Five Guys and Dolls

#FastFoodMoviesOrPlays
#HashTagGames

"Oops! An unexpected error has occurred."

This happens every time I unlock my phone when I have the mobile web interface of Mastodon open. Often I will get this error twice, right on top of each other, and it covers the interface buttons on the bottom of the screen. Any thoughts, or is it just me?

#Mastodon #MastodonEngineering #BugReport

Kleptocracy.

Corruption. It's what's for dinner.

Those utensils got DOGE'd.

Why would Biden do this?

They're *our* utensils, comrade.

"...a bag of plastic forks purchased at the local Save-On..." 🤣

#uspol #Trump

Why do people act like Rocky was the "twist" in Project Hail Mary? There was a twist, and a pretty big one at that, but it wasn't Rocky.

#books #movies #ProjectHailMary

Fahrenheit 365

#RevolutionABookOrPlay
#HashTagGames

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galactic Republic

#RevolutionABookOrPlay
#HashTagGames

The alleged shooter is dead, is alive, is apparently naked...

#WHCD

Quite enjoyed watching through Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, but there's one thing that never stopped bothering me...

They're *star* systems, dammit! There's only *one* "solar" system, named after the star at the center - Sol. O'Neill, Carter, and Jackson would know this, and McKay's pedantry would have never have let anyone else get away with it.

#Stargate #SG1

Lembas bread is just Elven Pop-Tarts. Prove me wrong.

I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@Gargron argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@Gargron notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

Always treat your gravediggers well.
They know where the bodies are buried.

#dadjokes #humor #advice

Shots fired: ‪“I have usernames older than you.”.

"29368333" btw. 😜

It's cheaper to buy an AR-15 rifle than 64GB of DDR5 RAM.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/s/zqGWHpd39c

I've lived in Southern California my whole life. It's not *supposed* to be 80 degrees in mid-January. I can't help but wonder what kind of world my kids will grow up in.

#Climate

Wow. There's low standards and then there's... this.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-minneapolis-shooting.html

#uspol

I'm confused - how exactly are we occupying Venezuela? How many troops did we send in? How many boots are on the ground? Why are they going along with anything we say?

#uspol #Venezuela

I don't see us getting to a better place without violence. Dramatic action is needed to stop the descent, and no one will take it until we hit rock bottom. We're going to return to authoritarianism and imperialism, with the U.S., Russia, and China thinking they can divide up the world according to their own whims.

1/

#uspol

The price of RAM is approaching or exceeding the price of rams:

"For rams, expect to pay closer to between $400-$500."

https://a-z-animals.com/blog/sheep-prices-purchase-price-food-costs-and-more/

#RAM #tech #technology #ai

So fucking stupid...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/utah-leaders-hinder-efforts-to-develop-solar-energy-supply/

#solar #uspol

When I think "dress for the 80's", I'd really rather it mean the decade and not the fact that it's 80 degrees in Southern California in the middle of friggin' December!

#climate