I feel you... For 30+ years of my life I prided myself for writing without typos and other mistakes (without autocorrect), using lots of bullet points, dashes, and words such as "delve into" or "underscore".
Now I find myself intentionally adding typos and other msitakes, and using less sophisticated language, just to not be accused of using AI.
It’s been about 30 years since prose editors like word started underlining spelling mistakes in red. I don’t get typos when writing formal text in a keyboard. One handed on a touch screen phone with “auto correct” causing issues is another thing, but not for published articles.
I don't mind that in a "proper" text where it's actually useful and fun to read something with a flair. But maybe it has always irked people in short form (forum comments etc), but they've never just called it out until now? I do sometimes read something that gives me an "iamverysmart" feeling, as if the author used a thesaurus to find a synonym for half the words to sound clever but it just makes the whole thing incomprehensible.
Americans famously have a median 6th grade reading age, so words like "delve" and "perspicacity" aren't going to win friends and influence people.
Ironically, AI writing is too literate. It reads like clunky pastiche to literate readers, but it's still using words and constructions less literate readers haven't seen before.
The distinctiveness of LLM language comes from overuse of specific words, not because it has a particularly sophisticated vocabulary. Some of the words it overuses may be considered sophisticated by some people, but that's not what makes it identifiable (or what makes it grating). It's still not hard to distinguish your voice from LLMs by being thoughtful about style at all.
It's not just [thing], it's [more dramatic thing.]
You can customise the default style over an impressive range. Most people don't, so most AI writing is distilled essence of Failed LinkedIn Marketer, even when that style conflicts hilariously with the content.
It's not profound. It's literally just the age old <group of of people> <thing> combination but with a couple extra words to seem high brow and the group it casts shade upon is picked to confirm certain biases.
People who live in trailer parks are poorer and have lower educational attainment than other groups. It's not a bias to acknowledge this or to reference it.
It's also not unreasonable to believe that the two things are linked.
You could've called it hoodrat logic, their educational and financial success is on the same order.
Why not call it woman logic? They are famous for strictly using long term planning and cold logic to plan their lives to the point they even joke about it.
You could've subbed in just about any nationality.
But you chose trailer park because the point was to pick a group of people that a bunch of other educated white collar people (I think the trailer park people would use the term "coastal elites" for this group, lol) like feeling better than, hence why the other groups wouldn't do.
If you wanted to make if harmless you could've chose any manner of public personality (politicians are gold mines for peddling short sighted stuff, plenty of examples to choose from) to name it after.
> But you chose trailer park because the point was to pick a group of people that a bunch of other educated white collar people (I think the trailer park people would use the term "coastal elites" for this group, lol) like feeling better than, hence why the other groups wouldn't do.
I started calling it that when I lived in the trailer park.
> If you wanted to make if harmless
It's already harmless. The people who live in trailer parks don't need your protection, and acknowledging that most of them don't want to be there isn't hurting anyone at all.
> and acknowledging that most of them don't want to be there isn't hurting anyone at all.
You're not acknowledging that they don't want to be there. You're assigning them a lack of long-term planning and ability to reason about how to achieve the best outcome for life. You're calling them "stupid" without using the word.
The comparison didn't include someone who chooses to take night classes at a junior college with hopes of transferring credits to another institution for an accredited degree, for example. No, they're too hopeless to find a third way. Having a background living in a trailer park in no way absolves you of dumping on people who still do in that comment.
I realize that I'm being hyperbolic to make a point and that life isn't simple when living in poverty. But I've been destitute as well, and I don't blame people who have trouble overcoming the same.
> You're not acknowledging that they don't want to be there.
I told you what I meant. You're trying to tell me that it's not what I meant. As the the guy who said it i can tell you that you are wrong about my intent.
> You're calling them "stupid" without using the word.
I'm willing to own that it's Blunt language that might hurt feelings if you really want it to, but that wasn't the intent. I refuse to walk on eggshells because someone somewhere in the world might find some meaning i never intended if they really look for it.
As a human being sometimes I can't accurately communicate my full intent to everyone. However, as a normal human being you also have he obligation to try to see the best version of others peoples words before assuming the worst version.
On a side note, I thought a little bit about that concept. For me, recreating deceased loved one with AI would be reigniting the grief all over again. I would want to avoid that.
Maybe, just maybe, I would be able to use it, for example, to see my grandparents who died ~30 years ago, as a curiosity, but still I'm not sure if I'd want to.
My interest is training a model on myself and everything I’ve learned through life so that if I die, my kids might be able to extract some value from my experience. Learning life on your own without help can be tiring and costly (both emotionally and financially), and bad advice can be worse than no advice. A guide would be helpful imho. Step 1: survive. Step 2: enable yourself to thrive.
I already have boxes of paper notes and videos I’ve recorded, as well as books and url bookmarks, just need to get them into a machine readable format.
If the AI could extract advice to give people from his life experience, wouldn’t that be an advanced enough AGI not to need his personal experience to begin with? It’d just analyze the inputs and dispense personalized wisdom.
If you wore a voice recorder and recorded all your physical interactions with your family for a year then transcribed it then trained an LLM I wonder if you could get close.
That's weird, I have Windows 11 Home installed by the computer manufacturer but I don't recall having any ads. Is that because I disabled them at the start? (don't remember) or maybe because I have pihole in my network?
Anyway - no ads for me.
Any time something like this comes up, there's always people it doesn't happen to. It makes me wonder if some random fraction of users get off the hook just to gaslight us.
I'm the same but I don't use PiHole. (I am in UK. Does geography matter?). If I seen ads in my windows start menu, I'd suspect I have a cracked windows copy with a 3rd party spamming me. It's literally that far fetched to me. I always use Pro though as well...
I bought (UK) Windows 7 Pro (retail) many years ago, tied to an MS account for licensing. Free upgrade to Windows 8, then Windows 10, followed eventually by my current Windows 11 Pro.
No ads in the OS that I've ever noticed, and the minimal pre-installs (Candy Crush, Office 365 etc) are trivially deleted upon OS installation.
That's 3 upgrades of Windows at no extra cost, and all 4 versions without advertising significant enough for me to remember seeing. And to be honest, even though I'm about 70% a Mac user due to the M1 hardware, and maybe 10% Linux, Windows remains very productive for me (more so than the others) so it's been a bargain.
I appreciate opinions vary, but despite occasional comments in HN about Stockholm Syndrome or not knowing what the alternatives are like I personally enjoy Windows. Yes, even Windows 11. And not just for games.
> What are use-cases for this that people will actually benefit from? Creative writing - sure. Brainstorming? Maybe for very vague and basic topics that don't need any business context. But more than that?
Looking at my Linkedin feed: lots of lazy people excited about possibility of "creating content" like "100 blog posts on a given topic in a minute". So, in short: seo spam. Lots of seo spam.
Interesting interview on the radio here in the UK a few weeks ago with a famous climber who went to Saudi Arabia I think to compete after much moral deliberation. He did say that every native he spoke to was very grateful for his attendance, people travelling and participating in these sorts of events is an effective way to bring change and open peoples eyes, mainly through his insistence there were female climbers competing also which wasn't in the original plan.
I'm in two minds about his story, it was a much smaller scale event and sounded well run. This World Cup though sounds flat out awful, mainly due to the throwaway slave labour in building the infrastructure and the rampant corruption from both sides. If the infrastructure wasn't built with slave labour, and if the country won the right to host fairly maybe I'd be OK with it.
Well, pardon me for pointing out, but he really should be talking to the people who aren't available to him to meet. The workers, slaves, people in jails. I'm sure they would have a slightly different opinion.
Bringing change by strengthening economic and cultural ties has been tried for a few decades now with mixed results. Be that the United States–China Relations Act of 2000 during the Clinton administration, or Angela Merkel cozying up with Russia during her chancellorship. In one case, it didn't keep China from abusing its Uyghur citizens, in the other case, it didn't keep Russia from invading Ukraine.
Registered as a charitable foundation (distinct from non-profits) with profits of $40M, and an endowment (distinct from cash reserves) of $100M.
In disputes, WMF has argued that it should not necessarily be liable for content written by 3rd-party contributors, which doesn't appear to be an entirely unreasonable position. It has lobbied for consumer rights in Copyright legislation hearings, and it has lobbied against governmental mass surveillance in which it was joined by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
It has also been criticised for some software projects being late, over budget, and not living up to expectations (so, par for the course for a typical software project?), or being developed with insufficient transparency. Which, OK, isn't great.
But you're comparing that to FIFA, whose officials have been repeatedly charged (with some guilty pleas, some convictions, and other cases ongoing) of multiple counts of political corruption, bribery, match fixing, racketeering and money laundering. Also, they lobby for exemptions to workers rights protections, and for special case tax exemptions beyond those normally afforded by it's non-profit status.
If you were trying to make the point that FIFA "isn't that bad, actually", I don't think comparing them to WMF does them any favors. (Or, it does make WMF look pretty good, in comparison.) Maybe try comparing FIFA to the IOC or the NRA if you want to make them look better next time.
FIFA only nominally is a private, officially non-profit (yet actually very much for-profit), entity.
They're embroiled in politics at the highest level because football / soccer arguably is the world's most popular (spectator) sport, which is something politicians gladly make use of to promote their own agendas and careers.
FIFA World Cups more often than not involve large public infrastructure programs.
FIFA and its high-ranking officials on the other hand profit in various ways, too, from "mere" tax holidays to downright corruption.
It is interesting to see all the discussion that follows regarding the term "barbaric". Is making homosexuality illegal barbaric? Is the US worse because they do $horrible_thing?
I think it may be useful to remember the origin of the word. Barbarians in ancient Greece were simply the non-Greek. People of different culture, speaking a different language. And of course, they were considered inferior and unrefined by the Greeks, who called themselves citizens.
For the Romans, Barbarians were those who were neither Roman nor Greek. It included Germans, Gauls, Persians,...
So I think it is useful to remember that in addition to the idea that "barbaric" means primitive, brutal or cruel, there is also that idea of looking down on cultures that are not our own.
> It's their culture, their country, do we have a moral right to say country barbaric for their cultural norms they accepted for hundreds of years?
Yes, who am I to say that throwing a virgin into a volcano to please the fire god is barbaric? They've done it for hundreds of years!
You know what's barbaric? Abolitionism! Slavery has been part of our society for hundreds of years, and that fellow Wilberforce thinks he can just overturn our norms by an act of parliament?
If you dig below the surface a little bit,most countries are barbaric, and not just by culturally relative things. Just one of many examples, the US openly tortures innocent individuals, persecutes journalists, and has started more wars in the last century than any other country. That's pretty warlike and barbaric, but if the entire world decided to boycott and sanction the US, Americans would throw a tantrum and rant about being the beacon of democracy and all good things.
But we are free to point out that the US has a bunch of people in jail for minor crimes, they still has the death penalty, lacks abortion availability in many places, bullies other countries, and so on.
We don't keep our mouths shut about that just because it's a foreign culture.
My country was incredibly barbaric just 80 years ago. We changed our norms and are much better now, but still lots of room for improvement.
Countries can change. I see no reason for not calling them out for their (apparent) barbarisms as long as I am willing to be called out myself. This is the only way that we can improve this world for all of us.
"possessing or characteristic of a cultural level more complex than primitive culture but less sophisticated than advanced civilization"
This is barbaric: Flogging -> "Flogging is employed as a punishment for alcohol consumption or illicit sexual relations"
stoning -> "As of 2014, certain provisions of the Qatari Criminal Code allows punishments such as flogging and stoning to be imposed as criminal sanctions."
> US
They are (were?) friends: "In 2003, Qatar served as the US Central Command headquarters and one of the main launching sites of the invasion of Iraq."
> This is barbaric: Flogging -> "Flogging is employed as a punishment for alcohol consumption or illicit sexual relations"
I think it is a lot less barbaric than imprisoning people for smoking weed, for years, or have them appear on a sex offender list, massively limiting their freedom, for arguably small-scale things, like public urination.
Homeless people dying on the streets shooting up drugs would be a good place for human rights to start, but NIMBY's cultural norms are very inclusive of this for some reason.
Also male genital mutilation at birth is such a nice cultural norm.
Its wrong to jail people for having consensual sex. You can say its a cultural element, but it doesnt make it right. We have every right to criticize a culture/country/religion that allows things we find reprehensible. Trying to force that to change would be wrong, but events like this allow people to pretend like its fine. But its not, and thats why people are upset.
The term barbaric is used to describe someone's * opinion * of another person/culture/group of people. Anyone is free to describe anyone else's culture as barbaric, that's their opinion.
You are not barbaric if you drone-bomb children in other countries, or have relaxed gun-laws that cause enormous number of civilian deaths in your country.
Yeah, but it is now illegal in at least one state to get your child medical care if they are trans… I’m not trying to do what about type stuff, just appalled at the myriad of conditions I see around the world.
I’m sort of just appalled watching the madness unfold. Ennui is probably a good word for it. Ennui for a past moral high ground (that is likely a lot smaller than we think given how much got ignored)
> Why on earth do some people think it’s okay to include USA with countries like Qatar?
Of course they're not at all comparable, but it is worth pointing out that Qatar is a very close ally of the US, and that close relationship likely enables some of their behaviour, or at least makes it less likely that they will suffer negative consequences.
>USA isn’t perfect, but being gay isn’t punishable by jail time here.
Give it time. Texas and other Southern states currently seem to be in a race to see which state can out Nazi-analogy the other in regards to trans rights, abortion and religious propaganda in schools and those states historically also had (or still have) "anti-sodomy" laws.
Outright criminalizing all LGBT identity and speech literally just depends on whether the Supreme Court lets the states turn the ratchet far enough, which they seem willing to do. It would absolutely have popular support among much of the country.
Jail time is less bad than being killed by a drone while your country is invaded by the USA, or being killed by a school shooter in the USA because you have iduotic gun laws, or being killed by a policeman because you are not white.
I think it can be argued that school shootings are culturally accepted. Many Americans seem to view them as a necessary price to pay for, and unavoidable consequence of, their Second Amendment freedoms, something I've seen argued numerous times. The gun culture ethos of "the only answer to a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun" implicitly normalizes the latter to justify the former. And then there's the fact that school shootings basically act as advertisements for the guns used, such that there's always a spike in guns sales after such an event.
It's quite obvious that mass shootings are culturally acceptable in the USA. If they weren't, measures would have been taken to reduce their frequency, as has happened in many other countries in the world.
Barbarism is subjective though. To me trying to control a woman's body is an instance of barbarism but I am yet to see the U.S. being reffered to as a barbaric country, so yeah let's hold our judgment.
Liberalism may even make you forget local laws that respect the cultural practices of others? Arrogant speech is no good. If someone like you reaches the top of politics, I think the world war will come soon, and you are more likely to be a fascist than others.
Now I find myself intentionally adding typos and other msitakes, and using less sophisticated language, just to not be accused of using AI.