@nightjar @Byte most of them that fall outside that category of "idk it sounds like a cool name" just took the name of their settlement. It is pretty common to be able to trace an Ashkenazi Jewish family back to the exact village in eastern europe by name alone. A lot of these places no longer exist because they were Jewish settlements targeted in pogroms, or just happened to be in the path of a war.

It really isn't that different than people in most places forced to adopt surnames. In other historical circumstances a surname would be a family trade, name of a clan, or something.

@thufie @nightjar oh yeah that also makes sense. I understand that’s how a lot of surnames came about. Like Anglo ones such as “Baker”, “Smith”, etc that are just a trade

@nightjar @thufie in 1000 years we will have people called things like “John Plumber” and “Björk Electrician”

@Byte @nightjar that's before the concatenation kicks in, and we get John Elektrikpetersson

@thufie @Byte Detlef Influencer. Abigail Sysadmin

@thufie @Byte there's this novel called Qualityland where Germany gets renamed to Qualityland for marketing reasons and everyone takes a surname according to the occupation of their parents. The protagonist's name is Peter Arbeitsloser

@Byte
@thufie @nightjar yeah that's raccommon for German surnames too. Followed by some ancestors social rank, a property about them, or where they lived. Sometimes it's also just a given name

@thufie @nightjar PETER JOB-LOSER?!?!

@Byte @thufie Peter Jobless

@nightjar @thufie @Byte ancap cyberpunk dystopia

@mynameistillian @thufie @Byte yeah. The premise of the book is basically that Amazon took over everything and automatically makes you buy products before you know that you need them. The algorithm is infallible