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mirrorwitch

@ mirrorwitch @awful.systems

Posts
6
Comments
169
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th April 2026

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  • Critical support for comrade Yudkowsky for getting some nerds to finally engage in direct action and blow up some goddamn datacenters

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th March 2026

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  • When that no-LLM policy hits you like...

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  • Kitty? Back when I tried to use it (uim-xim+anthy), no it didn't, also it broke my xcompose setup. When I asked the devs about it they said they don't care about non-European languages. I do not want to use software where the devs don't even bother to performatively pretend that languages outside of Europe matter. What I am missing is being treated like an equal fucking human being.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th March 2026

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  • Hey, it's not just that, that's unfair to the chatbots. They're also used out of contempt for one's employees

  • When that no-LLM policy hits you like...

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  • Adding to my hall of honour, more suggestions welcome:

    • Alacritty
    • Gentoo
    • GoTo Social
    • Loupe
    • postmarketOS
    • Qemu
    • Servo
    • Zig

  • When that no-LLM policy hits you like...

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  • My problem with kitty is, it didn't work for the languages I use, and when I complained the dev said he doesn't care about non-European languages. Alacritty works well for Japanese for me, including input methods, but sadly not for Arabic or other bidi.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th March 2026

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  • "AI is here to stay" the AI:

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd March 2026

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  • Dans cette vision, la démocratie entendue comme autogouvernement de citoyens égaux est déjà morte — et il ne reste plus que, dans l’obscurité d’un data center, la gestion clinique de son cadavre.

    I'll grant the Holy Inquisition guy something: he really knows how to turn a phrase. the English summaries of this piece really don't do it justice.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

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  • It's true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they needn't 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 it's normally a good thing to have ICE around and it's just malfunctioning as an exceptional state of things. If ICE is an immune system (malfunctional or not), what are we immigrants?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

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  • Systemd

    Jesus.

    I've been advocating for a hall of fame of projects that explicitly reject LLMs; ctrl+f "Gentoo" on this very comment thread for the few examples I heard about.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

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  • Take "Morgellons Disease," 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 Morgellon's don't 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 children's disease «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.» 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 it's real. So it's an attempt to legitimise the postulated disease by cherry-picking something "historical" that vaguely resembles it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

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  • they're both worse

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

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  • 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 didn't.

    I mean don't get me wrong, things are much worse now than 3 years ago, clearly. But they're not like, Great Depression worse. They're not even 2008 worse. It's 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 it's 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 I'm told it's down more often, and often in "soft downtime" like notifications not working, or DMs, or some other feature, or it's 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 "AI", 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 I'm not ruling out a spiral into complete recession, either.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

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  • 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:

    • Gentoo
    • Servo
    • Loupe
    • Qemu
    • postmarketOS
    • GoTo Social
    • Zig

  • Duolingo is dying celebratory thread

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  • Yeah recording oneself and comparing one's pronunciation to a model is a good practice, and I recommend it for everyone at beginner stages. That's 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.)

  • Duolingo is dying celebratory thread

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  • I haven't used it but from reading a description my first impression is:

    Better than Duolingo (low bar):

    • Native speaker conversations
    • A bit more context
    • Phonetic spelling
    • Voice recording for comparison

    Still bad:

    • Gamified
    • Extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic
    • Tries to replace human interaction with #engagement
    • Artificial ("bite-sized") content
    • Artificial context switching
    • Universalised organisation by topics "useful in real life", rather than individualised, free voluntary reading

    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 you're 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.

  • Duolingo is dying celebratory thread

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  • Duolingo is dying celebratory thread

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  • 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 sō-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 that's 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. That's how Japanese people do it, after all; they're already fluent speakers of Japanese when they start learning kanji. Thus the existence of material with sō-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 drills—before realising I had long reached the level of "can more or less understand manga with furigana" and was wasting time.

  • Duolingo is dying celebratory thread

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  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    Duolingo is dying celebratory thread

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    Wireborn husbands, ELIZA effect, Clippy, empathy (ramble)

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google

    wordsmith.social /elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    A depressed rant on my acceptance stage of living post-gen-"AI"

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    The broken search bar is symbiotic with the bullshitting chatbot

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    Disapproving of automated plagiarism is classist ableism, actually: Nanowrimo

    nanowrimo.zendesk.com /hc/en-us/articles/29933455931412-What-is-NaNoWriMo-s-position-on-Artificial-Intelligence-AI