i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
@tef fire was lit even before communities started migrating to discord. pouring one out for death of the semantic web.
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@tef fire was lit even before communities started migrating to discord. pouring one out for death of the semantic web.
@otakup0pe when i visited the internet archive back in 2013, i took the tour
a big part of the speech involved "the natural enemy of libraries are governments" and explaining who or what would most likely see the death of the archive
and joking "we hope that by being in a church, they might have some second thoughts"
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the simple answer is that none of the good futures we imagine happen by accident. and none of the people with power can be trusted to make better things happen
and now i'm asking myself if medieval peasants looked at the clock in the bell tower and told each other
"in the future, we'll have a weekend off, as they'll be able to see how long and hard we've worked"
What's the point of working long hours, there's only so much you can do to a wheat field
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i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
i mean, there is a slight increase over the last two years but there's sufficient variance to avoid suggesting a trend
as i understand it, waymos tend to take people off busses and other forms of transit, rather than out of their own cars
so i'm doubtful it will lower deaths on the road, just the number of busses
@tef The Waymo vehicles mimic human drivers too well: loitering and blocking crosswalks for right on red and tailgating cyclists on the road. Folks will say “gotcha; they’re safe,” but this misses a bigger intangible: these vehicles are a fucking nuisance and clog the road. Being safer than a human while being more plentiful and annoying is not a significant improvement.
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
@tef unfortunately, the original Big Web Dream began to die with the advent of mobile-first and social media. Now its death is only accelerating. Read @timbl's book about that.
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
@tef The operative word here is”open”, it is not possible to extract rent from an open resource, as western societies are built on rent extraction the open web had to go.
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sure enough machine translation has reasonably proven itself as a mostly public good, albeit at the expense of the translation industry
so i am aware that good things can come with bad prices, but i haven't really seen much good and i am seeing a lot of bad things
it literally breaks my heart that the public web now sits behind a proof of work system, forcing strangers to mine coins to buy access to webpages
because a bunch of tech companies are desperate for an poison-free training set
@tef translations are alreaddy getting notable worse by this. Its in some cases clearly visible there is nonhuman involved anymore.
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i don't want to be all "you are not immune to propaganda" but a lot of these arguments prey on optimism and hope that technology can lift people up
but when you start to examine the rhetoric, like "what if <imaginary circumstance where the tools are useful>"
or "bad thing? that's a lack of training and dicipline"
it just feels like gun logic in a new outfit
@tef hah, I was just comparing LLMs to assault riffles in one of the Node.js meetings!
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What's the point of working long hours, there's only so much you can do to a wheat field
@EndlessMason @tef "The origin point for nearly all of those 'you work harder than a medieval peasant' memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times…" — https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
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sure enough machine translation has reasonably proven itself as a mostly public good, albeit at the expense of the translation industry
so i am aware that good things can come with bad prices, but i haven't really seen much good and i am seeing a lot of bad things
it literally breaks my heart that the public web now sits behind a proof of work system, forcing strangers to mine coins to buy access to webpages
because a bunch of tech companies are desperate for an poison-free training set
@tef machine translation is only helpful if you cant speak a language and want to understand someone.
I once ordered some stuff of a czech homepage and was really happy the machine translation was there to help me make sense of words.
but machine translation is nothing that can be used without someone who knows context, style, humor, etc. if you want to convey the meaning, need to 100% sure or culturally accurate. KI can do none of this. Professional Translators can.
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@tef machine translation is only helpful if you cant speak a language and want to understand someone.
I once ordered some stuff of a czech homepage and was really happy the machine translation was there to help me make sense of words.
but machine translation is nothing that can be used without someone who knows context, style, humor, etc. if you want to convey the meaning, need to 100% sure or culturally accurate. KI can do none of this. Professional Translators can.
@thierna @tef also machine translation is only available between some languages - if you need a language that th machines don’t know it is likely worse than useless.
There is also a really dark pattern today where translations are shown before the original language - and it is really easy to not see that it is a translation (not just happening with - also with videos)
I hate when gmail or google search translates stuff before showing me the original (and also that multilingual search is bad)
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i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
i mean, there is a slight increase over the last two years but there's sufficient variance to avoid suggesting a trend
as i understand it, waymos tend to take people off busses and other forms of transit, rather than out of their own cars
so i'm doubtful it will lower deaths on the road, just the number of busses
@tef they also do stuff like this every day!
https://carfree.city/@scott/116427976509574244
controlling for speed and street type, I think they’re less safe than the median driver. -
@thierna @tef also machine translation is only available between some languages - if you need a language that th machines don’t know it is likely worse than useless.
There is also a really dark pattern today where translations are shown before the original language - and it is really easy to not see that it is a translation (not just happening with - also with videos)
I hate when gmail or google search translates stuff before showing me the original (and also that multilingual search is bad)
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@EndlessMason @tef "The origin point for nearly all of those 'you work harder than a medieval peasant' memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times…" — https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
@vfig @EndlessMason the point i was making in the post is that timekeeping, albeit good, has also been used as a means of control, and i am using the meme of a medieval peasant to satirise the belief that technology will save us
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@tef translations are alreaddy getting notable worse by this. Its in some cases clearly visible there is nonhuman involved anymore.
@Flyingmana this is why i said mostly and also talked about negative consequences
albeit without elaborating them
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the simple answer is that none of the good futures we imagine happen by accident. and none of the people with power can be trusted to make better things happen
and now i'm asking myself if medieval peasants looked at the clock in the bell tower and told each other
"in the future, we'll have a weekend off, as they'll be able to see how long and hard we've worked"
@tef if I read the accounts right, people were not friendly towards the idea of going from time boss to time slave. From "I'll produce exactly how much I need in my own time" to "thou shalt go on working till the bell tolls, and after the second bell, all lights out"
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@tef if I read the accounts right, people were not friendly towards the idea of going from time boss to time slave. From "I'll produce exactly how much I need in my own time" to "thou shalt go on working till the bell tolls, and after the second bell, all lights out"
@Klara see also wat tyler i guess
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the worst bit? i still like machine learning, i still think stochastic approaches can have benefits
but if i wrote software that pushed vulnerable teenagers to suicide, or enabled people to sexually harass strangers with pornographic forgeries
i would take a step back from the keyboard and ask my good buddy hans, "are we the baddies"
or at least, i hope i'd ask those hard questions
@tef I think the first part is one of the things that makes me extra angry. Much of what is now called "AI" is not exactly new or novel, we have used machine learning and generally stochastic approaches for ages, and it's great. I have applications where I can specifically activate a machine learning approach and it makes sense. But the lens of capitalism has 'forced' the companies to now slap a butthole next to the label, add a buzzword-adjective like "deep" and make it an "AI"-feature to compete. This sucks, I want to be happy using good software, not feel shame, leave us alone, fuck off with your capitalism
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sure enough machine translation has reasonably proven itself as a mostly public good, albeit at the expense of the translation industry
so i am aware that good things can come with bad prices, but i haven't really seen much good and i am seeing a lot of bad things
it literally breaks my heart that the public web now sits behind a proof of work system, forcing strangers to mine coins to buy access to webpages
because a bunch of tech companies are desperate for an poison-free training set
Machine translation is not even close to being decent in most (if not all) fields and language combinations. It is a useful tool for understanding the idea behind some text in another language, but mostly for personal (I'd say "irrelevant") cases. Any more than that and it's pretty obvious that professional translators are still needed. In technical fields, companies would have to trust a computer to translate things faithfully without making them liable to possible legal issues, for example. In more creative fields, the machine translated texts are lacking and do not transmit the intent of the original. Languages are not tools, they are culture and, thus, a machine won't be able to properly translate something. So, even in a field where "AI" has already "won", it's not that useful.
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@tef unfortunately, the original Big Web Dream began to die with the advent of mobile-first and social media. Now its death is only accelerating. Read @timbl's book about that.
Hi @gisgeek @tef,
#platforms. And they owe a lot to #sunsetting #Google #Reader. -
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