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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Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2024年1月12日

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  • [Warning: I’m mostly rambling.]

    As usual you need to be careful with metaphors: they break once pulled hard enough.

    The metaphor implies the security layers are independent, and always addictive. Often they aren’t - they interact with each other, and often the presence of one layer makes the other worse. It’s like double bagging condoms - they rub against each other, so they make you less protected than if you wore a single condom.

    The “holes” are often dynamic, and they might change place over time. Sometimes the vulnerability crossed a hole of the first slice, hit the second slice and stayed there, until the second slice’s hole aligns with it. Then the vulnerability crosses into the third slice, so goes on. If you’re dealing with human beings, that’s basically any system.

    “NEEDS MORE LAYERS!” is not always the solution. Sometimes you’re better off - in cost and security - if you replaced a few layers with a better one. Try mozzarella instead of Emmenthaler.


  • This is yet another case where people don’t notice the root of the problem, because one of the branches is so fucking large it takes the whole scene.

    Spot the common element between the text and the following:

    • When Internet Explorer still existed, Microsoft gave you no way to remove it.
    • Later on (Edge times), Microsoft went out of its way to ignore your browser preferences and shove Edge down your throat.
    • Google: Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect?
    • “Because we’re not designing a desktop for people who like to choose their own terminal emulators.” - Bastien Nocera, GNOME dev
    • Plenty pieces of software offer you a choice between “yes” and “maybe later”, but rather curiously avoid the word “no”
    • “Subscribe to our newsletter!” (i.e. spam). The only negative answer is worded like “I’m braindead trash thus I don’t want to subscribe”.

    It’s always about actively disempowering users. Even if technology was expected to do the opposite.

    Why this matters: because even if the image + text generators went away, or got heavily regulated, or whatever, the problem still persists. And it’ll still pop up elsewhere.

    Solve this disgusting “Stop treating those THINGS as if they were human beings! They’re users, not humans! Those things exist to be herded!” mindset and you’ll solve the problem.


  • If I had to guess, most people in RVs would rather live in a house. It’s just houses are not affordable in USA; I’ve seen posters from there talking about this in Lemmy all the bloody time.

    Based on that I don’t think prohibition is the right way to go. Instead make sure people can afford houses, and the problem goes away. Additionally the ones living in an RV by choice would be even freer to keep with their lifestyle - those are likely not an issue when it comes to zoning laws, as the main reason you’d want to live in a wheeled home is to travel.


  • Fuck neoliberalism. I might not like those kids giving thumbs up to authoritarianism but they’re less worse than neolib, it’s like comparing elephant shit with cat shit.

    That said: a few Hexbear users are fairly reasonable, but plenty of them remind me 11yos. Specially in groups. db0 threw the bait, in a humour community for anarchists… and they all ate the bait, with malagueta sauce. No, wait, Scorpion Trinidad sauce. While screaming “I CAN STAND THE HEAT!” amidst their torrential tears.

    Eventually the thing gets old, db0 gets bored and tells them to disengage.

    It was funny that the nanny - who was supposed to take care of the kids - was there too. And he’s another 11yo! He forgot to edit his comment and say EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER! They might’ve left Reddit, but they still behave more like redditors than like decent people. Also, I saw a neoliberal Anglo supremacist there. Full of gullibleness. He still didn’t think on the purpose of this utterance. And yes, I’m still laughing my arse off that muppet.

    I’m almost sure db0 knows why those kids are mostly defederated. And the reason his instance doesn’t do it is because, good or bad, they’re left-wing presence in the fediverse.

    Hexbear users who might take offence with my comment are encouraged to address their complains about their precious feelings being violated to this form.


  • 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’m going to reply to myself because there’s a huge discussion in the comment chain, and I’d rather speak freely than specifically address what they’re saying. And because this is 90% rant.

    A country is not the people it rules over. A country is not a human being. A country is an abstract structure of power. A country is an “it”.

    No country should be seen as having a “right of self defence” or crap like that; it’s the same as saying “I hate people so much I’d put them on the same level as an abstract structure.” It’s genuinely disgusting.

    And someone might say “well ackshyually the Israelis have a right of self defence”. Sure; unlike the state of Israel, the Israelis are human beings, they do have the right. However (and this is important), the ones joining the war against Hamas and the Palestinians are not just “defending themselves”; they’re putting themselves at risk to defend that abstract structure.

    And people keep oversimplifying this shit as if it was “Israel was attacked, so it’s self-defending”. More accurately, what’s happening is that the state of Israel was attacked by Hamas, and using the attack as excuse to kill the Palestinians.

    It gets worse. The continued existence of that “it” is causing people to be killed, since it’s an ethnostate on the same level as Apartheid South Africa. By assigning “it” a human right of self-defence, you’re giving the “it” an implicit thumbs up to kill actual human beings. Now you aren’t even putting human beings on the same level as an “it”, you’re putting them below the “it”.

    inb4 something that sounds pretty much like “B-but right of self defence! Apartheid South Africa is defending itself, from terrorists like Rolihlahla! Are you siding with the terrorists?”.

    (I do plan to read replies but I’m not arsing myself to reply to them.)



  • 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.



  • 22 yards in a chain

    What. I had to websearch this because it sounds too silly, but apparently it’s true.

    But, really, even if it used saner numbers (like 12:3:24:8:3), it still feels nothing like a “metric dozenal” would look like. It’s missing the two things the metric system did right:

    1. All prefixes are unit-agnostic, like they were numbers. For example you can plop “kilo” = 10³ on weight (kilogram), length (kilometre), volume (kilolitre), energy, (kilojoule), etc.
    2. All prefixes must be an integer power of the base. For example you could make a 10⁸ prefix, even if there’s none, and it would be OK; but you can’t make, say, a 10^(2.447) = 300 one.

  • Metric “dozenalisation” would be perfectly viable, and metric-dozenal units would still look nothing like USA units.

    I’ll use length for the example. All of them in base 10, just for clarity. (Also the name of the units would be different, but I’m not changing them for this example.)

    • metric-decimal: 10⁻³ km = 10⁻² hm = 10⁻¹ dam = 10⁰m = 10¹dm = 10²cm = 10³mm
    • metric-dozenal: 12⁻³ km = 12⁻²hm = 12⁻¹ dam = 12⁰m = 12¹dm = 12²cm = 12³mm
    • USA units: 1/1760mi = 1yd = 3ft = 3*12 in = 3*12*6 P = 3*12*6*12 p

    Are you noticing what the USA units do? They don’t stick to a base.



  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzConverting numbers is easy
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    5 天前

    People are focusing on the Excel part, I’ll focus on the maths.

    I wish our societies picked base-12 instead of base-10. Divisions in base-12 give you repeating digits less often, and being able to split exactly by 3, 6, 9 and 12₁₀=10₁₂ is far more useful than doing it for 5 and 10₁₀=A₁₂.

    Plus 4chan would stop arguing if 0.999… = 1. It would argue instead if 0.BBB… = 1.