My problem with kitty is, it didnāt work for the languages I use, and when I complained the dev said he doesnāt care about non-European languages. Alacritty works well for Japanese for me, including input methods, but sadly not for Arabic or other bidi.
āAI is here to stayā the AI:
Dans cette vision, la dĆ©mocratie entendue comme autogouvernement de citoyens Ć©gaux est dĆ©jĆ morte ā et il ne reste plus que, dans lāobscuritĆ© dāun data center, la gestion clinique de son cadavre.
Iāll grant the Holy Inquisition guy something: he really knows how to turn a phrase. the English summaries of this piece really donāt do it justice.
Itās true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they neednāt be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life.
This bothers me more than I can explain.
ICE as autoimmune disorder presupposes that itās normally a good thing to have ICE around and itās just malfunctioning as an exceptional state of things. If ICE is an immune system (malfunctional or not), what are we immigrants?
Systemd
Jesus.
Iāve been advocating for a hall of fame of projects that explicitly reject LLMs; ctrl+f āGentooā on this very comment thread for the few examples I heard about.
Take āMorgellons Disease,ā a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:
Nitpick but this is unusually sloppy for Doctorow. 1) People with Morgellonās donāt believe they have wires growing out of sores, but fibres (which upon examination turn out to be cotton for clothes). 2) The original Morgellons is a putative childrenās disease Ā«wherein they critically break out with harsh Hairs on their Backs, which takes off the Unquiet Symptomes of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions.Ā» Which is quite different from the modern condition, whose sufferers have skin sores anywhere in the body with fibrous material looking like lint, dandelion fluff etc., and not particularly associated with convulsions. And 3) The association between the two was made by Miriam Leitao, a mother who believes her son suffers from the disease, and has gone to countless doctors and media trying to prove itās real. So itās an attempt to legitimise the postulated disease by cherry-picking something āhistoricalā that vaguely resembles it.
theyāre both worse
So oil prices are down again, and on nothing but a promise from Trump and a promise from the EU. The economy has proved remarkably resilient to me; the attack on Iran is like, wild nonsense number 17 that the USA regime did that I thought would trigger a major recession, and didnāt.
I mean donāt get me wrong, things are much worse now than 3 years ago, clearly. But theyāre not like, Great Depression worse. Theyāre not even 2008 worse. Itās just a certain level of degradation (cost of living is higher, purchasing power is lower, concentration of wealth is higher etc.) that people got used to as the new normal. People can get used to lots of things.
To make the IT analogy, I think the global economy is like Twitter. Sure, it feels like a Jenga tower held up by thoughts and prayers, but itās holding up. When Musk took over I really did think his catastrophic management philosophy would completely break Twitter, but no, it trudges on. Yes, moderation is now nonexistent, and Iām told itās down more often, and often in āsoft downtimeā like notifications not working, or DMs, or some other feature, or itās working but slow, and so on. But clearly the site is up most of the time and more or less functional. Users just get used to degraded quality as the new normal.
I predict AWS will 1) get slower and costlier thanks to āAIā, with higher downtime, at higher stress for the workers; 2) the leadership will refuse to see or admit or even consciously be aware of this; 3) the worsened services will be the new normal. I predict similar developments for the socioeconomic situation of the world, too; though Iām not ruling out a spiral into complete recession, either.
I feel like at this point I want to highlight the ones that took a clear stance against LLM code. On a chardet thread, people listed:
Yeah recording oneself and comparing oneās pronunciation to a model is a good practice, and I recommend it for everyone at beginner stages. Thatās a good feature to have in an app like that. (Of course one can also just use the builtin android voice recorder or sox(1) or anything.)
I havenāt used it but from reading a description my first impression is:
Better than Duolingo (low bar):
Still bad:
I suspect your podcast and Peppa Pig routines (both good calls, as long as stuff like Coffee Break is interesting enough for you that it holds your attention without having to push yourself to do it) were doing much more of the job than the app, and if you replaced Mango by anything that involves other human beings in the loop rather than streaks and achievements, you would both have progressed more and felt much less bored by it. (For a longer discussion as to why, see the blog posts I just edited into the OP.) If youāre ever going to try something like this routine again, try comparing the Mango app to a fully offline textbook+paper notebook practice, or even better, an online penpal or language coach. Do a couple weeks each and see how it feels.
My own Japanese only left the Endless Intermediate Tarpit once I stopped spending all my time trying to drill every single kanji ever and/or optimising the theoretically perfect kanji reading learning order, and started reading stories in large quantities for fun. Since kanji is such a barrier for reading, that meant teenage-level manga with sÅ-furigana, children novels, and eventually light novels/YA. The alternative is talking a lot with Japanese speakers. In either case the keyword is a lot; it can be tricky to find teen stuff thatās interesting for adults, but luckily a lot of manga is very bingeable (the first one I read in Japanese, Hagane no Renkinjutsu-shi, I did compulsively in one go, all 18 volumes one after the other).
After you have a good handling of the grammar and already know the words of the language, then kanji drills become much more approachable. Thatās how Japanese people do it, after all; theyāre already fluent speakers of Japanese when they start learning kanji. Thus the existence of material with sÅ-furigana, and the way furigana are only gradually dropped stage by stage until adult-level material.
I spent an embarrassingly long time spinning gears in the cycle of doing drills, then getting bored and abandoning the drills, then feeling guilty and trying to push myself to go back to the drillsābefore realising I had long reached the level of ācan more or less understand manga with furiganaā and was wasting time.
deleted by creator
It is my pleasure to inform you that the research supports your conclusions on all counts :)
I fully agree with your insight on how Duolingo sets you up for failure, and it has another trap, tooāone common to all methods that are based on ādiligently do these drills every dayā* : You think that you should be getting somewhere because itās so boring and it sucks so much. You did the work, right? Youāre suffering, therefore you must be levelling up. Then after 4 years of doing French grammar drills on school or French vocabulary drills in Duolingo, you still canāt even ask for directions or read Le Petit Prince, and you figure itās because youāre such a lazy loser with no discipline who should have drilled more, instead of spending all day browsing Instagram or playing Animal Crossing.
When actually what you should have done was to browse Instagram in French or play Animal Crossing in French. Perversely, real language learningāwe call it āacquisitionā rather than ālearningā, to emphasise how itās an instinctive, subconscious processāhappens optimally when youāre in a state of flow where you donāt even notice youāre using the second language anymore, i.e. when youāre not suffering.
* Thereās a very limited number of things that you do actually have to consciously drill; mostly writing systems, maybe also the phonemes at the beginning (this part is debated). Luckily, almost all writing systems in current use are very simple and youāll get them nailed down in no time, as long as you already know the basics of the spoken language (remember, writing isnāt made for foreigners, itās made for native speakers to represent the words they already know). The exception is if youāre learning Chinese or Japanese, in which case thereās no way out of drilling characters, forever. my degree in Japanese is from over ten years ago and I can read Japanese pretty fine these days and Iām still drilling characters. It is still the case that itās much easier to learn the characters the way the Japanese and Chinese peoples do it, i.e. after you know the spoken language (at least to a basic degree, say A2 or so).
ooh gooods nooo now all the Claude slurpers are going to refer to this forever as definitive proof of how legitimately useful LLMs have got, it āsolvedā a math problem for Donald Knuth! :<
in the past 24 hours I was fooled by 3 pieces of fake news in a row:
I know that fake news can be made organically and have been since forever and Iām doing selection bias here but I canāt help but picture the misinformation engines firehosing bullshit constantly until some of it catches and spreads.
The good news is the report is false. According to contacts that are familiar with the Windows roadmap, there is no plan to ship a Windows 12 this year. In fact, I understand that the Windows roadmap for 2026 is all about fixing Windows 11 and attempting to improve its reputation by addressing top feedback such as reducing AI bloat across the OS
āWe have heard your complaints about lead in the paint, and our roadmap for Leaded Paint 2026 is all about improving its reputation by making the lead easier to swallowā
Todayās AI psychosis casualty, brought to you by Gemini.
Adding to my hall of honour, more suggestions welcome: