I’m just confused because I remember using Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows 98 in the 90s and it worked pretty accurately already back then for dictation and sometimes it feels as if all of that never happened.

Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.

I’m confused by this. Didn’t we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasn’t perfect but at least didn’t hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??

If anyone else is wondering: DSP here I think stands for “Delivery Service Partner”, and driver for someone driving a vehicle. (I assumed the context “Digital Signal Processing” and driver as in “device driver” at first and was quite confused :P)

On-topic: I think regulation needs to come down hard on the delivery industry in general, be it parcels or food or whatever, working conditions there have been terrible for a long time.

rsyslog goes “AI first”

what

Thanks for the “from now on stay away from this forever” warning. Reading that blog post is almost surreal (“how AI is shaping the future of logging”), I have to remind myself it’s a syslog daemon.

Yes, right, Reddit too! Forgot that one. When I visit there I use alternative Reddit front-ends now which luckily spare me from this.

btw I noticed that Etsy is not actually in SV, so the problem is bigger than that.

I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.

It’s something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I’m not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it’s the websites themselves.)

Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.

On a product page I then saw:

Material: gefühlt

This was very strange… because that makes no sense at all. “Gefühlt” is a form (participle) of the verb “fühlen”, which means “to feel”. It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.

So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense “to feel” as “felt”. And of course “felt” can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called “Filz”), so it’s a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they’re in.

And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.

And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It’s unbearable. At least there’s a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

A prompt-injection attack on Google’s Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozilla’s bug bounty program

TIL

Whenever I think Mozilla can’t get any worse…

So now they do “Agentic Security” and “Real-time GenAI intelligence on emerging threats”.

HN really is an attractor for the most boring people in the world.

It might be here to stay for at least a while in the same way that asbestos is.

I’ve not yet encountered someone saying “it’s here to stay” to me IRL but if it happens, I think I’d just ask them “and you think that is good?”

From this link in the article:

Cursor uses a combination of our custom models, as well as models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. […] Auto automatically routes to different frontier models based on capacity.

Uhm, since I don’t use any of this crap… can someone explain what Cursor actually does? I mean… when it’s using an “external model”, I assume that means they just use OpenAI/Anthropic/etc as a backend service? (Which means even with the current price increase it is indirectly still heavily subsidized…) What service does Cursor even provide then? Do they just prepend user prompts with some unhinged garbage and then send it off to OpenAI etc? Why are people paying for it… is it only for some fancy editor integration so it sends off/reads back the code as needed?

I’m in therapy and much better than I used to, but from my past before that, I am unfortunately quite experienced over many years in having existential worries and anxieties about extremely unlikely things.

And then I see this…

Cosmic rescue mission […] These missions aim to identify and mitigate suffering among hypothetical extraterrestrial life forms

…and damn, that’s next-level thinking, even for me.

I would also like to understand under what definition ChatGPT can be classified as “connection technology”.

Can you imagine selling something like a firewall appliance with a setting called “Yolo Mode”, or even a tax software or a photo organizer or anything that handles any data, even if only of middling importance, and then still expect to be taken seriously at all?

Ok, maybe someone can help me here figure something out.

I’ve wondered for a long time about a strange adjacency which I sometimes observe between what I call (due to lack of a better term) “unix conservativism” and fascism. It’s the strange phenomenon where ideas about “classic” and “pure” unix systems coincide with the worst politics. For example the “suckless” stuff. Or the ramblings of people like ESR. Criticism of systemd is sometimes infused with it (yes, there is plenty of valid criticism as well. But there’s this other kind of criticism I’ve often seen, which is icky and weirdly personal). And I’ve also seen traces of this in discussions of programming languages newer than C, especially when topics like memory safety come up.

This is distinguished from retro computing and nostalgia and such, those are unrelated. If someone e.g. just likes old unix stuff, that’s not what I mean.

You may already notice, I struggle a bit to come up with a clear definition and whether there really is a connection or just a loose set of examples that are not part of a definable set. So, is there really something there or am I seeing a connection that doesn’t exist?

I’ve also so far not figured out what might create the connection. Ideas I have come up with are: appeal to times that are gone (going back to an idealized computing past that never existed), elitism (computers must not become user friendly), ideas of purity (an imaginary pure “unix philosophy”).

Anyway, now with this new xlibre project, there’s another one that fits into it…

Yes, thank you, I’m also annoyed about this. Even classic “AI” approaches for simple pattern detection (what used to be called “ML” a few hype waves ago, although it’s much older than that even) are now conflated with capabilities of LLMs. People are led to believe that ChatGPT is the latest and best and greatest evolution of “AI” in general, with all capabilities that have ever been in anything. And it’s difficult to explain how wrong this is without getting too technical.

Related, this fun article: ChatGPT “Absolutely Wrecked” at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977

• You will understand how to use AI tools for real-time employee engagement analysis
• You will create personalized employee development plans using AI-driven analytics
• You will learn to enhance employee well-being programs with AI-driven insights and recommendations

You will learn to create the torment nexus

• You will prepare your career for your future work in a world with robots and AI

You will learn to live in the torment nexus

• You will gain expertise in ethical considerations when implementing AI in HR practices

I assume it’s a single slide that says “LOL who cares”

Maybe someone has put into their heads that they have to “go with the times”, because AI is “inevitable” and “here to stay”. And if they don’t adapt, AI would obsolete them. That Wikipedia would become irrelevant because their leadership was hostile to “progress” and rejected “emerging technology”, just like Wikipedia obsoleted most of the old print encyclopedia vendors. And one day they would be blamed for it, because they were stuck in the past at a crucial moment. But if they adopt AI now, they might imagine, one day they will be praised as the visionaries who carried Wikipedia over to the next golden age of technology.

Of course all of that is complete bullshit. But instilling those fears (“use it now, or you will be left behind!”) is a big part of the AI marketing messaging which is blasted everywhere non-stop. So I wouldn’t be surprised if those are the brainworms in their heads.

Also, happy Pride :3

Yes, happy pride month everyone!

I’ve decided that this year I’m going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows… wonder if anyone will notice.

That’s it, I’m ordering a copy.