Supposedly the best thing to do is to lay perfectly motionless in bed despite being wide awake, because that’s still a form of rest and “better than nothing”. This isn’t always what I do myself, though: sometimes I will take an extra melatonin tablet or use the bathroom, and I always wear my trusty eye mask in any case; but if you absolutely have to fidget with something in bed, I think the most recommendable thing is physical paper books. Either books for reading, including comic books; or a notebook into which you can jot down ideas, journal, doodle, whatever it may be.

The online language encyclopedia Omniglot has a page dedicated to “My hovercraft is full of eels” in all the languages of the world

https://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm

Probably French, actually. There are exactly two major languages where Israel is officially spelled Israël, and those are Dutch and French; of those two, the only one that says Palestine rather than Palestina is French.

Language learning resources containing woefully inaccurate information are, of course, nothing new, but LLMs represent a particular issue in how easily they can drown out or blend in with good materials, and how disproportionate LLM output quality can be between languages. I tried using a chatbot as a Japanese conversation partner once, and almost immediately gave up because it was spewing complete nonsense — and that’s Japanese, the eighth-most spoken language in the world by number of speakers, and one of the most in-demand languages for learning resources.

Norwegian is tiny in comparison, and at that many Norwegians primarily navigate the Internet in English, which means that LLMs indiscriminately stealing content from the open Internet simply have less to work with in Norwegian. Things are worst of all, of course, for endangered Indigenous languages. If we put on our POSIWID caps, I might argue that AI slop serves to hinder people from learning both Norwegian and the endangered Indigenous languages: in the latter case, it’s a part of the cultural genocide, in the former case, it’s because many rights and privileges in Norway (not least naturalization) are tied to Norwegian proficiency — therefore the longer it takes immigrants to learn Norwegian, the harder it will be for them to acquire those rights and privileges. This is part of my critique of the role of the English language in Norway: if every Norwegian also knows English, and uses English when talking to immigrants and Norwegian when talking amongst themselves, then the immigrants are denied more opportunities to actively practice the language. I recently met a British immigrant who’s lived in this country since the '90s yet could hardly speak a word of Norwegian.

We can also bring up Deaf issues here, as I recently shared an article about how some people are trying to use “AI” to make a Norwegian Sign Language translator… My friends, if “AI” gives us chiaoens in Norwegian — a language with like 2,000x more native speakers and probably 200,000x more training data and institutional support than Norwegian Sign Language — what the FUCK do you think it’s gonna do with Norwegian Sign Language‽ Deaf people criticize proposals to replace terps with AI for good reason. It’s abandonment.

We can at least take solace in the fact that this shit is gonna collapse under its own weight sooner rather than later.

.cat webmasters not knowing their TLD is for Catalan and .io webmasters not knowing their TLD financially supports the British occupation of the Chagos Islands, name a more iconic duo.

I’m pretty sure they’ll let you use the .cat TLD if you literally just do the bare minimum to “promote Catalan language and culture”, which is oftentimes as simple as just including Catalan as a UI language option. That’s what nyan.cat did.

But yeah, look into your TLDs before you use them, kids.

That’s certainly the pitch, but that’s not really what it is in practice, is it? It responds to your questions completely immediately, at a clear cost to the environment and even people’s access to water and electricity; it has vast amounts of knowledge, which is to say it possesses knowledge that any human could get from just skimming the first few results of a web search and then confidently bullshitting the rest; it never leaves you nor tires of you, and it’s always by your side, in much the same way as an anime body pillow is; and it gets to know you as you tell it things you’d tell nobody else, because you’re feeding your most sensitive information into foreign data centers, where your information might come up in other people’s chats, if it doesn’t literally get leaked without your consent.

I would see the appeal if it worked exactly as the pitch says, but it doesn’t. People are deluding themselves to their own detriment.

I genuinely don’t understand how people end up this way about “AI”. Like I just plainly don’t get it. People are capable of understanding how these machines work, including what they do with your input and the privacy ramifications of that, and figuring out through reason, research and experimentation what good use cases for the technology are — I have myself experimented with LLMs on several occasions, and have determined that I have basically no use for the technology at all, and only a few very limited use cases for other ML-based technologies.

I do not believe myself to be better than other people, nor uniquely capable of making rational decisions about new technologies, and yet here we are: relatives, employers, coworkers and the likes all treating “AI” as a god rather than as a mechanical Turk… But what on Earth drives these people to believe so firmly? We the actors who populate the present day are certainly Children of Troubled Times, it seems.

Calvin Coolidge (№30) was born on July 4, but I’m guessing you mean an incumbent president?

Edit: Also FWIW three presidents kicked the bucket on July 4, John Adams (№2) and Thomas Jefferson (№3) famously both in 1826, James Monroe (№5) in 1831.

Famously, X Dot Com and “AI” image generation are not at all used for mind-melting propaganda, it’s those damned TVs that hardly anyone watches anymore

Hah, implying the existence of “genetically modified crystals”? What is this, [Steven Universe / Land of the Lustrous / Friendship is Magic / why are there so many works of fiction depicting living crystals / I’ve never really thought about it before but it’s a surprisingly common trope isn’t it]?

If we’re being honest with ourselves the answer is really probably about the same as for people from anywhere else in the imperial core — but I still think that “overapplying” Celiac labels is really just an example of good universal design, so I don’t see what’s worthy of mockery about it.

…I don’t get it? Glucose syrup is gluten free. Is there something I’m missing?

shikanokonokonokokoshitantan

That’s what I’m figuring too, but it’s hard to interpret a one word reply.

…Is according to Wiktionary a rare synonym of “pedophilia” — what do you mean by this?

I also think that there’s a parallel between the sexual objectification of progressively younger people, and capitalists’ desire to bring back child labor — as in, these are two sides of the same coin, like one of the main driving forces behind the reproduction of pedophilia in our current mode of production is the mode’s need for a progressively larger pool of laborers who are ideally more easily exploited and abused.

So this is what I’m referring to when I say that “pedophilia is a system”: that all sexuality is in some manner both reproductive and reproduced, and as such pedophilia would not exist without a mode of production already prone to exploit and abuse children in other ways. That pedophilia is not really a product of “defective brains”, but is rather “programmed”, created by these systems of exploitation as a tool to help maintain themselves — and this is just as true of the pederasts of ancient slave societies as the Xitter “lolicons” of today.

But this is just my own view.

There is a cosmically ironic sort of humor in how people like me have to be like “If I mention that I enjoyed a problematic anime show seven years ago while still recognizing its issues, will people think I’m a pedophile?” etc, meanwhile rich and well-connected cishet men like this guy can literally scream “I WANT THE LEGAL RIGHT TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT CHILDREN!!!” and a bajillion creeps will arf and clap without worry of consequence.

Pedophilia Is A System

I think partially it’s that people’s eyes just sort of glaze over when they see a foreign language, because they’re afraid a false friend or wrong context-based assumption will screw them over, or because they’re otherwise just expecting it to be harder.

Not to mention that being able to parse French like this for me is making use of knowledge of several different languages which loaned different French words at different times and might use the same loans differently; as well as making use of my past exposure to French; so a text like this might be harder to parse for someone with less exposure to French, and fewer other (esp. Western European) languages under their belt.