Профиль

(Should add that what Dario Perkins thinks is beautiful about it is the logic rather than the prose, which may perhaps have a whiff of AI)

I think I understood about a quarter of this long piece, which probably means I actually understood about a tenth of it. It's a slog of a read, even controlling for my limited knowledge of finance jargon. Anyway, these bits seem to make up the crux of the gist:

Ah yes, Côte d'Ivoire, typically known in English as Ivory Landlocked

Great news: you can use the em-dash again. We studied a lot of AI prose, a lot of our own, and that of other journalistic outfits and books. The analysis found that today's models uses the em-dash slightly less than we do. www.economist.com/culture/2026...

Excommunication break

By a narrow margin the second best thing about this video is that the passer-by, Mona Hansen, had the sense to film in landscape www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...

But it never wants to hold me

Always annoying when a new showrunner retcons the classic storylines

It's puzzling. I feel fairly confident I would have noticed the hard g if I'd heard it, but apparently not. Then again, it's one of those words that are more often written than spoken, so maybe it's a case of Preface Syndrome. Garner doesn't mention it; Butterfield says soft g is a common mistake.

The excellent @lynneguist.bsky.social has blogged on this: separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2024/08/anal... I've always used a soft g, by analogy with, well, analogy (ditto tautologous). But today I heard it said with a hard g, which I'd never noticed before, and had an "am I wrong??" crisis

Given that LinkedIn posts are the source of human writing most likely to resemble ChatGPTish, this is... brave?

Just got randomly interviewed by a passing video journalist from Taiwan, so I burbled as best I could about the swans and the New River and London and whatnot. Forgot to ask where she might post it, so if you see me online somewhere, let me know

WE WILL GRAMMAR LIKE WE'VE NEVER GRAMMARED BEFORE

Do you pronounce the g in "analogous" like the g in "gif" or like the g in "gif"?

That "declares" makes the EA sound like a society belle in 1950s Louisiana

Odysseus isn't going to see your negative posts, but your friends who hid inside a wooden horse, razed a city, killed a cyclops, fled from armoured giants, listened to the sirens while tied to a mast, spent 7 years as a drugged amnesiac sex slave to a nymph and slaughtered a roomful of suitors will

I think one (UK) aspect of this is that partygate provided a timely (and wholly justified) focus for a lot of painful, pent-up emotion. But now it seems like we've got stuck in a place where "fury at politicians" is the default setting

I almost always use AI in my writing; they're two of my favourite letters.

Mummy swan still seems interested in relocating the family to the lower part of the river. Under this pumping station is a one-metre sluice that's the simplest route down. But it seems that calls from dad and the kids have persuaded her to hold off - *Attenborough voice* for now. #NewRiverBirds

Just had to pause my rewatch of Fargo s3e1 to revel in the fact that the line "Now you're speaking English" is immediately followed by the playing of Prisencolinensinainciusol