Cimorene

I haven't given up on oiling the sewing machine myself, I just haven't got around to buying new oil yet. But in the meantime, at work yesterday I decided to search and see if there are any local small appliance repair shops. I know there isn't a SEWING MACHINE shop, which isn't surprising for a town with one main street, but I thought there might be just an assorted Thing repair spot.

One of the top results I got was actually about a little part-time bicycle repair shop that's attached to the local plant nursery, but I didn't realize that's what it was talking about because the full address wasn't readable in the search result, so I clicked...

...and landed on a page of "customer reviews" completely in Finnish that was headed with a photo of my work office that I took last year, complete with the photo enhancement done by me.

So this is definitely scraped from one of the charity's official websites (there are two possibilities, frtdneatj), and like... not for any good reason, because the nursery and repair shop is not anywhere near here and the street names and addresses are not even similar. Not to mention that if any human being had been involved in the process at any point they would have realized that it's definitely not a repair shop, because if there's one thing my charity is unimpeachably flawless at, it's [sparkles]branding[sparkles]!: the photo features a huge internationally recognizable logo as well as the name prominently blazoned across the windows and doors.

If you scroll down the page, after the reviews there's some blather in Finnish about how dedicated they are to making Finland's best business reviews site blah blah blah (it's just a bad Yelp knockoff and there are like three better-known and better-designed sites in this market segment, so that's a fail too) and how extremely Finnish they all are, but the company address at the bottom of the page is in Singapore, so there's that.

Also they definitely aren't very invested in the site, because not only does their content scraper operate without supervision, nobody has bothered to create a layout or visual design for the site, so it looks like when all the images are turned off or a really heavy site loads the text first and it's just hanging there in black and white for a while before the style loads.

There's a link to report a "problem" with an article, and since it was actually my photo I did use it to point that out to them, not that I expect much to come of that.

I keep getting notification alerts on my phone - "New from GK Chesterton!" - when someone reuploads a GK Chesterton work to Google Books, which is rather frequent given that he's long dead.

Although I guess that's why the production time is so low, since they can just reformat it and slap a cover on with no concern for copyright.

Going by the quality of the cover designs, they can't be putting enough effort into the formatting to merit much profit.

A little while ago, my desktop computer at work was still running Windows 10, in Finnish, but the greeting screen before you sign in was a new photo from Bing every day and in the top left it said "Like what you see?" and you could click to help its algorithm tune to your preferences over time.

I installed all the available updates, upgraded to Windows 11, and installed all the available updates again. Then I changed the system language to Swedish.

When the computer restarted it said in the top right corner "Som bilden du ser?" (This is 'Like what you see?' word for word, using - incorrectly - the word that means like/as.) I took a photo of it to show Wax and make fun of.

Two days later when I got to work and signed in, it had corrected itself and said "Gillar du bilden du ser?" instead, which was what it meant to say all along.

A couple of possible explanations for this series of events occur to me:

• The Swedish regionalization of the program was new, and they pushed an update using a machine translation because they hadn't had time for a human translator yet. Then they fixed it when their translator came back from vacation.



• It's been incorrect for... however long, but some Swedish speakers who are more used to Windows than I am actually managed to find the feedback button and report the incorrect translation as a bug. I did glance around for it, but I didn't go as far as googling.



• One of our phones, even though they are both Android, was background eavesdropping when we walked the dog and I told Wax about the problem and the AI managed to parse it out and report it to Microsoft and they fixed it. Okay, so this is maybe less likely, but we are living in the future...

Somehow recommendation algorithms always manage an insane oversupply of my pet peeve, whatever it is, and they're so DETERMINED about it that there must be an underlying function that produces the peeves in reality (or in my mind) - and it must be one simple enough to be described by an algorithm.

Sommmmmmmmething about intersections that occur exactly one ring outside my area of interest and the much higher likelihood of those things turning into peeves, when other more distant (but fundamentally even less congenial) things, even things I dislike more on an absolute scale if I take a step back, never have a chance to do that. Oh, like the dynamic that determines what music you hate and find 'overplayed', which is also contingent on your particular exposure.

Google's AI is always trying to help out by automatically generating animations, and while some of them are hilariously off, it's hard to go wrong with pet videos. The source of this animation was all Snookums washing his belly with his feet sticking out in this weird position. The AI was set up for success because every single bit of the video was fairly good.

I know I should get a move on about switching back to Firefox (the last time I switched from it to Chrome there was some kind of streaming video bug I think? It was a few years ago), but I've been putting it off because of the effort involved.

But I have an Android phone, where the Google AI runs voice-activated searches and other minor tasks; and there's an app called Google or Google Search which stores a whole list of 'things you're interested in' for you (and used to be called Google Now or something like that before it got phased out). In your settings it asks you to 'subscribe' to things and offers you weird categories with different topics which it wants you to indicate you are interested in.

What it uses this for is a list of suggested articles that display every time you open Chrome on mobile right under the icons of your most visited sites. I do see the occasional link I want to click on there, usually related to upcoming movies, but the vast majority of the articles on the subjects of genre movie and tv franchises are essentially contentless clickbait blurbs that turn out to simply be notifying you that one person related to a project made a single tweet about it or that Marvel has released some new teaser posters.

I did manage to remove a lot of confusing and random content from the helpfully Google-generated list of "other things you may be interested in" that it offered for my approval in the settings of the Google Search app, and the changes I made there did appear to affect my home screen...

...except that for some reason Google thinks I am interested in tabloid gossip about British royals, presumably because I googled Meghan Markle when she married the prince. Even though I explicitly told Google that I was NOT interested in Prince Philip (the only suggestion related to them that it gave me in the settings), it continues to offer links to the sleaziest and scummiest British tabloids about things like royals blowing their noses or what hairstyles they're wearing, sometimes more than one per day, even though I uniformly dismiss them and have done for months.

Nothing I do can convince Google that I don't want to know about British royals.

In the scheme of things I've had far worse problems with browsers before, but honestly.... this one is pissing me off more than most of them because it's just so maddeningly STUPID.