Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 0 Posts
  • 845 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: January 12th, 2024
  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoGames@sh.itjust.works•The industry is lobbying against Stop Killing Games! | Accursed FarmsEnglish
    33·
    4 days ago

    Not surprised with the lobbying group.

    Ross did an amazing job addressing the babble in the statement. Specially because he’s being extra careful on saying things to the best of his knowledge - note how he doesn’t say “it’s false”, or “it’s a lie”, but rather “a German lawyer thinks this is false” and “this sounds like a lie”; gotta respect that.

    Some additional comments:

    The first paragraph of the lobbying group’s statement might sound like an introduction, but it’s already a straw man - it’s clearly misleading the reader on what Stop Killing Games is about.

    as the protections we put in place

    Excuse me?

    1. Sod off with this “THINK ON PROTEKSHUN!” idiotic argument;
    2. let us not forget the main concern when it comes to data protection are companies harvesting data so they can sell it to their “affiliate partners” (i.e. data vultures eager who’ll use it for targetted spam).

    Note #1 is a cancer way more widespread than just the gaming industry. Every fucking bloody time some megacorpo wants to fight against some sane customer protection law, they babble shite like this. And it always sounds like “a user/customer is not a rational human being, it’s irrational trash, and if you let it do what it wants it’ll cause itself harm, so We need to protect those filthy things. And how convenient, the way to protect this filth against itself magically aligns with our financial interests!”

    these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

    This is not even a fallacy. Not even bullshit. It’s simply to be a lying bastard, and to call the readers bloody muppets by proxy.

    1M+ sign European Citizen’s Initiative “Stop Destroying Videogames”: Help us protect gamers’ consumer rights!

    I think it would be sensible if the word “gamer” was replaced with “citizen” here. Because it’s what politicians care about.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoPiracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•They don't want people to pirate, but this is the service they want people to pay for.English
    27·
    8 days ago

    I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

    Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!

    Verbose example, using Portuguese to English

    I’ll give you an example, using PT→EN because I don’t speak JP. Let’s say Alice tells Bob “ma’ tu é uma nota de três pila, né?” (literally: “bu[t] you’re a three bucks bill, isn’t it?”) . A human translator will immediately notice a few things:

    • It’s an informal and regional register. If Alice typically uses this register, it’s part of her characterisation; else, it register shift is noteworthy. Either way, it’s meaningful.
    • There’s an idiom there; “nota de três pila” (three bucks bill). It conveys some[thing/one] is blatantly false.
    • There’s a rhetorical question, worded like an accusation. The scene dictates how it should be interpreted.

    So depending on the context, the translator might translate this as “ain’t ya full of shit…”, or perhaps “wow, you’re as fake as Monopoly money, arentcha?”. Now, check how chatbots do it:

    • GPT-4o mini: “But you’re a three-buck note, right?”
    • Llama 4 Scout: “But you are a three-dollar bill, aren’t you?”; or “You’re a three-dollar bill, right?” (it offers both alternatives)

    Both miss the mark. If you talk about three dollar bills in English, lots of people associate it with gay people, creating an association that simply does not exist in the original. The extremely informal and regional register is gone, as well as the accusatory tone.

    With Claude shitting this pile of idiocy, that I had to screenshot because otherwise people wouldn’t believe me:


    [This is wrong on so many levels I don’t… I don’t even…]

    This is what you get for AI translations between two IE languages in the same Sprachbund, that’ll often do things in a similar way. It gets way worse for Japanese → English - because they’re languages from different families, different cultures, that didn’t historically interact that much. It’s like the dumb shit above, multiplied by ten.

    If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

    That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoTechnology@beehaw.org•Brazil rules that social media platforms are responsible for users’ posts
    5·
    14 days ago

    When something similar happened in the UK, it was pretty much exclusively smaller/niche forums, run by volunteers and donations, that went offline.

    [Warning, IANAL] I am really not sure if the experience is transposable for two reasons:

    1. UK follows Saxon tribal law, while Brazil follows Roman civil law. I am not sure but I believe the former requires both sides to dig up precedents, and that puts a heavier burden on the smaller side of a legal litigation. While in the later, if you show “ackshyually in that older case the defendant was deemed guilty”, all the judge will say is “so? What is written is what matters; if the defendant violated the law or not.”.
    2. The Americas in general are notorious for sloppy law enforcement. Specially Brazil. Doubly so when both parties are random nobodies.

    So there’s still a huge room for smaller forums to survive, or even thrive. It all depends on how the STF enforces it. For example it might take into account that a team of volunteers has less liability because their ability to remove random junk from the internet is lower than some megacorpo from the middle of nowhere.

    Additionally, it might be possible the legislative screeches at the judiciary, and releases some additional law that does practically the same as that article 19, except it doesn’t leave room for the judiciary to claim it’s unconstitutional. Because, like, as I said the judiciary is a bit too powerful, but the other powers still can fight back, specially the legislative.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoTechnology@beehaw.org•Brazil rules that social media platforms are responsible for users’ posts
    10·
    14 days ago

    For context:

    There’s an older law called Marco Civil da Internet (roughly “internet civil framework”), from 2014. The Article 19 of that law boils down to “if a third party posts content that violates the law in an internet service, the service provider isn’t legally responsible, unless there’s a specific judicial order telling it to remove it.”

    So. The new law gets rid of that article, claiming it’s unconstitutional. In effect, this means service providers (mostly social media) need to proactively remove illegal content, even without judicial order.

    I kind of like the direction this is going, but it raises three concerns:

    1. False positives becoming more common.
    2. The burden will be considerably bigger for smaller platforms than bigger ones.
    3. It gives the STF yet another tool for vendetta. The judiciary is already a bit too strong in comparison with the other two powers, and this decision only feeds the beast further.

    On a lighter side, regardless of #2, I predict a lower impact in the Fediverse than in centralised social media.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoTechnology@beehaw.org•Windows 11 user has 30 years of 'irreplaceable photos and work' locked away in OneDrive - and Microsoft's silence is deafening
    3·
    22 days ago

    It’s mostly fluff kept for sentimental value. Worst case scenario (complete data loss) would be annoying, but I can deal with it.

    That’s one of the two things the 3-2-1 rule of thumb doesn’t address - depending on the value of the data, you need more backups, or the backup might be overkill. (The other is what you’re talking with smeg about, the reliability of each storage device in question.)

    I do have an internal hard disk drive (coincidentally 2TB)*; theoretically I could store a third copy of the backup there, it’s just ~15GiB of data anyway. However:

    • HDDs tend to be a bit less reliable than flash memory. Specially given the stick and SSD are relatively new, but the HDD is a bit older
    • since the stick is powered ~once a month (as I check if the backup needs to be updated), and I do a diff of the most important bits of the data, bit rot is not an issue
    • those sticks tend to fail more from usage than from old age.
    • Any failure affecting my computer as a while would affect both the HDD and the SSD, so the odds of dependent failure are not negligible.
    • I tend to accumulate a lot of junk in my HDD (like 490GiB of anime and shit like this), since I use it for my home LAN

    That makes the benefit of a potential new backup in the HDD fairly low, in comparison with the bother (i.e. labour and opportunity cost) of keeping yet another backup.

    *I don’t recall how much I paid for it, but checking local hardware sites a new one would be 475 reals. Or roughly 75 euros… meh, if buying a new HDD might as well use it to increase my LAN.