domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
Corvos
10m ago
It's as if Kaczynski was using AI agents and hypersonic missiles, starting a VC-backed startup for the cause of destroying technology.
'The Master's tools can absolutely dismantle the Master's house,' said Kaczynski, watching from his penthouse as smoke rose on the horizon. 'With great efficacy.'
sohois
23m ago
enshittify
This verb implies a movement from a good state to a bad one; the language was previously not shit. Except, the people using LLMs in this way already can't communicate. The original english translation you posted below is incomprehensible. You suggest
the English they do write will be worse
but I can't see how anyone would suggest the AI translation is worse than the original. It might screw up some of the meaning, but that comes with the tradeoff of being more readable.
Or are you just using this example to push your point that native speakers are going to degrade the quality of their communication? This seems far more to reinforce the argument that smart users of LLMs will use them to leap forward, while poor users will get left behind. As I write this post I am using the Grammarly add-on; it's a useful spelling and grammar checker. It will also pop up "writing improvements". Almost without exception, these improvements are shit, and they've been shit long before ChatGPT came along. However, it hasn't changed the way I write, because I am capable of judging the quality of its suggestions. Do you think that Grammarly has been degrading the quality of English for years because some users implement everything it says?
It's the same story with translation. 15 years ago, a non-native speaker might go to babelfish.com and pump out something completely useless. 10 years ago, they would have switched to Google translate, and got something better, but still missing a ton of meaning. 5 years ago, DeepL was the standard, but still a long way off human translation. Now it's LLMs. When learning any language, one of the first lessons a student learns is not to blindly trust any machine translation.
Dean
Flairless
25m ago
Sounds like quibbling over priorities. They also said taking out Saddam would aid in regime-changing Iran.
'Don't do [course of action] unless you're going to do it the right way' may be dismissed as quibbling over priorities, but it is still a caution against, and are not even indirectly instigating the [course of action] either.
Also, was what you're mentioning said in public, or in private? Because if it was the latter, you can't blame the public for not knowing what was deliberately kept from them.
When the result of private discussions are later publicized, and have been public for nearly two decades now, it is a distinction without a difference. Someone can claim the later public revelations were lies, but absent that we can absolutely blame people for not knowing the historical record exists.
And maybe I'm typical minding, but if it was anything like the times I've blindly trusted a woman who told me she was on birth control, the truth of the matter is that in the moment I didn't give a single shit if she might get pregnant.
Would you have still had sex with her had she stated she was not on birth control? If no, then clearly you did in fact give a shit to some extent if she might get pregnant.
If you would still have done so, then yes - I don't think it's appropriate for you to typical-mind.
And when you go to your dick for advice you should expect to get fucked. I can see your point from a societal perspective, but from a personal perspective only one thing matters - taking responsibility for your actions.
I'm of no impression that Amadan will ever agree with me (or that many of the people advocating this will ever agree with me, really), which is why I declined to pursue the point too much, but let's run through this morality for a bit. If it is really the case that a child has the right to support from both biological parents and that this deprivation of the child is so unacceptable that freedoms should be curtailed to pursue that objective, then the following should also be a logical corollary of this belief:
1: A woman should not avail herself of the services of a sperm bank, as it results in the production of a child without the father involved. This is especially true for single women, who should be barred from using a sperm bank under any circumstances. After all, the statistics on children raised by single mothers speak for themselves.
2: It should be against the law for a woman to leave the biological father off the birth certificate, or to fail to inform him of the existence of a child. She should be required to identify the father and get him involved in supporting the child either by choice or by force. A woman who does not do so is being horribly negligent.
3: Women should have no access to safe haven abandonment or adoption under any circumstances (possibly even extremely coercive ones). This is possibly even worse as it results in the unilateral abandonment of a child and alienation from both biological parents, and is a complete and total infringement of the child's right, excluding it support from even just one parent.
This is not exhaustive. But are you willing to assent to all the above, and state that any woman who makes the above choices in contravention of these dictums is being capricious and immoral? If so, I would say you're perfectly consistent, understandable, have a nice day. If not, it stands to reason that any child produced does not in fact have the inherent right to the support of both biological parents, and that this right can be infringed in practice for many reasons, including "a woman just wanted to be a single mother", or in fact "a woman just didn't want her child".
In practice I don't actually think most people believe that a child has an inherent and inalienable right to support from both biological parents, they certainly don't prioritise it above all else. They are perfectly willing to infringe on this principle especially if it gives women more choice. If it is perfectly moral for a single woman to use a sperm bank and produce a child out of wedlock which will not be entitled to any support from the father, by extension it should be perfectly moral for a man to surrender responsibility for a child before birth, producing the same outcome if the woman decides to keep it. This especially applies if he was duped into becoming a father by false representation, even if he didn't make the best decisions.
Personally in a situation like this I'd try to get custody of the kid and bring it home with me.
In theory I agree that would be ideal (I would not want a child of mine in the custody of a woman who would do something like that), in practice that's not going to be easy.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
55m ago
Right, this translation gets closer to the original in some ways by not reproducing the additions and deletions in the original proposal, but also loses some of the colour. Notably, none of the three translations really quite reproduces the heroin-addled vibe of the original (this was perfect, I am in a state of absolute bliss, I took a dose, and then I got another dose!! and soon I'll get yet another dose, I can't wait!!). I wonder if this sort of pathology has been thoroughly RLHFed out of ChatGPT, or one could elicit it with the right prompt.
(The "sexy heaven" thing in yours came from a typo @phailyoor introduced - it's 天国にいる気分 on paper, not the enigmatic 天国に色気分 for which that interpretation would be a fair guess.)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
If the goal is just discrimination, why single out Israel specifically? It’s an odd flex considering that there are other trade partners that would qualify under anti discrimination rules (India, Japan, Korea, Latin America, etc.) but they don’t get the same protections. If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine. If I do the same with South Asia, again, fine. It’s only when North Dakota says “we aren’t buying from Israel,” that anything happens.
Corvos
1hr ago
I think he must have tried to iterate on his original translation. The direct translation is more accurate:
Today’s stream was perfect! When I commented, “Step on me, please!” my oshi, Haachama, actually responded with “You’re gross!” And then she even followed up with “You’re way too much of a perv!” It was insane!! I feel like I’m in sexy heaven right now. This is honestly the most peaceful moment of my life.
And the thing I’m most hyped for is Haachama’s birthday live on Sunday, August 10th at 9PM!! I seriously want to support her with everything I’ve got. Just imagining that day feels like I’m drinking her bathwater.
Though I agree with @phailyoor that a lot of self-expression is lost here compared to his original attempted translation.
Corvos
1hr ago
Sort of. Broadly, I believe that young people weren’t in serious danger so depriving them of the vaccine for a while was fine. Rather, young people weren’t being deprived per se. Whereas your white guy over 45 was still in some need of a vaccine and depriving them is therefore a problem.
If the disparity was massive enough I imagine I’d bite that bullet and give the vaccines to the young black people first out of obvious necessity.
My understanding is that the disparities weren’t that wide and that in the cultural moment professionals were sort of overjoyed to find a reason to demonstrate their anti-racist credentials by giving black people preference in a matter of life and death. Which obviously affects my perception.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
Wait, so what was the process there? Was ChatGPT given the Japanese text and asked to generate its own translation for comparison, or asked to improve/iterate on his? In general, I agree with your critique of non-native speakers using AI for text massaging (the feeling of something not quite coherent being said in superficially polished prose by an AI broadcast announcer voice with occasionally inappropriate diction is pretty grating), but in this particular case, it seems to me that the AI translation is in fact superior and somewhat more true to the original, which may be because unlike in the "Indians making slop for Tiktok/Youtube shorts" case, it had access to a literate source text. Specifically, for example, there is in fact nothing to the effect of "I could die there" in the JP text. The author must have spontaneously come up with it while writing his own proposed translation.
In general, the text we are looking at is close to a pessimal case for both AI translation and translation by someone who learned formulaic English at school, because the original is dense with subculture references and memes that are not just invoked as keywords but determine the syntax and narrative form as well. It's like trying to translate a 4chan greentext, or a doge image.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Under the lens of the Civil Rights Act, a company saying "We won't do business with Israeli nationals" (note the number of dual-citizenships and US citizens residing in Israel, which is more than in Canada) is a pretty transparent violation.
[...] But in this particular case, "will not buy from Israel-linked companies" is pretty strongly associated with attempts to discriminate against persons of Israeli origin. I think this case is maybe winnable, but you'd likely need to be squeaky clean on the persons (not corporate) level.
Discriminating against Israeli citizens in the US seems bad from a civil rights perspective, yes.
Discriminating against Israeli companies or products seems much less problematic, especially if it is just spending decisions. Both states and companies should be free to chose with which companies they do business. If Texas prefers to arm its police force with weapons produced in Texas, that seems the kind of decision a state should be able to make. If Google decides that it hates South Korea and refuses to buy any computer components produced there, that is something for the market to solve.
I think that the use of financial incentives is pretty disingenuous, because it allows the feds to say "we did not violate your rights, you could just opt out of FEMA or not take tax credits".
If federal funds come with strings attached on how to spend that money specifically, that seems fine. "If you buy emergency shelters from your FEMA grant, you may not discriminate against Israeli companies" - "None of the medicaid funds may be spent on medical marijuana" - "5% of the medicaids funds are earmarked for abortion services. If you can not provide these, you do not get the 5%."
But my understanding is that this is not what is happening here. Instead, it is "follow our rules generally, or you don't get money", which I find bad.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
Saying something about the military implicitly distingushes between military things and non-military things.
But what are the actual clauses with actual words that go on to make further distinctions between things? Without that, your hypothetical isn't analogous.
I don't know. You could make arguments for either one.
Then at least try. Because right now, you're not even trying, and it's becoming ever clearer that it's because you can't. Because the Air Force just isn't authorized. It doesn't fit.
Don't worry, though. There's an easy fix. It's why we have Article V. Literally everybody really wants to have a legal Air Force. You want it so bad that you're tying yourself in knots trying to imagine that you already have it, when you clearly can't even come up with a half-hearted argument for it. Nobody is going to get in the way of passing an amendment to finally make it constitutional.
Original English:
Today’s stream was stunning! I commented “踏んでくだSTEP ON ME!!!” and My Oshi HAACHAMA reacted really disgusting me. Moreover, she said “You’re degenerate!!!” for me. OMG I’m in a heaven right now. It was a peaceful and an amazing moment in my life.
And also, the most excited thing is There’s HAACHAMA’s birthday live soon. It’s in August 10th 21.00JST. I could die there. I can’t wait to watch that!! I really wanna support her live too. Imagine that live I feel like drinking her bath water.
Original Japanese:
今日の配信は完璧でした！俺は”踏んでくだステップオンミー！”とコメントすると、推しのはあちゃまが「キモい！」と反応してくれて
さらに、「あんた変態すぎ！」と言ってくれたんだ、やばすぎ！！ 今、天国に色気分だわ。 これは、俺の人生で最高に平和な瞬間だよ。
そしてさらに、１番楽しみで仕方ないことははあちゃまの誕生日ライブが８月10日（日）２１：００にあるってこと！！全力で応援したいと思ってるんだ。 その日をライブを想像すると、彼女の風呂水を飲んでる気持ちになるよ。
ChatGPT output:
Today’s stream was absolutely mind-blowing!
I typed “踏んでくだSTEP ON ME!!!” in the comments, and my oshi, Haachama, actually reacted. Not only that —em—dash— she called me “degenerate!!!” directly OMG. I’m in heaven. That one moment was pure peace and bliss. Probably one of the best highlights of my life.
And the most exciting part is still ahead. Haachama’s birthday live is coming up on August 10th at 21:00 JST. I seriously can’t wait. I really, truly want to support her with everything I’ve got. Just thinking about that live … feels like I could drink her bathwater.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
Things started going wrong in a way that felt both predictable and deeply informative about human variance. My friend and I had a plan: 9 a.m., a specific train platform in south London. My model of the world holds that a plan between two people, especially one involving pre-booked tickets, is a settled fact. It has inertia. My friend’s model, it turned out, required a final handshake protocol - a morning-of confirmation call - without which the previous agreement existed only in a state of quantum superposition. I discovered this when my call at 9:02 found him mid-shower.
Norf vs Souf is a fractal, recursive pattern, it seems, that applies even to Indian immigrants in Britain.
Then came the second, more significant system error. An hour into our journey, my friend consulted a map and discovered that our train was, in fact, headed to the wrong side of Kent. Not a fatal error, but one that would cost us another hour in detours and connections. It’s strange how robust modern infrastructure is; you can make a fairly significant navigational blunder and the system just gently reroutes you, albeit with a time penalty. A hundred and fifty years ago, we would have ended up in the wrong village and had to marry a local.
Was it one of these trains that split in two? I travelled to Canterbury by one once, and even the natives were mildly confused.
And this is where the second part of the mission began. My friend, who had planned this leg of the journey, had mentioned a “long walk.” I had stored this information under the tag “pleasant stroll.” This turned out to be a failure of definition. I was also, thanks to having planned a far less prolonged or adventurous trip, resigned to wearing shoes that could best be described as “smart casual.” They were the best £20 in the local Primark could buy, and had netted me about twice that value in unearned compliments. Alas, they weren't quite built for this task.
My wife and I once rode a cable car to a mountain in Austria, where a guide book promised a "pleasant 40-minute round-trip around the summit". Yeah, right. It had stone steps tall enough to qualify as ledges you would have to press a button to climb in a video game. It had fucking via ferrata segments. Like you, we were wearing smart casual shoes. The next time I heard such curses from my wife was a week ago, when we were hiking in 35-degree heat.
It seemed half of Asia was haunting the cliffs that day. We counted nationalities like rare birds, there went the French (and very many of them), those two ladies were Ukrainian (my friend insisted on his heuristic that if they looked Slavic but were ugly, they must be Russian - I am unconvinced that this technique works well).
Recognizing Ukrainians post 2022 is as easy as recognizing Canadians, vegans and people who use Arch. That is, they will make sure you know. Phenotypically, it's as hard as telling an Indian and a Pakistani apart. Especially if they are both Punjabi.
I love British countryside. If you're in the mood for another trip, Lewes to Brighton is another good option. Make sure your friend is on time, though, it's a four-hour walk and you'll want to spend three or four hours in either town.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2hr ago
Or take the stock market. Nvidia has a net profit of 76G$/year and a market cap of 4T$, so it is worth about 50 years of profit. If there was less capital around to be invested, it might only be worth 2T$ instead, but I fail to see what would be so bad about that.
Tiny probabilities of huge profits are what drive Venture Capital to take risks. If a Venture Capitalist sees a chance to spend $10 billion for 10% chance of $90 billion, they don't take that risk. If they see a 10% chance of $180 billion they probably do.
Nvidia is currently planning to invest $500 billion in new infrastructure over the next few years. If hypothetical Mvidia startup entrepreneur sees that and thinks they have a 20% chance of rising up to compete with them to also be worth $4T (average output $800b), investors will throw those dice and happily pay $500b. We end up with more competition and diversity, lowering prices for consumers. If taxes go up and Nvidia and hypothetical peers are worth $2T, the dice odds don't look so good and there's more of a monopoly (unless someone is so confident that they can compete with 40% odds.
For any marginal tax increase, the cost/benefit ratio for new competitors shifts and it requires greater odds and more monopolistic profits before you get more entrepreneurial competitors. This leads to more monopolies, higher consumer prices, and people working for megacorps instead of starting their own small businesses.
With the increased usage of ChatGPT and other aislop in everyday communication such as casual emails and slack messages, AI apologists have increasingly tried to excuse this usage by non-native English speakers(citation needed, but besides the point). The excuse being that for non-native speakers, AI usage can save time, or even increase the quality of the resulting writing. I want to argue this is actually the opposite, and that using AI output particularly and exceptionally corrosive when used by non-English speakers.
I came across this section(plaintext transcription in below comment) of a YT video, where an intermediate level English learner is trying to use ChatGPT improve a piece of writing, and also learn from it. (source video, not important). Here’s the catch ChatGPT’s output is just plain bad
Overall, my issues with ChatGPT for this use case can be broken down into three main problems:
- The ChatGPT output is just plain worse in many ways, and English learners won't be able to tell.
- By critiquing things that aren’t wrong, learners who follow blindly will lose their voice.
- The meaning has changed, and the user will not easily recognize this. The original meaning can be teased out of a sentence in broken English, but it has been erased completely in the AI output As a result, I feel like people using ChatGPT in this way are completely kneecapping their learning.
Let’s go over the main revisions point by point
-
stunning -> absolutely mind-blowing - Stunning is already quite a strong adjective and ChatGPT is overdoing it. OK edit.
-
I commented -> I typed in the comments - Absolutely a bad edit. More wordy for no more meaning, and the original English is more true to the original Japanese.
-
Moreover -> Not only that - Moreover is perfect here. Bad edit.
-
Em dash - not called for here. AI tell.
-
reacted really disgusting me -> actually reacted - This seriously changes the meaning, taking away a major element of the storytelling. Bad edit.
-
I’m in a heaven right now -> I’m in heaven - I’m in heaven right now is emphasis. Bad edit.
-
It was a peaceful and amazing moment in my life -> That one moment was pure peace and bliss. Probably one of the best highlights of my life. - Deemphasized and wordified into two sentences. A better version would easily be “It was the most peaceful and amazing moment in my life”. Bad edit.
-
And also, the most excited thing is -> And the most exciting part is still ahead. - AI slop tell. Bad edit.
-
I could die there -> nothing - ChatGPT just took that out completely!!!! WFT!!!!
-
I really wanna support her live too. -> I really, truly want to support her with everything I’ve got. - “really, truly” came out of nowhere and the double emphasis with “with everything I’ve got” is odd. Bad edit.
-
Imagine that live I feel like drinking her bath water. -> Just thinking about that live … feels like I could drink her bathwater. - This one is totally lost. Basic context clues and cultural knowledge make it clear that the narrator already wants to drink gamer girl bathwater irregardless of any live. The correct edit would be “When I imagine that live, I feel like I’m drinking her bathwater” or “Imagining that live feels like drinking her bathwater.” The original English is closer to correct than ChatGPT and the correct meaning can be inferred.
Of course ChatGPT can probably be made to produce better outputs with better prompting, or used differently, but this is just one of many examples where ChatGPT usage by a casual user has actually made things worse.
Now what's the point of this post? First I would like to urge everyone not to use GenAI outputs in the final work, even for edits. Using AI as a judge is probably fine, but the best way to maintain quality is probably write all of the final text in your own words. Even for people without perfect English. Secondly, with all levels of society using or even abusing AI tools, it may increase productivity by some metrics, it will also be like an enshittification of all written communication.
We've seen an increasing number of complaints enter the discourse about foreign immigrants with weak English skills just being annoying to deal with in everyday life. And I've also had similar experiences, where dealing with a fresh off the boat foreigner has been an annoyance when ordering food or asking a simple question - and also where hiring an American would have only costed a tiny bit more. Well now AI slop is going to provide a double whammy - lazy or misguided native speakers are going to enshittify their own communication with slop, and also foreigners will have their English learning impeded, and the English they do write will be worse.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
I laughed out loud at this, thanks. Nothing moves the literary soul quite as deeply as thoughts written in all caps.
FtSoA
2hr ago
We all come to miss at least some of the fallen for livening things up around here.
Kind of hilarious how much drama is generated here over banning people for being dramatic.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
I wouldn't discount the possibility that even now he has somewhere an alt that will pick up his ball and keep running for the goal. I do not write this based on some knowledge of his character, just that this is a time-worn strategy of many who get banned.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
As a member of "some overlap" I'll say this works both way. The people screaming bloody murder about BDS, would see the kind of laws directed against it as an egregious violation of their basic civil rights, were they directed at an anti-Muslim boycott.
Mantergeistmann
3hr ago
As I often do, I like to consider a counterfactual: suppose there was a movement that existed to boycott only Muslim nations. Now, it wasn't against Muslims, per se, just that for mumblemumble reasons it only called for those nations to be boycotted, and for nations that are demonstrably worse at human rights like the likes of North Korea to be not sanctioned.
I don't think a lot of the people complaining about anti-BDS would also be complaining about being anti-Muslim-Nation-boycotts. Sure, there'd still be some overlap, but not enough to really make the news.
I dunno man, it's complicated and frustrating, but the gay community is a one big "be careful what you wish for" cautionary tale, whenever I get frustrated with the male/female sex-drive difference.
FistfullOfCrows
3hr ago
There seems to be something in the male nature that just goes, “here’s my penis.”
Imo women would be far happier if they had the same mindset. Suddenly getting a dick pic wouldn't be a drama in three parts, it would be a mild, huh he likes me that much, here's some tits.
Mods do not judge the quality of arguments here.
I feel obligated to point out that obviously you do. The rules are full of guidance about specific qualities of arguments. Perhaps you mean to say that the mods aim to evaluate meta argument qualities, not object level.
So, actually, at the risk of being egregiously obnoxious, in the context of that comment chain, which rule(s) exactly did I break? Actually, why don't all mod warnings come with a citation? That's standard in many a Reddit forum. Don't make us guess.
Is it, by definition, always low effort to provide a link for which the context has been established and/or is self-evident? Since this platform does not allow me to provide a screenshot, a link is actually a pretty relevant counterargument for the claim that was being contested.
Would I have been fine if I had merely had a preamble of something like: "If you click on this hyperlink to a google search, as I previously recommended you conduct to evaluate the evidence for yourself, you will be able to see a fair number of posts on the topic you claim does not really get covered in EA circles."
I'm telling you what your available options are here. Not everywhere else on the Internet, but here.
Not very charitable of you regarding my reading comprehension, I must say. I've only been participating since the olden Reddit days. Never even been banned. Perhaps it was only the soft bigoty of low expectations.
People can make bad arguments. You may point out why they're bad.
God bless the Motte. Mods for, of, and by the people.
EDIT: How could I forget. Is it not implicit in the rules and the epistemic heritage of this forum, the rationality sphere and SSC, that basic norms of logic and reason and evidence are expected? A basic epistemic methodological sanity baseline. Clearly the rules indicate awareness of such concepts, but perhaps they are taken as omissible.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
4hr ago
Maybe. The only tattoo covered WWE fan I know is a sysadmin with hilariously idiosyncratic views on politics.
And this particular condition is not characteristic of the whole law either, and as such characterizing the broader law in terms of this particular condition is wilfully misrepresenting the broader law.
Or, to put in other terms, it is missing the forest for a tree. It can indeed be a joo-tree in the forest, but it is not a joo-tree forest.
More importantly, and part of that broader context, the joo-tree is coincidentally planted beside the anti-DEI-tree, and the anti-illegal-immigration (ALL) tree, in same same small grove with exceptional visibility, under the care of the hated forest-lord. This grove is now being publicized to audiences with people who would like to cut down joo-trees, anti-DEI-trees, and ALL-trees even before their hatred of the forest-lord is considered.
That's bait, and SS fell for it as much or more than the intended targets.
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