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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • I use local instances of Aya 32B (and sometimes Deepseek, Qwen, LG Exaone, Japanese finetunes, others depending on the language) to translate stuff, and it is quite different than Google Translate or any machine translation you find online. They get the “meaning” of text instead of transcribing it robotically like Google, and are actually pretty loose with interpretation.

    It has soul… sometimes too much. That’s the problem: It’s great for personal use where it can ocassionally be wrong or flowery, but not good enough for publishing and selling, as the reader isn’t necessarily cognisant of errors.

    In other words, AI translation should be a tool the reader understands how to use, not something to save greedy publishers a buck.

    EDIT: Also, if you train an LLM for some job/concept in pure Chinese, a surprising amount of that new ability will work in English, as if the LLM abstracts language internally. Hence they really (sorta) do a “meaning” translation rather than a strict definitional one… Even when they shouldn’t.

    Another thing you can do is translate with one local LLM, then load another for a reflection/correction check. This is another point for “open” and local inference, as corporate AI goes for cheapness, and generally tries to restrict you from competitors.


  • I think the (ideal) future looks more like an accelerated Orion’s Arm, where humanity-changing technologies take over.

    Again that’s what I’m getting at. We will never be colonizing Mars as squishy humans… We‘ll be augmented, modified, interfaced with mechanized AI, uploaded, maybe even just mechanical intelligences, something like that. We’ll be using nuclear propulsion, at least. There will be no need to worry about drinking water, breathing oxygen, radiation, psychological/physical impacts of space travel/low gravity, or even traditional resupplies, because that will all be irrelevant.

    The New World is (IMO) a bad analogy because baseline humans could live out an existence, mostly, from the local environment, and the incentives were clear from the start. The “profit” motive for Mars is purely scientific at this point.



  • I think the average person (and average Musk acolyte) doesn’t grasp how hard spaceflight is, much less sustainably living there.

    Colonizing the bottom of the ocean would be orders of magnitude easier. Or the South Pole. Or Kīlauea’s open lava pit.

    The tech you’d need to make living on Mars independent of Earth, like consciousness uploading, self sufficient friendly AI, extensive human/plant bioengineering, terraforming… Well, they’re better at solving our problems on Earth anyway.

    …Look, I’m all for science mission there, but “escaping” to Mars is the wildest fantasy. A few years ago I’d say Musk was lying or exaggerating, but I think he’s actually drinking the Kool-Aid, and doesn’t even understand the basics of modern spaceflight.