The problem with taxing vices too heavily is that it incentives a black market to emerge... and all the crime that comes with it. Australia is a great example of a place where this is causing a lot of problems.
The explosion in KYC over the past ~20 years means that a lot of digital vices simply can't meaningfully exist in black market form. Online gaming, prediction markets, predatory financial speculation, etc., are vices that only exist because they're tolerated.
You and I can theorize how black market analogs might somehow exist, but they wouldn't have 1% of the reach they currently enjoy.
I also think that conspicuous consumption in the form of yachts and $40,000 handbags is, in truth, a vice -- and one that can generate a lot of tax revenue, and only be black-marketed away with severe difficulty.
I know parent is probably talking about a different type of threading, but Thunderbird's lack of process threading means the UI just gets stuck when it's syncing a large numbers of emails, which can happen if your subscribed to a lot of mailing lists, etc.
LLMs are not the root cause here, they're just an accelerant. This was always inevitable with the progression of globalisation. Even before the internet, kids were watching Disney cartoons across the world (to be fair, often dubbed in the local language, but still an example of how global culture had been narrowing.) Perhaps this wasn't felt as strongly by those in the US quite as quickly as the rest of the world, because their culture just happened to be the source for many of these common elements.
There are always trade-offs. Globalisation has too many benefits for most to want to go back. It is up to us to intentionally cultivate our cultural uniqueness, but I'm not sure the corporate environment was ever the right place to do so, given it was already constrained by rules and etiquette, and motivated by a desire to encourage universal communication styles. Instead we have to take it upon our selves, in a very intentional way outside the corporate setting, to cultivate our own unique cultural expressions to thrive. Failure to do so either directly, or by proxy, means cultural extinction, as has been the case of many cultures that have passed before.
How are LLMs not the cause here? Reading online content is unpleasant these days because it all uses the same vocabulary and style. You can tell that an LLM wrote or edited it and it grates on you.
I'd need to see a study showing that this was already a trend, because globalization should increase linguistic complexity via exposure to other cultures. I certainly didn't use the term chaebol until the rise of Korean pop culture.
> globalization should increase linguistic complexity via exposure to other cultures. I certainly didn't use the term chaebol until the rise of Korean pop culture.
Globalization moves every culture towards each other, with a higher weight on dominant cultures. You borrow a few Korean words, they borrow a few more English words. McDonalds pop up everywhere, everyone buys the same phones, hotels across the world converge towards a standard experience, and so on. The end result of such a process is a monoculture. Not now, not medium term, but I expect a few centuries of globalism would suffice to blend all extant cultures into a slurry.
Per https://eoconf.com/index.php/icmse/article/view/578, globalization decreases complexity of individual languages through standardization, but increases overall complexity by creating new multilingual and hybrid forms.
Either way, LLMs are an entirely different mechanism for shrinking linguistic diversity than just people watching Disney.
Yup, I bounce very quickly as soon as I see typical formulaic LLM sentences. If the person online hasn't bothered writing the content, I don't see why I would waste time reading it.
Personally, I use LLM to do a quick pass on my writing to see if there's any glaring issues but would never ask it to reformulate what I wrote. I feel that you then lose the voice behind it.
I'd argue that Disney is responsible for a certain globalisation of culture but they help with the language problem. We're a multilingual family with me speaking French and my wife speaking Cantonese (with school being English and Mandarin). Disney is one of the very few cartoon maker that actually dubs in all 4 languages. It would not be this easy to find Cantonese content otherwise. And the quality of dubs is surprisingly high. They don't only translate, the actually adapt to the local culture.
I agree, Disneys’ dubs are generally of high quality.
Netflix seems to just grab radio announcers or something. The dubs are stripped of all emotions and acting. It’s like the voices are reading out an advertisement.
Obviously there’s exceptions, but Disney seems to employ actual actors. The dubs feel natural and native for the most part.
> This was always inevitable with the progression of globalisation.
To a certain extent that's probably true, but there are limits to this. Local cultures, dialects etc. persevere despite open floodgates of communication. As an example take small-ish countries like Denmark or Sweden which despite generations of mixing still have distinct local dialects. It's not clear that those would just disappear naturally. With LLM tooling, such equalizing could be stronger though.
Though, ironically, at least for some tasks, Russian is a better choice than English.
Back in 2025, a research paper titled "One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context language models" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01996) published some benchmark results for finding and aggregating information found in long documents, measured by language. English ranked 6th in accuracy.
The top performers out of the 26 they measured were, in order: 1. Polish, 2. Russian, 3. French, 4. Italian, 5. Spanish, 6. English, 7. Ukrainian, 8. Swedish, 9, Portuguese, 10. German.
Ruby is beautiful in its design, but it made imports and namespaces (a.k.a. modules) separate concepts. This is so flexible it became hard to ever find anything easily in practice.
Likewise, it made classes incredibly easy to extend, which led to a monkey patching bonanza and far too much magic everywhere (Rails being by far the worst offender but not the only one). It meant having to keep too much stuff in your head and needing deep framework/library familiarity just to be able to understand basic code.
In the end, I feel like the incredible flexibility was Ruby's undoing, not just lack of library availability for a specific popular application. I was a Ruby zealot at one point but it began to lose its lustre not because it wasn't beautiful in theory, but because it was inconvenient in practice. In some ways, Python's restrictiveness became its greatest attribute. Then Python 3 helped to fix a lot of the inconsistency.
Both Python and Ruby have a consistent logic to them, just not consistent with each other. Just as all attributes are methods in Ruby, so all methods area attributes in Python, etc. Things get much easier in either language if you stop fighting their internal logic.
Did you mean to say that Ruby doesn't link name spaces to file system paths? Ruby has namespaces and they're far more flexible than Python's... too flexible in my opinion, making it harder to find things.
I like Python but this was always actually one of my pain points. The CPython C API is full of foot guns, the API surface is expansive, and writing against it requires a lot of careful care. Anyone who's ever written C modules for both languages would be able to attest how much more pleasant the experience was for Ruby than Python.
I'm not sure I follow your meaning here. You can return unnamed lists, dictionaries, numbers, among others, or combinations of any of these. With some very light syntax sugar magic you can even make returning tuples look like your returning multiple values.
I'm not sure if I would call whitespace-as-syntax arbitrary, though it is opinionated. I admit though that for me it started feeling like a time saver once I got over my anti whitespace as syntax zealotry.
If all I'm doing with git rebase is reorganising my commits, and I have to deal with conflicts, after I'm done, I always git diff my pre-rebase head with post rebase head commit hash. I can quickly see I've messed something up if the diff isn't empty. For more complex tasks it's best to leave the rearranging until last, but where not possible, the diff is still pretty useful to double check my work.
