Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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  • 365 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • It’s basically my experience with translation, too: asking a LLM is a decent way to look for potential ways to translate a specific problematic word, so you can look them up in a dic and see which one is the best. It’s also a decent way to generate simple conjugation/declension tables. But once you tell it to translate any chunk of meaningful text, there’s a high chance it’ll shit itself, and output something semantically, pragmatically, and stylistically bad.


  • I’m not. You can’t lose trust on something if you never trusted it to begin with.

    I. Talent churn reveals short AGI timelines are wish, not belief

    Trying to build AGI out of LLMs and similar is like trying to build a house, by randomly throwing bricks. No cement, no foundation, just the bricks. You might want to get some interesting formation of bricks, sure. But you won’t get a house.

    And yes, of course they’re bullshitting with all this “AGI IS COMING!”. Odds are the people in charge of those companies know the above. But lying for your own benefit, when you know the truth, is called “marketing”.

    II. The focus on addictive products shows their moral compass is off

    “They”, who? Chatbots are amoral, period. Babbling about their moral alignment is like saying your hammer or chainsaw is morally bad or good. It’s a tool dammit, treat it as such.

    And when it comes to the businesses, their moral alignment is a simple “money good, anything between money and us is bad”.

    III. The economic engine keeping the industry alive is unsustainable

    Pretty much.

    Do I worry that the AI industry is a quasi-monopoly? No, I don’t understand what that means.

    A quasi-monopoly, in a nutshell, is when a single entity or group of entities have an unreasonably large control over a certain industry/market, even if not being an “ackshyual” monopoly yet.

    A funny trait of the fake free-market capitalist that O’Reilly warns us about is that their values are always very elevated and pure, but only hold until the next funding round.

    That’s capitalism. “I luuuv freerum!” until it gets in the way of the money.

    IV. They don’t know how to solve the hard problems of LLMs

    Large language models (LLMs) still hallucinate. Over time, instead of treating this problem as the pain point it is, the industry has shifted to “in a way, hallucinations are a feature, you know?”

    Or rather, they shifted the bullshit. They already knew it was an insolvable problem…

    …because hallucinations are simply part of the LLM doing what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t understand what it’s outputting; it doesn’t know if glue is a valid thing to add to a pizza, or if humans should eat rocks. It’s simply generating text based on the corpus fed into it, plus some weighting.

    V. Their public messaging is chaotic and borders on manipulative

    O rly.

    Stopped reading here. It’s stating the obvious, and still missing the point.




  • I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

    Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!

    Verbose example, using Portuguese to English

    I’ll give you an example, using PT→EN because I don’t speak JP. Let’s say Alice tells Bob “ma’ tu é uma nota de três pila, né?” (literally: “bu[t] you’re a three bucks bill, isn’t it?”) . A human translator will immediately notice a few things:

    • It’s an informal and regional register. If Alice typically uses this register, it’s part of her characterisation; else, it register shift is noteworthy. Either way, it’s meaningful.
    • There’s an idiom there; “nota de três pila” (three bucks bill). It conveys some[thing/one] is blatantly false.
    • There’s a rhetorical question, worded like an accusation. The scene dictates how it should be interpreted.

    So depending on the context, the translator might translate this as “ain’t ya full of shit…”, or perhaps “wow, you’re as fake as Monopoly money, arentcha?”. Now, check how chatbots do it:

    • GPT-4o mini: “But you’re a three-buck note, right?”
    • Llama 4 Scout: “But you are a three-dollar bill, aren’t you?”; or “You’re a three-dollar bill, right?” (it offers both alternatives)

    Both miss the mark. If you talk about three dollar bills in English, lots of people associate it with gay people, creating an association that simply does not exist in the original. The extremely informal and regional register is gone, as well as the accusatory tone.

    With Claude shitting this pile of idiocy, that I had to screenshot because otherwise people wouldn’t believe me:


    [This is wrong on so many levels I don’t… I don’t even…]

    This is what you get for AI translations between two IE languages in the same Sprachbund, that’ll often do things in a similar way. It gets way worse for Japanese → English - because they’re languages from different families, different cultures, that didn’t historically interact that much. It’s like the dumb shit above, multiplied by ten.

    If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

    That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.



  • The problem with landfills is widespread, not just in USA. And the solution is simple in theory, hard in practice: we shouldn’t be using landfills at all. It’s hard in practice because it means:

    1. Reducing the average amount of waste per individual. Yeah. In an economic system that encourages mindless waste.
    2. Sorting the waste so it can be processed (recycled, composted, etc.). Waste is messy, so you need to rely on human labour (that’s expensive). And people throw dangerous junk away, things the workers won’t know how to deal with, things that are so oddly specific you won’t be able to pile a large enough amount of it to process it further (and yet since there are multiple types, they’re together a big problem). Ah, if you’re composting it, give up using the compost to fertilise food crops - odds are it’ll be contaminated as fuck.
    3. Creating and maintaining facilities that process that waste. Except people nowadays really, really, really love plastic; and plastic is not just “it’s plastic lol process it together”, each type must be processed separately (this compounds with #2).
    4. Deciding the less shitty way to handle what you won’t process. Burning is often a solution, and often a problem on itself; let’s not forget that decomposition is never complete unless you reach high temperatures (here’s some additional cost!), and if it’s incomplete you’re releasing harmful substances in the atmosphere.

    So… yeah, we got a bunch of ticking bombs, all around the world. Yay, capitalism. /s




  • Wow. Installing it now. I need this.

    I see YT videos mostly in three languages (IT, PT, EN), and you have no idea how much I bloody fucking hate that autodubbing crap - no matter how I configure YT, Google, and my browser, that steaming pile of shit automatically turns on for at least two of the languages.

    And frankly, I don’t want it even for other languages. For me it’s subtitles all the way. Let me see the korokke recipe with the original audio, who cares if I don’t speak Japanese?

    It is not even good dammit. Not even for people who want/need it. It sounds robotic and expressionless, the voices being chosen don’t match the people being shown, the lip movement is desynchronised to the point of uncanny valley, the translation is filthy garbage.

    I wish I could outright ditch YouTube, but PeerTube tends to be unstable and true alternatives (i.e. not relying on anything Google) have network effect against them.


    [rant]

    Might as well rant about the rest of the botnet aka Google aka Alphabet:

    Even when taking privacy concerns out of the equation, I can’t help but stay clear of most things Google. Mostly because of anti-features like the above.

    Search? I’m using DuckDuckGo nowadays, except for reverse image search. It has the decency to ask me if I want an AI overview, and if I say “never” it respects my choice; I don’t need an assumption algorithm telling me to put glue on my pizze. I also abhor results being “tailored” (= bubbled) based on location, and goddammit respect the language options I’ve set up in my browser!

    GMail? I never used it for my primary e-mail, only for potentially junk subscriptions. Nowadays it isn’t even worth that, so I’m using a Proton account for the same purpose. And if some service assumes you use GMail, guess what - I’m not using it.

    Android? Yeah, I still need to use it because of my bank app, but goddammit every fucking update I need to deactivate yet another dumb feature. Plus I barely use the phone. Also, stop trying to convince me to enable PlayProtect, this wall is not to stop invaders going in - it’s against users going out, and using non-Google repositories.

    Maps? I want a map; nothing more, nothing less. Organic Maps fits the bill.

    And in every single Google product, there’s always that belittling tone. Never to be spoken in loud voice, always implied. Something like this:

    • “Since you’re a user, we assume you to be stupid/filthy/dumb trash unable to think by itself. Something like you would cause itself harm if allowed to decide what it should do, so we’re telling you what you should do.”
    • “You want to say «no»? Ah, so you’re too stupid to understand simple concepts, like obedience… right. Here’s a «maybe later»; we’re going to smear the same pop-up on your snout all the time, until you say «yes». You’re a user, not a human being, so consent doesn’t apply to something like you.”
    • “Oh, the user is still able to jump the wall and run away from the walled garden! Quick, raise the walls. Users are things to be herded in factory farms, not free range, you know?”

    [/rant]


  • For my take on those news, check here. Including context. Here I’ll solely talk about the comments in that cesspool of idiocy.

    [1]All this does if make things worse. [2] Things like banning the sale of personal information would be a step in the right direction.

    1: It’s too early to know what’ll happen. It might make things better, worse, or the same.

    2: I agree that the sale of personal info should be outright banned; one’s control over their own data should be seen as an inalienable right.

    Note currently there’s an ongoing law project seeking to assign property rights to individuals over their personal data. IMO a side-step - on one hand it means you’d have an easier time suing megacorpos for stealing your data, on another it means they can still press you to share it.

    A big issue here would be defining social media. // Are forums social media? What about reddit? What about YouTube? // I think what we really need is a ban on algorithmic recommendations that seek to encourage engagement or total time spent on the app.

    The article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet - that the STF is getting rid of - does not talk about “social media”, but rather “provedor de aplicações de internet” (lit. internet application provider). It’s basically anyone providing internet services to a third party.

    As such, “ackshyually wut teh definishun of sacial meria” is not a relevant concern.

    US Social Media should just cancel service to that territory.

    I kind of low-key wish that that happened, those megacorpos are cancer. But it won’t - no megacorpos would unnecessarily restrict its own market.

    But let’s roll with that. The impact of that would be hilariously small: a single month of disruption, then business as usual. For reference check what happened when the dickhead Alexandre de Moraes banned Twitter, almost everybody and their caramel-coloured dog migrated to Bluesky. Once a platform is gone so is the network effect associated with it.





  • Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not “encourage or measure ‘sludge,’” and that “there was zero intent to add ‘sludge’” to my interactions with Ford.

    Here’s the catch: odds are that what Levine is saying is technically correct - truthful, but misleading.

    Sure, they (people in those big businesses) might not be active and directly adding sludge. They might not be encouraging it. Or measuring it. But it’s there. Because they created the perfect conditions for it to thrive, as the author shows.

    And, sure, odds are they are not targetting the author; that sludge is for every single body in a similar situation.

    Why this matters: because any potential law punishing sludge should disregard esoteric concepts like “intention”, and focus solely on what the customer gets. If the customer is getting sludged, it doesn’t matter if the business says “trust us ( = be gullible filth), we don’t have the intention!” - the business should get the short end of the legal stick.