this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I believe it'll happen a bit later when david/self/blake are around

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago (11 children)
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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

i completely forgot until i saw this comment

i've been running on adrenalin since thursday for reasons i'm not going into yet (started deeply fucked up, i'm smiling but i'm very fucking furious, may be resolving to less fucked up cross fingers, i'm smiling like that Ukrainian politician who made the phone video welcoming the Russian invaders into Hell) so expect nothing of me for a little while until all is more determinate

it's useful having a cowriter, we can cover for each other

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[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

can anyone recommend a language learning app or system that isn’t dependent on LLM garbage? after bouncing off of Duolingo I almost landed on Readlang, but:

  • all of its features seem to be LLM-dependent
  • because of that, its word and phrase explanations have a bit of oddity to them that I feel will get worse when I get past the beginner material
  • it’s a lot slower than it should be because it’s calling into ChatGPT for everything
  • even though this is supposedly their strength, I’ve had really bad instances where a GPT-based translation app translates Spanish (which should be fairly easy) into absolutely nonsensical English, and I’m kind of terrified I’ll make a fool of myself learning Spanish from a system where that’s a statistically likely probability
  • maybe I don’t want to pay some asshole to not write me some study materials????
  • plagiarism and the rainforests
  • it feels like Readlang really doesn’t need an LLM or a $6/month subscription that’ll almost certainly go up? like, it’s essentially an e-reader with a manual translation feature (that could be just a Spanish word/phrase dictionary) that also generates flash cards whenever you activate the translation. is there really not an e-reader or browser plugin that just does this shit without LLMs?

with that rant out of the way, I’m open to suggestions that aren’t Duolingo’s model or another round of passing grades and zero vocabulary retention at the community college

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I have a memrise lifetime thing that I bought some years ago and occasionally use, but I've never done a comparative test so I can't tell you how much better/worse it is than anything else. they did try integrating some chatgpt-backed "have a conversation" junk a while back but it's optional (and when I asked support about it, as well as which data is used for training, the answer said it was optional. I have no measure to tell how true this was/is)

you don't say which you want to learn (except mentioning spanish) but best other addition I have is that languagejones (youtube channel) recently did a review of every language on duolingo, including some comparisons with how those languages were treated on other platforms. might be worth a look

bonus round: the most recent agma schwa cursed conlang circus featured some absolutely amazing entries (I watched part 3 last weekend while recuperating on the couch). some of the ones from it include goptjaam and seraphim and I promise you they may be the most cursed thing you see all day

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