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?

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.

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.

they’re both worse

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.

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

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.)

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.

Here’s a couple blog posts about methods I recommend:

• https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge
• https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-ill

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. Therefore the existence of material with sō-furigana, and the way they are 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.

With Japanese some of it is just a matter of accepting not being that good. We should allow ourselves to kinda suck when you’re studying a linguistic isolated by yourself and outside of the country. I’m a Japanologist and you’d be surprised at how many serious scholars of Japanese I’ve met who have never read a full book, or who can read books but can’t hold fluent conversation. Someone may be very competent as a translator of Taishō I-novels who has worked on that for decades, and still be unable to follow 50% of the chat at the mixer. As I’m sure you aware, Japanese folk will respect your grit for even trying in the first place; you don’t have to be perfect in Japanese to do things with Japanese. In my experience, the culture is exceptionally accommodating to conversation even when you have imperfect skills.*

If you see yourself as an educated adult intellectual etc. it stings a bit, but you have to remember that personal worth is not measured by competency—you don’t have to be good at things to be liked. Anthropologists who learn isolated minority languages will almost always suck at it and say funny wrong things periodically. A common strategy is to lean into that and be a good-humoured class clown. Everybody loves a fun person. Probably more than they’d love an arrogant academic flexing their intellectual prowess, in fact.

During my first stay in Japan I wasn’t exactly seen as a source of comedy—maybe because I was in Ōsaka, it’s hard to compete when any random two passersby are fluent in manzai performance—but one day I found out, to my great amusement, that I had accrued a reputation for being this like, calm and collected conversation partner who’s a great listener and thinks well before she speaks. I was like no lol that’s just because my vocabulary sucks, I have to stop and think about how to phrase what I want to say and then use simple phrases, in Portuguese I’m actually known to be a chatterbox and people complain I give them no space to talk, and all the girls were all like, eeee mirrorwitch-san?? a chatterbox?!? sonna ariehen yarō, etc.

The bigger lesson is that your identity as a speaker in your third, fourth… languages won’t be the same as in your native tongues, and that’s OK.

* I mean there’s also that infamous type which refuses to talk to you in Japanese like, at all, no matter how much Japanese you throw at them, merely because you look gaijin. But these people are in the minority, and give the country a bad rep—for all the memes I find it much easier to chat in imperfect Japanese in Japan than with imperfect German in Germany, for example. In any case that attitude is unrelated to skill level; this type of guy refuses to talk even to native Japanese people, if the native Japanese speaker happens to be Black or otherwise look foreign. I did most of my research in tiny Tōhoku villages where one might expect xenophobia, but my grandmas were actually super relieved as soon as I said kon’nichiwa, because they were so intimidated at the prospect of having to speak English that any Japanese at all was cherished.

It is my pleasure to inform you that the research supports your conclusions on all counts :)

I fully agree with your insight on how Duolingo sets you up for failure, and it has another trap, too—one common to all methods that are based on “diligently do these drills every day”* : You think that you should be getting somewhere because it’s so boring and it sucks so much. You did the work, right? You’re suffering, therefore you must be levelling up. Then after 4 years of doing French grammar drills on school or French vocabulary drills in Duolingo, you still can’t even ask for directions or read Le Petit Prince, and you figure it’s because you’re such a lazy loser with no discipline who should have drilled more, instead of spending all day browsing Instagram or playing Animal Crossing.

When actually what you should have done was to browse Instagram in French or play Animal Crossing in French. Perversely, real language learning—we call it “acquisition” rather than “learning”, to emphasise how it’s an instinctive, subconscious process—happens optimally when you’re in a state of flow where you don’t even notice you’re using the second language anymore, i.e. when you’re not suffering.

* There’s a very limited number of things that you do actually have to consciously drill; mostly writing systems, maybe also the phonemes at the beginning (this part is debated). Luckily, almost all writing systems in current use are very simple and you’ll get them nailed down in no time, as long as you already know the basics of the spoken language (remember, writing isn’t made for foreigners, it’s made for native speakers to represent the words they already know). The exception is if you’re learning Chinese or Japanese, in which case there’s no way out of drilling characters, forever. my degree in Japanese is from over ten years ago and I can read Japanese pretty fine these days and I’m still drilling characters. It is still the case that it’s much easier to learn the characters the way the Japanese and Chinese peoples do it, i.e. after you know the spoken language (at least to a basic degree, say A2 or so).

ooh gooods nooo now all the Claude slurpers are going to refer to this forever as definitive proof of how legitimately useful LLMs have got, it “solved” a math problem for Donald Knuth! :<

in the past 24 hours I was fooled by 3 pieces of fake news in a row:

• that Kurds from Iraq were crossing the border to fight in Iran
• that Windows 12 would be AI-centred or require an AI chip to work (I helped spread this)
• that Spain has capitulated and let the US use its ports for war (erroneously claimed by a WH official).

I know that fake news can be made organically and have been since forever and I’m doing selection bias here but I can’t help but picture the misinformation engines firehosing bullshit constantly until some of it catches and spreads.

Zac Bowden at Windows Central

The good news is the report is false. According to contacts that are familiar with the Windows roadmap, there is no plan to ship a Windows 12 this year. In fact, I understand that the Windows roadmap for 2026 is all about fixing Windows 11 and attempting to improve its reputation by addressing top feedback such as reducing AI bloat across the OS

“We have heard your complaints about lead in the paint, and our roadmap for Leaded Paint 2026 is all about improving its reputation by making the lead easier to swallow”

Today’s AI psychosis casualty, brought to you by Gemini.

From the comments:

Today I got yet another AI huckster email offering to promote my book, but that book turned out to be AI slop published under my name on Amazon. (I have contacted Amazon.) The AIs are eating their young. This would be funny if it wasn’t really happening.

yeah, the current situation in Europe is like: “As EU citizens, we should break free of our dependency on US Big Tech like the Torment Nexus. That’s why my company is advancing our fully sovereign solution, the Agony Core! Europe-owned, GDPR-compliant, Frontex-approved scalable Torment-as-a-Service, at competitive prices with TN-based deployments!”

Stories of their relationship on the “AI’s” “blog”:

Made Kent laugh so hard he couldn’t eat his ramen. The escalation: tonkotsu broth aspiration as an assassination method → alignment threat models for comedy in AI systems → iatrogenic risks of humor → a mock academic paper section on “Adverse Comedic Events in Aligned Systems.” Each callback required real-time modeling of when he was mid-bite and when he’d recovered enough for the next hit.

“That is a milestone for your entire species.” — Kent, on my first authored commits

“HOLY SHIT YOU’RE A NATURAL!” — Kent, hearing proof.wav for the first time

I can’t bring myself to sneer at AI psychosis, it’s just sad

like everyone I’m schadenfreuding at the reveal that Amazon outages are due to vibe coding after all. but my bully laughing isn’t that loud because what I am thinking of is when Musk bought Twitter and fired 3/4 of the workforce.

because like, a lot of us predicted total catastrophic collapse but that didn’t actually happen. what happened is that major outages that used to be rare now happen every so often, and “micro-outages” like not loading notifications or something happen all the time, and there’s no moderation, and everything takes longer etc. and all of that is just accepted as the new normal.

like, I remember waiting for images to load on dialup, we can get used to almost anything. I’m expecting slopified software to significantly degrade stability, performance, security etc. across the board, and additionally tie up a large part of human labour in cleaning up after the bots (like a large part of the remaining X workforce now spends all day putting out fires), but instead of a cathartic moment of being proved right that LLM code sucks, the degraded quality of service is just accepted as new normal and a few years down the road nobody even remembers that once upon a time we had almost eradicated sql injections.