Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
How the fuck can a hallucinating bullshit machine have use in translation
Machine translation was the original purpose of the transformer architecture, and I guess it was unreasonably good at it compared to the existing state-of-the-art RNNs or whatever they were doing before.
To the extent that machine translation was already a bullshit machine I guess. Language learning I sometimes get totally desperate if thereās some grammar construct I canāt figure out. A machine translation sometimes helps me know what to look up, or at least move on to the next sentence.
Anyway this isnāt a position I believe strongly in. Itās iffy for sure and none of these companies ever share their quality evaluations or put āprobably nonsenseā warnings on the output or give you an option.
Translation is definitely mostly pretty good, but I think I still prefer the older style with broken grammar to LLMs making up well formed plausible sentences that are completely wrong.
Also the results of translating back and forth and on and on are a lot less interesting, though in exchange it is fun to type stupid nonsense into it.
Really what I want is both:
A list of words and their individual translations. Parts of speech, pronunciation, and any relevant conjugations, tenses, etc. How the sentence is put together grammatically / vocab wise basically. Google Translate stinks for this you have to type in fragments of a sentence and hope for the best. This is what Iām usually after since my goal is to learn a language, not have it read to me.
A computerās best guess about what a sentence means as a whole. In case Iām terribly confused and it happens to be accurate enough for me to figure it out from there.
Google Translate focuses on #2 over #1. e.g. it doesnāt make a very good dictionary / grammar reference.
Translation is a good fit because generally the input is āboundedā and stays on the path of the original input. Iād much rather trust an ML system that translates a sentence or a paragraph than something that tries to summarize a longer text.