It’s actually something that is changing in English right now. In some languages like German all word-initial vowel sounds are pronounced with a glottal stop at the start (a so-called “hard attack”) but English generally doesn’t (or didn’t) do that, resulting in “thee apple”. Younger speakers are starting to use hard attack before word-initial vowel sounds so the “thee” variant isn’t present for them.
I’m not sure if this also affects “a” vs “an” (i.e. I don’t know if younger people are starting to say e.g. “a apple”) because that obviously makes an orthographical difference so it might be more persistent. Although I suppose they coud say both “an” and begin the next word with a glottal stop.
Keep an ear out if you’re listening to a younger native English speaker and you might be able to hear it.
There's a channel on YouTube where the guy demonstrates how they might have built Stone Henge and the Egyptian pyramids using only technology that they would have at the time
As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.
Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.
> As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.) ... they aren't hypocrites.
I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".
Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
People who are anti-whaling generally think whaling is morally wrong, that no one should be doing whaling, ever.
People who are environmentalists don't think having an impact on the environment is morally wrong. We have to have some impact on the environment in order to live, and nature can take quite a lot of impact, just not all of it from all of us.
All environmentalists believe there's an acceptable human footprint. How big, varies.
A wealthy environmentalist merely believes they're entitled to a bigger share of the acceptable total human footprint because they can pay for it - and my point, the logic of that is not at all controversial in our society.
Also isn't a huge (maybe the largest?) audience for gaming these days children playing games like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite etc? For whom it's parents buying the equipment, so unless you have a tech-savvy parent they're likely to just buy a console.
The largest gaming market, by about an order of magnitude, is mobile games like Candy Crush. But we should differentiate the market further because most of us probably don't want to be making Candy Crush.
I think those games are mostly played on tablets these days.
But there might be a generational change coming. Basically the entire cohort of parents in my kids’ kindergarten is much more intentional about what kinds of games they’re playing and how they’re spending their “screen time.” I see a lot more people just giving their kids retro-consoles and emulation rather than setting them loose on the kiddie grooming and dopamine receptor-frying skinner-boxes.
I suppose it’s one of the benefits of having a generation of parents who grew up with formative memories of playing video games themselves combined with a growing awareness of UI dark patterns and their long term impacts on cognitive development and well-being.
Check out the sceptic Sextus Empiricus. Hackett has a collection of his writings. Admittedly he was strongly opposed to the stoics as he considered them dogmatists, but at its heart scepticism is the idea that we should hold all arguments about non-evident things in suspension of judgement, because against any argument put forward we can balance an equally plausible argument. Instead, we should "turn our back upon the whole dispute and go back to talking and acting like a civilised, common-sensical man instead of a pedantic dogmatist".
I personally wasn't too convinced by scepticism but it was an interesting read nevertheless and I did take some bits away from it.
I will do that, thanks for the recommendation. Stoics are a mixed bag for me, I definitely had a better opinion of them before I actually read their works. Most of my journalling is about how blatantly obvious and non-helpful their writings often are, or how they miss the point. But there are certainly value in the general guidelines and they certainly have nuggets of value. I find they add flavor to my personal philosophy, but don't dictate it. After I get through my book of writings, I was planning on moving on to humanists and Camus.
As you say, often you check up on the LLM's "reasoning" and it doesn't follow at all, or you can easily get it to contradict itself with just as much certainty as it had about its previous convictions.
It is very scary to me that people are entrusting potentially life-altering decisions to these things.
The first time I worked with Polish people I had this problem a lot until I noticed the pattern. Someone told me to go and talk to "Maciek", it was only on asking Maciej where to find him that I found out they were the same person
The irony is the top three tax havens are overseas territories of the UK and subject to legislation which should curtail their tax-haven status but which the UK is unwilling to enforce
I guess you can get a bit of an idea of what this is like by listening to French people speak English. French doesn’t have phonemic syllable stress like English does and so French people often make mistakes with this. For a native English speaker the syllable stress is an integral part of the word and being phonemic it actually distinguishes between two words that otherwise sound the same. The commonest category of this would be words that change between verb and noun depending on the stress, like “reject”, “protest”, “transfer” etc. And there are other minimal pairs like “insight” vs “incite”.
The native English (many other Indo-European languages also have similar systems) speaker is very unlikely to make a pronunciation mistake in this manner but even very accomplished francophone speakers of English struggle with it even after being corrected.
For example here’s French cabinet minister Bruno Le Maire pronouncing “damages” as “daMAges” https://youtu.be/qKWFsg5uHKo
I think one difference is that to a native speaker daMages still sounds like damages. But in a language where 'ma' not only has a ton of different homophones, but entirely different sets of meaning based upon the tone, things get out of hand quickly. For instance in Chinese, "mother scolds a horse" = "ma ma ma ma" with the entire meaning determined by tones alone.
It's not just a Catholic thing, in Book II of Plato's Republic (written ~2,400 years ago) Adeimantus mentions that some people say there's no point in acting justly because you can just act unjustly and sacrifice to the gods later to make it up.
I’m not sure if this also affects “a” vs “an” (i.e. I don’t know if younger people are starting to say e.g. “a apple”) because that obviously makes an orthographical difference so it might be more persistent. Although I suppose they coud say both “an” and begin the next word with a glottal stop.
Keep an ear out if you’re listening to a younger native English speaker and you might be able to hear it.
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