WRT Shakespeare, it’s perhaps worth noting that Shakespeare himself wasn’t immune to unusual names.

He literally coined the names Jessica, Imogen, Miranda, and Cordelia (as well as some others which have more or less fallen out of favour today, like Ophelia, and Desdemona). And he popularised several more which would have been highly unusual in his time, like Juliet, Olivia, Viola, Beatrice, and Adriana.

There’s a family in a Terry Pratchett book where a family did that for the girls but didn’t quite understand the rules and just knew that it should be different for boys. So one of the secondary characters of this book is called Bestiality Carter.

Pratchett handles it beautifully, too. Like, he’s a character for a good third, maybe even half of the book with it not remarked on at all before he gets an asterisk next to his name, which leads to a footnote which starts off (paraphrased, but the tone is correct): “okay, look, so it’s like this…”

IIRC, Alien didn’t officially make a profit until a couple of years ago.

Hollywood accounting is wild.

At the moment OpenAI can’t pay back anything, becuase they’re hemmorhaging money. Losing billions a year. And there’s no path to profitability.

That’s why they make investors confirm that they’re considering their investments a donation. That’s also why it’s unusual.

It’s not unusual for the opening phases of big tech companies to be “operate at a massive loss until the competition has gone out of business”, as companies like Netflix and Uber can attest, but it is unusual for that to be done where the investors aren’t expecting to make a profit.

Writing is absolutely part of language. If your point is that English has weird, illogical spelling rules, then you’re right. That’s not a new observation. People have been writing about that since spelling was standardised.

And it’s been changing for a very long time.

How do you feel when you see the name “Amy”. Do you dislike it? What if I told you that the original spelling in English was “Aimee”? “Amee” was also very common once upon a time. “Amy” was a much later spelling and was once considered a cringey, trendy “Tragedeigh”. As, as I said above, were Ashleigh & Kayleigh.

But you don’t think of them that way, because they’re now common. “Kayleigh” only gained popularity 40 years ago. “Ashleigh” is less than 100 years old. And already people don’t bat an eye at it. But they will at “Emmaleigh”, even though it’s exactly the same evolution.

What’s not standard about the phonetics of Emmaleigh? Or Graycyn, for that matter, to go with the example in the screnshot?

“Gray” is a word, and even an extant first name (Gray Davis, for example, or Gray O‘Brien). “Cyn” is a common syllable, like in “cynic”, but it’s also a name itself - it’s a common nickname to shorten “Cyndy” or “Cyntha” (eg Madame Cyn or Cyn Santana).

You’re fine with Graycyn, right?

VCs typically want a return on their investments

What is or is not considered dumb in any particular culture is normally nothing more than a function of the age of that thing.

For example, Wendy is just considered a normal name today, but people were mocked for calling their daughters Wendy once upon a time. It was invented for the book Peter Pan and was derived from a child referring to their friend as their “Fwendy”.

Vanessa was once considered a stupid, trendy, quirky name, being another one taken from literature.

Cheryl - a combination of Cherie and Beryl. Melinda - a combination a Mel and Linda. Annabelle - a combination of Anna and Belle. Annabeth - guess what that’s a combination of?

All of those got the same push-back for being stupid and contrived. Yet now they’re just…names.

Give it 50 years and people called Khaleesi and Katniss will be talking about how stupid all these new names are, rather than sensible ones like thiers.

Why is He not called Batcat?

Let’s not leave out that he abuses his co-stars for the sake of “method acting”.

I thought he was really good in Mr. Nobody.

IRL dick, though. To put it mildly.

Billie Eilish has several middle names. Eilish is in fact one of them. One of them, however, is “Pirate”. Because her parents allowed her big brother to choose one of them when she was born.

Why she doesn’t go by Pirate, I’ll never understand.

Very much this. The people who make these kinds of posts forget that this is how names are invented and evolved.

People who complain about what can be termed “Tragedeigh” names seem to be fine with “Kayleigh” and “Ashleigh”, despite both being a later variation on “Kayley” and “Ashley”, with the former not becoming popular until the 80s - and because of a song, at that.

In general, people have a very hard time with the idea that language in general, and names specifically, evolve over time. Whatever was commonplace until they reach, say, their 30s is what’s “right”. Any variation after that is “wrong”. When, of course, it was just as mutable when they were young and before they were born, but they weren’t around for the latter and were equally mutable when they were themselves young.

There can often be an unpleasant class/race undertone to it as well.

Not framed like that. You have to acknowledge that investments can depreciate rather than appreciate and that you may lose your money, sure. That’s very different to saying that you acknowledge that you probably will lose your money and that you consider your investment a donation.

FWIW, part of the OpenAI investment process is signing something to say that you understand that you’re unlikely to get any return on your investment and that you consider it more akin to a donation

I was just scrolling down to see if anybody had mentioned it

Scientists from Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry found that children diagnosed as autistic earlier in life (typically before six years old) were more likely to show behavioural difficulties from early childhood, such as problems with social interaction.

However, those diagnosed with autism later on in life (in late childhood or beyond) were more likely to experience social and behavioural difficulties during adolescence.

I assume that the paper itself frames this a little differently, because what this is saying is trust there’s a correlation between when traits become noticeable and when people get a diagnosis. Which is what you’d expect. You don’t tend to diagnose people who don’t exhibit the traits required for diagnosis.

It’s not just that. Employers think you’re “getting away” with…something…if you can manage to be productive while having something which advantages you.

For one example, several firms - including Microsoft - have conducted experiments where they move an office to a 4 day, 32 hour week while paying people the same. They unfailingly found that productivity either stayed the same or went up. So, at the end of the experiment they…went back to a 5 day week. Because otherwise people are just getting an extra day off, aren’t they? When they “should” be working.

Even if productivity went up and it was better for the company and for the workers, it was still ultimately seen as a bad thing because the workers were better off.

Another example: at a previous job I had we got an hour’s break over the course of the day. 15 minutes 2 hours after start, 30 minutes 4 hours after start, and another 15 minutes 6 hours after start. On a Friday, however, the workday was 7 hours rather than 8. This meant that an hour before leaving people would have a 15 minute break, and then it wasn’t worth actually starting anything because before you’d have a chance to get into it you’d be getting ready to go home. So the workers went to management and said “let’s work through the last break on a Friday and go home 15 minutes early instead”. Management agreed, productivity went up, and everybody was happy at getting off an extra 15 minutes early.

Then the old upper manager was fired and a new one took their place, and this arrangement was deemed to be “getting away with it”. Taking a final break & going home later was mandated. Suddenly none of the management who had agreed it had anything to do with the initial decision and they’d always thought it was a bad idea.

So the workers were unhappy because they had a longer workday, less work got done because everybody was unproductive after break, and the company was getting less value for money becuse they were paying people the same amount for less work. But they thought it was a better situation because people were physically in the building for an extra 15 minutes, and therefore not “getting away with it”.

There’s very often a mindset in management that employees are naughty children, and that strict rules must be good just because they’re rules, rather than because they actually lead to better outcomes for the company.

You probably haven’t. Spiders can trap air with the hair on their skin and can survive a trip down the drain. They’ll probably climb back up again once it’s dry.

Yup. I don’t like having spiders in the house. Know what i like having in the house less? Flies. So the spiders stay.