trowawee

They'll be trash, but after a decade bouncing around startups, that's not exactly a problem unique to LLMs. There's probably going to be more startups with more trash than there used to be, but hey: that's job security.

The interesting thing about art is mostly not its physical existence. The interesting thing about art is that another human being made it to try to express something, in words or colors or film or whatever medium. It's a person trying to show you their interiority, taking something fundamentally unknowable—another living mind—and making it legible to other people. Even when it's art for hire like animation in a commercial, at the end of the day there's some human or humans who put some work in there. LLM-generated art just doesn't have that. There's no interiority to be exposed.

The financials have always been crap, though. A lot of his previous assholery was limited to very online people. Guarantee if you poll 100 people if they've heard of the "Thailand pedo guy thing with Musk", most will have no idea what you're talking about. Now it's on every news channel every night.

Probably worth noting that Pratchett wrote most of the "Adam and the gang" sections of Good Omens, while Gaiman was responsible for the riders and the more "mythological" parts. So I do see a pretty clear throughline from Sourcery to the Pratchett parts of Good Omens.

Hey! I got diagnosed with ADHD last year as an adult and getting diagnosed and medicated has been a massive improvement in my quality of life. If you have the energy to do it, I would strongly recommend it. The medication is great—I have far fewer "stare at the wall, bounce in my seat, get nothing done" days—but I also appreciate having a concrete diagnosis. Even after decades of assuming I had it, it felt good to actually hear it from a doctor for some reason.

I think the author dismissed that too casually. Anything that makes the three less valuable will result in less space around the hoop. That's not necessarily a bad thing if we want to reemphasize the mid-range shot. The only way to tilt the game back that way is to change the math on the current dunks/layups & threes meta.

Yeah, on web with extensive adblocking it's not as miserable (or routing my phone back through my pihole install). But most people aren't adblocking, and the "normal" user experience was jarring.

The Facebook aside was interesting. I've been back on FB periodically this year to try to sell some stuff after years off it and it cannot be overstated how terrible the basic experience of browsing the feed is, at least on mobile. It's a minimum of 3-4 ads per actual post from a human I chose to friend, and the ads are just the stupidest, trashiest stuff imaginable.

All true in the abstract. But doing it the day before an acquisition is always gonna earn you a door knock, even if you're a serial gambler.

"short-dated out-of-the-money call options that cash out a day after a merger/acquisition" is, like, the definition of a suspicious transaction. Somebody's gonna get a knock on the door from the SEC.

Yeah, the “ew, yucky gay people!” asides are both very revealing about the author and fundamentally undermine his argument for the value of libraries.

> the above 2 passages cannot be serious at the same time as translations of a literary work

This honestly reads like maybe you don't understand how translation works? I mean, you're clearly coming at this from the standpoint of "I have a culture war axe to grind and I'm gonna grind it", but here goes: languages don't map perfectly into each other. Even languages that exist in the same time, in the same physical locations, where many people are fluent in both languages. There are words in modern Spanish and German that you can't express in a single word in English, and those languages have massive overlap and lots of common roots. There are words in English that mean different things to different people. My 21 year old cousin and my 70 year old father would understand the sentence "I saw Bill Murray on the street today, no cap" in completely different ways.

All of those issues are massively compounded the farther you are from the context of the original text. A 50 year gap between living people in the same country and speaking the same language is enough to make communication confusing; a 3,500 year gap makes it nearly impossible. The article this thread is based on (that you are clearly commenting on without having read) displays 5 different ways that different translators approached the exact same passage in the Iliad over multiple centuries. Lombardo's translation, much like Wilson's, much like any translation, is a work of invention. It has to be, because we aren't Ancient Greeks and we are not operating in the same milieu as the original audience for this work.

You clearly don't like Wilson's work for personal/political reasons, but trying to generalize that to "she's a bad translator" because her translations are different from other translations is a silly complaint that reveals a fundamental shallowness in your understanding of the process of translation.

Right?! This is the dumbest bit from a pretty dumb statement. Politics is just people working out how they're going to interact with each other. There's no way to cordon that off from anything else. You can certainly pretend that those industries don't interact with politics, but that's just another form of politics.

Hard to imagine a sillier complaint about a translation than "it tries to convey an ancient text to the people in the era when it is translated". It's like complaining that cooking a steak changes the nature of the meat. Yes, correct, that's literally the point.