@nickashdown.bsky.social
Canadian journalist/writer in Brussels writing mostly about Turkey. New Lines Magazine, LA Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Policy, Globe & Mail, etc. Selected clippings: https://nickashdown.weebly.com/selected-published-works
Poll indicates that while most Americans oppose the strikes on Iran, Republicans overwhelmingly (84%) support them.
Today, Ekrem Imamoglu stands trial on the most Kafkaesque allegation of establishing a " criminal organisation for illicit gain." The most threatening political rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan allegedly sought, through this purported network, +
AI is also perfect for some of the brainless grunt work that I hate as a writer/journalist, e.g. coming up with a headline or section heading.
It even includes notes for references in the transcription not every reader will know.
Claude even catches mis-transcibed names of historical Kurdish writers!
Conflicting reports regarding whether the Iranians intentionally targeted Turkey.
The 15 journalists and media workers currently imprisoned in Turkey for doing their jobs:
And now of course you have people not just using AI in their own writing, but subconsciously mimicking the style of AI, just like AI mimics us, to the point where it's very hard to distinguish between AI and human.
I really think all the bad habits of LLMs come directly from the human-written text they've been trained on. Yes, the false profundity of bad writing like Seva points out, but also the hollow platitudes of corporate-speak, PR-speak, therapy-speak, positivity-speak, social media-speak.
NATO shot down Iranian missile "headed towards Turkish airspace." Debris of interceptor fell over Hatay.
In Lebanon people are sleeping in cars or sitting in front of schools, which have opened their doors to displaced, because there is nowhere else to go.
I witnessed one woman begin screaming outside one school who said they had no more place. People sat along the walls or on motorised scooters.
Some immediate thoughts on possible implications of the current US/Israel-Iran war for Turkey:
1) For Turkey, the security and economic risks of a prolonged war are significant. These include rising energy prices amid ongoing domestic economic fragility, potential declines in tourism revenues,
People keep saying that this goes against the Davis speech. It does not. Carney said the rules based international order was always hypocritical, is now dead, and we live in a time of rupture. I disagree with support but this is not against what he said. The sign is gone. GONE GONE.
Was listening to interviews with Iranians in Iran at the beginning of this podcast, and they also supported an American attack.
www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-...
"The more likely scenario is not columns of Russian tanks rolling into Poland, but rather a limited attack on a Nato member that challenges the alliance to risk a major military confrontation with Russia to come to that state’s defence."
There's lots of other good (and free) Euro alternatives to US software (hardware is harder) that also have much greater privacy and no enshittification.
Search engines: Ecosia (🇫🇷), Mojeek (🇬🇧), Qwant (🇩🇪)
Web browser: Vivaldi (🇳🇴/🇮🇸)
Email: Proton Mail (🇨🇭)
Word Processor: LibreOffice (🇫🇷)
Invest in Europe!
"America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe...These days, the social democracies of Europe are luring Americans...The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there."
For research, make sure it provides citations (to credible sources) after *every paragraph*, and for translations/summarizations, you gotta check/supervise it, just like if you had an employee do it. And again, I'd never use it for actual writing (its proofreading is incredible though).
When people say AI hallucinates a majority or even large minority of the time, I don't know what to say, except that's never ever been my experience. I'd say less than 5% of the time for me. It's trial and error though, and it takes months (years?) to learn how to use AI well.
I use Whisper for transcriptions of audio (in any major language) and it works almost perfectly, even with accents, background noise, etc. You can use it unlimited for free if you download an application like Vibe, though it's bad at distinguishing between multiple speakers.
But then I tried Claude, and it summarizes book chapters almost flawlessly (you can write the first few words of each chapter to make sure it distinguishes between them) and translations are phenomenal if you use detailed parameters ("tell me if you're unsure about a word," etc.)
The only times I've seen bad hallucinating (with ChatGPT and Gemini) is when summarizing an epub book file, or translating long interviews (when it works, the translations are stunning though, much more natural than DeepL because its aware of the context).
One of Turkey's best reporters arrested for the usual political reasons.
EU commissioner Marta Kos’s visit to Turkey—and her warm rhetoric about Turkey’s growing importance and the EU’s need to deepen ties—has had the intended effect. In Ankar, it’s being hailed as the start of a new chapter in Turkey–EU relations. But that reading is far too optimistic. 1/4
Our recent article tackles this question directly. TL;DR: Turkey is not secularizing like Europe, where each younger generation is less religious. Instead, religiosity is being reshaped by political polarization, with decline concentrated among non-AKP supporters. A 🧵
Yeah I saw that too, and maybe the 3.2% was never sustainable, but still, 40 million!
What could have been....
Canada may be a small country, but 5% of the world's 9th largest economy is not too shabby, and we're now past 40 million people, with 2023 seeing the highest population growth (3.2%) since 1957, one of the highest anywhere in the world.