Gemini Starts Rolling Out On Android Auto
Gemini is (finally) rolling out on Android Auto, replacing Google Assistant while keeping “Hey Google,” adding Gemini Live (“let’s talk live”), message auto-translation, and new privacy toggles. “One feature lost between Assistant and Gemini, though, is the ability to use nicknames for contacts,” notes 9to5Google. From the report: Over the past 24 hours, Google has quietly started the rollou … ⌘ Read more

↳ In-reply-to » @bender Thanks for this illustration, it completely “misunderstood” everything I wrote and confidently spat out garbage. 👌

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

Skill Erosion vs. Skill Evolution

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

tl;dr

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

Never again

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

Amazon is Testing an AI Tool That Automatically Translates Books Into Other Languages
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon just introduced an AI tool that will automatically translate books into other languages. The appropriately-named Kindle Translate is being advertised as a resource for authors that self publish on the platform.

The company says the tool can translate entire boo … ⌘ Read more

Der ganze Vorgang ist archetypisch für die seit Jahrzehnten völlig ohne Not stattfindende politische Selbstverzwergung Europas.

A comment on heise about the recent AWS outage.

https://www.heise.de/meinung/Kommentar-zum-Totalausfall-bei-AWS-Nichts-gelernt-in-den-letzten-30-Jahren-10794622.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

(Too bad there’s no good translation for the great word “Selbstverzwergung”.)

I’m paraphrasing: Europe (and other regions) depend on US IT services, a lot, without an actual need. We saw AWS, Google, and Microsoft build large datacenters and then we thought “welp, shit, nothing we can do about that, guess we’ll just be an AWS customer from now on.” Nobody really went ahead and built German/European alternatives. And now we completely depend on the US for lots of our stuff.

The article even claims that there’s now a shortage of sysadmins in the EU? I’m not so sure. But I’d welcome it, makes my job more secure. 🤣

Hosting services, datacenters, software, everything, it’s all US stuff. Why do we accept this, why not build alternatives …

↳ In-reply-to » @bender Baaaaaah 😂

@quark@ferengi.one I’ll translate “desert rat” as “Wüstenmaus”, which is kind of cute, and I’ll pretend that you just didn’t call your partner a rat. 😂

“Here’s what we do know: After their meeting ended and Vice President Vance left the room, the pope was still alive. We can deduce that he was alive, because he was heard asking an assistant, “Ho appena incontrato il volto del diavolo?” which roughly translates to, “Have I just encountered the face of the devil?” It’s a very common question that has been asked in many languages after encounters with JD Vance.”

I couldn’t help but chuckling a bit while reading.

↳ In-reply-to » For Example:

@eapl.me@eapl.me A way to have a more bluesky’ish handles in twtxt could be to take inspiration from Bridgy Fed and say: If NICK = DOMAIN then only show @DOMAIN
So instead of @eapl.me@eapl.me it will just be @eapl.me

And it event seem that it will not break webfinger lookup: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=%40darch.dk (at least not for how I’ve implemented webfinger on my sever for a single user;)

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

On my blog: Developer Diary, International Translation Day https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/09/30/translation.html #programming #project #devjournal

On my blog: Developer Diary, International Translation Day https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/09/30/translation.html #programming #project #devjournal

↳ In-reply-to » Yeah sorry just realised, but just checked again and the referrer is the same (/post) on either the POST or the GET 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Sorry, my messages don’t get included in the current convo unless I tag you. Guess something gets lossed in translation with this weird posting issue. ANYWAY, it is rather perplexing. Clearly only an issue on my Pod, but what could the source of it be 🤔

↳ In-reply-to » (#axkd3eq) @prologic I don't understand what you're saying. podman works with TLS. It does not have the "--docker" siwtch so you have to remove that and use the exact replacement commands that were in that github comment.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, bummer. I was hoping that translating the docker commands to podman syntax would work but it looks like it’s more subtle than that. Thanks for trying!

The weird thing was I wasn’t getting errors like that on my end when I tried it. podman thought the connection was created, and it set it as the default. But I don’t think it was sending anything over the wire. When I have more time to tinker with it maybe I’ll play around and see if I can figure out what’s up.

@prologic@twtxt.net @jmjl@tilde.green
It looks like there’s a podman issue for adding the context subcommand that docker has. Currently podman does not have this subcommand, although this comment has a translation to podman commands that are similar-ish.

It looks like that’s all you need to do to support podman right now! Though I’m not 100% sure the containers I tried really are running remotely. Details below.

I manually edited the shell script that cas.run add returns, changing all the docker commands to podman commands. Specifically, I put alias docker=podman at the top so the check for docker would pass, and then I replaced the last two lines of the script with these:

podman system connection add cas  "host=tcp://cas.run..."
podman system connection default cas

(that … after cas.run is a bunch of connection-specific stuff)

I ran the script and it exited with no output. It did create a connection named “cas”, and made that the default. I’m not super steeped in how podman works but I believe that’s what you need to do to get podman to run containers remotely.

I ran some containers using podman and I think they are running remotely but I don’t know the right juju to verify. It looks right though!

This means you could probably make minor modifications to the generated shell script to support podman. Maybe when the check for docker fails, check for podman, and then later in the script use the podman equivalents to the docker context commands.

↳ In-reply-to » Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

@marado@twtxt.net It’s very different. Language models are part if traditional search engines and translation engines. The new policy mentions Cloud AI abd Bard specifically. This is a weird change and probably a good preemptive move as I said previously. I’m not sure why you’re downplaying it

One of the frustrating parts of using twtxt for conversations is the URLs are, well… ugly. Anyone (like y’all yarn folks) looked at using webfinger for translating user@domain accounts to URLs?

@prologic@twtxt.net You will have to agree that always using reply (like I am doing on this one) loses everything on translation after the third or fourth replies. It simply doesn’t promote engagement. On top of that, all replies show on the timeline as well, without much—to none—context.

@prologic@twtxt.net check out this project for detecting language in two like strings. Could be useful when paired with translation services.

https://redd.it/o50ukf

@jlj@twt.nfld.uk excellent! We could add a translate twt for twts of another language to the UI with this.

Is there a usable API for language translation? Non-Google preferable.

↳ In-reply-to » @prologic do you have any info on how the '!' tags are supposed to work? are they just a different kind of hash tag?

@prologic@twtxt.net (#keh22ka) maybe a custom linking method on a pod level? like can pass a template that gets translated. ex https://{domain}/wiki/{nick}/{tag} + !somepage -> https://sour.is/wiki/xuu/somepage

↳ In-reply-to » @prologic do you have any info on how the '!' tags are supposed to work? are they just a different kind of hash tag?

@prologic@twtxt.net found it!

2020-07-25T00:52:27.000000Z a new twtxt/weewiki feature: any word starting with ‘!’ will translate to an internal weewiki reference in my HTML renderer. Example: here is my !wiki_index

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: Victor Séjour’s Le Mulâtre https://john.colagioia.net/blog/media/2020/02/23/mulaitre.html #books #literature #blackhistorymonth #translation #french #announcement