You’re hired!
I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.
They also devour my dreams.
You’re hired!
You know what, I got a brilliant idea:
See, the chimp in my avatar is called Ai Ai. Was? I don’t know if she’s still alive; last news I could find about her are from 2005, when she stopped smoking. Anyway, what if I had artificial intelligence to create a bunch of her pictures, and sold them as NFT? The “AI Ai Ai collection”, or Ai³ for short. I wouldn’t do this to scam a bunch of suckers, noooooo; I’d do it because you can get rich, if you “invest” into my collection: buy an Ai³ NFT now, for just 100 euros. Then resell it for a thousand euros, for mad profitz!!!
[…I’m obviously joking. C’mon, this summer is easily getting past 30°C, in a city where it used to snow once in a blue moon. I definitively don’t want to feed the global warming further with dumb crap like this.]


I’m still reading the machine generated transcript of the video. But to keep it short:
The author was messing with ISBNs (international standard book numbers), and noticed invalid ones fell into three categories.
He then uses this to highlight that Wikipedia is already infested by bullshit from large “language” models², and this creates a bunch of vicious cycles that go against the spirit of Wikipedia of reliability, factuality, etc.
Then, if I got this right, he lays out four hypotheses (“theories”) on why people do this³:
Notes (all from my/Lvxferre’s part; none of those is said by the author himself)
twaróg
That’s actually a great idea — gotta try it next time. (I’m almost sure the locally sold keschmier is the same as twaróg, but worst hypothesis homemade requeijão does the trick.)
Ah, I stole the pic from some random site. They do it this way because it’s more presentable. But it’s better to spread the “sauce” across the pasta, mix it a bit, and then add the strawberry pieces. (Or add the strawberry pieces and then mix it, your choice.)
Truskawki z makaronem.

This should be enough for 2 people. It tastes surprisingly nice.
And upon sharing this recipe, I can hear my ancestors… some rolling in their graves and saying “che schifo”, some giving me a thumbs up, and some asking if I could add yucca meal to the dish (no).
Now picture a gangster rapper dressed as Santa Klaus, with an eyepatch on one eye and a bottle of rum, saying “yo ho ho ho”.


Perhaps due to my heavy consumption of Japanese media, my views are biased. But frankly? I think Western design tendencies are the ones being weird here.
Note quotes are out of order. Also, that by “West” I’m including the Latin America I’m from.
“The West has an aversion to information density at times,” says Shoin Wolfe
Indeed, in a country preoccupied with safety, information overload is a part of daily life.
I think the difference is caused by advertisement: Western advertisement is so obnoxious, noisy, bossy, that it is bound to cause even more of a cognitive load than the Japanese counterparts. Western ads boil down to selfish arseholes screeching “are you too stupid to follow simple orders? I told you to consume it!” into your ears, while flashing loud lights. The following excerpt reinforces it:
“For the most part Japanese advertising has been ‘soft-sell,’ relying on the use of celebrities, attractive graphics, music or catchy slogans to sell products.” This was contrasted with “hard-sell” advertising, which uses “analytical logic, product comparison, or ‘annoy and attract attention’ tactics.”
And this might explain why people in the West avoid minor but still relevant info, while in Japan they seem to expect it:
In 2020, Lawson learned the hard way that too much minimalism can backfire. When the convenience store chain redesigned its branded product packaging to embrace negative space, it faced swift and loud mockery on Twitter. Users complained the now uniformly beige products looked too similar and gave no indication of the contents.
Moving on:
“(In web design) I think that negative space is an aesthetic, Western idea,” says Wolfe. “In the West, with physical products and just design in general, they have this idea that more negative space equals luxury.”
I have a better name for the so-called “negative space”: it’s “wasted space”. Space that failed to benefit the user.
And while some waste is unavoidable, I think the current Western design tendencies boil down to “cripple your design until you’re offering the users the bare minimum, before they stop bothering with it”.
“Because one symbol (of kanji) can compress what would be four to six letters in an alphabetic language, we grow up being accustomed to processing dense visual information very quickly,” says Akiko Sakamoto, a freelance UX designer and design strategist who works between Kyoto and Tokyo.
Under ideal conditions, the difference in scripts shouldn’t be relevant here. Sure, kanji is more informationally dense per character, but as a consequence your average kanji has more strokes than your average Latin letter. Thus requiring larger sizes for comfortable reading. And I think both things cancel each other out, forcing both scripts to convey roughly the same amount of info per area.
For the sake of example, contrast
People here in the Fediverse are probably seeing all four characters the same size, right? Note how the difference between 水/氷 feels way subtler than the one between E/F.
…that is, under ideal conditions.


Sorry, I can’t hear what you said, because of all that *CLANK CLANK CLANK* noise you’re making. Clanker~


Crimea has a mountain range up south, really close to the sea, so it has a bunch of really short rivers. Chile is the same.
That said the river from the “Crimea river” meme is the Salğır/Салгир:



Info on how to disable AI anti-features from Firefox here and here.
I’m getting real tired of this shit. It isn’t just Firefox, or large token models; every fucking little thing nowadays has anti-features, that go against why I want that thing, that I need to work around, that makes every simple task a bloody chore.
I open my bank phone application. Then I unlock it through biometry. Then I close 9001 useless pop-ups. Then I can actually check if my client paid me. Every bloody single time.
I open my e-mail. Sometimes it asks for login, that’s fine. But if it does, it’ll try to force me to give it my phone number. There’s no “no, stop asking”, only a “MaYbE LaTeR LoL”. Keep in mind that email account is older than some adults here in the Fediverse.
COVID times I had to buy a new microwaves oven. It lacks numbers buttons; instead it has a bunch of useless buttons for popped maize, brigadeiro, milk, pudding, soup. If I want to heat my cats’ frozen food for 35s, I can’t simply press “3”, then “5”, then “on”, like I did with the old one — I need to press +10s four times, then “on”, then stare the bloody thing until there are 5s left, then stop it prematurely. If I don’t do it either there’s frozen cat food, or Kika refuses it because it’s too hot.
I go buy some slippers. Seller says I should register for their “discounts program” or crap like that. I tell her [translated] “no, thanks, I only want the slippers”. Seller asks me “Why?”, as if I had any legal or moral obligation to justify my decisions. I tell her “I do not want it. I only want to buy a pair of slippers.” She insists, vomiting some explanation on that bloody shite discounts program I give no flying fucks about, until I cut her short and say “I give up. I’m buying it elsewhere.” and leave the shop (and the slippers). I shit you not, I had an easier time buying nitric acid in the 00s than slippers now in the 20s.
That bloody browser is the cherry of the cake for me. I already avoid Chromium and similar Google trash as much as possible, as I know Google vultures the shit out of your personal info; now every bloody time Firefox updates I need to check two computers, two phones, and a few household electronics for potential shit to disable. Do I need to sell my soul to Satan to make things simpler again? Oh wait, souls don’t exist so I’m out of luck.
Yes, I’m aware, there’s LibreWolf. But that’s like makeup hiding your black eye, since it’s a “soft” fork of Firefox. And it doesn’t change that bitter taste on your mouth, that you can’t even browse the internet in peace any more.


Those are great to add to beans or chickpeas.
For example, feijoada relies on those and pig ears for thickness, while other ingredients (like sausages, jerk, bacon, smoked pork ribs, etc.) get added for the meat and flavour.


Give up all hope (of seeing the recipe), you who enter (the site)!


This is like a network of small problems: the advertisement model being awful, ads paying almost nothing per view, overabundance of cooking sites, Google’s monopoly on search, search engine optimisation, Google forcing you to feed its AI to show your site in search results, AI models and their intrinsic shortcomings (such as not understanding what they output)…
Cooking sites were the first victims because of how heavily they rely on SEO shit, and how people hate it. But others will eventually go the same way.


Now I regret following it with only two points, instead of three. LLMs love listing threes.
I typically used the em dash only when writing professionally, but because of this AI thing I’m doing it in general, just to see how it turns out. (So far it’s a good way to sniff out assumers.)
a ‘product of its time’.
Something like this, indeed. Or more like a product of the situation, plus a few laws - like network effect (the value a user derives from the OS depends on the number of users using it).
Note that not even the devs are to blame for this; it makes sense someone releasing commercial software would focus on the 70% (Windows), sometimes on the 15% (Mac OS), but almost never on the 4% (Linux).
It does, but this is a vicious cycle: small market share → devs don’t release Linux versions for their software → the software ecosystem is fragile → users who’d rather use Linux still need to use Windows → small market share. Anything countering any of those “links” weakens the vicious cycle, including Microsoft pissing off some Windows users; that’s why the penguin gets smug, because they know “Winrows is now an Agenric OS lol lmao” means slightly higher Linux market share.
Your typical Linux user gets really smug when learning about dumb shit Microsoft is doing with Windows. Just like that penguin in the OP. Because that dumb shit is making plenty Windows users consider ditching Windows for Linux.
One of those things is to force-feed AI into the users. Exemplified by Microsoft seeking to transform Windows into an “agentic OS”. People who don’t know how those systems work don’t want it; and people who do, even less.
If she is/was alive, what if she was the one vibe coding the AI? Then you’d get Ai Ai AI AI Ai Ai.
…this is quickly becoming buffalo⁸ tiers of silly.