I really don't get this take where people try to downplay AI the most where it is obviously having the most impact. Sure. A billion people are supposed to go back to awful machine translation so that a few tens of thousands can have jobs that were already commodity.
I have sympathy for those affected but this article is disingenuous. I speak Spanish and have just gone to 3 or 4 Spanish news sites, and passed their articles through to ChatGPT to translate "faithfully and literally, maintaining everything including the original tone."
First it gave a "verbatim, literal English translation" and then asked me if I would like "a version that reads naturally in English (but still faithful to the tone and details), or do you want to keep this purely literal one?"
Honestly, the English translation was perfect. I know Spanish, I knew the topic of the article and had read about it in the NYTimes and other English sources, and I am a native English speaker. It's sad, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. LLMs can translate well, and the article saying otherwise is just not being intellectually honest.
What isn't tested here, and what I can't test myself as a mono-linguist, is how well english is translated to other languages. I'm sure it's passable, but I absolutely expect it to be less sufficient because most of the people working on this live in the USA / speak english and work the most on that.
I want to know how it holds up translating Spanish to Farsi, for example.
Spanish is probably the most likely language to be succesful (due to the amount of spanish speakers in the US). Still English to Spanish, while passable, is very clearly not something that passes for native speech.
Funnily enough, I'd say it reads like most of my American friends here in Spain - the best way I can put it is, it's fluid spanish from a brain that is working natively in English and translating on the fly, rather than a mind thinking in Spanish.
This is obvious to me because I speak both languages, so I can trace back in my mind the original, native English phrase that resulted in a specific weird spanish expression. a Spanish monolingual can probably only tell that it doesn't sound native.
The important point though, is that there is no significant loss of meaning other than the text being annoying to read. it won't work for literature but it's perfectly serviceable for pragmatic needs.
I see a high risk of idioms getting butchered. It's usually a good idea to translate into English and fix that up first. And unless a native-language editor revises it, there might be sentence structures that feel unnatural in the target language.
A classic issue is dealing with things like wordplay. Good bilingual editors might be able to get across the intended meaning in other ways, but I highly doubt translation software is capable of even recognizing it.
It's probably better to just stop using social media. (And stop tolerating people that do.)
I doubt that even something as 'light' on that spectrum as Hacker News is worthwhile enough compared to the non-social-media alternatives. (As a reminder, you can have a tree-like discussion structure without an upvote system.)
Have an ironic upvote. HN's system of not explicitly showing post scores and using accumulated score to give access to downvote buttons etc is the least bad that I have encountered.
If you have a better solution to the paradox of tolerance, I'm all ears.
(People still using platforms : the likes of Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn, Github, or ChatGPT being amongst the ones that undermine democratic ideals and that ought to be socially shamed, and, in some cases, beaten up.)
Can you be more concrete about this? How would you resolve this specific paradox without throwing out any obviously true axioms or introducing any obviously false ones? If it was easily resolved, it wouldn't be called a paradox.
Banach-Tarski is a paradox. You can resolve it by deleting the axiom of choice. But the axiom of choice is obviously true, at least as much as B-T is obviously false. That's why it's a "paradox" and not just "a proof that the axiom of choice is false"
We're talking about unsolved philosophical issues here, matters of barely stable equilibriums.
Would you rather be «team Plato», ruled by enlightened 'philosopher-kings' ? Comes with its own set of issues.
P.S.: Also, it's probably only a real paradox if you conflate the levels of application : what is really problematic is the systems that result in increased intolerance.
We did get more : the return of VR couldn't have been possible without drastically improved hardware.
But the way how it stayed niche shows how it's not just about new gameplay experiences.
Compare with the success of the Wii Sports and Wii Fit, which I would guess managed it better, though through a different kind of hardware that you are thinking about ?
And I kind of expect the next Nintendo console to have a popular AR glasses option, which also would only have been made possible thanks to improving hardware (of both kinds).
That’s exactly what I mean, too. We obviously will get much better AI. It just seems like the value that most people are getting out of it is already captured, just like how technically impressive stuff like VR is very niche.
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-my-job-transla...