• 16 Posts
  • 545 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • My spam filter on my email server. Autocorrect on Heliboard. I think that’s it. Luckily I picked up English at a young age so I don’t need it for translation.

    Also for people having a kneejerk reaction, “AI” and “ML” as terms long predate the current slopwave. The ML I am talking about in the previous paragraph is not genAI, it is the kind of ML to classify things (emails into spam/ham, words into correct/incorrect), that you can feed training data to improve its accuracy rate.





  • Ubuntu was my first Linux distro and I liked it back then. I would’ve recommended the old Ubuntu to non-tech-savvy people, or people who want a Linux that “just works” (although back then no Linux “just worked”, there was always at least a bit of debugging for me). However it’s enshittified a lot. A lot of basic software is only available as snaps. It generally feels quite corporate these days.


  • Seconding Niri, but also I’ve seen swayfx setups that have Hyprland-like aesthetics.

    If you don’t care about fancy effects, I’ve been a river user for years and I like it. Nowadays it is just a compositor and the WM is separate, but river-classic (which includes a WM) has a dwm-like tag system, is programmatically configured (ie you speak to the river IPC in any language of your choosing—by default it’s a shell script but the WM just executes ~/.config/river/init on startup, so that file can be any executable), and is simple and lightweight. The new 0.4.x release separates the compositor and WM, so you can pick or write your own WM that suits your own workflow/use-case, if that’s your thing—it might not be if you don’t want customisability and you just want something that makes the decisions for you to a good enough standard.



  • Yes, I said “no they don’t” because translation has the ethical implications of global inequality. Which, btw, climate change greatly exacerbates. I never said that LLMs don’t have environmental impacts if used for translation; I said they have additional ethical implications when used for machine translation. Which is true. I have my doubts that you are particularly concerned with tech ethics and global inequality given how flippant you have been about the real issue of exclusion of global majority populations just from things as simple as language choices.


  • A small fraction? I’m talking about the majority of people on Earth who are disadvantaged by English centrism.

    And where did I say “it’s ok to burn the world”? I never specified any position on technology, but to be clear, I am a luddite, I don’t think modern tech is ecologically justifiable, and is built upon a foundation of slavery and ecological destruction. It is a separate question of a policy of a small software forge (which already runs on ecologically destructive hardware; the vast majority of emissions for modern tech come from the manufacture of the devices we’re using to talk now, from your own client device to the devices being used as servers to relay our messages) to allow or disallow AI translations. I do not think that our energy use is justifiable. Now LLMs use a comparable amount of energy to, say, AAA video games. I think this is a bad thing and video games should be more computationally efficient. Does that mean I support banning people from playing AAA video games? No, I don’t think that’s the way to address this problem. Questions of policy are separate questions to questions of technology; a technology can be bad without the solution being to ban it, because the effects of a ban are different to just getting rid of the banned technology.



  • If you want to skip to the changes.

    I think this is a really solid LLM policy for a platform like SourceHut. Since they rely on a policy that’s deliberately open to interpretation to allow for reasonable discretion, and rely upon the honour system for enforcement/adherence, I don’t think we should necessarily be telling larger projects to adopt the same policy because this becomes untenable for big projects or platforms. But it’s still good to see policies in this spirit being adopted. The only change I’d like to see is explicitly allowing AI translation for non-code, like comments and emails. It reduces the barrier of entry for ESOL contributors. If there’s concern about the accuracy of translations, they can always include the original alongside the machine translation.