Thanks for having a good attitude to criticism!

It’s always strange to see a member of the most incarcerated population on the planet wax lyrical about how free they are.

The US is actually #6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate

Obviously that’s still not great.

This is a really misleading title if it’s just grouping places where people were imprisoned with places people were actually tortured. There’s obviously a massive difference. This seems like the original article in Ukrainian: https://mvs.gov.ua/news/pid-cas-zustrici-iz-specialnoiu-dopovidackoiu-oon-z-pitan-tortur-katerina-pavlicenko-povidomila-pro-viiavlennia-v-ukrayini-80-rosiiskix-kativen

Are they actually saying people were definitely tortured in all 80 places there? (Also kind of funny, Google Translate seems to do a better job than the link in OP but it’s still not clear to me exactly what they meant.)

That certainly sucks all the joy out of pirating it.

Ah, I see. I was going to recommend you a link to the audiobooks that I found.

I managed to find what I assume are English fansubs.

It was on Amazon Prime’s streaming service for a while so there should be official subs at least floating around.

It’s fairly entertaining but you really have to suspend disbelief. I’d call it fantasy with some sci-fi jargon more than actual sci-fi. I guess I could say overall plot doesn’t make a lot of sense but scenery on the way isn’t too hard on the eyes.

Just curious, to you speak Mandarin?

Makes sense, sure. If you aren’t in the category of idiot though it’s pretty annoying and it’s just plain harder to get the results you’re looking for than it used to be.

If it’s a common typo it does that, but below it is a link “search instead for” with your original word.

Pretty sure it’s not just common typos. However you’re right that it doesn’t provide a link to search with the original word. It’s just annoying that even I explicitly went through the trouble of quoting my query it still tries to second guess me and makes me follow another link to get to the results I originally requested.

I don’t know about your or the other person’s particular examples but even when quoting stuff, Google search very frequently thinks it knows better than the user. I use quoting a lot and very often it gives me something I didn’t ask for with “I think you meant blah: showing results for blah” even though I specifically quoted my query to ask for something other than “blah”.

It was a lot more reliable about giving me what I actually asked for a few years ago. The results are currently a lot worse when you’re searching for something specific.

First just think about the logic of what I said before: if there are finite number of combinations in the link, how can you possibly link to a larger number of items? It’s just logically impossible.

Then how is it that I was able to link to 800 words with 5 characters, (stripping aside the static portion of the links)?

The fact that you were able to link to 800 words doesn’t really mean anything. somesite.com/a could point to a file that was gigabytes. This doesn’t meant the file got compressed to a. Right?

There also might be less combinations for that site than it appears. For an 800 word chunk of grammatical English text, there are a lot less combinations than the equivalent length in arbitrary characters. Instead of representing each character in a word, it could just use an id like dog=1, antidisestablishmentarianism=2 and so on. Even using tricks like that though, it’s pretty likely you’re only able to link to a subset of all the possible combinations.

Regarding compression in general, it’s a rule that you can’t compress something independent of its content. If you could do that, even if the compression only reduced the file by the tiniest fraction you could just repeatedly apply the algorithm until you end up where the problem I described is obvious. If you could compress any large file down to a single byte, then that single byte can only represent 256 distinct values. However there are more than 256 distinct files that can exist, so clearly something went wrong. This rule is kind of like breaking the speed of light or perpetual motion: if you get an answer that says you have perpetual motion or FTL travel then you automatically know you did something wrong. Same thing with being able to compress without regard to the content.

it would be possible to parse any program or any bit of software into its text equivalent and then generate the URL that attaches to this algorithm for that entire page reducing a thousand characters to 16.

This can’t work. Let’s use a simpler example, instead of 16 characters for the link let’s say it’s a single digit and let’s say the content of the “page” is 4 digits. One digit has 10 possible values: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 4 digits have 10,000 possible combinations. With only one digit to index into the 10,000 possible combinations, you can point to only 10 of them.

It’s the same thing for pages of text. If you have a 16 character link and the content you’re trying to index with it is more than 16 characters then you can only point to some of the possibilities in the larger set.

But as OP points out, someone will get that kidney eventually anyway.

OP erroneously thought that but it’s not actually correct. The conditions where someone dies but their kidney is viable for a transplant are rare.

I don’t recommend using RAID 0 for kidneys.

You now have a single point of failure, where you had redundancy before.

On the plus side, someone else gets to continue existing.

Or from the IT perspective: I have two important servers, one has a single drive, the other has RAID mirroring. The drive in the first server fails. I could take a drive out of the server with RAID and have two functional servers or I could keep the second one running on its RAID and have a server with redundancy (that hopefully/might not be needed).

(I’m not going out and donating a kidney though, guess we can say it’s because I’m selfish.)

One would hope that IBM’s selling a product that has a higher success rate than a coinflip

Again, my point really doesn’t have anything to do with specific percentages. The point is that if some percentage of it is broken you aren’t going to know exactly which parts. Sure, some problems might be obvious but some might be very rare edge cases.

If 99% of my program works, the remaining 1% might be enough to not only make the program useless but actively harmful.

Evaluating which parts are broken is also not easy. I mean, if there was already someone who understood the whole system intimately and was an expert then you wouldn’t really need to rely on AI to port it.

Anyway, I’m not saying it’s impossible, or necessary not going to be worth it. Just that it is not an easy thing to make successful as an overall benefit. Also, issues like “some 1 in 100,000 edge case didn’t get handle successfully” are very hard to quantify since you don’t really know about those problems in advance, they aren’t apparent, the effects can be subtle and occur much later.

Kind of like burning petroleum. Free energy, sounds great! Just as long as you don’t count all side effects of extracting, refining and burning it.

To put it a slightly different way, if the original person said “those people (black people, for example) can’t be trusted to use the money responsibly, we need to manage it for them” then criticizing that would basically be criticizing the person for being racist. I’m not saying you were rude or even very direct. I’m just saying that kind of criticism or counterargument is a different type than “I think method A is more effective than method B”. The latter is just about practical stuff and doesn’t touch on moral issues like racism.

Anyway, the way I interpreted your first post was arguing against that first type of problem. It’s very possible I misinterpreted both of you but hopefully why I said what I did makes more sense now.

Idk what you mean by normal disagreement, but I have no intention of being hostile about this if that is what you mean?

Ah, that’s not what I meant. Sorry for not being clear. I was referring to where you originally said:

It is so weird to me you can somewhat accurately describe the issues that still exist today related to slavery and then just “but I don’t think we should give em the money because they probably wouldn’t spend it responsibly”.

If the parent post was talking about “those people” as in a specific race, then the problem would be that person was being racist. So calling out a post for racist statements or overtones is different from just a normal disagreement about the best way to accomplish something. See what I mean?

quick edit:

worrying too much about the money being used “correctly” or “efficiently” above all else is a misdirection to keep the debate stagnated

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” — I agree. I think we should try to identify the best way to use resources to help most effectively, but certainly not to the extent we’re just paralyzed and don’t do anything.

So you might feed it your COBOL code and find it only coverts 40%.

I’m afraid you’re completely missing my point.

The system gives you a recommendation: that has a 50% chance of being correct.

Let’s say the system recommends converting 40% of the code base.

The system converts 40% of the code base. 50% of the converted result is correct.

50% is a random number picked out of thin air. The point is that what you end up with has a good chance of being incorrect and all the problems I mentioned originally apply.

I was speaking generally. In other words, the LLM will convert 100% of what you tell it to but only part of the result will be correct. That’s the problem.

I don’t really agree with that either.

That’s just a normal disagreement, though. Right?

giving people some cash does generally help.

Maybe. I wouldn’t personally argue it doesn’t help at all, but I also don’t feel like it’s that likely to be the most effective use of resources. I don’t have any issue with that approach in principle, just to be clear. I’m 100% in favor of whatever approach does the most good.