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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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. -
R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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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@mastodon.social i apologize for just jumping in here but i want to back up just how literal this destruction is. despite me using an ai blocker, my server is now at a constant 50%+ cpu usage, most of which coming from caddy and thus being unavoidable for me unless i write my own reverse proxy too (not too unlikely i suppose, but either way).
i am now experiencing up to 300-something requests per second that are confirmed to be coming from llm scrapers, usually hovering around 185 with regular spikes to 250. that means an average of 16 million requests per day. this translates to over 99.7% of requests to my sites coming from scrapers.
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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
This study has a lot of data and finds Waymo's safer for certain kinds of crashes...
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@tef@mastodon.social i apologize for just jumping in here but i want to back up just how literal this destruction is. despite me using an ai blocker, my server is now at a constant 50%+ cpu usage, most of which coming from caddy and thus being unavoidable for me unless i write my own reverse proxy too (not too unlikely i suppose, but either way).
i am now experiencing up to 300-something requests per second that are confirmed to be coming from llm scrapers, usually hovering around 185 with regular spikes to 250. that means an average of 16 million requests per day. this translates to over 99.7% of requests to my sites coming from scrapers.
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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 Funny how it's exactly the same as with Uber years ago. Which was marketed as a solution for private cars, but in fact was replacing public transit:
Uber and Lyft are undermining public transit, a new study shows - 48 hills
UC Davis researchers demonstrate that rideshares don't wean people off cars; they get people off buses and trains.
48 hills (48hills.org)
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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 @bert_hubert BUT THE MONEY / FIRST MOVER ADVANTAGE / BEING THE PERSON WHO OWNS ALL OF THE LABOUR IN THE WORLD etc
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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 @davidgerard “The only way to stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI.”—Doctorow, possibly
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@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
@janamarie @tef yeah, I hate the way these people vandalize language. I grew up as a cyberpunk fan excited by AI, robotics, space exploration and cryptography. Now I have to constantly append "but not like that" every time I talk about things that interest me. I guess I'm lucky I was never deeply interested in quantum physics. If they inflate a guitar or bicycle bubble next I'm going to lose it
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@Klara see also wat tyler i guess
@tef I wasn’t thinking about peasants, but about the protest/fights between craft guilds and whoever installed the clocks and control system.
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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 Self-driving cars, have the *potential* to be safer, but only as part of a holistic change to the way we approach transportation and urban planning as a society that would include decreasing the need and desire for individual conveyances in the first place. Most of the rest of that change kinda has to happen *first* before self-driving cars will actually be able to provide any benefit.
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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 i do wonder if this is intentional, now that the internet has been fully scraped it doesn't need to exist any more and in fact must not because it can't be monetized/controlled like an llm service can be
i despair
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it feels like a lot of the arguments i hear boil down to "what if none of the bad things were happening right now, and instead, good things happened instead"
and sure, if that were true, things would be good
but, well, all of the bad things are happening already and none of the good things are any closer to appearing
and i'm just not confident "wait and see if everything reverses course" is a sensible way to evaluate the impact of new technologies
@tef What if the temperature of the water starts going back down again, magically? Then you frogs who jumped out are going to look pretty foolish!
Did I say water and frogs? What if climate change fixes itself magically? Why don't we wait and see?
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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 Does anybody believe that in private investor pitches, Elon Musk tells people that RoboTaxis will mean that nobody needs to buy a Tesla? No!
He tells investors that the market for RoboTaxis are all the municipal transit lines everywhere, and that while Waymo may look like competition, they're actually frenemies dismantling public transit.
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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/
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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 I think we are more likely to be destroyed by a Vogon construction crew.
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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 listened to an excellent podcast yesterday on 'Neuroprivacy' - a brilliant example of cooperation between ethical/legal and technical expertise working very hard to make new neurotechnologies a net positive by considering and guarding against social harms whilst the technology is still developing.
From the @eff podcast:
https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/1c515ea8-cb6d-4f72-8d17-bc9b7a566869/episodes/3955c653-7346-44d2-82e2-0238931bcfd9/audio/6ce9ce71-a66a-46ba-9472-890fadb7ff08/default_tc.mp3 -
@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 @tef It does feed into a weird revanchism that is popular on both the right and the left, though.
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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 This comparison is really clarifying for me, because I'm coming up against a lot of "what if"s where blind people like me are used to justify AI because we benefit from it so much. Not all of which is imaginary but it's really exaggerated and context-specific.
And the reaction to any problem I mention is "oh you/other blind people just need to learn about it, get used to it, skill issue." No! It is not just a skill issue.
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similarly, i've heard a few times that "we might cure cancer", and sure enough some brute force computation can fold proteins fast
but in practice it is more likely these tools will be used to fabricate experimental results, push dietary supplements and other snakeoil cures
and more coarsely, ai isn't pouring funding into the CDC, ai isn't reversing the destruction of the FDA, and is more than likely going to be used to justify those things
@tef
The medical industry doesn't even *want* to cure cancer. Plenty of researchers do of course, but we have to contend with the fact that the people who *fund* research have literally said out loud that they don't want to cure cancer because it would interfere with their profits. -
R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
