I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use, and I've found myself significantly changing the language I use to a very utilitarian and direct style to prevent the endless blank stares... reading this blog post just made me realise that this self-editing has made my interactions rather more 'flat' and unnatural, as they now lack spontaneity, with everything passing through a secondary filter before leaving my brain.
I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.
The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.
Reminding me that early Windows versions used to have this colour as the default desktop colour -- and I remember seeing similar tones on Mac and Unix desktops in the 90s.
The Middle English spelling and phonetic shifts are what make it so painful to read. The words themselves though are mostly comprehensible with a bit of effort.
Go back another four hundred years to Old English and Beowulf and it becomes complete gobbledygook (to me at least).
Very cool to see one comment linking to an old Sears magazine from the 1920s, showing some of the equipment people would have constructed these networks from:
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
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