Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

Hysterical take from a Verge interview with Zoom's CEO.

if the end state of AI is just to have a bunch of avatars on Zoom calls talking to each other, then... what's the point? pic.twitter.com/qFmC1eznxR

— Jack Raines (@Jack_Raines) June 6, 2024

Hysterical? wasn't that word retired a decade ago?

are you concentrating on that or is the digital version posting for you already

Lads!

Ok I’ll change the subject to something not related to this thread. Anyone know how to make audio player apps? I was browsing for some open source code and couldn’t find what I was looking for. I basically want to make a loop player for my Roland looper. So something with an A/B looping player so I can hear the loops together and stop/start A or B if that makes sense.

Seems like a good use for Max/MSP? I don't use it but I know there are a lot of cool free loopers that people have made for it.

That looks cool thanks jordan

Hysterical? wasn't that word retired a decade ago?

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

my man, you don't get to police misogyny

quit doing that and i'll be less pissed off at you

Hysterical take from a Verge interview with Zoom's CEO.

if the end state of AI is just to have a bunch of avatars on Zoom calls talking to each other, then... what's the point?

we kinda already have that

ai generating content to get clicks from spambots

the butlerian jihad can't come soon enough

my man, you don't get to police misogyny

was he wrong?

I read hysterical as in hysterically funny.

was he wrong?

― mookieproof

speaking only for myself, yeah, he was

because now the conversation is all about whether or not the word "hysterical" is appropriate to use

like ok i'm a woman and i _personally_, you know, both didn't think it was inappropriate and didn't really want to have a conversation about whether or not it was appropriate

so he comes up responding to some xweeter who isn't even on ilx saying "dude we don't use that word anymore"

what's the audience here? who's he talking to? i mean if jack and aimless are at one of those awful piss troughs in the men's room at some sporting event and jack says "oh god that was fuckin' hysterical" and aimless says "dude not cool", i mean, fine. like there _are_ women here. my feeling is that we can speak for ourselves, advocate for ourselves, and that his white knighting is neither wanted or useful

but i'm in a pissy mood, i brought an ostrich to the smoothie party and nobody even noticed

okay! fair

I like seeing when men recognise things are sexist. please keep doing it, men!

but I get what you're saying about the focus of the conversation.

Aimless doing a weird version of literary crit on fucking tweets will never not be funny.

I like seeing when men recognise things are sexist. please keep doing it, men!

but I get what you're saying about the focus of the conversation.

― kinder

yeah i wanna be clear i'm not like, giving blanket advice to all men everywhere on behalf of all women everywhere lol

this is me specifically being still pissed off at aimless after the absolute shitshow that were his posts on the "do women like anything as much as men like star wars" thread earlier this week

it's a challenging thing to talk about because i _know_ it is _absolutely_ something i didn't get in the before time

and this is gonna get long and what follows is pretty much entirely directed at cis guys, from my perspective as someone who for a long time thought and acted the way cis guys are taught to think and act. kinder specifically, nothing that follows has anything to do with you so feel free to tl;dr on the rest of this :)

i gotta be very careful where or how i criticize a man for anything but particularly when it comes to where and how a guy talks about or treats _women_

cuz one, he might not get what i'm saying, which in every case is my responsibility

and then two, other men than him might not see what i'm seeing. and i know in the Before Time when i felt like that i would be like "wait a second, i don't understand what he's doing wrong, am i doing something wrong? what's wrong with what he said?" it's probably like the best-case scenario to ask in a case like that haha, because the alternative is to be like "oh well i guess i'd better never stand up for women again because this one woman in this one particular case was pissed off at this one guy", i mean i'm making it sound ridiculous but this is actually what i believed in the Before Time

which brings me to three, i don't have a lot of knowledge or experience in doing this kind of thing, like i've only been personally having these experiences for about five years, and sometimes i do get shit wrong. i feel a lot of pressure, not just as a woman but as a trans woman, to not _get things wrong_. as time goes by i'm getting more confident that having Bad Takes doesn't make me "not a real woman" or whatever but at the same time i am continually learning... i had and still have a really hard time taking other people's beliefs and perspectives into consideration when writing sometimes. i don't know if that's specifically me or just patriarchy, probably some combination of the two tbh

for all those reasons combined i do tend to wanna give guys a pass for stuff i would've spoken up about before, even in cases where i have _more_ knowledge and experience on the topic than i did before. boy, that's kinda weird now that i write that, isn't it? i don't feel that way when it comes to women, though, and that's probably not just me, because yeah, women do seem to get a lot more criticism and held to a lot higher of a standard than guys do. i sometimes do feel like i'm being held to a higher standard as a woman than i ever was as a man. and thinking about that, i think that's honestly a good thing. like if i had a Bad Take in the Before Time and women didn't feel comfortable criticizing me for some combination of the aforementioned reasons, i don't feel like that's actually to my benefit. to the extent that i do have more knowledge and experience today, a lot of it i think comes down to people who _didn't_ really feel safe or comfortable criticizing me before, when i was coming from this position of privilege, feel more comfortable criticizing me now. in the aggregate it doesn't always feel great, it feels like getting dogpiled sometimes, but there are individual criticisms that are more valuable than anything i would've gotten before

so why am i bagging on aimless for a casual comment in an unrelated thread because of stuff he said in another thread last week? because four, i find that if i ignore or excuse someone saying or doing something i got a legitimate grievance about, they're gonna keep saying and doing that stuff. and i'm gonna get pissed off and resentful about it, and the more they do it the more pissed off i'm gonna get about it, until i finally blow up and a lot of guys will look at that and say "typical hysterical woman", though they may not use that exact word because it was retired a decade ago :) but then if i _do_ decide to air a grievance, even if it is legitimate i gotta be prepared to defend the legitimacy of my grievance and/or explain the exact nature and extent of that grievance at length. the latter at least i don't think is a _bad_ thing necessarily, it's how people _learn_, but it's fucking _exhausting_. i mean you know me, i write fuckin' novels at the drop of a hat, but even for me, it's exhausting. i struggle to not come off as tired and cranky in a way that would have put Before Me on edge. you know, to smile more. :)

the ultimate goal, for me at least, of doing that is to get to a point where guys can call out other guys for saying and doing shitty things regarding women. so yeah i'm particularly hesitant to criticize something like what aimless said because _he means well_, genuinely and truly he does. when i was doing IT in the field i'd run across these guys sometimes who, when it came to computers, knew "just enough to be dangerous". that's kinda the feeling i have about things some guys say about women, sometimes. it's way better than being whole ignorant and misogynist, but boy once someone knows just enough to open up the registry editor, some real trouble can come from that.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/10/brighton-general-election-candidate-uk-first-ai-mp-artificial-intelligence

I have something to contribute to the "pro" side of the ledger - machine translation. I've spent hours reading the French version of Wikipedia. I'm reading updates on current events in China from accounts that only tweet in Mandarin. It is a miracle.

i mean the google app camera to translate? finally, I can read all those essays included in japanese CD pressings.

machine translation. It is a miracle.

tell that to translators who lost their jobs

machine translation is quite bad in quality but infinitely better than no translation, so for people who had no access to translation it is pretty miraculous, the unfortunate thing is a lot of people who were paying translators decided that quite bad is good enough for them too, which means a lot of people lost their work and a lot of high quality translation is now low quality, the classic disruption story

Similarly, ML captions riddled with obvious errors were deemed to be accurate enough to make my team's edited captions a luxury item.

you just know this shit is going to get people killed, some big industrial machine is going to ship with a shoddy computer translated manual

the first death by robot occurred in 1979

I'm French/English bilingual and have experimented quite a bit with Chat GPT translations and found it pretty impressive. Don't know how it fares with other languages

Using Google Translate’s camera to translate Japanese CD liner notes isn’t putting anyone out of a job at least. Those things were never translated.

Yup. Increased automation can be a great thing. The problem -- as polyphonic states -- comes in as to what we do about the jobs lost due to automation.

Google Translate is still hilariously bad at translating speech, as I have found out on numerous occasions when using it in the compang of my in-laws. The nuances of a conversation seem to utterly defeat it. So there will be a job for translators of real-time speech long after the ones for translating documents have gone.

https://trossachs.co.uk/mountains/ben-aan/

ho ho holy shit

Once more of this kind of drivel escapes onto the internet it will surely be used to 'train' the next generation of LLMs, subsuming us all beneath an accreting tide of bollocks.

are there any recent articles about jobs lost due to automation? I think it's still a drop in the bucket compared to outsourcing and moving production around to the least expensive global locations

outsourcing is more wealth extraction rather than job loss since those jobs are still being presumably done by humans though?

It feels like there's more and more jobs now than ever, just fewer and fewer meaningful and/or reasonably-paying ones.

well, it's job loss in the country that's outsourcing

I kept joking with my coworker about that goofy Amazon grocery store concept they shut down. You know, the one that claimed to have no cashiers, but they did have a team of 1000 people in India working in shifts analyzing the video to both train a video analyzer and actually tally up the purchases.

They may have not had a cashier, but they did employ 1000 people in India!

youd think that one wouldve been doable every item just has a tag on it and the computer reads them it doesnt seem that hard but no

Yes a lot of companies/consultancies that claim to automate processes by using tech actually make most of their profit by facilitating outsourcing.

But in specific cases like translation/making subs I think the automation has led to job losses.

Automation is not a straight line, it takes a long time to develop.

This piece cites the prediction made a few years back that radiologists would cease to exist by now, but so far it hasn't happened.

Not to say it won't.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/paul-taylor/llamas-pizzas-mandolins

lol that is an amazing url, thank you

i hung out with this dude once whose job was to dissect ferrets and remove some organ to send on to labs using them for research. it occurred to me that these type of jobs that build up training chips for ML models will probably always exist, but they will be low paying jobs. i could see AI wiping out the middle class this way, especially the white collar upper-middle class.

That was a really good piece

tell that to translators who lost their jobs

― reggae mike love (polyphonic)

i'll keep saying it as long as i need to - the problem isn't the machines, it's _capitalism_.

now that linux has been fully co-opted by the beast, which is the true socialist OS to run our solar-powered LLMs on? (there's a cool solar-powered online zine that does run on linux though: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/)

yeah pretty wild that we keep developing this technology to make people's jobs easier and it's universally seen as a bad thing

ryan broderick has a good piece today about, er, pieces like that

Last week, a group of former OpenAI employees came forward with a very scary warning that AI companies have been acting secretly and irresponsibly and need to be regulated. Was this group of insiders ringing the alarm bell on rampant copyright infringement? No. What about the fact that racial biases are being encoded into these models? Nope. Misinformation and destruction of journalism? Don’t be stupid.

Rather than anything that currently matters or even exists, this group is actually very worried about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction,” as they wrote on their website. It makes for good headlines and is enough to earn them the token New York Times arms-crossed whistleblower photo, but let’s be real. This is just marketing.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/cargo-cults-autocorrect

ai is really in an alltime hype cycle right now, usually you dont get people thinking the hot new thing is going to exterminate humanity

we've already got climate change doing it but that isn't a money maker :(

climate change is increasing human misery but has no chance to wipe us out

no chance?

life won't resemble anything we would recognize today, but the special suits for the surface visits will probably be pretty cool