Mistranslating Tomodachi Life as something about mothers is a very bad literal syllable reading by Grok. And it's a trend. In this post, the user says "I made Sawk in Tomodachi Life." Grok rendered it as "I made a stepmom and daughter-in-law account with a super cheap price."

Interestingly, even when instructed to search before responding, Gemini still returns an idiomatic translation rather than the incorrect X-poisoned translation. But it still does not understand the Pokémon reference.

When I force the ChatGPT and Claude to use RAG, they all return the incorrect translation. The data for "친모아로 격짐 만들었어요" just might become permanently poisoned when translated to English. "격짐" is the official Nintendo Korean term for Fighting-Type, but it may never be in the future to LLMs.

This is an interesting translation failure. The original text, "친모아로 격짐 만들었어요," uses two gaming idioms. Claude(1) and ChatGPT(2) got it wrong. Gemini(3) is basically right. Grok failed badly. Idiomatic translation should be: "I made a fighting gym in Tomodachi Life."

Many Trump supporters literally think they're living in the End Times. 21% of White Evangelicals think Jesus will definitely/probably return during their lifetimes. Sadly, 22% of Black Protestants agree. 47% of Republicans are unsure or think it will happen, compared to 28% of Democrats.

If you're going to be a pedant, at least be correct about things. Wikipedia's first sentence on longships would've been handy for this guy.

Objectively true. 95% of all profits made by venture capital firms are made by just 2% of the firms. 80% of all VC investments fail. Most VC successes are due to insider access, that is someone with a great idea has a connection. It's about access. An LLM could and would do better than most.

One of the most common racist "evolutionary psychology" slanders is that Caucasians are "K strategists" that produce few offspring while investing in them more, and that Africans are "r strategists" who produce many children without spending much to help them. Well, well, well:

That sounds like Underpants Gnome Socialism. Parties must spend tens of millions of dollars educating and activating. Only 59% of adults could name Joe Biden as VP 18 months into his term. web.archive.org/web/20120114...

That is the opposite of my statement. many ≠ all don't ≠ won't The entire premise of the post is that people need media to help them understand who has policies that they like. The world is drowning in far-right propaganda because naive people on the center-to-far-left don't get media power.

Overwhelmingly, passive visual sites like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook that dominate media. Text-oriented social media is not that interesting to most people. Pornography is more popular than Wikipedia and far more popular than news. SEMRush's 5/26 traffic data makes this clear:

I often post about Americans' knowledge gaps, but they exist in many other countries as well. Only 17% of UK adults could pass a citizenship questionnaire. 56% don't know the factions in the Civil War. 1/4th couldn't name Robert Walpole as the first PM. iasservices.org.uk/is-the-life-...

People don't vote on policies. They only generally know what candidates stand for. 67% of people supported the major policies of Kamala Harris. Didn't matter. Republicans have monstrously unpopular policy views (eliminate multiple depts, criminalize abortion...). It doesn't matter.

Fox host Emily Compagno is terrified that Texans love James Talarico. On Friday, she called him a "demon in human skin" and "anti-Texas." Extremist rhetoric like this is designed to keep low-information Christian traditionalists in a 24/7 state of fear. They don't bother w/positive arguments.

Happy Independence Day: In a multiple choice question, 46% of American adults couldn't pick that the 250th anniversary of the country commemorates adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Likely many of the 53% who got it right were guessing. An uninformed people becomes a subjugated people.

John Stuart Mill nailed this. Stupidity is very common, and organized stupidity can easily become powerful.

It's that the PoA is deterministic. The piece isn't all wrong. He makes some good points. But humans reusing neurons and also relying on prediction are very undermining of his contentions. This is also a very poor argument. He's confusing side-effects of thought with the origins of thought:

There are more issues I could list but this is getting too long. I am begging elite media editors to please have computer people write the columns you want arguing that chatbots are not conscious. It's actually really important that they be published. But they need to be credible. /end

In the actual example, Chiang is describing a "for" loop. These have been used in pretty much every programming language released in the last 40 years. It's not a useful criticism of LLMs to say that a computer uses them. There's a bigger problem though...

Everything is classifiable as pornographic. Never doubt this. Bluesky, a website run by non-religious people, thinks that a post about AI that links to Wikipedia is porn. Your work documents, your TV shows, your political views--everything--is porn to someone out there.

WOW: University of Minnesota biologists say they have managed to make the first synthesized cell. It's not made entirely of artificial parts, but it was assembled as a new entity by humans. Video of it below. Popular media writeup: www.cnn.com/2026/07/01/s...

My latest: Thousands of people think their favorite chatbot has a soul, but why does no one ever say the same about Midjourney? Finally finished my essay debunking false beliefs in chatbot consciousness. Please share if you could: plus.flux.community/p/large-lang...

Besides promoting a false Christian nation narrative in American history, the Trump regime is trying to utterly erase any hint that civil rights activists were fighting against racism. The censorship is appalling. This didn't get the attention it deserves earlier: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/a...

I say all the time that so much ostensibly "liberal" discourse is actually just rebadged libertarianism, so it was interesting to see right-wing activist Richard Hanania arguing that all of the most popular content at "The Argument" is basically doctrinaire conservative opinionizing.

✅ Also notable is that Kennedy's anti-vaccine obsessions are not supported by a majority of self-identified MAHA people. The White House knows this and has basically instructed Kennedy to do his deeds in the dark, rather than publicly boast about them.

✅ What we can see from these results is that taking the issues that Kennedy used to attract supporters to Trump can be used by Democrats to educate voters about the corporate agenda of Trump and other Republicans. Having tighter regulations on chemicals is rather popular.

✅ As a former Democrat, Robert Kennedy very clearly did bring some Democrats into the Trump fold, and some have remain there it would seem. But MAHA is such a new movement that there is not overwhelming agreement on much of anything. No single policy idea gets over 60% support.

🧵 The MAHA slogan has always been very vague, so this was a useful Politico poll about what people who identify as MAHA say they believe. Some points: ✅ It's notable that while people commonly associate MAHA with mothers, more men say they identify with it. www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

41% of adults did not know that Joe Biden was the vice president in 2010, despite him having served in the office for 18 months. Currently, 31 percent of adults say they have never heard of Pete Hegseth, despite his 18 months serving in the office of Secretary of Defense.

1/2 The central dilemma for progressives in the US is that they don't spend nearly enough on popular media. Starting in the 1950s, reactionary politicians and activists began building an ecosystem that funded media which built more activists. It worked. Progressives can do the same thing.