chechen warlord ramzan kadyrov brags about cybertruck technical and praises musk for allegedly giving him it in grozny (take it with a heap of salt, like everything that clown says). they want to send it to the frontline armed with nothing more than NSV (think soviet M2 Browning) https://xcancel.com/NOELreports/status/1824820843463000392#m

Kadyrov claimed that Elon Musk supposedly gave him a Cybertruck in Grozny. According to Kadyrov, he plans to send this armed vehicle to the "SVO" zone.

“I express my sincere gratitude to Elon Musk! This is, of course, the strongest genius of our time and a specialist. Great man! Well, the cybertruck turned out to be a powerful project. Undoubtedly one of the best cars in the world! I literally fell in love with this car.”

would be a nice future addition to oryx's list, if they actually put it outside of chechenya

this will probably become a NotAwfulTech post after I explore a bit more, but here’s a quick follow-up to my post last stubsack looking for language learning apps:

the open source apps for the learning system I want to use do exist! that system is essentially an automation around reading an interesting text in Spanish (or any other language), marking and translating terms and phrases with a translation dictionary, and generating flash cards/training materials for those marked terms and phrases. there’s no good name for the apps that implement this idea as a whole so I’m gonna call them the LWT family for reasons that will become clear.

briefly, the LWT family apps I’ve discovered so far are:

• LWT (Learning With Texts) is the original open source system that implemented the learning system I described above (though LWT itself originated as an open source clone of LingQ with some ideas from other learning systems). the Hugo Fara fork is the most recently-maintained version of LWT, but it’s generally considered finished (and extraordinarily difficult to modify) software. I need to look into LWT more since it’s still in active use; I believe it uses an Anki exporter for spaced repetition training. it doesn’t seem to have a mobile UI, which might be a dealbreaker since I’ll probably be doing a lot of learning from my phone
• Lute (Learning Using Texts) is a modernized LWT remake. this one is being developed for stability, so it’s missing features but the ones that exist are reputedly pretty solid. it does have a workable mobile UI, but it lacks any training framework at all (it may have an extremely early Anki plugin to generate flash cards)
• LinguaCafe is a completely reworked LWT with a modern UI. it’s got a bunch of features, but it’s a bit janky overall. this is the one I’m using and liking so far! installing it is a fucking nightmare (you have to use their docker-compose file only, with docker not podman, and absolutely slaughter the permissions on your bind mounts, and no you can’t fire it up native) but the UI’s very modern, it works well on mobile (other than jank), and it has its own spaced repetition training framework as well as (currently essentially useless) Anki export. it supports a variety of freely available translation dictionaries (which it keeps in its own storage so they’re local and very fast) and utterly optional DeepL support I haven’t felt the need to enable. in spite of my nitpicks, I really am enjoying this one so far (but I’m only a couple days in)

Google’s Search Dominance Leaves Sites Little Choice on AI Scraping (no archive - archive.ph appears to have died)

Because Google literally can't stop being evil even when the world's eyes are on it

OT: since we’ve occasionally featured a music thread and such, any interest in a music sub? it could be pair well with this, the awful pub.

the awful pub sub[0], if you will

this thought brought to you by prior threads as well as this that I’m listening to in late-afternoon 26C weather

[0] you know I had to, I couldn’t not

Tangentially topical, here's a startup (of course) who offers CNC-milled marble statuary:

Bloomberg: This Startup Will Make a Sculpture of Your Dog for $10,000

https://archive.is/xHcHH

Via this HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41248112

Not really TESCREAL, more really really late stage capitalism.

Although weirdly I'd be up for one of those really cool late Roman Republic realist busts.

Following up on this comment re: the TESCREAL wikipedia page https://awful.systems/comment/4332398

It's now been nominated for deletion (again), the discussion has blown up because it was noted on social media, and the nominator seems to be an... interesting... character

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/TESCREAL_(2nd_nomination)

Edit I now see they have admitted conflict of interest and visually downgraded their "Delete" nomination (I have no fucking clue if that actually affects anything, it would not surprise me that Wikipedia considers strong formatting a valid signal for determining weight of opinion)

Tangentially related. In 1878, some asshole exhumed 25 human skulls from an abandoned cemetery in far Northern Sweden and took them to Helsinki, where he and his buddies measured them to "prove" that people from the region were less advanced.

Now the skulls are finally being re-interred thanks to pressure from the local community.

Here's a background on the cemetery and the skull-snatching (in Swedish):

https://kulturmiljonorrbotten.com/2023/09/29/akamella-odekyrkogard/

Worldcoin manages to convince Bloomberg it's 2022 and not 2024

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-08-12/how-worldcoin-is-building-digital-ids-to-combat-the-ai-apocalypse

Cosmos Magazine publishes AI-generated articles, drawing criticism from journalists, co-founders

It's the weekend B) time to check in on the doomers w/ Dr. Torres...

Oh damn! I missed the irrefutable evidence of LLM reasoning. They must have done a series of replicable experiments that contradicts the overwhelming evidence that LLM reasoning is more or less a series of pattern matching heuristics. Let's take a look together at their data lads, let the scales fall from our eyes.

... this is their confirmation of reasoning? And they say we are the ones who are fucking coping, lmaou.

oh god the slop machines are coming for the scientific world