I personally don't have a problem with xenophobia. I see it as the other side of the coin from openness to 'foreign' cultures and peoples. Both always exist in a society (opening up and shutting out) and you need both.

A people that don't have any xenophobia will have their country taken over and their culture erased. While also, a people that don't have any openness to foreign people and foreign cultures will stultify. You need both, in balance (and often that balance is shifting, in one direction or the other).

I read the entirety of 3m4r's posts in that thread and nowhere did I see any hint of such an implication

I don't find it surprising or disappointing that ppl aren't bothering to go read the article because of the two factors in conjunction above

It's a pity because the material she is covering, the fever of Elizabethan rhetorical inventiveness, including in the written form, is so rich & interesting.

She pulls out useful detail & quotes but then links it together with her own overwritten & eccentric prose.

Your second formulation doesn't work. Words in parentheses should be able to be omitted without loss of grammaticality.

Instead,

The small (business) owner

would be a better contrasting formulation to the first one.

Putting adjectives in parentheses before a noun (phrase) is, yes, a useful device but those adjectives should usually be words that give more (but not necessary) information, rather than purely subjective qualifiers such as the two that the author uses. I know they're probably being a bit tongue in cheek but it still grates a little that these were the two examples they led with.

Visual Basic is a whole steaming pile of crap and you would always have been better learning to use non-corporate, non-proprietary languages and development stacks than wasting your time on that. And calling Office "the number one productivity desktop publishing software" only shows that you have fully drunk the Kool-Aid. More 'office productivity' has probably been lost to Microsoft Word than any other text-processing software on the planet.

2. Calling LLMs 'AI' is part of the grifting hype that has been wildly prevalent in the US corporate space. It's very natural and also very good that there is now backlash to and scepticism around all of the hype that is has been generated over the last 5 or so years

This is all (Microsoft) junk and so I wonder if you actually benefitted from this 'piracy'. And of course, it's well known that MS turned a blind eye to such 'piracy' in lesser developed countries, as they knew that they were gaining a future paying customer base.

> Chat rules : no sycophancy or over-agreeableness

(But even with that rule it's still necessary to be discerning about the responses you get and to push back against points made, or words used)

We have got very far from Cicero's coining of the word 'intelligentia' (from inter legere, a 'reading between' and hence discernment) when people talk about 'intelligence' as a commodity

People have been decrying the 'cheapening' of the word intelligence for over a century now, going back to Psychology's adoption of the word and coining of nonsenses like "Intelligence Quotient". "Artificial Intelligence" is just the latest degradation of the original humanistic meaning, and now people aren't ever bothering to prepend 'artificial' to their idiotic use of the word

Technology is what has always precipitated political change

Maybe for those who are younger and who mostly know of Jobs posthumously but Jobs was a highly polarising figure through the 80s, 90s and 2000s and there were many ppl who would never buy any Apple product because of the Jobs personality behind it (including when Jobs wasn't actually in charge; it was still a company built in his "Walled Garden + Salesman Hype" image)

> With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Yes, true, so why was it flagged ?

> (paulkrugman.substack.com)

Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).