Wait, what?
10Am I having a stroke or something? I’m trying to read this web article and lots of the sentences are not making sense to me, starting with the headline: They Had been Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia. Now They Boom It Used to be a Fraud.
Is it just me?
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That’s… something? I wonder if it was written by a bot.
The whole article reads like it was written by a bot. I couldn’t get past 4 paragraphs.
Who’d expect that from a reputable source like “The Finance Time”
@themutilator Are you confusing The Finance Time with Financial Times? Or not.
Names can be so confuse.
http://www.easycounter.com/report/thefinancetime.com
@rockblossom I assumed the site is an intentional rip-off of the Financial Times. They co-opted the by-line too. Super reputable.
I think it was written by something like @Moose’s bots. Either that, or it was translated to some language, then translated back.
I’m just glad it wasn’t just me
@therealjrn It looks like an article published in a non-English paper/magazine and then republished in English via Garble Translate.
@rockblossom @therealjrn
@rockblossom @therealjrn
The original popped up in my Firefox suggestions. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/us/mined-minds-west-virginia-coding.html
@themutilator And now you know why I searched this article out–I was attempting to find a version that wasn’t behind the onerous NYT paywall.
@themutilator @therealjrn “Now they say” became “Now they boom”. Actually it’s just off by one word.
So close and yet so far.
@sammydog01 @themutilator Yep, and here I’ve been a HUGE fan of the boom-boom since high school.
@therealjrn Try this for a 3 day trial: https://www.tusclibrary.org/sites/default/files/NYTimes Instructions.pdf
@cinoclav That’s nice your library offers this. Our library has 4 hard copies, available in the library only at 4 locations. No digital subscription offered.
@cinoclav Apparently, our library is also offering the librarians job security–if you email in your request, they’ll send you an individual article from the NYT. No mention of how many times one could do this.
@therealjrn It’s not my library, I just googled ‘New York Times library login’ and found that. I’ve run across other libraries with subscription logins. Helps to search for specific magazines or websites.
@themutilator @therealjrn Reasons I wish it was possible to exclude articles by certain publishers from appearing in my Google news feed!
@PooltoyWolf @themutilator @therealjrn
You can use the sliders to tell google “more like this” or “less like this”.
Unless you’re paranoid about the information Google collects on you and opted-out and are now complaining about not understanding why Google doesn’t tailor your news just for you. Derp.
@PooltoyWolf @themutilator @therealjrn
@mike808 creepily related news article!
@mike808 @themutilator @therealjrn Thanks for this! I have looked several times and for some reason never saw that option.
I see these a lot also for Automotive News articles. Many search result pages are just the headline with a link back to the original, or sometimes it’s one of these translations of a translation. I think they’re trying to beat the original at SEO and siphon off a few clicks.
@walarney I get them in Google alerts all the time. Back in like 2017 I set up a Google alert for Hyundai Santa Cruz when they started talking about bringing the concept to production. A few times a month I get links to articles just like this that appear to have taken an article, translated it to Swahili and back, and then had every fifth word substituted with something from the same page of the thesaurus.
I have asked Google a few times to implement a way to flag low quality content. Right now the only input I have is to flag something as irrelevant, and the articles aren’t irrelevant, they’re just shit.
Wow, is that horrible. Roget the plagiarizing thesaurusbot needs a little bit of work.
As an aside, a good friend’s ex-wife is from Beckley. I went and stayed there down in the holler some years ago.
Oooooh. This is like the new terrible copy bots that we have around here.
They copy a comment and use the thesaurus on a few words to make the comment weird.
@RiotDemon That’s awesome!
OWLS! TOWELS! JOWLS! AWESOME!
@RiotDemon Handle it with pop sockets!
Popped there, socket’d that.