Murray Hunter

To give a sense of the innate AI training bias for African languages: I recently learned that the percentage of websites using Swahili finally reached 0.002% in 2026, per @w3techs.com estimate: w3techs.com/technologies...

It's the second highest ranked African language, after Afrikaans (~0.0025%).

Referring to the stylistic tendency to "a sort of polished language with almost no facts, references, concrete claims or anything", the authors have dubbed it "Synthetic Low-Information Language".

Most social media posts aren’t really written by people anymore: what does that mean for public c... | Media and Journalism Exchange | Marius Dragomir | 23 comments In recent years, I’ve had to part ways with some contributors (editors, writers) after discovering that they were fully generating content with AI, or relying heavily on automatic tools to rewrite tex...

Via Marius Dragomir / mjrc.bsky.social:

An study of 40000 LinkedIn / FB posts looked for stylistic changes after the mainstreaming of gen AI, found roughly 9 of 10 posts since late 2024 were likely AI-drafted.

"The short story: most people have stopped writing their own posts."

bit.ly/4jN5Yly

Unknown judge in unknown court gags Open Secrets from saying … This appears to be the most draconian prepublication interdict we have come across

This @groundup.org.za editorial does a fine job of articulating just how outrageous the gag order against @opensecrets.org.za is. We don't know who gagged them, on what grounds, in which court, or by which judge's ruling. groundup.org.za/article/anon...

I don't know who here remembers the late, utterly loveable Siya Africa -- but I think of him every time I stumble upon a great new podcast and think, 'Damn, would've sent this one to Siya.'

It's called the Siya Test, and it's an invaluable assessment criterion for prestige audio.

A red-skinned sweet potato with a cleft that makes for very suggestive curves

Good morning. I'm pleased to share this vegetable that can be used to test automatic content filters.

Genuine question: 3 years ago, how many people realised how much dramatically *worse* the internet was about to get, and how rapidly it would get there?

“I Have Lost Everything”: The Toll of Cities’ Homeless Sweeps Cities often take belongings — including important documents and irreplaceable mementos — when they conduct sweeps of homeless encampments. ProPublica gave notecards to people across the country so…

We asked people who lived in homeless encampments that were cleared out in city “sweeps” to write about what object was the hardest for them to lose.

“They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries,” a 29-year-old in California wrote.

My friend Sophie is raising funds to send 12 independent performers to the National Arts Fest this year.

Don't think of it as contributing to their transport costs. Rather tell everyone you paid for Sophie Joans's OnlyVans: thundafund.africa/campaign/182...

A Reddit post: Any advice for entertaining a 3 year old and 6 year old for a 23 hour flight? First response: where are you flying? The fucking moon? Second reply: There's a FUCKING moon?! Third reply: Yar, but she's a Harsh Mistress

The boys are having a ball over on Dad Reddit

Unmelted cheese melt

Repulsive Philly cheesesteak that looks like insoles

Weird deflated hot dog

Cheesy chips that are just.... Fries with loose slices of cheese on top

This account just posts food at British football stadiums and it's the most upsetting shit I've ever seen

I came here to find out what happened in the game, which I eventually figured out, and also found this extremely valid point about Bluesky.

YouTube video by Netflix Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight | Official Teaser | Netflix

I peeked in on Netflix's new Asterix series, really just to see how they'd messed it up, and am happy to report: it's *delightful*.

For those who grew up on the comics, it feels like they managed to capture the original spirit while still making it feel contemporary. youtu.be/bJnDJcoeqZs?...

But four years after the fires, getting this one small glimpse into the ongoing work of the people trying to put everything back together has also left me with deep gratitude for the untiring nerdish dedication of the librarians.

Bless em.

The archivist informed me that the David Marais collection was partially damaged in the fire, so I'd been feeling Rather Virtuous. But reading through the account of the losses -- I just feel sad. This little act of restoration is nice symbolism. But measured against the true loss to memory? Pfft.

As of that 2023 article, the full losses had yet to be fully counted, in part because the fires claimed the exact records which would helped: about a third of the catalogue files were destroyed, along with the "beautiful, redbound volumes" which gave a seven-decade record of all donated items.

You'll recall: UCT's Jagger library's vast archive of rare books, historical papers, and assorted Africana was gutted in a fire 2021. The archivists called it " tragic and irreparable loss to South African research and historiograph." www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Anyway, I didn't know what to do with the cartoon, but couldn't bring myself to get rid of it. I discovered there was a collection of his papers in UCT's Manuscripts and Archives; I wrote to them and they agreed to accept it as a donation.

A brief search established the cartoonist as David Marais, who worked for the Cape Times. (Apparently first as their Parliamentary correspondent, but they eventually started publishing his Press Gallery doodles, putting him on double-duty as cartoonist/reporter: africacommons.net/collections/... )

The image shows apartheid PM Vorster on a therapist's chair, surrounded by a cloud of ... anarchist bombers? The doc asks: "And which one do you call Centlivres?”

(The deeper meaning is lost on me, but Centlivres was chief justice in the 50s - presumably this dates to when Vorster was an MP.)

A black-and-white cartoon framed and mounted in faded mat board. It depicts apartheid Prime Minister BJ Vorster on a therapist's chair, surrounded by a pixe-like cloud of anarchists bombers? The therapist leans forward and asks Vorster: "Very interesting. And which one do you call Centlivres?”

Something moderately cool that happened to me: a while back I found this obscure (to me) historical political cartoon in a set of frames bought at a charity shop, and I've just gratefully transferred it into the care of UCT's Special Collections library.

A brief thread of useless minutiae:

The comparison is doubly true because both outbreaks are overwhelming the obvious results of a set of voluntary and avoidable choices.

Study: Your coworkers hate you for using AI at work Will AI help you in your career? No. Not if anyone finds out, anyway. Today in science discovering the obvious, if you use chatbots to pump out the AI slop at work, your coworkers think you’re an i…

According to science: your coworkers judge you for using AI in your job. pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/10/y... via @paulmwatson.com

I realise AI product features are like CGI in films - we tend only to notice them when they're really bad. But Jesus wept, it feels like we're beset on all sides by really bad AI product features. Almost always as the default, mandatory user experience.

Who are the people who are enjoying this??

Refuses to pay his debt to society. Shellfish.

Every time I try to use generative AI for anything remotely useful I walk away feeling like it's a softserve machine that makes pretty decent ice cream 60% of the time, slightly disappointing ice cream 35% of the time, and 5% of the time it spits out liquid pig shit.

I can't work with those odds.

I'm certain with better prompts or a more powerful model I could get better outcomes. But brief excursions like this really shore up my GenAI curmudgeonliness.

I can't lose any more time on this nonsense so won't factcheck the summaries properly (some of which disappeared after I aborted the query), but even these appeared to be at least partially hallucinated. F'rinstance, Equal Education appears not to have litigated in the Makhanda High Court.

Please give me a 200-word summary of this court judgment ChatGPT said: Here is a 200-word summary of the court judgment: This judgment by the Constitutional Court of South Africa addresses a dispute between the Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Health, Eastern Cape You said: Your answer is completely unrelated from the contents of the PDF I uploaded. Please analyse the court judgment from the PDF. ChatGPT said: The PDF appears to be mostly blank or consists of scanned images with no extractable text. This is likely why the content did not load properly. To analyze the judgment and provide a

Please give me a 500-word summary of the court judgment contained in this PDF. ChatGPT said: Here is a 500-word summary of the court judgment from the PDF: Summary of Court Judgment: Equal Education and Others v Minister of Basic Education and Others

Please give me a 500-word summary of the actual judgment, attached here ChatGPT said: Here is a 500-word summary of the actual judgment from the document titled "Republic v. Mohamed Ibrahim Omar & 3 others – Criminal Case No. 38 of 2012 (High Court at Nairobi)":

GPT bullshitting: I asked Chat GPT (GPT-4o) to summarise a PDF of the Kenyan High Court's recent order for Worldcoin to delete all biometric data. Thrice ChatGPT gave a fluent and 100% confident summary of a completely unrelated case: one relating to the Westgate massacre, two from South Africa.

Joining a proud tradition of litigants who've not heard of the Streisand effect