That is some excellent writing - I went through a little of it and found it well laid out. I’d say you make very efficient use of your time and this is an important contribution for the fediverse, keep doing you!

I had this procedure done as a child. Very simple, zero problems. I never even remembered it before your post.

I thought this was about programming

Luxembourg and Belgium?

More tech bro world domination shite. Please regulate these guys and their ludicrous ideas out of existence, we just got rid of monarchies and now this?

anti-intellectualism and distrust of “so-called experts

Experts or authorities?

Here some conspiracy for you: A lot of psychiatry (not all) is made up shit rooted in old white guys’ ideas about how to keep unruly youngsters and women in check. The DSM is a vague symptom list sponsored by the pharma industry and gets changed every few years or so (glad they took the gay out).

I consider the output of (the scientifically connected side of) psychiatry, together with the output of my peers, together with my own perception when I make decisions about my own wellbeing - if that alone is anti-intellectual and conspiratic to you, you might be adhering to scientism rather than science.

Weighing in for Southern European mental health care, family support and abuse support. Believe me, you will be better off talking to friends or fellow sufferers online or offline than trying your luck in the public system. Pills is all you get here, and prescribed somewhat hit-or-miss after what amounts to a 15 min interview, most of which are spent by the doctor typing your data into his computer.

If you need help for domestic abuse, be prepared for hours of bureaucracy while reliving and retelling your trauma to a host of police and social security professionals repeatedly. Then relocated to somewhere where you receive the bare minimum of care. I was lucky to never need it but have witnessed it, and frankly would consider any offers from unknown van-dwellers before this.

The only way to get the help you need is to research your stuff well beforehand, and then wheedle out of the system what you need by annoying the bureaucrats till they give up.

Maybe some non-Europeans could weigh in with their perspective as well.

Same with real people out there. I grew up in conflict with my parents before the internet and had the exact same issues you describe, just offline. it comes down to taking any and every advice with a grain of salt, no matter. Online and offline self help groups can be great, and life saving.

Currently sitting next to silent bf silently. We just grunt at each other for days in a row. Live with someone wanting constant interaction = hell.

Oh hi! Let’s discuss some human issues, like eating and watching TV, fellow human. Because I’m also human.

I do see the problem that a valuable set of global data is ultimately held by a US-American organization. I do know regional subsidiaries exist and in the case of Europe often seem to be run by public organizations, so that offsets this problem. I also wouldn’t know how federation would work with something like inaturalist. Maybe keep instances of regional data? I could see a use case there.

Der überfreuteste Schaden den ich je die Freude hatte live mitzuerleben. Der Kapitalismus frisst sich selbst, danke!

Upcoming app ideas from a world of restless engineers:

• Nightmr - find the partner of your dreams^TM
• Google Dream Ads - advertise your product while your clients sleep

Shit I wasn’t even going to spoof a car logo, just make a tiny wheat paste sticker with a penis drawing and the words “small utility vehicle” - but your idea is beautiful as well.

I got slightly taken off track when I was too lazy to draw the tiny penis myself and typed “tiny penis” into my search bar.

If anyone would like an A4 sheet of tiny penises to print and glue on SUVs, let me know I’ll finish it. Shaming these motherfucking SUV-owners out of existence maybe works.

The best part is, the MTPE workers’ output is 100% going to get fed back into the algorithms, so it’s only a matter of time before the average error rate of the models is good enough that there’s no real reason to pay anyone to look at it.

Not quite, yes and no. It will be ever so slightly off, and the slightly off gets fed back, and language will change. It is already happening since CAT tools introduced segmentation - which means texts were segmented, and thus translated, at sentence level. Where a human translator in front of an unaltered text would have joined some sentences and separated others in the translated text, one tends to stick to the segmentation when working in a CAT tool, and MT- and CAT-translated German sounds almost, but not quite, like human German - remember that beverage machine making tea in the Hitchhiker’s Guide? Only we got used to drinking the stuff and reading the texts, what can we do.

And now you have the added feature of MT flavoured translated texts. I for my part really enjoy handmade things these days, fuck AI. I thought AI generated images were funny at first, then understood the computation needs involved, the intellectual property stolen and put to work for corporations, the implications for many digital workers … it’s just more awful than fun honestly and should just fuck off back into the arseholes of the thieving scammers who invented it.

It’s of course heavily hyped. No matter that the AI they are hyping for translation now isn’t much different from the MT we are using since more than a decade.

Btw I like the MT with reservations as it saves my hands from typing a lot. And I have been picky in choosing clients and negotiating my services, so I can’t complain personally. But I would like to help organize online language workers in some way, and make sure AI doesn’t fuck up quality even further, and demand reasonable rates. Especially for those poor folks in cheap translation mills (forgot their names). I also have heard of rates like 0.03€ doing translations for a (South) EU government, work for which usually a language degree is necessary, yet people accept these laughable shit rates.

Both you and @Outtatime@sh.itjust.works have a point, and miss it by a bit. It’s not the point that a job that could be done by a robot is automatically useless, or that working in a trade is damaging.

• Not the type of work does the damage, but the daily hours you do. Whoever said that every job must be done 8 or more hours a day? Can we call it a day at 12:30 if the work is heavy or damaging or monotonous? If I type 8 hours i suffer as much damage as a trade person working 8 hours, just in different parts of my body. Same for people who drive 8 hours or paint 8 hours every day.

• If we got out of the mindset that a real job is something we have do at least 8 hours every day, we could do illustration, raising bonsai, writing novels in our free time. Without the pressure of survival in our necks. But we hand over most of our productivity to whoever owns ‘our’ corporations these days. There’s no need to do this anymore, we can get together and stop this.

Technological progress is okay if it is

1. ecologically sustainable
2. in the hands of the public, not a few corporations.

And AI fails for both.

Erm how much is than in sheep or potatos? I don’t do McDonald’s maths

I am literally fixing punctuation all day that AI is too stupid to pick up. But it translates whole paragraphs most beautifully. I spend most of my working day in some state of dissociation, with an occasional laugh as I watch what I thought was civilization crumble before my eyes - as always, my work software wanted an update before starting a new project, and as ever more often, didn’t work after the update. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore and I guess we’re all on drugs or suffer the consequences of long Covid, or both.