I personally think B5 is a better show than The Expanse, but I don't mind the dated visuals or the occasional bit of campy acting or whatever. The storytelling is absolutely first-rate.
Their statement on this issue opened by emphasizing how eager they are to help kill people:
>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.
It's not controversial to say that democracy is a more ethical form of government than autocracy. It's also not controversial to say that violence is sometimes justified when it's in self-defence or to prevent a greater injustice from happening. So what's the ethical objection to that statement?
You gave two statements which are different from what I quoted.
The idea of "defend[ing] the United States and other democracies" and "defeat[ing] our autocratic adversaries" are always the stated reasons for US military action. Iraq was certainly an "autocratic adversary" and hundreds of thousands of people died from the war there. Vietnam was about "defending democracies" and resulted in millions of people dying. These are atrocities on an incomprehensible scale.
The ethical objection is very simple. War is evil, and the military is in the business of war.
The ethical objection is that the United States is an empire that kills for money, this is not a "defense" project. They even call it the department of war now.
I wonder if GP subscribes to the narrative of moral equivalence between things the Iranian regime does (such as slaughtering crowds of anti-government protestors) and what Hamas does (such as the butchery and terror committed against innocent civilians on Oct 7th) and any deaths or injuries that occur directly attributable to a US military action. If so, then I suppose they'd say it's fair to condemn the US as evil because deaths have happened, after all. Pacifism and turning a blind eye to anything happening in another sovereign country seems like what that particular worldview advocates. Iran isn't pacifist, but would definitely like it if their geopolitical rivals would adopt pacifism.
"ethical" is not a word that carries the connotation of a universally agreed upon set of behaviors. Different peoples, groups, and cultures vary in what they consider acceptable behavior.
To be fair to GP, while I agree that literary translations are still much better left to professional translators, the specific examples actually given have recently been moving in the opposite direction in my experience - at least for translations from English. In my own language, I've seen articles published in translation under license, on major local news sites, including mis-translations as ridiculous as "1000 lb bombs" translated as "1000 £ bombs" ("bombe de 1000 de lire").
News sites are extremely cash strapped, I bet it's all automatic translation, maybe with the exception of a few important articles, and it has been even before LLMs.
On my local news sites I still see crap like english word order but Romanian words on filler articles, which means it wasn't even a LLM.
During the Ukraine war I saw many Russian or Ukrainian language articles or whatever translated with just Google Translate and it was a hopeless jumble of errors.
Even GPT 4 was massively better.
Some people just don’t understand how general purpose these chat bots are and insist on continuing to use single purpose tools that have been left in the dust.
If you want a verbatim translation of a piece of foreign language text where your problem is specifically that human authors are editorialising their translations… then yes, AI is the solution.
“You always want to use the backhoe!”, says the person with a giant hole they need excavated quickly and cheaply.
Yes, looking at their profile it does look that way for all their contributions on HN. Ctrl+F "real" and Ctrl+F "genuine" as one quick indicator--AI absolutely loves these adjectives and their forms right now.
Is Grammarly considered AI or not? I use Grammarly heavily because I use speech recognition in a stream of consciousness mode. It catches misrecognitions and language where I thought the right word but said a different one.
The below is the above once through Grammarly and a couple of written-by-me substitutions.
Is Grammarly considered AI or not? I use Grammarly heavily because I use Aqua speech recognition in a stream-of-consciousness mode. It catches misrecognitions and language where I thought the right word but said the wrong one.
It’s the reaction of the audience that matters, not what happened on your device that nobody can see.
If the writing ends up being the same as what you would produce if you carefully edited it yourself, it will be well received. If it shows any signs of being machine-generated rather than human-authored, the audience will sense it and react negatively.
We advise against copy+pasting any generated text into HN. If you think there’s some fuzziness around the definition of “generated”, well, see what happens.
Just because those things don't contribute to your final grade doesn't mean you don't do them.
At Oxbridge, for CS we still had lab work. We still had problem sets assigned for CS and for math which were graded. We had one large CS group project in, I want to say, our second year. Humanities students were still assigned essays. It's just that none of this stuff contributed to your final degree classification which was based entirely on your exams (although if you didn't do your CS practicals you wouldn't be allowed to pass).
Obviously Oxbridge isn't exactly representative but certainly my experience showed me that the American style is not the only way of making education work.
I'm not Dang, but I agree AI articles are a disease - but with reservations.
In this case, a Chinese developer who's not a native English speaker - I feel is _adding_ to "interesting conversations" not detracting from them but using AI assistance to publish an article like this in readable/understandable English.
I know HN and Ycombinator is _hugely_ US focused and secondarily English-speaking focused. But there's more and more interest in non US based "intellectual curiosity" where the original source material is not in English. From YC's capitalism-driven focus, they largely don't care. From my personal hacker ethic curiosity, I'd hate to miss out on articles like this just because of a prejudice against non English speakers who use AI to provide me with understandable versions.
Having said that, AI hype in general certainly feels like a disease to me. I was noting recently how the percentage of homepage like/discussions I click has gone way down. I remember the days where I'd click and read 80 or 90% of the things that made it to the homepage. These days I eyeroll my way past probably 2/3rds of them because they look at first glance (and from recent experience>) to just be AI hype in one form or another. (I've actually considered building myself a tool that'd grab the first three or so pages and then filter out everything AI related - but the other option is just to visit less often...)
I'm all for people who aren't native English speakers publishing their thoughts and opinions. But I would much prefer they still wrote down their own thoughts in their own words in their native language and machine translated it. It would be much more authentic and much more interesting--and much more worth reading.
I just get my agent to read them for me and present a few options for comments as derived from the vibes of any existing comments. If I time out, it posts a random option, then at the end of the week I get it to summarise all the content I (royal) read and distill it into a take-aways note in my (royal) journal. It's been a huge productivity boost. When ever I think I might want to think about something I just ask the agent to find a topic I (royal) read within some timeframe and have it synthesise a few new dot points in my (royal) journal. I'm hoping to reach 10,000 salient points by the end of the year.
>And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them.
I don't think it's clear at all why people do this. I suspect a large amount of it, at least on a site like HN, is just hapless morons who think it's "cool".
I find the whole thing pretty depressing. They went to all that effort with the organization and setup of the company at the beginning to try to bake this "good for humanity" stuff into its DNA and legal structure and it all completely evaporated once they struck gold with ChatGPT. Time and time again we see noble intentions being completely destroyed by the pressures and powers of capitalism.
Really wish the board had held the line on firing sama.
> Time and time again we see noble intentions being completely destroyed by the pressures and powers of capitalism.
It is not capitalism, it is human nature. Look at the social stratification that inevitably appears every time communism was tried. If you ignore human nature you will always be disappointed. We need to work with the reality we have on the ground and not with an ideal new human that will flourish in a make believe society.
I don't want to set that aside either. Why is AI generated slop getting voted to the top of HN? If you can't be bothered to spend the time writing a blog post, why should I be bothered spending my time reading it? It's frankly a little bit insulting.
Normally the 1 sentence per para LinkedIn post for dummies writing style bugs me to no end, but for a technical article that's continually hopping between questions, results, code, and explanations, it fits really well and was a very easy article to skim and understand.
It's action thriller writing for something that's in reality is super dull (my question is loaded with outdated cliches, but would you be telling a girl you're trying to impress at a party about this problem you faced of trying to push some data over the network?). I had to skim over it, like watching a YouTube video at 2x so I don't start evaluating how obnoxious the narrator is.
Well it's an inherently unprovable accusation, so assumption will have to do. It reeks of LLM-ese in certain word choices, phrases, and structure, though. I thought it was quite clear.
I committed typing en-dashes and ellipses on Windows to muscle memory. Alt+0150, Alt+0133. Bam!
I'm sure there are easier ways this can be set up. But, as I said, muscle memory.
Although I'll have to admit that wanting to use proper typography in the first place probably started when I was typesetting a print magazine on a Mac, where it's super easy to do it the proper way.
(I'm also never going to let AI slop discourage me from trying to use proper punctuation.)
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