An hackernews responds to the call for "more optimistic science fiction" with a plan to deport the homeless to outer space
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
18 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1811 readers
170 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Microsoft brags about the amount of technical debt they're creating. Either they're lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
I'm thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.
Newsom is pitching Generative AI to make government more "efficient" : https://abc7.com/post/gavin-newsom-announces-ai-driven-efforts-help-california-reduce-traffic-jams-improve-road-safety/16279785/
~~The predictions of slopworld 2035 are coming true!~~
Blergh. Just fucking fund public transport and don’t use AI. Easy wins on traffic and efficiency.
Aw man, Natasha Lyonne is going AI. Notably she is partnering with a company, Moonvalley, that claims to have developed an “ethical” model, Marey, trained on “clean” data- i.e. data that is owned or licensed by Moonvalley and whoever else they are partnering with.
ah yes the 937 partners of this website and their legitimate interest to scan and own your thoughts forever
i don't expect literally this but there's some potential hidden sleaziness inside
And thus Poker Face joins Sandman in the "no longer interested in Season 2" pile, but for different reasons.
The plot of Uncanny Valley centers on “a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present.”
So, Tron again, then. But with goggles this time.
I mean I appreciate the attempt to mitigate one of the many problems with genAI, but I would expect the smaller dataset to make a model that confabulates even more and is gonna be even harder to work with than something like Sora. Like, I'm sure a decent director will be able to make something with it but I can't see how it's going to be better results or more time/money/labor efficient than human VFX pipelines even if you pay the poor bastards decently.
That and also: training and running a model still takes a ton of energy! LLMs will never be ethical.
Update on the University of Zurich's AI experiment: Reddit's considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
In terms of depreciating assets, an AI data center is worse than a boat.
In terms of sailing the high seas, an AI data center is worse than a boat too.
In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.
AI data centers brought some ratty bloggers into their five minutes of fame, while a boat only brought Ziz &co from Alaska to SFBA
so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.
My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it's the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
I've been using Anki, it works great but requires you to supply the discipline and willingness to learn yourself, which might not be possible for kids.
no idea, sorry. “find some wordpals online” maybe but then you need to also deal with the vetting/safety issue
it’s just so fucking frustrating
I find Duolingo to be of low quality.
I like Babbel. It's not free and they have a relatively limited number of languages but I find the quality really good (at least for French -> Deutsch).
Unfortunately, Babbel has slop integration too.
after I've previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have "chat to a buddy" as a non-skipable step in course iteration
the "buddy" is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions "MemBot - powered by AI" at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but that's a dead link
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Can't avoid slop reading translated books, can't learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. It's the microplastics of the internet age.
Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Not-so-fun fact: that's a marketing term for what amounts to basically a scam to pay people less.
I used to work for a large translation company when this first came up. Admittedly, that was almost ten years ago, but I assume this shit is even more common nowadays. The usual procedure was to have one translator translate the stuff (commonly using what's called a TM or Translation Memory, basically a user dictionary so the wording stays consistent), and then another translator to do an editing pass to catch errors. For very high-impact translations, there could be more editing passes after that.
MTPE is now basically omitting the first translator and feeding it through a customized version of what amounts to Google Translate or DeepL that can access the customer's TM data, and then handing it off to a translator for the editing pass. The catch now is that freelance translators have two rates: one for translating, depending on the language pair between $0.09 and $0.5 per word, and one for editing, which is significantly less. $0.01 to $0.12 or so per word, from what I remember. The translation rate applies for complete translations, i.e. when a word is not in the customer's TM. If it is in the TM, the editing rate applies (or, if the translator has negotiated a clever rate for themselves, there might be a third rate). With MTPE, you now essentially feed the machine heaps of content to bloat up the TM as much as possible, then flag everything as pre-translated and only for editing, and boom, you can force the cheapest rates to apply to what is essentially more work because the quality of what comes out of these machines is complete horseshit compared to a human-translated piece.
For the customers, however, MTPE wasn't even that much cheaper. The biggest difference was in the profit margin for the translation company, to no one's surprise.
Back when I worked there, and those were the early days, a lot of freelance translators flat-out refused to do MTPE because of this. They said, if the customer wants this, they can find another translator, and because a lot of customers wanted to keep the translators they'd had for a long time, there was some leverage there.
I have no idea how the situation is today, but infinitely worse I assume.
I've logged a support ticket.
the shunning is working guys
"Kicked out of a ... group chat" is a peculiar definition of "offline consequences".
"The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post"- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!
I have no idea where he stood on the bullshit bad faith free speech debate from the past decade, but this would be funny if he was an anti cancel culture guy. More things, weird bubble he lives in if the other things didn't get pushed back, and support for the pro trans (and pro Palestine) movements. He is right on the immigration bit however, the dems should move more left on the subject. Also 'Blutarsky' and I worried my references are dated, that is older than I am.
he's a centrist econ blogger who's been getting into light race science
I'm a centrist. I think we should aim for the halfway point between basic human decency and hateful cruelty. I'm also willing to move towards the hateful cruelty to appease the right, because I'm a moderate.
And he is brave enough to say that:
-
There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.
-
Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.
-
Trans people are not people.
Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.
Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just don't work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyone's done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on "correcting" my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
On the (slim) upside, it's an opportunity to ditch Google, and maybe it will sooner or later break their monopoly position. I switched my main search engine to Ecosia a while ago, I think it uses Bing underneath (meh), but presumably it's more privacy friendly than Google (or Bing directly). I've had numerous such attempts over the years already to get away from Google, but always returned, because the search results were just so much better (especially for non-English stuff). But now Google has gotten so much worse that it created almost an equilibrium... sometimes it's still useful and better, but not that often anymore. So I rarely go to Google now, not because the others got better, but because Google got so much worse.
Ecosa? The australian mattress in a box company?? (jk)
Apparently they offer an AI chatbot alongside their services, so…
The same goes with DuckDuckGo, because the venn diagram of programmers and AI bros is apparently a circle.
Less a standard piece and more "Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes" this time around
Said revenue estimates, as of 2026, include billions of dollars of "new products" that include "free user monetization."
If you are wondering what that means, I have no idea. The Information does not explain.
Probably something to do with their recent ramblings about getting an openai social network off the ground.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
sinks like a pellet of uranium on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43825285
edit flagged and dead
This feels like a lot of straw man arguments?
No it doesn't?
Did anyone ever claim these things?
Yes?
Are these problems to implementing SMR? I don't think so.
OK, but aside from lower efficiency, higher price per watt, and not solving any of the problems they're supposed to solve, are there any problems with SMR? I don't think so.
Still sad the SMRs will not work out but good you posted it here. Lol at the HN guy going 'these are strawmen', buddy you build websites perhaps the guy in the field (with a physics phd) knows a little bit more.
From: The Sentry Team <noreply@sentry.io>
Subject: Update to Sentry’s List of Subprocessors
...
- Google LLC (Google Cloud Services) and OpenAI, L.L.C. are now reflected as subprocessors for all Sentry products, instead of select features only; and
- Anthropic, PBC is now added as a subprocessor.
sigh
they do still have user-specified controls (and appear to respect them), but... sigh
view more: next ›