This is what bugs me every time I have to use Chrome. I know why Chrome does it, it has every incentive to put people through search at every opportunity.
There is no way to put results from the history on top.
> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
I think you're drastically overgeneralizing. There exist many scientists who think about the impact and ethics of their work, and choose what to work on accordingly, as well as trying to discourage or mitigate harms.
There aren't necessarily enough, but I wonder how much of that is actually lack of introspection, rather than lack of being in a position where their reflections are able to amount to much. I wish everyone were empowered to follow their ethics without worrying about their next paycheck.
> If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, which are also the modal outcomes from AGI if we don't thread the needle, there won't be anyone left to reflect.
Not uncommon in Australia too. As a very ordinary General Australian speaker I use haitch (and therefore a, not an). I'm probably not 100% consistent in this. It's one of many words where Australian English permits two equally valid pronunciations (e.g. 'dance').
I do cringe when people insist on "an + h" where the h is in fact invariably pronounced, as in "an historic occasion". You only ever seem to hear this from Americans trying to sound educated, which makes me suspect it's affected, not organic. I doubt the person giving a speech on 'an historic occasion' would then go home and give his kid 'an history book'.
Praline: 'Ello. I would like to buy a fish license, please.
Clerk: A what?
Praline: A license for my pet fish, Eric.
Clerk: How did you know my name was Eric?
Praline: No, no, no, no. My _fish's_ name is Eric. Eric the fish. 'E's an 'alibut.
Clerk: What?
Praline (in upper-class accent): He is an halibut.
There was a lot of discourse about the (then declining) aristocracy and their mannerisms, accents and so on, in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, discussion of "U" (upper class) versus "non-U" English, highlighting the differences in language usage between classes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
The Pythons were highly attuned to this class distinction and wrote it into their sketches. Another good sketch is an upper-class family distinguishing "woody" and "tinny" sounds, but the whole sketch's premise is to laugh at the odd mannerisms of the upper-classes.
> Specifically, upper-class Brits pronounce the "h".
I think you have this slightly muddled. It's not that upper-class Brits
pronounce more of the "h" sounds. The idea is that upper-class types go
to private schools and they learn French, and so they know that lots of
English words that have a leading "h" are French loanwords and thus the
they are unaspirated in the original, i.e. the "h" is silent – it ought
not to be said. "Hotel", "hospital", "honour", "homage", and so on - no
leading "huh" sound. Which means that the word starts on a vowel sound,
and in turn, that means it takes "an" in front not "a".
But people who don't know French and don't know which words have a sort
of silent H on the front and which don't try to hyper-correct – so they
start inserting extra initial "huh" sounds on words beginning with some
form of vowel.
This is how old British TV comedies tried to parody policemen talking -
they are often working class but in dealing with lawyers, judges, etc.,
they are aware of speaking to someone from a higher social class and so
they try to speak more "proper" and insert loads of extra "h" sounds.
"Hin my hopinion, your onner, the suspect was hup to something."
Drop the "h" sounds where they _should_ be, and at the same time insert
extra ones where they shouldn't be.
I think this is what the Pythons were playing with. Now that Britain is
a little bit less class-conscious – and foreign accents are heard a lot
more often – it doesn't seem funny any more so it's gone away. That's a
good thing overall, I reckon.
(Wondering how long I should keep this up...)
> Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining
Why thank you! :-)
There's reams of it on my late-1990s homepage, which I resurrected and
uploaded a few years ago. I did an extremely cursory update but expect
plenty of broken links and things.
Finding it is an exercise for the reader... ;-)
Hey, I can go further and point out further muddles and general weird English inconsistencies.
Expensively educated people might pronounce French loanwords by dropping the h in an ostentatiously French way (and maybe making homage rhyme with fromage) to showcase their etymology knowledge and are more likely to use the grammatical convention[1] of prefixing them with 'an' rather than 'a' even even when sounding the 'h'. But the "correct", RP way their expensive education teaches them to enunciate the words you listed as English words is with a leading h and has been for a century or so, except 'honour' (also 'honest', 'heir'), which pretty much no native speaker pronounces the 'h' in.
[1]now usually an historic grammatical convention ;-) it survived longer than the silent 'h' in 'historic' in conventional English speech though...
On the other hand a leading 'h' is routinely dropped in spoken English in most words in many British dialects spoken by less expensively educated people (especially southern urban "working class" people), which has no more to do with French etymology than the glottal stop that means some of the same accents also drop a lot of 't's from the middle of words. That's where all the twentieth century jokes involving Cockney stereotypes overcorrecting by inappropriately adding 'h' when trying to speak 'proper' come from. The overcorrecting in turn came from "upper class" people being snobbish about the sort of person who 'abitually indulged in "h-dropping"...
As for the name of the letter, according to the OED and RP dialect the sort of expensive schools that emphasize correct pronunciation teach, it's is definitely called 'aitch' in British English. And has been for several hundred years. Not all people who pronounce it 'aitch' are "upper class" (there's a rapper with the stage name Aitch) but all people who are "upper class" are taught to pronounce it 'aitch'. On the other hand, it's a bit weird that the name of the letter doesn't contain the letter, so lots of British people whose education doesn't involve teachers emphasising The Correct Way To Speak feel the name for the letter 'h' should start with the letter 'h', hence 'haitch'.
Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)
So "upper class" learn to enunciate the letter 'h' without an 'h' in it, but are taught to pronounce it more or less everywhere else (with a few quirks to keep them honest) and others more likely to drop the 'h' sound from other words but add it to the letter name. Yes, English pronunication is weird
> Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)
Fascinating. I didn't know that, despite my Belfast-born dad being the reason I'm a citizen.
Perhaps the most succinct explanation of British class difference is the famous Frost Report sketch featuring John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett:
> Funny tidbit: "missile" used to be an adjective, "a missile weapon" = "a weapon than can be sent/thrown".
Related bit of comedy:
> Note also that the correct term for 'a missile to be deployed against "anti-missile missiles"' is not "anti anti-missile missile." It's "anti anti-missile-missile missile." You're always supposed to have one more "missile" than "anti," because otherwise nothing will blow up.
> "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"
Them having to bring lockpicks (or more commonly a battering ram) would be preferable. This is more like "all locks and locksmiths must only manufacture locks that can be opened with one of a handful of TSA-approved backdoor keys".
It's more like "locks are illegal because the police might need to get in".
There's a matter of scale and friction. If the police have to work for six hours to get into something, they can't mass-surveil that way. While we still might not like that, it's much better than mass surveillance.
It used to be like that - they'd have to clip an expensive machine onto someone's phone line to record who they called. They'd have to tail someone to know where they went. Criminal still got caught in those days.
> It's more like "locks are illegal because the police might need to get in".
Same idea, yeah. One of the issues with "TSA-approved" locks is that the corresponding keys are widely available. We should not expect a government backdoor key to be secured any better than that.
Unfortunately, in practice most PC vendors get paid to bundle a giant pile of bloatware/malware/adware on the system, and they eagerly accept those payments because PCs are a low-margin business. So if your refund actually represented the amount the vendor spent, you'd end up paying them more to have a system without Windows.
You are forgetting that we are free to change and invent new rules whenever we want. PC manufacturers can change this. Some already have, like Lenovo (sorta) and Framework. It does not need to be the way that it has been.
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