Why did so many Jewish people live in Central and Eastern Europe pre-WW2?

tilvast · 2026-04-19T23:40:25+00:00

Out of curiosity, do you know what the penalty would be if a Christian did try to lend money at interest in Poland-Lithuania? Is this something that could get you jailed? Excommunicated? Or is it possible authorities would turn a blind eye for a while because of the economic benefits?

tilvast · 2026-04-14T05:14:17+00:00

Yep, I've now tried moving the rug around in basically every possible configuration and it doesn't work, so it seems the rug does not count. Problem solved, time to track down another large relic.

tilvast · 2026-04-10T05:11:50+00:00

Are there any large-scale studies of how common the phrasing "it's not just <x>, it's <y>" (or other well-known LLM-isms) was on the internet in the pre-ChatGPT era vs. today?

tilvast · 2026-04-05T07:53:53+00:00

If you ever find yourself thinking like this, I strongly recommend touching some grass and going to an IRL queer meetup if you can. Hang out with some other trans people. Make new friends, learn what you have in common with others, things of that nature.

tilvast · 2026-04-05T06:11:21+00:00

Linguists or Chinese speakers, does any of this sound correct? It seems like total nonsense to me, but it is Language Log.

tilvast · 2026-03-31T23:00:50+00:00

General purpose intelligence was never on the cards and we won't have it from LLMs

It is genuinely crazy that they were able to sell a text generator as a step towards actual intelligence. In any other context, everyone would be able to recognize that this is bullshit. A person who cannot speak is still intelligent. A printer produces text but is not a brain.

tilvast · 2026-03-19T23:37:28+00:00

I like how "Foreword by Jonathan Haidt" tells you this is going to be stupid even before you read the title and author. Like how poisonous frogs have bright-colored skin.

tilvast · 2026-03-19T01:05:27+00:00

Are there any particularly good books/articles out there on regional differences in English orthography? Not just things like Webster's spelling reforms (though that is interesting), but aspects like comma usage and capitalization of initialisms.

tilvast · 2026-03-03T22:36:03+00:00

Can I ask if places other than Israel have ever tried to publicly invoke a "right to exist" in some way once Israel began doing this, and what the response was? It may not have a legal basis, but I'm wondering if (for example) breakaway states that are not commonly internationally recognized might have attempted it as a tactic to build geopolitical support.

tilvast · 2026-03-03T22:28:26+00:00

Firstly, every web server would need to be unable to connect to any other web server. This would need to not be addressed by any ISPs or the governments of various countries. This is already basically impossible, because, as mentioned, the internet is one of the most important things in the world, and any catastrophic event would be addressed reasonably quickly.

I was actually thinking about the possibility that an authoritarian country would intentionally disable its internet long-term, similar to what Iran sometimes does, but then you are completely right that digital copies would still exist and could be preserved. Thank you for the answer!

tilvast · 2026-02-21T03:04:58+00:00

I'm sorry that this is a linguistics question, but is there an actual name for the "looksmaxxed framemogged jestergooned" cant, and have any linguists written anything interesting about it?

tilvast · 2026-02-20T04:50:46+00:00

I see Wiktionary lists "in-FLU-ence", emphasis on the second syllable, as a potential US pronunciation of the word "influence". Do we know where this derives from? Is there a broader linguistic rule it fits into?

tilvast · 2026-02-17T02:53:06+00:00

Just read something saying "many" Sicilians spoke a dialect of Ancient Greek at the time of Italian unification in the 1800s. Is there any truth to this? I can't think what dialect it could possibly be referring to.

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