Mii

I tried to find that out but it doesn’t seem to be mentioned in any of the articles. However, searching for the names associated with it (wife, brother-in-law, and the third business partner) brings up “Kadima Ventures” from Arizona, which has these three names listed as management. However, information about that company beyond some weird mentions and a LinkedIn profile seems to be scarce (and the AZ business registry is either down right now or not accessible from where I am).

I looked again and found a 404 article on the whole story that’s better and has more info than the one I linked before, though. I’m adding that to the original post.

Road rage victim ‘speaks’ via AI at his killer’s sentencing [Archive]

I fucking can’t right now.

[Judge] Lang allowed Pelkey’s loved ones to play an AI-generated version of the victim — his face and body and a lifelike voice that appeared to ask the judge for leniency.

“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me: It is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances," the artificial version of Pelkey said. “In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness.”

Edit: 404Media article on the story that’s much better

Marc Andreessen claims his own job’s the only one that can’t be replaced by a small shell script.

https://gizmodo.com/marc-andreessen-says-one-job-is-mostly-safe-from-ai-venture-capitalist-2000596506

“A lot of it is psychological analysis, like, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘How do they react under pressure?’ ‘How do you keep them from falling apart?’ ‘How do you keep them from going crazy?’ ‘How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’ You know, you end up being a psychologist half the time.”

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.

Shit, I actually like Hank Green his brother John. They’re two internet personalities I actually have something like respect for, mainly because of their activism, John’s campaign to get medical care to countries who desperately need it, and his fight to raise awareness of and improve the conditions around treatment for tuberculosis. And I’ve been semi-regularly watching their stuff (mostly vlogbrothers though, but I do enjoy the occasional SciShow episode too) for over a decade now.

At least Hank isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong. He’s done this multiple times in the past, making a video where he says he changed his mind/got stuff wrong. So, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and hope he comes around.

Still, fuck.

Christ on a stick, they found a way to remove the black person from the “I’m not racist, one of my friends is black” dogwhistle.

I fucking can’t.

Fair points, but I still take cleaning up someone’s own bad Node.JS code over cleaning up LLM Node.JS slop because the optimist in me hopes that the human who wrote bad code can at least learn something and become better over time. After all we all have started with writing garbage, I know that I have.

On the other hand, I guess I should find a job where I don’t have to touch web development with a ten-foot pole because it’s probably not getting better.

Our company is currently looking for a new programmer and we’ve interviewed a few so far. I don’t want to generalize but it really seems that a non-negligible part of the younger ones at least tries to use LLMs to make up for a lack or experience, and that really shows.

I normally don’t like doing programming challenges during an interview because they have little to no real-world connections, but I’ve been throwing small questions around lately just to see what people do, and how they approach them, and there’s a subset of people who will say, “I would ask ChatGPT now” in those scenarios.

I haven’t met a vibe-coder in real life yet, but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time.

I am fairly certain that their stupid AI stance at least played a role. I’m part of a largish writing community, where at least several hundred people did NaNo each year, a good part of them donated too. Last year, no one partook, instead we did our own internal thing.

If this happened across other communities too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it did, they must have felt it financially.

Can confirm. Our C-suite approved a large amount of money last year so we could implement chatbots into all kinds of processes. Now that the chatbots have been implemented, no one is using them past the initial trying-out phase and questionable image generation tasks for presentations. Even the suits themselves don’t.

I told them this would happen. They didn’t listen.

I hate it so fucking much that a non-trivial number of FOSS communities have become hostile nazi bars in the last years (or maybe they always have been and I’ve just not noticed it before).

Why would anyone shit on Lina of all people? She’s such a nice and wholesome person and her work is exceptional.

Fuck these asshats.

Also, from that one Lemmy thread:

What fascists are ruining OSS?

LOL! Lmao even. Just input Linux into the YT search bar and you have roughly a 50% chance of getting fascist content.

If I had to judge Razer’s software quality based on what little I know about them, I’d probably raise my eyebrows because they ship some insane 600+ MiB driver with a significant memory impact with their mice and keyboards that’s needed to use basic features like DPI buttons and LED settings, when the alternative to that is a 900 kiB open source driver which provides essentially the same functionality.

And now their answer to optimization is to staple a chatbot onto their software? I think I pass.

Thinking that trying to sell LLMs as a creative tool at this point into the bubble will not create backlash is just delusional, lmao.

Every time I hear Bengio (or Hinton or LeCun for that matter) open their mouths at this point, this tweet by Timnit Gebru comes to mind again.

This field is such junk pseudo science at this point. Which other field has its equivalent of Nobel prize winners going absolutely bonkers? Between [LeCun] and Hinton and Yoshua Bengio (his brother has the complete opposite view at least) clown town is getting crowded.

I hate that this shit has an established name now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding

I’m a senior software engineer

Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don’t think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.

At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don’t have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn’t mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.

I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.

If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

Let’s be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don’t think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label “potentially useful” on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold–kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.