[seanmcdirmid]

And yet, clothes would have remained very expensive if we kept doing fabric by hand. Even destitute people in the poorest countries can have clothes these days, the meaning of “who wears the pants in this house” has lost its original (一条裤子) scarcity meaning.

[torben-friis]

>the meaning of “who wears the pants in this house”

That's pants as opposed to skirts. It's a gender implication, not a scarcity one.

[t-3]

You're right for the english version, but the Chinese version is IIRC a family that shares one pair of pants - the person who needs to go outside wears the proper clothes.

[seanmcdirmid]

I was only aware of the Chinese version because my friend explained it to me on my first trip to yunnan in 2002. I always thought the English version descended from the Chinese version, not that they were separate. Oops.

[omnimus]

I think you are misrepresenting the luddites. They were not against technological progress. Many of them were the ones who invented the machines. What they were fighting for were labour rights and distribution of power. They were fighting against enshitification by some guy who stole their collective inventions and by force kicked them out.

They were not against more clothes for everyone - quite the opposite. They were against fast fashion bad quality clothes made in horrible conditions by people (or children) who had no other choice.

[izacus]

I think the case of Luddites shows just how strong anti-worker and anti-union propaganda is - making it a mock word was very effective at preventing uneducated people from understanding what they fought for.

[tao_oat]

The Luddites-as-labour-movement view is not entirely wrong, but also misses a lot. They were also an elite group that fought to preserve their own status and the exclusion of women from the industry.

I thought this was a pretty good post about it: https://www.verysane.ai/p/against-the-luddites

[omnimus]

I am no expert but from books I've read on the topic. It was also pretty diverse movement as is usual with decentralized movements like this. There absolutely were lower class people present who saw it as labour movement.

In other words. The Luddites as elite group that fought to preserve status view is not entirely wrong, but also misses a lot.

In context of audience here - programmers (elite group). You can say that programmers fighting with AI do it to preserve their own status. Or we might trust those (like geohot) who are angry because it's just leading to bad results. It's enshitification - of the result, the working conditions, the ethics. The whole chain.

[seanmcdirmid]

> You can say that programmers fighting with AI do it to preserve their own status. Or we might trust those (like geohot) who are angry because it's just leading to bad results. It's enshitification - of the result, the working conditions, the ethics.

Economic competition should prove either position right in the long term. If AI really is BAD and is just waiting energy, not providing a real benefit and not really making reasonable quality software/content cheaper produce, then the hype will eventually crash. If its SWEs trying to protect their jobs, then one country or the other is going to lean into it for an overwhelming economic advantage and the rest will be forced to follow regardless of what they feel.

The same thing happened during the industrial revolution or even the neolithic revolution. Superior technology will diffuse no matter what barring an overwhelming geographical barrier.

[card_zero]

Doesn't that just say "a pair of pants"? Or literally one line pants.

[thaumasiotes]

条 is the appropriate measure word for pants; they're plural in English, but uncountable (like other nouns) in Chinese.

You could translate it as "a pair of pants", and that's the appropriate way to put it in English, but really it says "one pants".

[card_zero]

I guess the measure word works equivalently to a unit of measurement, then. One bottle of beer, one sack of sugar, one 条 of pant.

[thaumasiotes]

Correct. In Chinese all nouns require them.

(It's not the case, however, that all measure words require nouns. 天 ("day") and 年 ("year") are measure words that are almost always used on their own. There might be an implicit notion of "one day of time" or similar.)

[seanmcdirmid]

You wouldn't be surprised how often chinese learners say 一双裤子 (one pair of pants) rather than 一条裤子 (one long slender flowing pants).

[thaumasiotes]

All learners of Chinese, or just the ones whose native language is English?

I figure the most natural mistake to make when counting pants is to use 件, since that's the measure word that applies to "clothes", but you'd have to already know at least some Chinese in order to make that mistake.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ah, the ones coming from English of course. I don't have much experience in how Koreans or Russians learn Chinese (although I had plenty of non-English classmates when I took language lessons at PKU).

I'm thinking more Kouyu than writing. If I didn't think hard about it, I might say yi shuang kuzi or even, for some reason, yi jian kuzi.