According to the article, Norman influence led to double letters being used to better mark out sounds, which achieves the same as diacritics. It made English mostly good enough (failures like 'lead' are rare). Being good enough, and lacking a strong central authority, the language only accepted a conservative standardisation, and avoided larger changes such as including diacritics. Without these Norman changes, there is more chance diacritics would have been added, as it would not have been 'good enough'.
Written English is a worse is better story. The Norman influenced version being the first-mover that users cling to even when better comes along.
Well, the "lead issue" could be fixed by writing the verb "leed" (after all, it's exactly the same sound as in the word "queen" mentioned in the article), but for some reason this hasn't happened...
It happened in newspaper jargon for the leading sentence of an article (though they used the spelling "lede" instead), because "lead" was already a metonym for hot type (which was cast out of the metal).
It hasn't happened otherwise presumably because the risk of confusion is normally very low when not in a Pb-filled context.
I find the power asymmetry is in my favour. I give money to the bookmaker or I don't.
If I don't, then the bookmaker is powerless as regards my money.
If I do, then I also gain some power over the bookmaker's money.
I don't expect many to see it the same way. Most people are more concerned than I am with the problems suffered by those whose decision making does not interact well with the existence of the gambling industry. Given their concerns, it is understandable that they wouldn't share my perspective.
I don't want to stop those who enjoy it from enjoying it for the sake of those whose decision making doesn't interact well with its legalisation. I think others care more about preventing people from acting in ways that have negative consequences than I do, so I don't expect many to agree with me.
I think the majority of people who are against these changes, like you, don’t want to ban people from gambling. The situation before was that bets between individuals on sports events was totally legal, but no businesses were allowed to profit from it.
It’s not that casual bets between friends should be banned, but this insidious industry that spends 100s of millions on marketing, and uses every tactic available to lure people and then get them addicted. That is such a far cry from not wanting people to gamble at all. Those who want to be a nanny and say boo hoo gambling bad are in a totally different category to the people who reasonably think that there’s a serious issue with this industry.
I think you are right that most people who want to ban such activities want to go back to the former situation where people could only bet on sports with friends. Their position is different to mine.
I've never heard of asking vs guessing culture before and don't know much about them, but, based on the article, I'd say guessing looks more transactional. It uses a shared history and remembers past favours ("I gave him soup, so I can seek to get his van", as the example in the article had it), which is really an implicit transaction without guarantee the other side will meet their end.
I am not even sure transactions are possible in asking culture, as it looks stateless. Askers just broadcast needs without reference to any past event, such as a favour.
This might be an equivocation, but, funnily enough, you said guessing is about understanding and for people to have an understanding is a way of saying they have a transaction (often implicit). For instance, "I gave him a pass on that, so now we have an understanding that I can do this".
People in "ask" culture can provide context to their request, in effect making it transactional again. That works best if parties are not in a close relationship with each other, else the communication is already more contextual and "guess"-like than with loose acquaintances.
A team I was on hired someone because I dug up an emulator he had written in the past (I think it was of some Nintendo console). I took a quick look at it, showed it to the other devs on the team, asked the candidate about it to check he really built it and understood it, and then we told the manager to hire him, if he passed the personality assessment. He hadn't even mentioned it on his CV as he worried it would look unprofessional.
I got another person hired as I found a Android game she had written and pushed to the Play store. Again, I don't think she mentioned it on her CV. After looking at it and talking to her about it, I told management to hire her, if they found no issues in her as a person.
In both cases they were outstanding at their job, relative to their level of seniority and pay. Both are very high up the list of people I'd happily work with again.
It might not be fair to the candidates that didn't have projects (or had ones that I couldn't find), but it was a very effective way of getting amazing people. Which makes sense as examples of work are probably better than CVs and interviews for judging someones ability to do the job.
I have no reason to think 200 nations nationalising AI are going to be any safer than 200 companies, even if the companies are the hubristic archetype beloved by Hollywood scripts.
PopeGPT debating آیت الله-GPT about theology could be interesting; but do you want to wake up to the news that советский-GPT is running a successful propaganda war in the USA and now the American Communist Party is likely to win the next presidential election? That ChatKimJongUn is successfully boosting the industrial capacity of the North despite sanctions?
That's why international agreements are also relevant, even if you don't share Yudkowsky's fear of alignment failures paper-clipping everyone.
If there was a proxy service that acted as an ip mask, and there was a list of the ip addresses of such masking proxies, then could EU customers using such services solve the issue?
Written English is a worse is better story. The Norman influenced version being the first-mover that users cling to even when better comes along.