the Soviet era. (Moreover, many of these languages never had a Latin-alphabet phase.)
But in the USSR, official doctrine required crediting the Bolsheviks with the development of minority-language writing, and it became taboo to mention all the pre-1917 developments. Only around the time of glasnost and perestroika was this era revisited in Soviet scholarship, but many ordinary Russians remained unaware they had been taught a myth.
Your claims elsewhere here about Uzbek are out of date. I have traveled extensively in UZ and, as an OSM mapper, I am constantly looking at signage. There is exceedingly little Cyrillic left in most of the country. So little that when one spots it, it seems a bit of a novelty.
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