[jstanley]

I was prepared for you to have found examples of me using this pattern (in fact I think better examples are in the comment you replied to, "reads well", and "this post exhibits").

But I don't think the examples you chose are very good. It's not "stocks appreciating", it's "$1m in stocks appreciating at 9%". The stocks are not an actor in that sentence. "$1m in stocks" is a thing that is having appreciation done to it.

If I had written a self-contained clause saying "stocks appreciate", that would have been a good example. But that's not what I wrote.

[Asraelite]

> "$1m in stocks" is a thing that is having appreciation done to it.

How? "appreciate" in this sense is not a transitive verb. There cannot be an agent.

In any case, I don't think you need to defend this. It's not about humans never using that pattern, it's about how frequent it is relative to LLMs. Individual counterexamples do not disprove a trend.

[moralestapia]

Is "$1m in stocks" an inanimate object or a concept?

[jstanley]

It's not being used as an actor in the sentence.

[moralestapia]

"$1m in housing appreciating at 3%"

Which one is the actor there?

Help me learn, ESL.

[thaumasiotes]

> Help me learn, ESL.

There's nothing to learn from jstanley; he's a crackpot.

The subject of "appreciating" is "$1m in housing", or if you want to narrow it down as much as you can, the subject is the word "dollars". ("$1m in housing" is shorthand for "one million dollars in housing".)

[jstanley]

I'm curious if you can tell me whether you think I'm a crackpot because of the things I've said in this thread, or because of things I've said more broadly?

I am definitely high risk for crackpottery, but not sure I'm quite there yet.

[thaumasiotes]

The things you've said in this thread. So far you've identified an extremely common phenomenon as "rare" and demonstrated that you are not able to accurately describe the structure of simple English sentences.

Which hasn't prevented you from expounding at length on your obviously false ideas.

What would you label yourself, if not a crackpot?

[jstanley]

Noone is the actor there, that's the passive voice.

[Asraelite]

It's active voice. Intransitive verbs cannot be put in the passive.

[fragmede]

Was this written by an LLM?

[jstanley]

Which part? My comment? No. The post we're commenting on? I think pretty obviously it was at least LLM-assisted. That's not to knock the technical content, and not even (necessarily) any more a criticism than if I said I thought the author had used spellcheck.