That I feel is a case of people yearning for a day that never existed.

Like, every GenX/Older Millennial who had a modem too early in life has stories about The Anarchist’s Cookbook. And the thing you learn REAL fast is that people would edit and share MUCH more dangerous versions (and considering what the source was to begin with…). I remember being part of the mod staff for a couple DC++ hubs where we would check versions and tell anyone with a(n overly) dangerous edit to delete that shit or be banned.

Fast forward a couple decades and I needed to do a temporary repair on my car before I could get some “body” damage fixed (like two hours of effort but needed a part). Every attempt at searching, even on reddit, would talk about how you should use flexseal or the good duct tape or whatever. Only lucked out because I found one blog post that talked about how using any of those methods would guarantee you rip off the paint and drastically increase the cost of repairs and to instead use automotive masking tape unless you REALLY needed to drive in a heavy downpour.

Same with doing house work. Youtube is immensely useful for that. But there is a reason so many “maker” channels have “React to life hack” videos. Because if you don’t know what you are doing? Some whackjob using clever editing to make it look like they built a duct adapter out of elmer’s glue and an actual repair video are indistinguishable (especially after youtube hid the dislikes…). And that can range from wasting your time to outright fire hazards or frozen pipes.

The reality is that people have always been shits. And it REALLY fucking sucks when the LLMs designed to parse that, invariably, become shits too. But this has been a problem since people discovered SEO in the first place. Volume has gone up but the problem is not new.

And… late stage capitalism. But I find myself REALLY liking Kagi (libertarian tech bro CEO aside…) simply because it reduces the impact of my search history on results while also letting me manually emphasize some sites or outright block any that piss me off. Still get the SEO blogspam but a lot less.

What is “human speech”? Again, so many people (around the world) have picked up idioms and speaking cadences based on the media they consume. A great example is that two of my best friends are from the UK but have been in the US long enough that their families make fun of them. Yet their kid actually pronounces it “al-you-min-ee-uhm” even though they both say “al-ooh-min-um”. Why? Because he watches a cartoon where they pronounce it the British way.

And I already referenced socal-ification which is heavily based on screenwriters and actors who live in LA. Again, do we not speak “human speech” because it was artificially influenced?

Like, yeah, LLMs are “tainted” with the word “delve” (which I am pretty sure comes from youtube scripts anyway but…). So are people. There is a lot of value in researching the WHY a given word or idiom becomes so popular but, at the end of the day… people be saying “delve” a lot.

Having read the article:

I agree that the approach is no longer viable but I strongly disagree with the rationale. It boils down to three key aspects:

1. Wordfreq works by scraping the “open web”. As a result, it is being inundated with massive amounts of gpt spam articles. This is problematic in that it is not “natural language” between people but… those articles never were. If you think anyone talks like the average SEO recipe blog then… more on that later.
2. Sites are increasingly locking down access to scraping their text. This… I actually think is really good. I strongly dislike that that locking down means “so that only people who pay us can train off of you” but I have always disliked the idea that people just train models off of social media with no consent whatsoever
3. Funding for NLP research is basically dead. No arguments there and I have similar rants from different perspectives. But… that is when you learn how to call what you do AI to get back your old funding.

But I think the bigger part, that I strongly disagree with, is the idea that this is not the language of a post-2021 society. With points like

Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.”

But… look up “so-cal-ification” and how many people have some “valley girl” idioms and cadence to their normal speech because that is what we grew up on. Like, I say “like” a lot to chain thoughts together and am under no illusions that came from TV. Same with how you can generally spot someone who grew up reading SFF based on how they use some semi-obscure words and are almost guaranteed to mispronounce them.

Because it is the same logic as “literally there is no word that means literally anymore”. Yeah, it is true. Yeah, it is annoying. But language evolves and it doesn’t always evolve in ways that make sense.

Or, just look at how many people immediately started using the phrase “enshittification” every chance they got. Or who learned about the Ship of Theseus and apply it every chance they get.

Like (there it is again!), a great example is cell phones. Reality TV popularized the idea of putting your phone on speaker, holding it in the palm of your hand, and talking into it. That is fucking obnoxious and has made the world a worse place. But part of that was necessity (in reality tv it is so that the audience gets both perspectives. In reality life it is because of shit like the iphone having a generation or two that would drop calls if you held it like a god damned phone) and then it is just that feedback loop. Cell phone companies design their phones to look good on TV when held that way and people who watch TV start doing that because all the cool people do it. And so forth.

AI has already begun to change language and it will continue to do so in the future. That is just reality and it is no different than radio and especially television leading to many regional dialects being outright wiped out.

See this going around and… that is a LOT of reaching from a random CSR trying to placate an angry user.

“We are currently working with Rockstar games to find a fix” followed by “You can buy the game you already have for cheap” just means that Valve sent an email saying “Bro, what the fuck?”. And Rockstar will likely send a response of “Do you want GTA 6 or not?” and this will never come up again.

I would like to be proven wrong (GTA:O is trash but some people like it) but … not optimistic. And we get these kind of “A random CSR said something to make me stop asking to speak to their manager!” level of “leaks” a few times a year. The vast majority go nowhere.

It can be hit or miss with some particularly stupid government workers, but Passport Cards are very much a thing and qualify as Real ID Compliant.

As a passport it is only valid for like Canada and Mexico but it is well worth the extra 20 or 30 bucks when you get a passport. On travel it is a nice ID that you don’t REALLY care if it gets stolen (since your Driver’s License is back at the hotel). Also incredibly useful when you need multiple forms of ID for something.

But also would not be a horrible choice as a non-driver ID. Just a hassle to get one without a Driver’s License because 'murica.

• Wait a couple of weeks.
• Return to police station, pay the fee, and pick up your brand new ID or passport.

I mean… that IS how you get a passport. Just replace “police station” with “post office”.

The issue is that the US is comparable in size to the EU. Even excluding the flyover states, people can spend an entire lifetime just going on domestic trips for holidays and the like.

So the vast majority of Americans see no need for a passport until they have booked their dream trip and realize that France is a different country. Hence the mad rush and expedited processing and so forth.

I personally make life more inconvenient for myself because I refuse to deal with booking time for photos at a post office or pay a pharmacy to do it for me so I end up spending ten minutes in gimp formatting things every N years. But that is very much a stupid me thing.

That is very incorrect.

There is a lot of footage (some “fun” and some horrific) of pagers exploding in grocery stores and malls and the like. Because the point of the pagers was for the terrorists to be reachable outside of caves and camps.

And… there are civilians standing around in those cases. With kids who tend to have heads at waist level.

I saw unsubstantiated reports claiming there was 10-20 grams of high explosive (eg C4). Which looks pretty “right” based on the footage I looked at before remembering this would be faces of death. An energetic “explosion” coming out the side of the pager that, combined with the metal from the batteries or the interior plates of the pager, would generate a good amount of shrapnel. So high odds of death if you were looking at your pager to read the message and almost guaranteed injury and cuts otherwise. And, if you were gripping your pager on the wrong side, likely loss of fingers (like a fire cracker in the hand).

Its one reason that a big part of securing your supply chains is to actually inspect what you purchase. (Allegedly) Israel with a few hours in a warehouse overnight could swap out a LOT of pager backplates in ways that are more or less indetectable at a glance or even picking it up (20 grams is nothing). But if you were to weigh those and realize they are 20 grams heavier than all the other pagers you bought (since packaged goods are fairly consistent), that should raise a lot of red flags.

But I am not aware of even government orgs (let alone terrorist orgs) who are willing to put the effort in to do that.

The secret service are cops too.

But hey, I guess I am just angry at badges and not at increasingly militarized orgs that have no problem violating people’s rights (breaking up protesters and the like) but can’t even do the fucking job they are allegedly shitting on civil rights to do.

… So did you wake up this morning and just say to yourself “I need to defend some cops”

The secret service were in charge of trump’s security detail. There was an armed gunman on a roof for a ridiculously large amount of time. No matter how many punisher skulls you have tattooed on your wee wee, they fucked up. Simple as that.

So… the secret service did their job this time? Rather than waiting while someone was camped out on a roof taking ages to miss a shot?

I genuinely don’t care if someone’s holy book or ancient traditions say killing yourself is fine.

I very much do care about the family and friends that are left behind to process the deaths of loved ones. As well as the lives that are cut short because someone decided the world would be a better place with them dead.

I mean, taking the conquered as slaves also has a lot of history behind it. So does ritualistic sacrifice to get your way (hmmm).

But hey, that is a good enough reason. So please let me know who I should cheer for and call a hero for making the world a better place by killing themselves. Just like I need to know who should be property of others and who shouldn’t

Or maybe, just maybe, we can realize that it is massively fucked up to celebrate suicide just because it might be politically advantageous even though, time and time again, it isn’t even that?

Got it. he died for your righteous cause so it is all good. Nobody has EVER said that in human history.

So that means we need to rent a billboard to make sure everyone knows Little Johnny Smith killed himself because Amy Jo wouldn’t go to the prom with him?

There is a reason that news outlets have increasingly made it a point to not publish suicide letters. Whether they be individuals slitting their own throats or kids committing suicide by cop. It just leads to people who can find a political use for their death glorifying it… as we are seeing in this thread.

As for people who have commit suicide to advance a political or military agenda of an organization: We glorify Thích Quảng Đức even though, to quote wikipedia

Quảng Đức’s act increased international pressure on Diệm and led him to announce reforms with the intention of mollifying the Buddhists. However, the promised reforms were not implemented, leading to a deterioration in the dispute

Do we also glorify Japanese Kamikaze pilots in World War 2? What about child soldiers so manipulated that they are willing to die for a warlord?

Suicide is NEVER the answer*. And all glorifying it and calling people “heroes” for killing themselves does is give scared and lonely people an excuse. They aren’t ending their own lives, they are dying for something more important, yeah…

And anyone whose immediate reaction is “how can I use this death to my own advantage”… they are a fucking monster.

*: Well, outside of euthanasia for medical reasons but that is a much more complicated topic that requires a lot of discussion on the proper way to ensure someone is ending it because of quality of life and not because they are lonely or angry.

No. His death is something you can take advantage of.

Think about that

People make plenty of excuses for why they kill themselves. Plenty of scared and lonely people have complete manifestos on why they are actually winning by ending their own lives.

The end result is still someone killed themselves and left a hole in the lives of everyone who cared about them. And it should not be celebrated.

Exactly. All this person has accomplished is making those opposed to genocide seem like extremists while taking someone away from all the people who care about him.

And it should not need to be pointed out why calling him a “hero” and cheering for his death is maybe the wrong takeaway from this.

I have sprinted without this being an issue so color me very confused.

Do you wear very loose fitting clothes by any chance?