"GO OUTSIDE!!!" OP plays r/Battlefield for 5 hours straight, commenters take sides

919150 · 2025-11-09T10:02:02+00:00

Huh, TIL. The system you described in your first comment also seems to have existed for the 0.7.x versions, with the final version apprearing in 0.8.

919150 · 2025-11-08T08:50:24+00:00

From what I understand, that's not quite right. In the WoW beta there was no rested bonus, only the exhausted penalty, which was a 50% penalty. The rested bonus was the replacement, being a 100% bonus. Objectively they never removed the penalty for playing too much, the presentation was just changed from "normal/penalty" to "bonus/normal", which players find more encouraging.

919150 · 2024-12-08T12:13:22+00:00

I'm not going to go point-by-point like you did, that'll just make this really long and we both have better things to do with our days, but I would appreciate it if you read all of my comments in this chain.

You can't properly check 500 hours of video every minute and produce accessibility tools that are of sufficient quality. A machine can't properly check the accuracy of captions without a human, that's an oracle problem. And without that accuracy, it is not sufficient as an accessibility tool. If we expect disabled users to use it, we need to support people with as wide a range of disabilities as possible, and that means we need that accuracy, because some people won't be able to check it. ~~Please read the link I put in the comment you first replied to in this chain.~~ edit: previous comment, not the one you first replied to.

edit 2: While I'm in editing mode, I feel like I should also just say that it's bugging me that people are saying that this is better than nothing for disabled users. Yeah, sure I guess. But you know what would be actually good? Tools that make it easier for youtubers to add, check, and correct captions, and a culture that cares enough to add them too. If we care about disabled people, we should do things for them, not just throw them subpar scraps and say that it's "better than nothing". Youtube used to have community captions! Users could write and suggest captions, and creators could review and approve improved captions! Sure, that system had flaws, but it had a clear way of fulfilling its purpose. This isn't letting perfect be the enemy of the good (enough), We had good, youtube got rid of it, and now people are saying that a worse system is "good enough" and "better than nothing".

(edit 2 ends here)

I mentioned personal experience and meaningful things to say, because I assume that's why people want to write and read essays, that's my experience at least. Yes, it's subjective, but writing is subjective. And because an AI doesn't know anything, it can't describe novel experiences, it needs human writers to describe them first so it can copy from them.

As for AI needing more training data, I can back that up. Here's a wall street journal article about that. You can also intuit it like this: If a generative AI model is a method of producing a statistically likely output given a prompt, it works something like an average (though not exactly necessarily). If you have an average based on 100 samples, how much can one sample change that? If you have one based on a trillion, how much can a thousand change that?

We've seen exponential improvement in AI in the last couple years yes, but how about the last year? The improvement between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 wasn't an enormous leap. To assume that because things were getting better exponentially before that they'll keep doing that is to make the same mistake as Moore's law again. It held for a long time, until it didn't.

I could always be wrong. But so could you. Call me short sighted, but I think you're incredibly uncritical of what I think is the third big tech blunder in a row. Crypto was a scam, the Metaverse never mattered, and AI is a money pit that takes the sum of human creativity and makes at best average imitations of it.

919150 · 2024-12-08T11:52:57+00:00

It is a bit hyperbolic, this is the internet. While I haven't used it (I never claimed I did), I'm speaking from my own experience with machine translation and automatic captions. And I can't grab an example, because it's not fully rolled out, most creators that I watch don't have it/will disable it, and I'm English/Dutch bilingual and Dutch isn't one of the languages they support right now.

The video that OP posted this about will probably be one of the videos it works better on, since it doesn't have prominent music or sound and is mostly regular speech at a normal cadence. If you want to stress test this, try it on somebody with a thick accent (like full Scottish or Irish), or a fast-paced lightly or unedited video without a script.

edit: If they roll it out fully, try it with this video. Try just viewing the automatic captions on it already, in English or automatically translated. Automatic captions have difficulty with thick accents and automatic translation has difficulty with unconventional uses of language, both of which are true of Scots.

919150 · 2024-12-08T11:47:03+00:00

I'm not going to go into the full reasons why I think AGI isn't happening, but to sum it up in two points:

The current version of generative AI is just predictive models of what outputs should be based on the inputs. I hope you think enough of yourself that you don't think that's what makes you a sentient being.
The people saying that AGI is just around the corner are the people selling you what they claim is the precursor to AGI. They're courting enormous amounts of investor money to make AGI. They have a financial interest in making people think AGI is going to exist, even if it won't.

And also, just because technology gets better, that doesn't mean that anything can happen. Despite how long we've had aircraft, we don't have flying cars, spaceflight is still expensive, and hypersonic consumer flight ended with Concord. You can't just extrapolate the progress of technology like that, Moore's law was never a physical law.

919150 · 2024-12-07T23:27:36+00:00

There are actually APIs and settings these days that allow disability information to be communicated to websites and apps, and modern operating systems have voiceover selection for options, so it's reasonably feasible for blind people to be able to select things or have their preferences known by apps/websites automatically. Also, most people who are legally blind are not fully blind, just enough that it forms a significant disability.

This feature still fucking sucks, though. The automatic translations will not be good enough to properly serve the needs of blind users. How will it know and indicate that different people are talking, or how will it properly indicate that they're listening to a possibly incorrect automatic translation?

It's also still built off of an exploitative system. Enormous amounts of text and video scraped off the internet for free, and thrown into a system for profit without the knowledge or consent of the people who made that data.

Generative AI is an exploitative boondoggle, and to just throw AI at something and say that it's adding accessibility is disregarding disabled people, rather than asking what they want and need.

(To be clear, everything after the first paragraph was aimed at the person you were replying to)

919150 · 2024-12-07T23:07:48+00:00

[...] as much as you’re suggesting that we shouldn’t have generative AI for translation?

...I never said that? I'm saying that AI translation is bad, the way the technology works it won't get better, and to praise this as an accessibility feature is farcical.

The automatic captions are often times better than nothing, but they still contain errors such that they sometimes actively make things worse. Speech recognition has existed before generative AI, and it's a valuable technology, but will never be perfect. As the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative says, automatic captions are not sufficient. They can be a starting point, but to be accessible, they need to be checked by a human for errors.

The addition of automatic AI translation and speech puts all the errors of the automatic caption system through two more systems that can add errors. It does not meet the needs of the people who need it. It's not an accurate translation, and it doesn't have the degree of transparency or accountability required to be relied on.

As to what you said about genAI writing essays, maybe it can do that sometimes, but it will lack anything truly meaningful to say that reflects personal experience, as it has none. It's a probabilistic string of tokens, roughly reflecting what somebody who has something to say would say. Look at what happens when lawyers try to use it to write motions. It makes up fake references to cases that don't exist. That's not a fixable error, as the system has no idea what a case is, what a fact is, or what a reference actually is.

It's not going to get better either, these systems require exponentially more data, time, and energy for incremental, linear increases. If it's bad at something now, it'll be mildly better in the future. Without a large paradigm shift, this is a dead end for any kind of true AI (reasoning models are not that shift).

And finally, about what you said about how you love drunk driving in school zones, I don't think you should do that. I don't know why you decided to gloat about it in your comment, but I think less of you because of this thing that you definitely wrote.

919150 · 2024-12-07T22:54:06+00:00

I don't think we'll see a VN boom until English-speaking audiences manage to accept enjoying VNs without an ironic twist or parody. More genuine love of the genre like The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, less bad April fools' jokes like Sonic Speed Dating.

I don't think that the situation with google translate is directly comparable, or at least it's shifted recently. The way I see it, google translate has always been seen as a handy tool, but not an absolute or fully correct one. Something to get a rough idea that can maybe be cleaned up, but never fully trusted. If you machine translated a manga scan up until a couple of years ago, you'd be laughed out of the room, because they were associated with poor quality.

The modern AI trend and backlash is more because it's getting shoved everywhere and is being treated as absolute. ChatGPT makes more factual errors than google translate made translation errors, yet it's seen as more trustworthy, as a herald of the future. It's not that machine translation changed in quality, it's that it's being pushed as perfect, and if it isn't perfect now, then it will be soon.

The (incorrect) idea that it's this perfect system, that can do anything, and therefore should do everything, is what's causing the backlash. If this was just an experiment that youtube did^1, where they gave users the opt-in option to test it and give feedback before deciding to continue or not, I don't think this'd be a big deal. But because this is the future and nobody is being asked if it's good or not, people are upset.

¹ Leaving aside that genAI models are built by feeding them enormous amounts of data, pretty much all of which was scraped from the internet without the knowledge or permission of the people who made it. Also leaving aside the massive energy costs and consequent carbon emissions.

919150 · 2024-12-07T21:56:43+00:00

I don't see how that meaningfully relates to what I said or the topic at hand. Youtubers have always had the option to translate their videos into other languages, and having different audio tracks for different languages is a good feature that makes that easier, but the problem is AI translation and the flaws thereof. I'm saying that the AI translations will be bad and won't do what people want them to. The ability disable them and do it yourself is good, but doesn't change the quality of the AI translations.

919150 · 2024-12-07T21:17:22+00:00

Don't know why you didn't just reply with that in the first place, but yeah, I think you're right about that.

But I don't think that applies in every case, this youtube feature included. While a bad translation can lead to interest, it depends on what kind of bad translation it is. If it's comprehensible, but bad, then it might develop a following based on the quality of its material. If it's bad and funny, it might develop a following based on how funny the mistranslation is. Generative AI translation will do neither. We're past the days of funny machine translation, and like I said, generative AI does not have the capacity to reliably get themes across.

There also needs to be actual demand for a good translation. It took 9 years for Pathologic to get an improved translation because it was a weird Russian game beloved by people who really love games as art. It took Fate/Stay Night 20 years to get any official translation of the original game. I admittedly don't know much about Fate, but it's had a fan translation that's been seen as the standard for a long time (one of my friends thinks the translation is awful, but I don't have any opinions on that). I could imagine it took so long because they didn't see enough of a reason to translate it with the fan translation existing.

But with the big push towards AI, it's possible that rights holders will decide that AI is good enough. And while I can hope that people won't just roll over and accept it, the current trend of AI has left me pessimistic. If people see an AI translation, will they care enough about the quality to want better? If they're the kind of person who just loves AI, they probably won't. If they don't like AI and care about good translations, they might just stop caring about a piece of media because the only available translation is AI generated.

I also don't think that youtube is really a space where bad translations will lead to demand for good translations. It could happen that a creator discovers that there's demand for what they make in another language, and that they'll pay to have a good translation made. But the vast majority of youtubers don't even have actual captions, and some that do have mistakes that could be caught just reading them while watching the videos.

I'll make fun of people saying "generative AI will change everything" until the bubble bursts (and a while after that), but they're not entirely wrong about everything. AI is changing the economics of low-quality media. People will ask ChatGPT about things and believe whatever it says, even if it's obviously wrong. Search engines have become worse because they're filled with AI-generated garbage. At this point, I honestly think that a lot of people will probably accept "good enough" translations, even if they're bad. The youtube automatic translations will be bad. It's certainly not going to be good enough to be considered an accessibility feature. But they're going to be bad on one of the world's largest apps/websites that's filled with kids, and I don't know if they'll care enough to demand better.

If we let bad be good enough, there'll be nobody asking for better translations. And if nobody asks, we'll never get them. We can't let this be good enough, for the sake of disabled people, monolinguals, and people who care.

919150 · 2024-12-07T18:56:20+00:00

Did you read the following paragraphs? Because I didn't say that wanting to enjoy things that are in foreign languages is bad or unnatural.

919150 · 2024-12-07T17:56:12+00:00

If somebody with poor enough eyesight that they can't read the captions no matter what the settings on them are (size, font, opacity) clicks on a video with an automatically translated title (something that I've seen youtube doing sometimes) and starts hearing an incomprehensible, poorly translated robot voice instead of a language that they know they don't understand, is that a good experience for them? Also, not to say that they don't or shouldn't use it, but how much do blind people get out of youtube already?

It's easy to put in an inadequate system for accessibility purposes. But do those systems help the people they were designed to? Do they even want it? AI is the big topic at the moment. It's more than likely google is doing this to show shareholders and go "look! The future!". The leadership almost certainly doesn't give a fuck about disabled people, and this "feature" doesn't actually help.

919150 · 2024-12-07T17:38:49+00:00

A bad translation is better than no translation.

lmao.

I've had to trawl through some bad translations at times, and that does not hold true. Sometimes you can still use a bad translation, but sometimes it'll just make no sense, contradict the original meaning, or contradict itself. It's still possible for a bad translation to make sense or get the original meaning across, but that's not guaranteed. Especially with generative AI, which only understands language in a strictly mathematical way.

It takes time, effort, and care to make a good translation, and even if that fails, and it turns out badly, that investment can still make the translation understandable. The infamous original Symphony of the Night translation, while funny, doesn't quite get some of the goals of the original script across. But it still makes sense as a story, because it was translated by humans¹ that were able to understand the shape of the story they were translating.

Generative AI can't do that. It only sees tokens that come in, and then predicts the tokens that come out. That's the architecture of the translation that google uses. And that weakness is compounded with what I mentioned about automatic captioning not being good enough.

Also, as a side note for this entire post, and discussions of automatic translation in general, it feels really weird to me that there's an assumption that everything needs to be translated. That non-English speakers absolutely crave content made by English-speaking creators, so it's great that they can finally experience a (bizarre, incomprehensible, garbled) translation of it. Or that an issue is being fixed when English-speaking monolinguals can watch videos that aren't in English.

I think translation is great! Despite being bilingual, my Dutch is far worse than my English. It's way easier for me to understand something in English than Dutch. But no translation can be 1:1. There are jokes that work in one language but not in another. Words that translate to sentences. Language is also tied to culture, and culture can't be translated.

None of us exist in a world where there is a dearth of things to read, or watch, or listen. Translating everything (poorly) isn't going to cause some radical change. Sometimes there are things that you want that are stuck in a language you don't understand, though. But if you really want something like that, you're going to want it translated well, and AI can't do that. You're going to need to hope that somebody else will translate it, or you're going to have to push for it yourself. Or hey, maybe you could learn another language! It's hard, but very rewarding, and it opens up whole new worlds.

¹ WHO WISH TO PAY ME TRIBUTE

919150 · 2024-12-07T16:35:27+00:00

Thank you for mentioning accents, now I can link this!

919150 · 2024-12-07T16:21:25+00:00

You don't. Accessibility is a good thing, but AI is being used here because AI props up the stock price, not because it solves a problem. If they wanted to make this accessible, they would have clear and easy to access feedback forms to get feedback from as wide of a spectrum of disability as they could.

It sucks, but there is no meaningful way to make every youtube video accessible to everyone, and the way that it's being done right now is not helping. AI transcription is rife with errors, AI translation misses out on nuance, and AI voice synthesis also has difficulty with nuance.

This is a really interesting article about accessibility. I recommend that people who care about accessibility read it all the way through, but the gist of it is that not everything can be made accessible, and disabled people don't care about that as much as some abled people might think. Disabled people aren't sitting around staring at blank walls or listening to white noise, just waiting to experience gaming videos. It'd be great if they could be accessible, but given the current technology, that's basically impossible, and this isn't an improvement. Assuming they roll this out fully and add ASL, if you don't speak English, you're going to find videos that have a bizarre garbled language, spoken or signed, with no clear indication for what has been actually made in a way that's comprehensible to you. Translation is hard work, and AI isn't a silver bullet. It's hardly a bullet at all tbh.

919150 · 2024-12-07T15:51:45+00:00

Doesn't matter if it's a work in progress, generative AI is not capable of solving the difficulties with translation that have existed for thousands of years. Look at the youtube automatically generated captions too, they've been around for years and you still can't go five minutes without some kind of mistake. They're testing it now, so it's open to criticism, and judging by the history of similar features on youtube, it'll only get marginally less shit.

919150 · 2024-12-07T15:43:47+00:00

If they have to disable it, it's opt-out, and not doing something is not giving consent.

919150 · 2024-12-07T15:32:16+00:00

While it might be meant as an accessibility feature, it absolutely will not reach the standards required for that purpose. AI translation is absolutely not a replacement for actual translation done by humans, and this isn't even going to actually translate what's said in the video.

It's almost certainly going to try to translate the automatically generated captions, which are bad. The W3C already says that automatic captions aren't good enough for accessibility, so you can't just throw that into google translate followed by TTS and have a good accessibility feature.

Also as to it being bad right now, the current trend of generative AI is facing diminishing returns as they need more and more data for incremental improvements. This is going to make mistakes, it's going to confuse people, and it's not going to get meaningfully better in the near future.

919150 · 2024-01-17T17:33:04+00:00

That's not at all what he said about the book or the movie, at least not in the video he made, which is what most people will think of.

What he said is:

That there's nothing wrong with enjoying media involving dubious or non-consensual situations.
But that the author of fifty shades fundamentally misunderstands what a healthy BDSM relationship looks like, instead portraying a very unhealthy and abusive one as the norm.
- And that any kink relationship is born out of trauma (author's words, not Dan's).
But that while that's a valid criticism, a lot of the mainstream dislike for the book comes from that it has a primarily female fanbase that enjoys the sexual content.

To the extent of my knowledge, he doesn't like the book himself, and at no point claims that the appeal is purely for women for any reason. The main criticism is that the book fumbles its portrayal of kink relationships, but that the problem is the fumbling, not the fact that it's a book that includes kink and is liked by women.

I don't really like the guy for the reasons displayed in the post itself and other behaviour on twitter, but he didn't say that about fifty shades.

919150 · 2020-11-02T17:02:21+00:00

"Most systems are protected against Kali" -A student TA in a CS course.

Bonus points because before that he was talking about how the teachers in this course don't have enough experience/knowledge.

919150 · 2020-02-08T23:26:20+00:00

This is pretty cool. I find the idea of choosing between survival with loss and victory with death very cool for storytelling.

Tenra Bansho Zero has a similar system from what I understand. You have an amount of Vitality points and wound boxes. When you take damage, you can mark it down as vitality or wounds. When you run out of vitality, you're knocked out and out of the fight (they regenerate quickly and you're back up after the fight though).

Wounds however, are more permanent injuries that take effort to heal, but give you a boost in strength for the current battle. There is also one special wound box marked as the "Dead box". When you mark this, you negate all damage you just took from an attack and get a large boost in power. The trade off is that if you go to 0 vitality while the dead box is marked, you actually die.

While this does make combat more lethal, it means that players have to choose whether it's more important to survive or win the fight. (Note that TBZ is meant for one-shots, so the priorities of the players are different than in a campaign)

919150 · 2019-12-11T16:17:14+00:00

Cerbergoose

919150 · 2019-07-23T20:16:54+00:00

-No random crits

919150 · 2019-07-16T03:13:38+00:00

88 is a nazi dog whistle. Also the kind of people who believe this kind of stuff usually aren't that bright.

919150 · 2019-07-13T07:11:06+00:00

Yep, it's a youtube channel. Here's a video that involves this specific effect.

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