schmorp

Believe me, in too many cases somebody thinks that a lower price can somehow be had without compromising quality. What if we let a bot do it and a human quickly checks the result? It’s like proofreading, right?

That’s an interesting view, because one way I always looked at it was it became a gating function (in a negative way). Just like the rich raise the barrier to entry, I always thought that there were people who were dismissive of others because you couldn’t speak their language perfectly.

I think that’s more or less the same idea as language carrying an authority. You can only use language for gating an ivory tower if the plebs believe your expensive terminology describes real and relevant facts. I think an insider language that doesn’t carry this authority gets called other names, slang maybe? Also used for gating, just not as a barrier towards rising towards a higher status position in academia or rich circles.

English and the internet have this potential of bringing people together, it’s quite powerful. You suddenly find out how your situation relates to people on other continents. I remember that before there was a much stronger feeling of ‘other’ towards people from other countries and cultures, and often the only information you could get about these others would be through the eyes of someone else. To be honest, even if the powers that be fuck up the internet beyond recognition now, that’s a kind of devil difficult to stuff back into the box.

Here’s the thing: human translators have been using ‘AI’ for over a decade. It used to be called machine translation, and for anything but the dumbest stuff it’s a dumb idea, first nail in the coffin of translation. Translation agencies loved the shite, of course, because they could now pay a translator 0.05€ per word instead of 0.10€, arguing that now the same work took less time (it did, and also a lower quality translation was produced with a lot of costly bullshit software in the middle). The translators, as is to expect, hated it, but were forced to accept it or starve. We are now very slowly reaching the point where we are hired back as esteemed professionals after AI-caused communication mishaps and business fuckups keep piling up …

Language is in a peculiar decline these days - there’s the process of English becoming the most badly spoken and written language ever, because all of us non-natives use it online and often also at work. Together with the inescapable avalanche of slop being churned out.

Also, language used to carry authority and this is getting lost for more and more people. We have been bombarded with advertising, propaganda, lies for many generations now and it’s becoming stale. Longer texts used to carry more authority, now a topic can be communicated very precisely through a meme, and why not? For a translator I am getting awfully distrustful of words I’m afraid. I believe we are already standing right under the crumbling tower and will have to learn to communicate through shrugs and grunts. And again, why not?

This is very important. I’m in a situation where the work I used to do is supposed to be taken over by the shitrobot. On a job platform now 15% of the job offers are the original work, 85% is AI slop fixing in one way or another. This led me on a 2-year odyssey of trying manual work (too weak), being really poor (getting better at that), and finally deciding that if I’m forced to serve the shitrobot to avoid starving I’ll serve it badly. Btw so far I’ve managed to avoid these jobs, may it remain so.

That said, if you are in need of a real human translator for tech or creative EN-DE projects do contact me, I’d be glad to keep doing work that makes sense!

Questiin is do we need more code, or better code?

Good documentation makes me happy, bad documentation makes me run away. I suspect I’m not the only person who not only reads the fucking manual but thinks writing good technical documentation is an art of its own. Good luck with trying to replace proper documentation with profuse gibberish.

Who’s in this pic and doesn’t like it? Not me, of course, because I don’t work for an evil company directly, I just help their operations through a middle man. So I work for several evil companies, but only a tiny little bit for each, which in the grand scheme of evil is nearly nothing!

Ah beautiful, that’s the way!

Not if you could express it in a more accessible way without loss of meaning, and especially not if you claim to want a broader public to opt into your cause. Mostly it’s smartassery. I understand that there’s situations where you want to speak about scientific topics and need specific terminology for precision, but this is definitely not it.

Okay thanks, though I wish you hadn’t used AI. I’m fiercely against AI, which is why I voiced my disappointment that a cause I stand behind is obfuscated by pseudo-radical word salad.

Anyway I don’t believe OP wrote the manifesto themselves, so my criticism is most likely not arriving at the right address anyways.

This particular OP rather than suffering from mania is suspiciously bot-like. It’s the second account I encounter in a few days whose posts and comments seem ever so slightly off - in this case it’s just the completely random stuff they post and an uncanny and distanced way of commenting.

I’m a bit dismayed that I now have to make an effort to distinguish real people from bots and that if I block those I find suspicious it includes the risk of blocking some real people who are just having a weird way of expressing themselves.

More of an integral protestation of the inherently unknown in the paradigm of embedded meta-complexities, but you do you ;-)

Or is it the text of the manifesto itself that makes the AI shitrobot explode? Maybe I misunderstood.

The problem with most manifestos is that every second word is more than 10 characters long. Why? Can you not write what you want to say in as few words as possible, and in a way it even can be understood by people whose native language is not English? Come on, give me an ELI5 please, I want to fight AI but I don’t want to have to wade through word salad to do so.

Our current treatment for such types of depression are essentially still in the stone ages. Throw something at it, see what happens, adjust as needed.

I know, and I guess watching a loved one being slowly destroyed by the trial and error that is ‘modern’ medication made me want to never consider it no matter how bad i felt - so this AI thing seems to be an even more dangerous trial and error method, because it seems even more invasive and less tested than the medication that’s available now. On the other hand I’ve found self medication with plant medicine (yes, it’s weed, weed, and more weed, but also quite a few other herbs I collect myself) quite efficient and safe. I’ve managed to keep myself going for a few bad years and have now reached the point where I went off it cold turkey - something my loved one never managed to do once he was hooked onto the meds. All done on my own terms, no doctor pretending they know better than me, giving myself the time I needed. So that’s for a true stone age method, and given the fact our bodies are still working the same way as they did in the stone age I feel it might be safer than any novelty they have come up with in the last decades. Probably that’s a controversial take on this, and I don’t expect this to work for everybody (you need to have lots of time to be able to afford to rest and relax and have access to unlimited amounts of plant medicine).

Horror might be more entertaining than depression, but the sheer idea of letting some techbro implant shit in my brain is so ridiculous, I’d probably try DIY lobotomy before I consider the AI option.

As someone who is literally living where others go on holidays while depressed let me tell you my depression is very much a response to the world being a rotting shithole. I am not sad because my life sucks but because so many others are suffering and I feel powerless to change it. The narrative of ‘chemical imbalance’ is a very reductive and misleading one.

The feeling of powerlessness and disconnect also points to the cure I find for myself. Instead of implanting experimental BS inventions into my brain I try to be a force of connection, community and hope for others. There is very few things I can do as a single tiny person, but in these very small things lies the power of change for the better.

Thinking about AI trying to fix my brain cured my depression, thanks.

Huh, I wonder what wrote this stupid article on this not at all fishy fucking website. /s