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British aristocracy has been pronouncing their own surnames wrong for centuries on purpose. Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider. The misstake is the membership card. (Heck, even in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St probably every year in local press as some bar for membership to our own locals only vibe.)

I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider.

The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.


Or its a simple signifier that the author was human, and that a real person is trying to convince you of something. I've experimented with putting minor grammar mistakes into my work of the sort that would be frowned upon, but are not strictly invalid. The existence of any kind of mistake makes the work sound "human".

Don't know about that as a general rule, since spam messages have had typos and mistakes in them since forever, and its precisely what marks them as not trustworthy.

I expect that won't be the case for long. LLMs don't make spelling errors.

Who said signalling would be limited to just 1 thing at a time?

More like signaling that a specific human wrote it themselves instead of one of their human assistants. The article is mostly about emails from the Epstein files so non-human authorship wasn't really a possibility at the time they were written.

I don't necessarily think it's that... it's just a matter of a rush to respond/send quickly and not take a lot of time. It's pretty easy to either fat-finger when typing on a keyboard, or gesture input on a phone to get the wrong word and you hit send before realizing.

Sometimes I'll notice right after, delete and re-reply (social media) other times I'll just let it be... It's pedantic busy bodies that will single you out for a typo as opposed to discussing the idea at hand.


>It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes.

Interesting, is that the equivalent of billionaires wearing sweatpants?


Yes. It is also the equivalent of heads of states calling other persons dumb on camera. The absolute decomposition of respect and decorum.

The "enriewu" thing wasn't a misspelling of "en route", it was someone's name who had arrived in Miami with Jean-Luc and Peggy. It's probably a misspelling of Henry pronounced in French.

Henry Wu is the Jurassic Park character who figured out how to produce viable hybrid embryos.

You could also blame the constant negative press covfefe

[dead]


We’ve known since Socrates that writing instead of speaking eroded thinking. We seriously need to stop putting packaging, especially writing, on a pedestal. Instead we should put what little lifetime we have in sum towards focusing on what’s actually important: the ideas and concepts themselves.

Here in Toronto area city of Vaughan pronounced as (/vɔːn/ or /vɑːn/) like in "dawn" or "gone"

Imaging me fresh from USSR asking someone how do I get to ... and getting blank stare


That's great. What's also amusing is how you felt it necessary to provide the diacritical pronunciation guide for "Vaughan"... because I think to most native English speakers we can't imagine any other pronunciation!

I think native English speaker who had never heard of Vaughan (sure we can find some of those) would likely to pronounce it like "Vog-un" - /ˈvɒɡən/ or "Vog-han" - /ˈvɑːɡən/

This sent me down a mental rabbit hole, I think it's one of those interesting nuances that are rules that native speakers follow without being able to name it, or know it. I'm a native speaker, and also thought `vawn` was the most obvious pronounciation. I'm guessing it's because `augh` is perceived as a recognizable vowel cluster where `gh` tends to be silent (daughter, caught, naught, taught). The interesting twist for me is that `laugh` is in obvious counter example, until I realized that gh in final position (laugh, rough, enough) is almost always \f\. And further, in words like laughter, roughness, we immediately distinguish a modified root word from the lexical position.

Maybe there's also an interesting thread to pull on in that the pattern may be more pronounced for names (e.g. Hughes). Just ruminating here though, I don't have a source for any of this.


No, I don't think they would. I've never heard of Vaughan and assumed one syllable like the parent commenter.

No, "gh" is usually silent in English spelling.

Laugh, trough, tough, rough. Maybe it should be "Vawfan"

Ghoul.

Hiccough.

Loughborough, which has it both ways. (Apocryphally pronounced by Australians as "Loogahbaroogah".)


augh is not as common as ough, but either one can make any sound in the whole syllabary.

How about Sequim, WA. Guess how to pronounciate that.


Or Puyallup, WA. Those two are definite shibboleth tests in the PNW.

Pend Oreille is the eastern WA test for western WA.

and for our eastern neighbours: Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (and Boise too)

My years of french class steered me wrong there.


Des Moines, WA vs Des Moines, IA.

There are a handful of neighborhood and street names used in Toronto (not necessarily from Toronto) that have unusual pronunciations. Here I'll give some triples of (English spelling, actual pronunciation (IPA), a naive pronunciation (IPA)):

(Yonge, [jʌŋ], [jɑndʒ]); (Strachan, [sdʒɹɑn], [ˈsdʒɹa.tʃæn]); (Tecumseth, [tə.ˈkʌm.zi], [ˈti.kəm.sɛθ]); (Markham, [ˈmɑr.kʌm], [ˈmɑrk.hæm]), (Etobicoke, [ɛ.ˈtoʊ.bɪ.koʊ], [ɛ.ˈtoʊ.bɪ.koʊk]).

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2cyg6bFeRc , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmeDWvwD8M


That's because some are Indigenous names phoneticized for English speakers (Yonge and Markham on the other hand are entirely English names):

Etobicoke. From Adobigok [1]

Tecumseh (or Tecumseth). From tecumtha or takhamehse [2]

Mississauga. From Misi-zaagiing [3]

[1] https://www.etobicokehistorical.com/brief-history-of-etobico...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga


As a non-native English speaker I wonder if Leicester is naturally pronounced right for the natives, or has to be explicitly taught.

It has to be taught. Most english native speakers will say Lie-chester by default.

Asking people how to pronounce "Strachan Street" is an old Toronto pastime. (Strawn, by the way.)

Typical in Toronto - remember there’s only one T in “Toronto”

There's also only one T in "Atlanta". (For some people there are none.)

Definitely heard "Alana" in the South. On the West cost right now, got a buddy from West Virginia, and even after 20-30-some-odd-years in California, he still says it like that. Among other things he boomhauers.

I didn't realize "boomhauer" could be verbed.

'oronto?

...and the first o is silent, and the remaining o's are pronounced 'a'.

But the TV news reporters enunciate every letter in Toronto.


ROFL. I ignore this sacred rule

> misstake

I see what you did there. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law


A smelling pistake

In case you're wondering, Couch St. in Portland, Oregon, USA is pronounced "Cooch." It's named for 19th century ship captain and early businessman John H. Couch. It's the "C" street in the so-called Alphabet District north of Burnside, which is the "B" street. There are, or were, other landmarks named after Capt. Couch, but I'm not sure if any still exist.

Note that you only pronounce Couch that way in Portland when talking about the street. You wouldn’t maintain the pronunciation when saying eg “Sorry for spilling wine on your couch”

Same as Texans asking where Houston Street is in NYC.

But Houston Street is older than Sam Houston, and was always pronounced that way.

My Scottish mate with the surname Houston would side with the Texans, on this one.

And likewise, Austin has a bunch of names that are pronounced oddly.

Manchaca checking in

There's also St. John, which for some odd reason is pronounced as sinjin.

https://old.reddit.com/r/madmen/comments/12i3n9o/why_is_sain...


That's just centuries of change without updating spelling, a la Leicester or Worcester.

Pronunciation inconsistency is due to all the invasions.

You should watch Map Men.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4


Sometimes I wonder about the aristocrats who towns and roads in the UK were named after, like Lord Penistone of South Yorkshire, or Lady Sluts Hole of Norfolk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penistone

https://www.norfolklive.co.uk/news/norfolk-news/rude-funny-s...


Is it the same reason as Worcestershire mapped to "wooster" ?

Plymouth -> plee-mooth not ply-mouth

Outsider! :-)

More like PLIM-uth. I guess there is no way to write it unambiguously in English


Not outsider - non-native speaker.

maybe "Pleemuth"?

Plymouth, England is PLIM-uth

PLI-muth?

Haha thanks, typo

I hope you aren't talking about the one in Massachusetts which is not pronounced either of those ways


But the link says it is named after Plymouth Rock which is indeed the Plymouth in Massachusetts

Well, I wouldn't piss on the British for that, when Louisville is pronounced "LOO-vul" and not "Lou-iss-ville".

And don't get me started on Des Moines, Boise, La Jolla (at least that has an excuse), Spokane, Versailles, Tucson, Willamette, ...

And the worst of all: Arkansas.


Featherstonehaugh pronounced Fanshaw is apparently something made up by P.G. Wodehouse for one of his characters. It's just Featherston-haw for everyone in reality.

The character Beauchamp ("BEE-jum") Day in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is a softening of the English aristocratic way ("Bee-chum") of the French spelling Beauchamp ("boh-SHON" as the French would say).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76tVgne0gOA

But he's less a British aristocrat than a brittle prep-school martinet in a cheap tie who rants at a secretary over three typos like a duke defending the realm, sneers about Kelly girls and office decor as if guarding the Social Register, treats sleeping with his own employee as proof of authority, and then sneaks off to bathhouses while running his typing pool with equal parts class anxiety, closet panic, and a middle manager's superiority complex.


> in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St

That explains why many years ago when I visited Portland, a homeless guy corrected my pronunciation of that while we were walking past him.


In New Orleans, protesters against outsiders acquiring and developing real estate hold up signs that read "Say Tchoupitoulas" (/ˌtʃɑp ə ˈtuː ləs/). I give my wife lots of hassle about the pronunciations of Louisiana place names like Tchoupitoulas, Natchitoches (/ˈnæk ə ˌdɪʃ/, really!), etc. especially when she complains about northeastern place names like "Leominster".

Nackadish!

>Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider.

This is a monstrous crime against language.


well how do you say Newfoundland? Soon it will be said "Noovlan"

People from there generally pronounce it "New-fund-LAND", people from the rest of (english) Canada tend pronounce it "NEW-fund-land".

It's still got three syllables.


I tend to go with "Newfn-lan".

Did they? The article[1] seem to be in contradiction to the claim. For centuries it was rather easy to distinguish aristocracy without lingustic conspiracies. I'm really not an expert in British surnames however I know for sure that pop history is full of invented "fun facts" which are not true but persist cause they sound cool.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featherstonhaugh


There's also the British penchant for deliberately mispronouncing French words. I have heard "renaissance" pronounced "reh-NAY-sance", "fillet" pronounced "fill-it", "valet" as "val-it" and so on. I think it's a national point of pride to pronounce the words of their neighbor incorrectly.

America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.

As to fillet and valet, they joined english before the contemporary french pronunciation, and are much closer to the middle-french.


I'm always amused by some mispronunciations that stray farther away from the original than necessary.

My favorite is probably crepe, which Americans pronounce like an almost diphthong-y craype (or crape like grape I guess) when crep (like step) would do just fine and be closer to the original.

But as a native French and basically-native American speaker, I also couldn't really care less about it, or about things like Americans pronouncing the t in croissant, or French people being unable to say the.


I notice the variance in british and american pronunciation of especially romance + greek words, correct or otherwise and I'm willing to give credit where it's due, I'm also happy to celebrate the differences rather than mock or correct them, I just won't accept the slander!

The plural is what gets me though crepes (just sounds weird as krehps vs krayps).

I kinda get it, but you can say step and stehps, not stayps, so why not krehps?

I say it the American way when I speak English anyway because that's just how it is. :)


>America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.

See also: Cairo, IL or Versailles, KY...


Is the Illinois one the same pronunciation as "KAY-ro", Georgia?

Not just Americans! I will add the small town of L'Ardoise, NS, pronounced "Lordways".

Notre Dame, IN

Or Wilkes-Barre, PA

Or Montpelier, VT!

Delhi, Ca -> Del-High

Fontainebleau State Park -> Fountain Blue State Park

These were two off the ones that really stood out from my travels.


Or Pueblo, Salida and Buena Vista CO

Birmingham, AL

Detroit, MI

Calais, ME

Apparently, workers on the Gemini space program pronounced it "Jeh-mih-nee" back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation

the soft g is triggering, I can hear my classics tutor yelling even 20+ years later, don't get me started on the american pronunciation of hegemony!

I’ve always said that one key difference between British English and American English is that a British speaker will intentionally mispronounce a foreign word, while an American will attempt to pronounce it correctly but get it wrong anyway.

It's much deeper than that probably because the kludge of english is in large part french.

But I also completely disagree, I don't think americans are attempting to pronounce croissant correctly for example, whereas brits will be much closer with no attempt at intentional mispronunciation, it just happens that brits are much closer on some and further on others, and vice versa re americans.

and I don't think there is any malice, in fact it became common among the british aspirational middle-class in the 70s to adopt french words in an attempt to appear cultured and upper, ironically now a clear marker of non-u.


> it became common among the british aspirational middle-class in the 70s to adopt french words in an attempt to appear cultured

Mon dieu Rodney!


"Valet" and "cadet" is an interesting pair: they rhyme in French (/va.lɛ/ and /ka.dɛ/), but rhyming them in English would be ... unusual.

If there were just French words pronounced in a French way and English words which came from French and are now pronounced in an English way that would be bad enough but in fact we have a whole spectrum of bastardisation.


Interestingly in British english valet would rhyme with cadet if you were referring to a servant and not to someone who will park your car.

Those are the standard British pronunciations, if you meant 'I have heard' as though it might be a niche or occasional occurrence. ('fill-ay' et al. are AmE pronunciations.)

It's not always that way though, consider 'niche': it's AmE that decided it's 'nitch'!


It's a national past time for us Brits to annoy the French. Kind of how two cousins who don't like each other would behave at a family gathering

Yep. And try "lieutenant" or "herb" on for size. (Edit: I guess "herb" is a bit of a complex one... originally from Latin's "herba" where the H was pronounced, but from UK it came most immediately from French's "herbe" with no H sound. So UK did somehow shortcut back to a more original sound.)

As a Brit, my understanding of the American pronunciation was from Italian immigrants in the US.

Oybs

So this isn't the British being deliberate obtuse, foreigners pronounce English words wrong all the time and we don't accuse them of doing it on purpose. They do it because that's how they would pronounce those words in their language.

Fillet/valet are mis-pronounced because of mallet, pallet, etc. Renaissance? Nail, snail, tail, etc.

It really is that simple, we're just pronouncing them as if they were an English word.


Surely the American way of saying "REN-uh-saunce" is further from the French than the British pronunciation?

Meta and AI: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Meta did make Pytorch and Llama. That quote may be better-off used for Apple or Microsoft.

> sales automation, lead enrichment, biz dev, [...] linkedin outreach,

Sigh.


It also does all or most knowledge work there is, the goal is for it to be smartly be able to do anything you ever do on your machine.

I've taken that bit out of the text above. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314105 for more.

The kernel owns the page tables. It can always find another way in.

> The kernel owns the page tables.

not entirely, IOMMU is a thing, that is IIRC how Amazon and other hyperscalers can promise you virtual machines whose memory cannot be touched even in the case the host is compromised (and, by extension, also if the feds arrive to v& your server).


>how Amazon and other hyperscalers can promise you virtual machines whose memory cannot be touched even in the case the host is compromised (and, by extension, also if the feds arrive to v& your server).

Even if we take those promises at face value, it practically doesn't mean much because every server still needs to handle reboots, which is when they can inject their evil code.


MK-TME allows having memory encrypted at run time, and the platform TPM signs an attestation saying the memory was not altered.

Malicious code can't be injected at boot without breaking that TPM.


Subject to the huge caveat that the attacker does not have physical access. https://tee.fail/

This is excellent. The ability to trick remote servers into believing our computers are "trusted" despite the fact we are in control will be a key capability in the future. We need stuff like this to maintain control over our computers.

An interesting implementation flaw, but not a conceptual problem with the design.

Well, it kind of is actually. The previous iteration of the design didn't have that vulnerability but it was slower because managing IVs within the given constraints adds an additional layer of complexity. This is the pragmatic compromise so to speak.

Does it count as a conceptual problem when technical challenges without an acceptable solution block your goal?


If your threat model is being v& by feds, maybe you should keep your server at home behind Tor.

Hosting tor outbound server at home is stupid idea.

Your home is gonna be raided by Police and you will wait months or year to get your shit back and then if nothing, gonna be charged for having pirated windows and Photoshop lol

real story


lmao please tell more

Not even two years ago, see https://www.golem.de/news/nach-hausdurchsuchung-deutscher-to...

And it's not just a one off occurrence either. Tor exit node operators getting v& has been a thing for decades: https://www.heise.de/news/Anonymisierungsserver-bei-Razzia-b...


These days, every American's threat model should include being v& by the feds, and here in Germany, the situation isn't much better, you can get v& for saying the Minister of Interior is a dick [1].

Yes, this was later on ruled unconstitutional, but it doesn't change the facts, and, worse, Germany doesn't have a "fruit of the forbidden tree" rule.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/hamburg-wohnungsdurch...


Proper OPSEC dictates that the server be located as far away from home as possible, ideally in a location with zero ties to your person.

But the point here is that userspace can use this to bypass kernel protections that would otherwise prevent it from mutating R^X pages for example, not that the kernel can bypass its own.

Those protections are mainly about preventing well intentioned people from accidentally shooting themselves in the foot though, right? So it's not really a big deal that there is a way around it.

No, page table write access allows arbitrary memory access because I can map any PFN I want. It's certainly a vector to execute arbitrary code in ring 0.

It’s a huge deal. It’s a trivial gadget for building a larger exploit chain

Not really, of the security measures on Windows, is exactly to control how kernel can access secure process memory, as possible mitigation to attacks by rogue drivers.

Naturally it is the kind of stuff that requires Windows 11 vlatest with the nice Pluton security CPU, as part of CoPilot+ PCs design.


I'm in my 50s and when I was early 20s I crossed from US to Canada for a business meeting. "Why are you coming to Canada?" "To work." "Where's your work permit?" "Huh, I don't have one." That simple "wrong word" slip STILL gets me flagged and cordoned off into hours-long border diversions whenever I go to Canada.

Just imagine how it'll be now... for decades you'll be fending off some hidden receipts from an IG comment you made.


Back in around 2012 or so, some friends and I decided to book a canal house in Amsterdam to all pitch in together and live there for about 2 months. Celebrating a few coinciding life achievements before moving onto the next phase of adult life sort of thing.

I worked remotely, so planned to simply do work for half the time I was there. As such, I brought a proper monitor, keyboard, etc. with me.

As I have my 20" boxed up LCD panel in my arms in the immigration/customs line at Schipol, a Dutch immigration officer comes up and asks me what the monitor is for. I of course like an idiot said "staying here for a couple months for a vacation, but I plan to work some while I'm here!". I got infinitely lucky with the officer in question - she very quickly told me I was incorrect and that the monitor was to play video games and that's what I was going to tell the immigration officer at the passport desk.

One of those early lessons learned that I'm sure looking young, naive, and stupid helped me in a way that I could not get away with in my mid-40's these days.


I worked for a small company that did work for a cross-border manufacturer. Coming from Canada, we were told explicitly that "meetings" was a perfectly good reason for a day trip, and we were never there "to work". US customs has been historically as humourless a bunch as ever existed, and the factory on the other side was unionised, so meetings it is.

What cracked me up was driving back late one evening, arriving back at the Canadian side. The agent asked where I'd been, and I mentioned the town just behind me.

"Oh, _meetings_, eh?" wink


Not your fault but another lesson here is lying to border guards is ok if they say it is.

Which proves how much theater there is in security and that laws are not there to be blindly followed, but to enable the state to pursue its perceived enemies


Had a similar experience: over a decade ago our firm opened an office in Canada and being scrappy and startup-like I had to cross into Canada with some networking equipment to help set up the new office. The amount of scrutiny was insane: thankfully it never stuck and I was eventually let on to do the work and return

Of the seventeen countries (including China, Saudi, Thailand, USA, etc.) I have visited over the last four decades the only time I have been taken out of the queue at passport control to be interviewed was at Toronto flying in from Europe. Actually the tone of voice was more suited to interrogation than polite inquiry. It was very odd, and quite at odds with both my impression of and experience of Canadians themselves.

Ah ok so only lawyers get to use AI hallucinations! (Actually, CA has a bill pending that AFAIR requires lawyers to manually verify AI citations... which is a lot narrower and better than what NY is trying here.)


100% this.


This is not directionally good because NY already has laws against unauthorized professional practice and deceptive conduct, and S7263 mainly replaces regulator-led enforcement with a vague, fee-shifting private cause of action that is likely to drive serial plaintiff litigation while chilling useful consumer guidance.


Same as it ever was. Honestly, I think we've probably passed peak consumer AI with with all the "guardrails" that regulations will require.


Whats at least somewhat humorous is the disclaimer requirement that "[t]he text of the notice shall [be] no smaller than the largest font size of other text appearing on the website on which the chatbot is utilized."

H1 hero font size here we come for disclaimers! (Which don't do anything, per the bill, anyway.) But also is the fancy thought that chatbots only appear on websites.


We're bringing back the <blink/> tag very strongly, some say more than ever before


1. Put very large font size title on the main page.

2. Display the disclaimer in the same font size to comply.

3. Disclaimer is now completely unreadable because it appears in such a large font size that it is one or two words per line.


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