jhirsch changed masto servers!

@jaredhirsch
6 Followers
90 Following
100 Posts

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jaredhirsch/115130727830646742

In practical terms, I wasn't able to get very far with "Simplified Technical English"--there's a huge spec, but I didn't find any good tools to help reduce the linguistic complexity of an existing draft.

To simplify my English, I've been using the Hemingway Editor--the desktop version, with no AI sprinkles. It highlights different problems with a writing selection, like complex sentence structure or passive voice, and provides a reading level score. Highly recommended!

https://hemingwayapp.com/desktop

Good rundown of the newly signed California immigration laws from Calmatters: https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/09/newsom-new-immigration-laws/

I don't know how well these will hold up against our corrupt SCOTUS, but it's something to hopefully slow Trump's Gestapo and inspire other states.

Most of these new laws go into effect immediately, though the masked police ban doesn't take effect until July 2026--too little, too late.

I reached a satisfying milestone last night: after a few months of 20 minute morning sessions with April Wilson's _German Quickly_, and leaning hard on Hyman's German-English math dictionary, I was able to slowly make my way through the table of contents and a few sentences in Kronecker's Grundzüge. Progress!

Screenshotting this beautiful summary of the fundamental intellectual dishonesty and greed behind Gen AI, because I couldn't fit it into a single mastodon post. The whole quote fits into the alt text field, another accessibility victory for all ❤️

From https://against-a-i.com/first-day-speeches/

TIL: there's a huge market in botnets to scrape the web for AI training. The new euphemism is "residential proxies".

Lots of details in this interesting article by @jwildeboer:

https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/04/Web-is-Broken-Botnet-Part-2/

Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken

I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you!

Jan Wildeboer's Blog
pretty excited to migrate from github to codeberg, including my static websites. (errr, I guess I'm mostly procrastinating getting those profiles blog posts into my existing static site...)

Lovely AI bullshit reality check

https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377

Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive. 14% say it's a 10x improvement. So where's the flood of new software? Turns out those productivity claims are bullshit.

Even better, add `&udm=14` to a google search URL to just show links. No summary boxes, no AI sprinkles.

To add this to your Firefox:
* Go to about:preferences > search
* Go down to the list of search engines and hit the Add button
* Set the URL to be: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
* Give it a one-letter shortcut, like @g, so it's easy to toggle it (or you can just make it the default)
* Search the web like it's 2005!

Bevor Sie zur Google Suche weitergehen

I've often wondered how best to structure my writing so that my use of English is easy to understand for non-native speakers. It turns out there is a standard for this! "Simplified Technical English", originally designed by the aerospace industry, specifies both a restricted dictionary and grammatical guidance. https://www.asd-ste100.org/
ASD-STE100 HOME PAGE

Welcome to the official site of ASD Simplified Technical English (ASD-STE100). Learn about the STEMG, official trainers, training opportunities, and resources to apply STE in technical documentation.

Finally figured it out. Add "-noai" to any google search to remove the AI sprinkles from your search results