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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • Well, there was Rainfurrest, which was so bad that I know the name off the top of my head without even being in the furry scene. From what I’ve heard it was an outlier organized by people who’d been banned from other conventions so by no means typical.

    But it’s not like I’ve never heard of a furry convention going wrong.


  • If you want a bunch of stuff that’s not in core or extra and you don’t want to intensely babysit the AUR, you could try Chaotic-AUR. It hosts prebuilt packages for a bunch of AUR packages which are actively maintained by the Chaotic team.

    I consider it to be more secure than the AUR proper since they actually care for their packages and review nontrivial changes. For instance, the recent takeover attacks didn’t hit Chaotic-AUR builds since the changed packages didn’t make it past the review.

    It’s still an unofficial third-party repository and closer to the AUR than to extra but I consider it a major step up.





  • Problem is, if your slang is too new it looks like gibberish. Of course you could try something else that stands out. Like badly translated idioms.

    But it’s probably jacket like pants. Even if you tear your ass open to make your writing look less 08/15 that doesn’t mean everything’s in butter. It’s probably only a matter of time until LLMs will copper off that style as well and your clever plan turns into a zero number. And that’s where the hare lies in the pepper: Your clarity goes over the Jordan and it ain’t itching the LLMs’ bean. It’ll get trained on your stuff anyway and the cat bites its own tail.

    Maybe bad translations aren’t the solution either.


  • The same happens to people who write a lot and pay attention to their style, such as this gentleman. The way LLMs generate text is strongly influenced by what used to be considered a high-effort eloquent style. Varied sentence lengths, triplets, typographically correct punctuation, yada yada yada. Until recently, that stuff used to be the hallmark of professional writers (and Kenyans, apparently).

    What were LLMs trained on? Professional writing, first and foremost. Books, scientific papers, op-eds, blog posts. So by default they take a polite, professional tone with all the flourishes and best practices that previously used to be de rigueur for authors and the like. So now what happens when someone used to “proper” writing writes something?

    Everyone thinks it’s AI slop because that’s how LLMs talk. High effort now looks like low effort. And because tech bros immediately went on to develop “humanizing” tech, any other style will soon also look like low effort. And the same is true for art: Being able to produce highly detailed pictures with spectacular colors and shadows went from something impressive to evidence that you’re just a random jackass with a ChatGPT subscription.

    You can’t really win anymore. Anything short of a live performance or a feature-length movie could feasibly have been generated by a fully automated content mill. That really sucks if you want to engage in creative expression of any kind and doubly so if you once thought you could make a living off of that.


  • It does to me. mm-dd is not used at all in my native language and would be considered grammatically incorrect. Since English doesn’t prescribe it I have no reason to fully accept it.

    Note that I still prefer to write ISO 8601 dates but my spoken dates are big-endian.

    Middle-endian dates like “June 15th 2046” are just bad, of course.




  • I’m partial to the Tietäväinen design, myself. The Daëron one is nice, too. The Vardopoulou one also feels properly money-like.

    I consider the Dünnweiler design a complete atrocity, the worst one by far. And most of the “people” designs aren’t good.

    What I dislike about the “bird” designs is the backside. Few people have any idea what most of those buildings are and they feel far less European to me than an abstract representation of a historical architectural style.