The part I hate most about phone security on Android is that the first step is inevitably to buy a new phone (it might be better on iPhone but I don’t want an iPhone)

The industry talks the talk about security being important, but can never seem to find the means to provide simple security updates for more than a few years. Like I’m not going to turn my phone into e-waste before I have to so I guess I’ll just hope I don’t get hacked!

Wait didn’t Google Translate used to have a feature where you could type in improvements? I don’t see it now so they might have gotten rid of it…

Aside: my favorite human-created dictionary is Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary. I have a physical copy and it’s around 480,000 entries across nearly 3000 pages and paging through it I just feel “yes, now this is a dictionary”. It’s so big that I might have to give it away or leave it with a friend if my plans of immigrating work out.

Really what I want is both:

1. A list of words and their individual translations. Parts of speech, pronunciation, and any relevant conjugations, tenses, etc. How the sentence is put together grammatically / vocab wise basically. Google Translate stinks for this you have to type in fragments of a sentence and hope for the best. This is what I’m usually after since my goal is to learn a language, not have it read to me.

2. A computer’s best guess about what a sentence means as a whole. In case I’m terribly confused and it happens to be accurate enough for me to figure it out from there.

Google Translate focuses on #2 over #1. e.g. it doesn’t make a very good dictionary / grammar reference.

To the extent that machine translation was already a bullshit machine I guess. Language learning I sometimes get totally desperate if there’s some grammar construct I can’t figure out. A machine translation sometimes helps me know what to look up, or at least move on to the next sentence.

Anyway this isn’t a position I believe strongly in. It’s iffy for sure and none of these companies ever share their quality evaluations or put “probably nonsense” warnings on the output or give you an option.

Google Translate having a normal one after I accidentally typed some German into the English side:

What’s the over/under on an LLM being involved here?

(Aside: translation is IMO one of the use cases where LLMs actually have some use, but like any algorithmic translation there are a ton of limitations)

I “ugly cried” (I prefer the term “beautiful cried”) at the last episode of Sailor Moon and it was such an emotional high that I’ve been chasing it ever since.

Thursday–that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday

Beep boop… training data located

Sweet mother of Roko it’s an infohazard!

I never really realized that before.

Without a captcha the AIs would be trained on cutting edge AI alignment research like “videogames are unintuitive sometimes”, and this would greatly increase the chance of P(Doom).

During the trial, Penny’s defense brought in a forensic pathologist who claimed that Neely hadn’t died from being choked but from a “combination of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, sickle cell trait and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint,

I get that defense attorneys have to work with what they have but goodness am I tired of this argument.

“Your honor the deceased did not die from being shot through the temple, but due to having chronic migraines and exposure to second hand smoke 3 years ago and also walking towards the bullet thus increasing it’s relative velocity slighty”

Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye

I looked up a video of someone trying to use a potato as a suppressor and was not disappointed.

deleted by creator

The final race to bubble collapse AGI is afoot so Sergey Brin thinks his workers should work 60 hours a week, and churn out LLM assisted code, and be in the office “at least” 5 days a week https://9to5google.com/2025/02/27/sergey-brin-google-agi/

Of course most people don’t have enough money to hire an army of assistants, they have friends and family that they actually like, or they have aspirations beyond babysitting shitty Gemini output every waking hour to further enrich billionaires at the expense of their own health.

But no no, he’s right! Those lazy 40-hour workers (the ones who dodged layoffs so far anyway) are doing the bare minimum and have poor work ethic!

US techno-fascism roundup part the fourth:

1. DOGE is reportedly using AI to assess the “what did you do last week” bullet points form all federal workers

2. Their privacy impact assessment for this had this to say

   The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email

   But Mr. Musk apparently forgot about this as he threatens to fire everyone who won’t respond (stuff like maternity leave be damned I guess)

3. A particularly unhappy person got an AI generated video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes to display on TVs in government buildings.

4. Hey firing people is hard. I know, what if we got the computers to fire people for us!

Excuse me but I need the tech industry to hold up just long enough to fulfill my mid-life-crisis goal of moving to another country. Please refrain from crashing until then.

Thanks.

Usually SSN yes. In recent years airports and secure federal buildings are starting to require “real IDs” / star cards which are state IDs which meet federal identity verification requirements. I couldn’t be bothered with all that since I already have a passport so my driver’s license says “Federal Limits Apply”.

For thinks like bank loans, state IDs are widely accepted.

OK this is just my unresearched opinion as an American but I really don’t know what I’m talking about so keep that in mind and treat it as vibes more than research. It’s messy and I haven’t learned about any of it since highschool (and my highschool left a lot of important parts out):

Media companies continue to impress me with their hard-hitting investigative boots on the ground reporting

Write a brief article titled “ICE Prosecutor Linked to Anonymous White Supremacist X Profile: Report”

The worst part is I can’t tell if that’s not meant to be taken literally or if it is.