I’ve got new socks on.

Anybody on the outside would think I live in the midst of utter chaos. Yet if they ask me where something of mine is, I can unerringly go to it.

So the only answer I can have for your question is either “无” or ☯.

Getting some decent flower pics since the spring explosion has started finally.

I just drink tea nowadays. Brewed tea at home, not bottled tea with ten tons of sugar per tenth of a serving. It took me about ten months to move from exclusively sugary carbonated drinks to tea, but now I don’t even enjoy the former anymore.

You are being a little bit pedantic. People talking about “AI” today are talking about “LLMs”, not the older tech that turned out not to actually be “AI”. (Rather like the current stuff isn’t actually “AI”.)

Ow. Fuck.

UNMARKED POLICE SURVEILLANCE VAN

Using it at all, really. Given the environmental costs, the social costs, and the fraud it entails, using it at all is pretty much unethical.

My favourite example, though, was the lazy lawyer who used ChatGPT to write a legal brief for him.

I can appreciate æsthetics independently of emotion.

But I need emotion to get “turned on”.

So I’m in this weird space where I can admire the looks of people (in about the same way that most people admire scenery) without wanting to fuck same (in about the same way that most people don’t want to fuck a forest … or a couch).

But logic isn’t innate. It’s a pattern. And human brains are basically very good at patterns.

But there are many, many, many patterns in life and logic is only one of them (and it isn’t even particularly useful if you don’t have some other patterns backing it up).

It was pretty common in the Zhou Dynastic period, being the official name and all that. That’s 789 years. I think we can consider it firmly established usage from that, no?

Bough, dough, slough, slough (yes, two different pronunciations!), rough …

It’s a mess, isn’t it?

Because the name of the nation comes from the Iroquoian word “kanata” (for “village”) and mythology says that Jacques Cartier mistook that for the name of the land.

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

French. Vietnamese (via the French influence) when transliterated. Italian (where in Greek-origin words you can see either being used). German (same as Italian, though over the years some words got formally modified from ph- to f-, but words like Philosophie is still spelled that way). Spanish and Portuguese too, though far more rarely than in Italian (where it is in turn far more rare than in French). Polish and Hungarian too, IIRC.

Uh… 中国(Zhongguo) was first used in the Western Zhou period, over 3000 years ago. Other words like 诸夏(Zhuxia), 诸华 (Zhuhua), 天下 (Tianxia), 华夏 (Huaxia), 神州 (Shenzhou), 九州 (Jiuzhou), and assorted combinations or variations of these were used off and on over the time as well. (None of which sound like “China” naturally.) 大清国 (Daqing Guo) was used the Qing before they were overthrown and the Republic, and later the People’s Republic, took the country over again.

And why “China” instead of “Zhongguo” or “Zhonghua” or any number of words, none of which sound like “China”.

I think that’s why it was “Min or Wu” there.

English is a trash fire. It’s a trash fire in pronunciation, in orthography, in grammar, in pretty much ever respect.

But my favourite thing remains ‘ough’: tough, trough, though, thought, through. All pronounced differently.

Perplexity is the only one I would think of using seriously, and then only when I want it to, say, summarize something I already know.

After which I fact-check it like crazy and hammer at it until it gets things right.

One annoying habit it has is that somewhere in the chain of software before or after the LLM it looks for certain key topics it doesn’t want to talk about and either comes out and says it (anything involving violence or crime) or has a visibly canned hot take that it repeats without variance no matter what added information you provide or how much cajoling you try.

At other points it starts into the canned responses, but when you catch it it will try again. Like I frequently want song lyrics translated and each time I supply some that it recognizes as such it throws up a canned response about how it will not be a party to copyright breaking. Then after a few rounds back and forth about how I’m clearly not doing this commercially and am just a fan who wants to understand a song better it will begrudgingly give me the translation.

Then five minutes later in the SAME CONVERSATION it will run through that cycle all over again when I give it another song.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

A half-American (it’s complicated) company I worked for went on a buying spree and bought a Swiss company that had some technology they wanted. When the Swiss technical and managerial leads came by the company headquarters to work on integration they were appalled at how slack our standards were compared to theirs.

How do I know this? (I mean I was just a lowly marketeer in a tech company; the most despised class.) Well, thing is, at one lunch hour I happened to join them in the elevator. I don’t look even slightly Germanic (Mom’s genes governs about 80% of my appearance) so they took it in stride and started saying some pretty mean things about my coworkers. And i just carefully listened in as we descended to the ground floor.

When the doors opened, I turned around and said in flawless Frankfurter German (with a slight hint of an English accent), “Des war echt en faszinierendes Gespräch; villeicht sollteste dat mal mit de Geschäftsführung bespreche.” (A Hessian dialect, as I said, to hammer the point home: what you’re seeing as grammatical error is my attempt to get how Frankfurters actually speak orally.) It translates roughly to “That was a fascinating conversation; perhaps you should have it with the management.”

It was cute watching large, fit, grown men suddenly look terrified at my oh-so-threatening 160cm, slim self.