mathieuh

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

DMT also commonly induces visions of elves (the so-called "machine elves"). Having tried DMT several times I can't say it's something that ever happened to me personally but lots of people report seeing elves on DMT.

> The later ones are sharp. They connect NASA redundancy systems to African kinship funeral economics.

wat

My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.

Semitic languages are Afroasiatic, not Indoeuropean.