Lvxferre [he/him]

That’s a common discussion in my family, with the added take of piracy. Basically, my sister not getting why my BIL and me download the songs/albums we enjoy, since Spotify exists. Or why I created a LAN to listen to downloaded stuff from my kitchen. And I often half-joke that, eventually, she’ll only listen to the stuff my BIL likes — as all her favs will be locked in a platform she won’t be able/willing to access.

Same deal with anime. I’m not ashamed to say I have 1600 episodes in my hard disk. I don’t download everything I watch (because… well, I do watch a lot of junk), but if I feel in the mood to re-watch something, it means I should avoid losing it, so I download it.

Of course, you could do all of that without piracy, if you got the bees’n’honey (unlike me). Or go for a middle ground; back in the 90s we used to record tracks playing on the radio in K7 casette tapes, while still buying official ones for artists we really enjoyed, so this isn’t exactly new.

I know the last two lines are naïve; and yes, the fate of the two former heads of the NKVD is a good example. Or even the whole USSR after Lenin. (If not for an ice pick, that would be known as “Bonapartism with Russian characteristics”.)

Still trying to find a good replacement. The original poem conveys “fight for groups you don’t belong to, because their enemies will also go after you”; I want the subversion to be something like “don’t fight for your enemies”, or perhaps “don’t fight against people fighting for you”.

I’m considering

Then they came for me
No, wait, they didn’t — they went after my oppressors
Now I can speak out for myself

Pinging @msage@programming.dev for ideas.

It’s just that “I was finally free from the current wave of oppression, and ready for the next one” would be a shitty closing verse.

But yes, you’re right. I think oppression is like weeds in a garden: if you’re diligent, the fight against it becomes easier over time, as you’re preventing the oppression/weeds from creating more of itself. But once you stop fighting, it sprouts out of nowhere, ready to reproduce and take your society/garden over again.

First they came for the billionaires
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a psychopathic money hoarder

Then they came for the fascists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a face to be punched

Then they came for the government
And I did not speak out
Because I was not an instrument of oppression

Then they came for capitalism
And I did not speak out
Because I was not part of the system

Then they came for me
No, wait, nobody came for me
I was finally free.

I’m still reading the machine generated transcript of the video. But to keep it short:

The author was messing with ISBNs (international standard book numbers), and noticed invalid ones fell into three categories.

• Typos and similar.
• Publishers assigning an invalid ISBN to the book, because they didn’t get how ISBNs work.
• References "hallucinated"¹ by ChatGPT, that do not match any actual ISBN.

He then uses this to highlight that Wikipedia is already infested by bullshit from large “language” models², and this creates a bunch of vicious cycles that go against the spirit of Wikipedia of reliability, factuality, etc.

Then, if I got this right, he lays out four hypotheses (“theories”) on why people do this³:

• People who ignore the limitations of those models
• People seeking external help to contribute with Wikipedia
• People using chatbots to circumvent frustrating parts of doing something
• People with an agenda.

Notes (all from my/Lvxferre’s part; none of those is said by the author himself)

1. “Hallucination”: misleading label used to refer to output that has been generated the exact same way as the rest of the output, but when interpreted by humans it leads to bullshit.
2. I have a rant about calling those models “language” models, but to keep it short: I think “large token models” would be more accurate.
3. In my opinion, the author is going the wrong way here. Disregard intentions, focus on effect — don’t assume good faith, don’t assume any faith at all. Instead focus on the user behaviour; if they violate Wikipedia policies once warn them, if they keep doing it remove them as dead weight fighting against the spirit of the project.

Perhaps due to my heavy consumption of Japanese media, my views are biased. But frankly? I think Western design tendencies are the ones being weird here.

Note quotes are out of order. Also, that by “West” I’m including the Latin America I’m from.

“The West has an aversion to information density at times,” says Shoin Wolfe

Indeed, in a country preoccupied with safety, information overload is a part of daily life.

I think the difference is caused by advertisement: Western advertisement is so obnoxious, noisy, bossy, that it is bound to cause even more of a cognitive load than the Japanese counterparts. Western ads boil down to selfish arseholes screeching “are you too stupid to follow simple orders? I told you to consume it!” into your ears, while flashing loud lights. The following excerpt reinforces it:

“For the most part Japanese advertising has been ‘soft-sell,’ relying on the use of celebrities, attractive graphics, music or catchy slogans to sell products.” This was contrasted with “hard-sell” advertising, which uses “analytical logic, product comparison, or ‘annoy and attract attention’ tactics.”

And this might explain why people in the West avoid minor but still relevant info, while in Japan they seem to expect it:

In 2020, Lawson learned the hard way that too much minimalism can backfire. When the convenience store chain redesigned its branded product packaging to embrace negative space, it faced swift and loud mockery on Twitter. Users complained the now uniformly beige products looked too similar and gave no indication of the contents.

Moving on:

“(In web design) I think that negative space is an aesthetic, Western idea,” says Wolfe. “In the West, with physical products and just design in general, they have this idea that more negative space equals luxury.”

I have a better name for the so-called “negative space”: it’s “wasted space”. Space that failed to benefit the user.

And while some waste is unavoidable, I think the current Western design tendencies boil down to “cripple your design until you’re offering the users the bare minimum, before they stop bothering with it”.

“Because one symbol (of kanji) can compress what would be four to six letters in an alphabetic language, we grow up being accustomed to processing dense visual information very quickly,” says Akiko Sakamoto, a freelance UX designer and design strategist who works between Kyoto and Tokyo.

Under ideal conditions, the difference in scripts shouldn’t be relevant here. Sure, kanji is more informationally dense per character, but as a consequence your average kanji has more strokes than your average Latin letter. Thus requiring larger sizes for comfortable reading. And I think both things cancel each other out, forcing both scripts to convey roughly the same amount of info per area.

For the sake of example, contrast

• ⟨F⟩ vs. ⟨E⟩
• ⟨水⟩ vs. ⟨氷⟩ // mizu “water” vs. kōri “ice”

People here in the Fediverse are probably seeing all four characters the same size, right? Note how the difference between 水/氷 feels way subtler than the one between E/F.

…that is, under ideal conditions.

Sorry, I can’t hear what you said, because of all that *CLANK CLANK CLANK* noise you’re making. Clanker~

Crimea has a mountain range up south, really close to the sea, so it has a bunch of really short rivers. Chile is the same.

That said the river from the “Crimea river” meme is the Salğır/Салгир:

Info on how to disable AI anti-features from Firefox here and here.

I’m getting real tired of this shit. It isn’t just Firefox, or large token models; every fucking little thing nowadays has anti-features, that go against why I want that thing, that I need to work around, that makes every simple task a bloody chore.

That bloody browser is the cherry of the cake for me. I already avoid Chromium and similar Google trash as much as possible, as I know Google vultures the shit out of your personal info; now every bloody time Firefox updates I need to check two computers, two phones, and a few household electronics for potential shit to disable. Do I need to sell my soul to Satan to make things simpler again? Oh wait, souls don’t exist so I’m out of luck.

Yes, I’m aware, there’s LibreWolf. But that’s like makeup hiding your black eye, since it’s a “soft” fork of Firefox. And it doesn’t change that bitter taste on your mouth, that you can’t even browse the internet in peace any more.

Those are great to add to beans or chickpeas.

For example, feijoada relies on those and pig ears for thickness, while other ingredients (like sausages, jerk, bacon, smoked pork ribs, etc.) get added for the meat and flavour.

Give up all hope (of seeing the recipe), you who enter (the site)!

This is like a network of small problems: the advertisement model being awful, ads paying almost nothing per view, overabundance of cooking sites, Google’s monopoly on search, search engine optimisation, Google forcing you to feed its AI to show your site in search results, AI models and their intrinsic shortcomings (such as not understanding what they output)…

Cooking sites were the first victims because of how heavily they rely on SEO shit, and how people hate it. But others will eventually go the same way.

Now I regret following it with only two points, instead of three. LLMs love listing threes.

I typically used the em dash only when writing professionally, but because of this AI thing I’m doing it in general, just to see how it turns out. (So far it’s a good way to sniff out assumers.)

In the specific case of clanker vocab leaking into the general population, that’s no big deal. Bots are “trained” towards bland, unoffensive, neutral words and expressions; stuff like “indeed”, “push the boundaries of”, “delve”, “navigate the complexities of $topic”. Mostly overly verbose discourse markers.

However when speaking in general grounds you’re of course correct, since the choice of words does change the meaning. For example, a “please” within a request might not change the core meaning, but it still adds meaning - because it conveys “I believe to be necessary to show you respect”.

And AI sucks at that. If you interpret its output as a human-made summary, it shows everything you shouldn’t do — such as conflating what’s written with its assumptions over what’s written, or missing the core of the text for the sake of random excerpts (that might imply the opposite of what the author wrote).

But, more importantly: people are getting used to babble, that what others say has no meaning. They will not throw it into an AI to summarise it, and when they do it, they won’t understand the AI output.

I don’t see a big deal given

1. What matters the most is not the words within an utterance, but the discourse conveyed by that utterance. [Translation: how you say it matters less than what you say.]
2. Word usage is prone to trends. Not just slang. Easy come, easy go.

What I am concerned however is that those chatbots babble a bloody lot. And people might be willing to accept babble a bit more, due to exposure lowering their standards. And they kind of give up looking for meaning on what others say.

Point still stands; the same “customers” of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.

Both are owned by the same corporations (Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, Geode…), who’ll win either way. Until the bubble bursts, that is.

On an individual level, Librewolf is a good idea, because it has saner privacy defaults than Firefox; and its devs are rather good at gutting out the crap.

However, on a collective level, the problem still remains: we have exactly two options, Chromium and Firefox (note LibreWolf is a custom version of Firefox). One is from GAFAM cancer, another is from a GAFAM vassal that keeps doing dumb stuff, since it’s nothing but contained opposition.

Mozilla is a mythical beast. It has many heads, but no brain. As such its actions and movement are unpredictable, erratic, and… dumb.

Replacing volunteer work with a bot does not make bloody sense dammit. You’ll actually pay for the bot, and the output is worse. The Japanese localisation community already called it quits, and others will follow. And every bloody thing is unnecessarily complex, from Mozilla’s structure to what it makes, even if there’s a single piece of its software people care about — Firefox. And Firefox only survives because its redeeming quality is negative, “Firefox is not Chromium”, without that negative quality Mozilla would be extinct already.