Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.

I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!

So in the past week or so a lot of pedestrian crossings in Silicon Valley were “hacked” (probably never changed the default password lol) to make them talk like tech figures.

Here are a few. Note that these voices are most likely AI generated.

1. A crosswalk with the voice of Elon Musk
2. A crosswalk with the voice of Zuck
3. Elon Musk crosswalk just wants to be friends (second video) also Zuck crosswalk is proud of his work (third video).

I didn’t get to hear any of them in person, however the crosswalk near my place has recently stopped saying “change password” constantly, which I’m happy about.

In this case ドドドド or ゴゴゴゴ are both meme sound effects from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure used in dangerous or unnerving scenes. The meaning here would be something like indicating what a menacing aura that hardcore mofo Yud is giving off.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/menacing-ゴゴゴゴ

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-youre-approaching-me-jojo-approach

https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/10/dodododo.html

Of course the AI doesn’t know this so combined the two to produce ゴゴドゴ which just looks kind of stupid.

My go to source for the fact that LLM chatbots suck at writing reasoned replies is https://chatgpt.com/

Oh gosh I looked up the post and that was a mistake. Actually Mr. Yarvin there is quote tweeting someone who dared, on twitter, to say that the Holocaust was real. The replies (including Yarvin’s incorrect & off topic nonsense) being about what you’d expect from twitter nowadays. So much Holocaust denial.

At this point cryptocurrency has a bad enough reputation that they have to try and ease readers into it.

(insert clown getting dressed meme image here)

1. It’s new digg!
2. AI is bad (but also sexy and all powerful)
3. so captchas are hard :(
4. let’s make a real fancy captcha!
5. With… Zero-Knowledge Proofs :D :D :D :D :D (all non cryptocurrency people flee at this point)
6. Also like NFTs for products you buy so when you shill them people know you’re at least a real person doing so (maybe, kinda, sorta)
7. So anyway I was thinking if only there was something else as dystopian cool as Sam Altman 様’s orb thing and we smeared it across the entire internet

Yeah it’s called “autopilot”; named after the Tesla technology!

Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

“We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off

Holy smokes

Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I’m supposed to fill in the blank or something.

To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. It’s a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldn’t understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

This “Cavallo” reference isn’t actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).

Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:

Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. […] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.

Amazing. The government’s official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.

Hey wait a minute we already made that (obvious) joke here on Awful Systems!

I’ve been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and it’s chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.

Do you think he knows that “inspired” and “Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090” are not the same word?

Edit: oh no I read the replies.

Don’t worry I know (approximately) what I’m getting into and have enough savings to be OK even if things don’t work out, and am on good terms with a few Swiss people so won’t start out totally isolated. Worst case scenario I can always move back to California but I’m at the point in my life where I want to check out Europe for a change.

weird german

When my German teacher told me she can’t understand Swiss German I thought “haha I’m in danger”.

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

To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of it’s own lately) and I’ve never worked in government.

But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If there’s anyone who isn’t convinced after reading all the headlines then there’s no convincing them.

I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:

• I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, don’t think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didn’t think I’d have to be in a hurry to update it, and now I’m worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.

• My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria

• My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.

• My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.

* Since I’m taking the work visa route I’ll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.

There is so much bad going on that even just counting the tech-adjacent stuff I have to consciously avoid spamming this forum with it constantly.

Yeah I’m sure DOGE doesn’t appreciate that structured programming hasn’t always been a thing. There was such a cultural backlash against it that GOTO is still a dirty word to this day, even in code where it makes sense, and people will contort their code’s structure to avoid calling it.

The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:

It is our experience that the cycle of workarounds adds to our total technical debt – the amount of extra work that we must do to cope with increased complexity. The complexity of our systems impacts our ability to deliver new capabilities. To break the cycle of technical debt, a fundamental, system-wide replacement of code, data, and infrastructure is required

While I’ve never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. I’ve seen a ground up rewrites go horribly horribly due to poor planning (basically there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense). I think either incremental or ground up can make sense, but you just have to figure out what makes sense for the given system (and even ground up rewrites should be incremental in some respects).

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