TechTakes

I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.

It's something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I'm not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it's the websites themselves.)

Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.

On a product page I then saw:

Material: gefühlt

This was very strange... because that makes no sense at all. "Gefühlt" is a form (participle) of the verb "fühlen", which means "to feel". It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.

So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense "to feel" as "felt". And of course "felt" can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called "Filz"), so it's a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they're in.

And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.

And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It's unbearable. At least there's a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people's faces?

Sanders why https://gizmodo.com/bernie-sanders-reveals-the-ai-doomsday-scenario-that-worries-top-experts-2000628611

Sen. Sanders: I have talked to CEOs. Funny that you mention it. I won’t mention his name, but I’ve just gotten off the phone with one of the leading experts in the world on artificial intelligence, two hours ago.

. . .

Second point: This is not science fiction. There are very, very knowledgeable people—and I just talked to one today—who worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology, and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society. We will not be able to control it. It may be able to control us. That’s kind of the doomsday scenario—and there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry.

taking a wild guess it's Yudkowsky. "very knowledgeable people" and "many/most experts" is staying on my AI apocalypse bingo sheet.

even among people critical of AI (who don't otherwise talk about it that much), the AI apocalypse angle seems really common and it's frustrating to see it normalized everywhere. though I think I'm more nitpicking than anything because it's not usually their most important issue, and maybe it's useful as a wedge issue just to bring attention to other criticisms about AI? I'm not really familiar with Bernie Sanders' takes on AI or how other politicians talk about this. I don't know if that makes sense, I'm very tired

found on reddit. posted without further comment

404media posted an article absolutely dunking on the idea of pivoting to AI, as one does:

media executives still see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say this, I guess, because everything else they have tried hasn’t worked

The curl Bug Bounty is getting flooded with slop, and the security team is prepared to do something drastic to stop it. Going by this specific quote, reporters falling for the hype is a major issue:

As a lot of these reporters seem to genuinely think they help out, apparently blatantly tricked by the marketing of the AI hype-machines, it is not certain that removing the money from the table is going to completely stop the flood. We need to be prepared for that as well. Let’s burn that bridge if we get to it.

Yud:

ChatGPT has already broken marriages, and hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool.

And suddenly I realized that I never want to hear a Rationalist say the words "mating pool".

(I fired up xcancel to see if any of the usual suspects were saying anything eminently sneerable. Yudkowsky is re-xitting Hanania and some random guy who believes in g. Maybe he should see if the Pioneer Fund will bankroll publicity for his new book....)

My new video about the anti-design of the tech industry where I talk about this little passage from an ACM article that set me off when I found it a few years back.

In short, before software started eating all the stuff "design" meant something. It described a process of finding the best way to satisfy a purpose. It was a response to the purpose.

The tech industry takes computation as being an immutable means and finds purposes it may satisfy. The purpose is a response to the tech.

p.s. sorry to spam. :)

vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ollyMSWSWOY pod: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/8ffce464/tech-as-anti-design

threads bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3ltwles4hkk2t masto: https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/114852024025529148

New high-strength sneer from Matthew Hughes: The Biggest Insult, targeting "The Unspeakable Contempt At The Heart of Generative AI"

Found an unironic AI bro in the wild on Bluesky:

You want my unsolicited thoughts on the line between man and machine, I feel this bubble has done more to clarify that line then to blur it, both by showcasing the flaws and limitations inherent to artificial intelligence, and by highlighting the aspects of human minds which cannot be replicated.

thinking about how often code will be like

[-1] * len(array) # -1 is a place holder because I don't know the vocabulary term "sentinel value"

and justified because "it just needs to work"

and now we have professional vibe coders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish

Haven't really kept up with the pseudo-news of VC funded companies acquiring each other, but it seems Windsurf (previously been courted by OpenAI) is now gonna be purchased by the bros behind Devin.

Previously sneered:

The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.

More recently, in the comments:

After reading your comments and @Jiro 's below, and discussing with LLMs on various settings, I think I was too strong in saying....

It's like watching people volunteer for a lobotomy.

nasb, new torres piece out, promising title and opening

(I’ll have to read it after done with my present other currency-related diversions. old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud.gif)