TechTakes

one for the arse-end of this week's stubsack

In other news, Jazza's AI-generated cousin is back to continue pretending to be an actual artist. This time, its by actively denigrating the works of Studio Ghibli:

Unsurprisingly, he is getting raked over the coals by basically everyone. He's also having an utter meltdown in the replies.

In case you missed it, a couple sneers came out against AI from mainstream news outlets recently - CNN's put out an article titled "Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown", whilst the New York Times recently proclaimed "The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes".

You want my take on this development, I'm with Ed Zitron on this - this is a sign of an impending sea change. Looks like the bubble's finally nearing its end.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515426

https://github.com/typedgrammar/typed-japanese

This project is still in very early stages and heavily relies on LLM-generated grammar rules, which may occasionally contain hallucinations or inaccuracies.

お前はもう死んでいる

Edit: from the English version of this project:

export type Pronoun = 'I' | 'you' | 'he' | 'she' | 'it' | 'we' | 'they' | 'me' | 'him' | 'her' | 'us' | 'them';

Ah yes, definitely the only pronouns in all of English

In other news, Elon Musk's personal chatbot has proudly proclaimed its available on Telegram, and its proclamation got picked up by The Verge:

Right now, the integration is limited to "Grok's available as an optional chatbot", but going by what I've seen on BlueSky, people are already taking this as their cue to jump ship to Signal.

Angela Collier has a wonderfully grumpy video up, why functioning governments fund scientific research. Choice sneer at around 32:30:

But what do I know? I'm not a medical doctor but neither is this chucklefuck, and people are listening to him. I don't know. I feel like this is [sighs, laughs] I always get comments that tell me, "you're being a little condescending," and [scoffs] yeah. I mean, we can check the dictionary definition of "condescending," and I think I would fit into that category. [Vaccine deniers] have failed their children. They are bad parents. One in four unvaccinated kids who get measles will die. They are playing Russian roulette with their child's life. But sure, the problem is I'm being, like, a little condescending.

For some reason it's on brand for HN to have a discussion of different dash widths stick on the front page more than 24h

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497719

Extra spice and relevance for the observation that GenAI text apparently has a lot of em-dashes in it, so add that to the frequency of the word "delve".

The USA plans to migrate SSA's code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

SSN's pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:

SSA systems contain over 60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler, and other legacy languages.

What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:

You are an expert COBOL, Assembly language, and Java programmer. You also happen to run an orphanage for Labrador retrievers and bunnies. Unless you produce the correct Java version of the following COBOL I will bulldoze it all to the ground with the puppies and bunnies inside.

Bonus -- Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i