Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.

Can’t avoid slop reading translated books, can’t learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. It’s the microplastics of the internet age.

Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.

Days since last “novel” prompt injection attack that I first saw on social media months and months ago: zero

Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It’s an AI product.

frodo.ai on the other hand is currently domain parked. It could be yours for the low low price of $43,911

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-04-23/state-bar-of-california-used-ai-for-exam-questions

When measured for reliability, the State Bar told The Times, the combined scored multiple-choice questions from all sources — including AI — performed “above the psychometric target of 0.80.”

“I dunno why you guys are complaining, we measured our exam to be 80% accurate!”

I think this article fits here as how this fear mongering reaches government: https://futurism.com/google-ceo-congress-electricity-ai-superintelligence

Eric Schmidt tells the US government that unfathomable amounts of power need to be spun up ASAP because if the US doesn’t make robot god first then:

If China comes to superintelligence first, it changes the dynamic of power globally, in ways that we have no way of understanding or predicting

Dedicating the US’s entire economic output to scaling corporate LLMs and filling the air with smog would at least have somewhat predictable consequences I suppose.

Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.

For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot

It’s not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. […] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.

2 out of 19 found this helpful

Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.

I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)

Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.

I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!

So in the past week or so a lot of pedestrian crossings in Silicon Valley were “hacked” (probably never changed the default password lol) to make them talk like tech figures.

Here are a few. Note that these voices are most likely AI generated.

1. A crosswalk with the voice of Elon Musk
2. A crosswalk with the voice of Zuck
3. Elon Musk crosswalk just wants to be friends (second video) also Zuck crosswalk is proud of his work (third video).

I didn’t get to hear any of them in person, however the crosswalk near my place has recently stopped saying “change password” constantly, which I’m happy about.

In this case ドドドド or ゴゴゴゴ are both meme sound effects from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure used in dangerous or unnerving scenes. The meaning here would be something like indicating what a menacing aura that hardcore mofo Yud is giving off.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/menacing-ゴゴゴゴ

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-youre-approaching-me-jojo-approach

https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/10/dodododo.html

Of course the AI doesn’t know this so combined the two to produce ゴゴドゴ which just looks kind of stupid.

My go to source for the fact that LLM chatbots suck at writing reasoned replies is https://chatgpt.com/

Oh gosh I looked up the post and that was a mistake. Actually Mr. Yarvin there is quote tweeting someone who dared, on twitter, to say that the Holocaust was real. The replies (including Yarvin’s incorrect & off topic nonsense) being about what you’d expect from twitter nowadays. So much Holocaust denial.

At this point cryptocurrency has a bad enough reputation that they have to try and ease readers into it.

(insert clown getting dressed meme image here)

1. It’s new digg!
2. AI is bad (but also sexy and all powerful)
3. so captchas are hard :(
4. let’s make a real fancy captcha!
5. With… Zero-Knowledge Proofs :D :D :D :D :D (all non cryptocurrency people flee at this point)
6. Also like NFTs for products you buy so when you shill them people know you’re at least a real person doing so (maybe, kinda, sorta)
7. So anyway I was thinking if only there was something else as dystopian cool as Sam Altman 様’s orb thing and we smeared it across the entire internet

Yeah it’s called “autopilot”; named after the Tesla technology!

Sailor Sega Saturn will no longer buy US based stocks! What a coincidence.

Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

“We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off

Holy smokes

Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I’m supposed to fill in the blank or something.

To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. It’s a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldn’t understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

This “Cavallo” reference isn’t actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).

Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:

Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. […] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.

Amazing. The government’s official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.

Hey wait a minute we already made that (obvious) joke here on Awful Systems!

I’ve been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and it’s chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.