I love my city (Beirut) it is full of trams (Kia Picanto 2013 base model w/ automatic transmission)

I have a special bottle of cognac for Kissinger, but I was abroad for work when he returned whence he came so I didn’t get to enjoy the occasion. I haven’t opened it yet given how shit the situation everywhere is, but maybe celebrating small wins is vital even when important stuff is happening.

Sprinkle on some Glorm to taste, or for you midsouthnortherners, pour in some Old Undeserving Chattal Slave Mamy’s for a similar effect

Mfw (I am in the Middle East and my understanding of American food is exclusively “<verging-on-parody tuple name> Whopper” (this is a 30 second explainer on how to boil a potato))

I’ve gone down parts of this rabbit hole (reading, not implementation). Wish I could guarantee that I could set anything up (including just setting up Meshtastic nodes in fun places) without getting arrested for setting up what can only look like an espionage infrastructure network to the government.

Difficult explanations of complex subjects that may not be aligned with the statistical word pattern distribution of the corpus of a dead web.

It’s not impossible that this exact paragraph could be generated. But it was more likely crafted by someone who both understands the subject matter on a comfortable level at the very least, and who understands what parts of it are intuitive enough to create a scaffolding of knowledge that are distinctive to this topic.

I don’t think I could have come up with anything that doesn’t use the word iota a half dozen times and then falling backwards on myself trying to get across the idea of how energy could not exist in measures that are not multiples of a minimum iota of energy (and explaining that it’s just how it is, no I don’t know how that was measured, etcetera etcetera)

This is what LLMs are taking from us, and I say this without a shred of irony

I do miss having languages listed on the side by default. I felt like it gave some depth to how important or culturally isolated a subject can be. For example, a short article available in 30 major languages, a long article available in 30 major languages, and a long article only available in like 3 languages would all feel just a little different.

English is not my native language and a lot of subjects I like (or fixations I may have, knowing Wikipedians) just exist in the realm of English. So these long long pages that don’t exist in many languages have a particular vibe to them.

I personally think cooking will have serious staying power.

Yeah it’s a famous Onion style account, local to me. At the risk of having every single one of my comments just be ranting about my country, this checks out. It feels like everyone around me, regardless of how original their thoughts are, sees anything you might input with a keyboard in English as a rough draft that exists only to be “corrected” by a slop filter.

I am even catching clunkily translated GPT-isms in Arabic-language ads on the radio. I thought it was funny that we had one of the highest ChatGPT users per capita soon after it launched (according to many dubious infographics at least, I can’t find them now so I guess that was overblown), but it’s been shit. Especially as my own writing is a bit mechanical, since my English is much more informed by reading than speaking. I love getting accused of not doing my job when I’m the only one on my team doing it.

The people behind this page seem to have a refreshingly witty sense of humor but they still felt like they needed to make a few pulls down at the slop machines to make it look good, it even watered down the messaging :(

I was taken aback when I heard someone I expected better from use “matrix”, although it was used in a “some people call it x” context and not the regular one dripping with… let’s call it baggage.

Outhouse Perilous is an absolutely spectacular username.

I won’t count on this being particularly productive. Most people in Lebanon are glad to see the old regime finally out of power but I don’t see any optimism about this one.

I’ve been looking at this kind of thing a lot lately and it really only makes me want to get an older iPod and shove a terabyte and a new battery into it

I somewhat love that regardless how shitty their politics are, the main way they frame having any opinion at all is by pointing to brands. Like beliefs primarily exist in the back and forth between whoever writes the PR statement and whoever points at it and makes caveman noises.

This obsession with companies’ “opinions” and political expression via public complaints about marketing blurbs is really funny to me.

This is the translation they forced me to memorize at gunpoint at Liberal Arts University of Woke:

Oh I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. I wonder how this integrates into something like Jellyfin if I want to host my own personal music streaming for myself.

Did someone just print out the list from the photo that’s been doing the rounds for a month now and post it to TikTok as a copy-and-paste joke?

I think reposting jokes is the lifeblood of the internet but being a meme cover artist seems kind of… hm. Sharing a joke reveals a good (or bad!) sense of humor. Copying it beat for beat reveals something a bit different, but I can’t place it.

The original had an Arabic keyboard in the background. Gotta look out for one of our own.

I didn’t know about this. That’s kind of disgusting.

They’ve been on a very aggressive charm campaign all over the Middle East as well. Still undoing the damage from that time their products were prominently photographed with the modern SS.

We’ve already reached the point where the Her scenario is optimistic retrofuturism.

I profoundly hate the AI social phenomenon in every manifestation. Fucking Christ.

I did notice the same title since they were near each other on my front page. But it does look like you’re posting this uncritically, even with the context. It looks less like you’re showing us something relevant but tasteless to gawk at the state of mainstream online “content” and more like you want to laugh at “annoying fat bitches maaaaan” (who are actually doing their friend a favor seeing what the OOP is going for).

Childish misogyny is endemic on most online platforms now, none of us here want to see this shit. It’s not people being dumb.