10 years using Duolingo, 4 years in Diamond League, and earlier this month I just had enough of the low-quality AI bullshit.

Out. Done. Gone. Waste of my time, every damn day.

The decline in quality and accuracy was just too much. As an English speaker learning a handful of other languages and concentrating on two, it was interesting to me that the first real noticeable patterns of errors and general slop were actually on the English side. Increasingly obtuse questions or statements, ok fine, I will spit those back in French or Spanish with good accuracy. I don't have any issue whatever with the occasionally-dark humor or the gender related topics that might push others' hot buttons, and I appreciate the occasional foray into curious stories and situations. But... over the past year there has been an increasing level of nonsensical AI-generated questions, erroneous answers accepted, multiple correct answers, etc etc... and it's obvious that no actual native speaker looked at a lot of the new content -- either from the native or foreign perspective. A couple years ago there was an increasing level of having to hit the button for "You should have accepted my answer." But for the past year, it's become a daily occurrence to have to hit the button for "You shouldn't have accepted my answer." The latter is a clear indication of AI slop and drift in the language models, and lack of QA. Real human QA is not optional, and Duo has apparently dispensed with it entirely. The result is gameified garbled nonsense. Playing the game was fun for a while (seriously, still in Diamond league for more than four years straight), but the goal is language learning not to compete with other stupid little games on my device. Feh. Done. Cancelled my subscription, et je vais dépenser cet hundred bucks de mon argent pour un spritz et une charcuterie chaque après-midi pour le reste de l'été.

Castillo de San Marcos - Built at Sea Level in 1672.

Castillo de San Marcos - Still at Sea Level in 2025.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

How is this of any significance to humanity? Seems like a weird way to waste both time and money.

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

Now all my crappy code will crash much faster. ;)

I made my chat font Comic Sans because I think it's funny that the "Supreme Allied Linux Commander" for our organization (me) uses Comic Sans on Skype For Business. Keeps 'em on their toes.

This is the exact same method by which Grubhub/Doordash/Postmates/etc get a large portion of their business: by getting their phone number and/or spoofed site listed as a search result or even in the google maps listing for a site nearest the searcher's location.
Of course Google won't "fix" the problem; it's a source of advertising revenue, and general boost to user engagement.

But Brave Browser has no problem blocking them.

The point of advertising is to generate demand (want). The more you can influence people to want your product, the more of your product you're going to sell.

Barbra Streisand
Woo-ooh, ooh-hoo, ooh-hoo, ooh-hoo

https://soundcloud.com/thathyp...

As good ole' Bill Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliette: "A plague a' both your houses!" -Mercutio

Is there anything either of these pox peddlers can provide that is necessary for living my life? The steady drumbeat of serotonin hits from exaggerated clickbait "news" and AI-written headlines designed to make my blood pressure spike? Frothy propaganda pieces posted by sock puppets and nation-states intent on sowing discord? Intrusive messages from people I tried to leave behind in high school and college? Advertisements for crap on Amazon that I paused the mouse over just long enough for the telemetry bots to smell $0.001 of revenue?

No.

Work doesn't use Facebook or TikTok or even Twitter anymore. My family doesn't use it, friends only occasionally, and the rest is just a steady fire hose of crap that makes my life worse when I look at it. Really there's no reason at all to participate in either of these. "Look away" seems like the best option.

That's my point, it's already legally/contractually banned on most devices in the country, so diddling around with discussion of a 100% ban is a diversion from the real issue. The crux is that a lot (majority? plurality?) of people use their work laptops for personal purposes, and their personal mobile devices for work, in contravention of numerous contracts and regulatory requirements -- and this is where the actual risk to data lies. Anyone who checks work email/messages/workflow/chat on the same device they install TicTok/Facebook/Insta/etc is already breaking policies, contractual rules, and/or civil and criminal laws. What we need is better enforcement, and the will to actually prosecute people for illicit behaviors they've grown so accustomed to getting away with that they no longer recognize them as a crime. A new law that mostly restates the old one doesn't solve the lack of will to enforce.

Two things: First, westerners don't generally understand that China is not a country in the western sense of the word; it is a corporation. The whole thing. Ever since the party leaders got right with that whole money thing, it's been this way. Now since the party controls the currency and operates the entire governing framework without exception, and every business operating within China has to comply with the legal framework, that effectively makes all such businesses a subsidiary of the party...corporation. The idea that a subsidiary corporation could have a policy or procedural framework to keep data private from the executive whims of its parent corporation only makes sense in a western context; but when the parent corporation is a totalitarian regime which makes the laws, runs the judiciary, and controls the currency, the idea of such a separation of control or information is laughable. It does not happen. Pure window dressing. Anyone who takes such proposals seriously is a fool.

Second... why? Is there any legitimate use case for non-work video sharing or other social media on a work device, especially one used for sensitive data or national security? No. Absolutely not. Even in a private-sector work context. If I install TicTok on a laptop used for my client's work, I should be fired. If I install it on a personal mobile phone also used for handling sensitive emails or regulated data, I should be fired and then sued or prosecuted. It's disappointing to see so many people fretting over how to accommodate other people's improper or illegal handling of data just so they can get their serotonin hit.

I am an old guy who is supposed to be watching his blood pressure, and people constantly suggest these manufactured products as a substitute for meat. The impossible burger has 370mg of sodium per 4oz portion, while an equal portion of ground beef has about 70mg. The Impossible people like to compare their 370mg patty with the typical ~370mg of a commercial burger but that ignores the 300mg coming from the cheese, bun, and condiments. So a BASIC single impossible burger prepared the same way is going to be almost 700mg of sodium, more than 1/3 of all the salt a typical adult is supposed to have in a day. The impossible patty alone is about the same salt as two pieces of fried chicken. I'm supposed to be on a low-salt diet, and this impossible stuff would give me a damn coronary. My doc (yes, a real GP with certifications in nutrition) specifically warned me away from novelty foods such as manufactured meat because of the sodium content required to make them palatable. If you want to cut back on the meat, then eat a vegetable. But once you've reduced the volume, honestly, the real thing is much healthier at least for old folks.