I once randomly found Hossenfelder’s YT channel, it had a video about climate change and someone linked it somewhere, I didn’t know who she was. That video seemed fine, it correctly pointed out the urgency of the matter, and while I don’t know enough climate science to say much about the veracity of all its content, nothing stuck out as particularly weird to me. So I looked at some other videos from the channel… and boooooy did I quickly discover some serious conspiracy-style nonsense stuff. Real “the cabal of physicists are suppressing the truth” vibes, including “I got this email which I will read to you but I can’t tell you who it’s from, but it’s the ultimate proof” (both not quotes, just how I’d summarize the content…)

And the language’s main data container is a kind of stack, but to push or pop values, you have to wrap them into “boats” which have to cross a “river”, with extra rules for ordering and combination of values.

cognitive forehead strap-on

ahahahaha, thank you that’s perfect

Nice sneer: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

Yes, doing the thing which the entire business world is pouring billions into and trying their hardest to shove onto everyone to maximize imagined future profits, that’s what counterculture is all about.

I’m just confused because I remember using Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows 98 in the 90s and it worked pretty accurately already back then for dictation and sometimes it feels as if all of that never happened.

Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.

I’m confused by this. Didn’t we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasn’t perfect but at least didn’t hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??

If anyone else is wondering: DSP here I think stands for “Delivery Service Partner”, and driver for someone driving a vehicle. (I assumed the context “Digital Signal Processing” and driver as in “device driver” at first and was quite confused :P)

On-topic: I think regulation needs to come down hard on the delivery industry in general, be it parcels or food or whatever, working conditions there have been terrible for a long time.

rsyslog goes “AI first”

what

Thanks for the “from now on stay away from this forever” warning. Reading that blog post is almost surreal (“how AI is shaping the future of logging”), I have to remind myself it’s a syslog daemon.

Yes, right, Reddit too! Forgot that one. When I visit there I use alternative Reddit front-ends now which luckily spare me from this.

btw I noticed that Etsy is not actually in SV, so the problem is bigger than that.

I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.

It’s something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I’m not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it’s the websites themselves.)

Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.

On a product page I then saw:

Material: gefühlt

This was very strange… because that makes no sense at all. “Gefühlt” is a form (participle) of the verb “fühlen”, which means “to feel”. It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.

So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense “to feel” as “felt”. And of course “felt” can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called “Filz”), so it’s a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they’re in.

And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.

And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It’s unbearable. At least there’s a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

A prompt-injection attack on Google’s Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozilla’s bug bounty program

TIL

Whenever I think Mozilla can’t get any worse…

So now they do “Agentic Security” and “Real-time GenAI intelligence on emerging threats”.

HN really is an attractor for the most boring people in the world.

It might be here to stay for at least a while in the same way that asbestos is.

I’ve not yet encountered someone saying “it’s here to stay” to me IRL but if it happens, I think I’d just ask them “and you think that is good?”

From this link in the article:

Cursor uses a combination of our custom models, as well as models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. […] Auto automatically routes to different frontier models based on capacity.

Uhm, since I don’t use any of this crap… can someone explain what Cursor actually does? I mean… when it’s using an “external model”, I assume that means they just use OpenAI/Anthropic/etc as a backend service? (Which means even with the current price increase it is indirectly still heavily subsidized…) What service does Cursor even provide then? Do they just prepend user prompts with some unhinged garbage and then send it off to OpenAI etc? Why are people paying for it… is it only for some fancy editor integration so it sends off/reads back the code as needed?

I’m in therapy and much better than I used to, but from my past before that, I am unfortunately quite experienced over many years in having existential worries and anxieties about extremely unlikely things.

And then I see this…

Cosmic rescue mission […] These missions aim to identify and mitigate suffering among hypothetical extraterrestrial life forms

…and damn, that’s next-level thinking, even for me.

I would also like to understand under what definition ChatGPT can be classified as “connection technology”.

Wait, they’re still drinking coffee, and it takes 58 minutes? Jeez, my genai quantum robot does that in 58 seconds and summarizes the gustatory experience into 3 bullet points for me. Get with the times.

The resolution to all this depends on psychic luck produced by evolutionary processes over the course of a handful of generations on Earth.

Oh and don’t forget the cat people that used to be more aggressive but now they are nicer because of all the long wars in which the aggressive ones killed each other. I liked Ringworld overall, but indeed there is an awful lot of eugenics thinking in there.