Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Google Translate having a normal one after I accidentally typed some German into the English side:
What’s the over/under on an LLM being involved here?
(Aside: translation is IMO one of the use cases where LLMs actually have some use, but like any algorithmic translation there are a ton of limitations)
lol i can replicate this glitch for glitch
On the left side within the text box there’s a sparkle emoji… so I guess that means AI slop machine confirmed
More seriously though, Google Translate had odd and weird translation hiccups for a long time, even before the LLM hype. Very possible though that these days they have verschlimmbessert1 it with LLMs.
1 Just tried it, google translate doesn’t have a useful translation for the word, neither does DeepL. Disappointing. Luckily, there are always good old human-created dictionaries.
Wait didn’t Google Translate used to have a feature where you could type in improvements? I don’t see it now so they might have gotten rid of it…
Aside: my favorite human-created dictionary is Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary. I have a physical copy and it’s around 480,000 entries across nearly 3000 pages and paging through it I just feel “yes, now this is a dictionary”. It’s so big that I might have to give it away or leave it with a friend if my plans of immigrating work out.
How the fuck can a hallucinating bullshit machine have use in translation
LLMs are a development from machine learning of the sort that works, and translation was always squishy. Just a straight LLM can do surprisingly well at translation, though if I run “surprisingly well” through a translator it comes out as “impressive demo, not so great product.” Tools like Google Translate are a complex array of stuff, not just one approach.
To the extent that machine translation was already a bullshit machine I guess. Language learning I sometimes get totally desperate if there’s some grammar construct I can’t figure out. A machine translation sometimes helps me know what to look up, or at least move on to the next sentence.
Anyway this isn’t a position I believe strongly in. It’s iffy for sure and none of these companies ever share their quality evaluations or put “probably nonsense” warnings on the output or give you an option.
Translation is definitely mostly pretty good, but I think I still prefer the older style with broken grammar to LLMs making up well formed plausible sentences that are completely wrong.
Also the results of translating back and forth and on and on are a lot less interesting, though in exchange it is fun to type stupid nonsense into it.
Really what I want is both:
A list of words and their individual translations. Parts of speech, pronunciation, and any relevant conjugations, tenses, etc. How the sentence is put together grammatically / vocab wise basically. Google Translate stinks for this you have to type in fragments of a sentence and hope for the best. This is what I’m usually after since my goal is to learn a language, not have it read to me.
A computer’s best guess about what a sentence means as a whole. In case I’m terribly confused and it happens to be accurate enough for me to figure it out from there.
Google Translate focuses on #2 over #1. e.g. it doesn’t make a very good dictionary / grammar reference.
Machine translation was the original purpose of the transformer architecture, and I guess it was unreasonably good at it compared to the existing state-of-the-art RNNs or whatever they were doing before.
Translation is a good fit because generally the input is “bounded” and stays on the path of the original input. I’d much rather trust an ML system that translates a sentence or a paragraph than something that tries to summarize a longer text.
Anecdotally, greek <-> english stuff seems to be deteriorating also.