I have a No Soliciting sign on my door, which salespeople often ignore, and I get grumpy about it.
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I have a No Soliciting sign on my door, which salespeople often ignore, and I get grumpy about it. But, a Sonic fiber internet sales person just came to the door claiming it is now available here and gave me a card for two months free, so I'm slightly less mad about it. Though I suspect it's a lie. They've been sending me flyers for years and every time I check it is not available.
I'm gonna check again, anyway, as I hate the cable company and they're charging me twice as much for slow service.
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I have a No Soliciting sign on my door, which salespeople often ignore, and I get grumpy about it. But, a Sonic fiber internet sales person just came to the door claiming it is now available here and gave me a card for two months free, so I'm slightly less mad about it. Though I suspect it's a lie. They've been sending me flyers for years and every time I check it is not available.
I'm gonna check again, anyway, as I hate the cable company and they're charging me twice as much for slow service.
@swelljoe I got something in the mail from them recently. It sounds like a great service that doesn’t exist yet (in Dallas). They’re very cagey about timelines, just that they’re coming “soon”.
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@swelljoe I got something in the mail from them recently. It sounds like a great service that doesn’t exist yet (in Dallas). They’re very cagey about timelines, just that they’re coming “soon”.
@tedchoward I checked and it's willing to let me sign up with my address, which has never happened in the half-dozen times I've tried in the past five years I've been here. I am still suspicious, and I'm planning to move sometime this year, so I'm kind of hesitant to do anything that takes effort or time or hassle (like scheduling a new installation and cancelling the old service). But, Spectrum is like 90 bucks a month vs. $50 for Sonic, plus two months free, allegedly with no contract.
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Chi esercita il DIRITTO di voto ha il DOVERE di informarsi.
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@reiver I've heard John Mastodon personally picks those out of a tall hat, for each user, individually. What a great man.
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I'm writing this in English.
Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.
This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.
@Gargron@mastodon.social argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.
For many of us, translation is first about access.
The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.
@Gargron@mastodon.social notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.
There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.
I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron@mastodon.social describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.
The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.
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I've been checking out @inkwell , the new journaling app on the Fediverse. It looks absolutely great. Fantastic work by @stanton. If you'd like to follow me there, check out @evan@inkwell.social.
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There is the complete list that Mastodon is suggesting I (potentially) follow.
