Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 0 Posts
  • 494 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: January 12th, 2024
  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoPiracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•They don't want people to pirate, but this is the service they want people to pay for.English
    27·
    12 days ago

    I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

    Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!

    Verbose example, using Portuguese to English

    I’ll give you an example, using PT→EN because I don’t speak JP. Let’s say Alice tells Bob “ma’ tu é uma nota de três pila, né?” (literally: “bu[t] you’re a three bucks bill, isn’t it?”) . A human translator will immediately notice a few things:

    • It’s an informal and regional register. If Alice typically uses this register, it’s part of her characterisation; else, it register shift is noteworthy. Either way, it’s meaningful.
    • There’s an idiom there; “nota de três pila” (three bucks bill). It conveys some[thing/one] is blatantly false.
    • There’s a rhetorical question, worded like an accusation. The scene dictates how it should be interpreted.

    So depending on the context, the translator might translate this as “ain’t ya full of shit…”, or perhaps “wow, you’re as fake as Monopoly money, arentcha?”. Now, check how chatbots do it:

    • GPT-4o mini: “But you’re a three-buck note, right?”
    • Llama 4 Scout: “But you are a three-dollar bill, aren’t you?”; or “You’re a three-dollar bill, right?” (it offers both alternatives)

    Both miss the mark. If you talk about three dollar bills in English, lots of people associate it with gay people, creating an association that simply does not exist in the original. The extremely informal and regional register is gone, as well as the accusatory tone.

    With Claude shitting this pile of idiocy, that I had to screenshot because otherwise people wouldn’t believe me:


    [This is wrong on so many levels I don’t… I don’t even…]

    This is what you get for AI translations between two IE languages in the same Sprachbund, that’ll often do things in a similar way. It gets way worse for Japanese → English - because they’re languages from different families, different cultures, that didn’t historically interact that much. It’s like the dumb shit above, multiplied by ten.

    If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

    That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoPiracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•Can Software Piracy Be Justified?English
    28·
    6 months ago
    1. It’s morally good when people access information, culture, and entertainment.
    2. It’s morally good when the author of a work gets rewarded by their work.

    Piracy is morally justified when 1 is a more pressing matter than 2. As such, it’s justified in situations like this:

    • If, in the absence of piracy, the pirate would still not pay for the goods - because #2 is set up to zero (the author of the work is not rewarded anyway).
    • If it’s impossible to obtain the goods without piracy. For example, abandonware.
    • If the author of the work would get breadcrumbs of the money used to access legally the goods, and the pirate compensates the author directly (e.g. donation).
  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.world•Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly 'toxic'English
    41·
    7 months ago

    If by “a little toxicity” you mean a little bit of aggressiveness, sarcasm, etc., I agree with you. It depends a lot on the community though - in some, allowing it will be counter-productive.

    If however you mean harassment and hate speech, as the author of the text, I strongly disagree. If the mod doesn’t curb down those things, they might not be “lording” over the discourse, but other users are - because

    • users shut each other up through harassment
    • hate speech silences whole groups, as they leave the community

    Another detail is that you don’t need to control the discourse to curb down harassment, since it’s only behavioural and not discursive in nature.

    So IMO when it comes to those two things the problem is not overzealous mods, but dumb ones not doing due diligence, who are a bit too eager to falsely accuse their own users to be voicing hate speech or harassing each other when it is not the case.

    [Sorry for the wall of text.]