It’s interesting how Trump continues making headlines in his unrepetant treasonous trajectory straight to hell.
Here he goes attacking an active duty U.S. military member for service:
Haley then said that anyone who mocks the service of a combat veteran should not be president, and again challenged Trump to take a mental competency test to prove his fitness to be president. “I have long talked about the fact that we need to have mental competency tests for anyone over the age of 75. Donald Trump claims that he would pass that — maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But if you mock the service of a combat veteran, you don’t deserve a driver’s license, let alone being President of the United States.”
The crucial point here is how Trump is mocking the military for serving.
He’s saying to America that the military should be ashamed for doing their duty.
And then here he goes saying Russia should invade the EU to destroy it.
Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the presumptive Republican nominee, said earlier today that he would side with Russia against NATO and encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to brutalize our allies. Not so long ago, many Americans—and especially most Republicans—would have considered anyone supporting such a view to be little more than a deranged and hateful anti-American fanatic.
Sounds like “deranged and hateful anti-American fanatic” is the GOP campaign strategy now. How much more anti-American can they get?
…the driver of the Model 3 simply attempted to overtake the Model Y and in the process, forgot to check their mirrors and turned directly into the path of the Model S. There’s also a chance the entire video is fake, but it certainly looks real despite the low quality of the images.
Here’s the FireFox browser translation to English:
“SNAKE PEOPLE”
That can’t be right. The guy in the middle is still sporting the Hitler mustache (like he didn’t get the message), and Nazis were characterized as snakes, but could that alone be enough to trigger such a caption by “learning” technology?
Confusing matters perhaps further is that a East-German politician named Stefan Heym called West Berlin the snake when he said it would get indigestion from eating the hedgehog (East Berlin).
Nach Ansicht des Schriftstellers Stefan Heym wird nach dem Wahlergebnis von der DDR „nichts übrigbleiben als eine Fußnote in der Weltgeschichte”. Heym weiter: „Die Schlange verschluckt den Igel, die Schlange wird Verdauungsschwierigkeiten haben.”
Anyway, let’s break it down. Schlange stehende Menschen…
Schlange: literally means snake. Allegedly it comes from an Old High German word “slango”, similar to Yiddish שלאַנג (schlang – penis). On that note, I’m a little disappointed Firefox didn’t translate it to “bunch of dicks”.
Stehende: literally means standing, an adjective formed from the verb “stehen” (to stand).
Somehow the literal German words “standing snake” were turned by the Firefox translation engine into SNAKE PEOPLE.
Now for the really fun part. ChatGPT says that everyone knows the phrase “Schlange stehende” really means standing in line.
You’d think that’s a simple and set answer.
Except, do you think ChatGPT really knows what it’s talking about…ever? See how confident it sounds that everyone knows “schlange stehende” is a common German phrase? So confident that immediately afterwards it contradicts itself, as if trying to win votes by saying anything, just to make you agree with something. Everything it says is a hallucination, always, and usually politically motivated.
ChatGPT is literally arguing that “schlange stehende” is not a valid German phrase. And then it tries to rationalize snakes are unable to stand. Both are laughably useless, proving AI continues to fail at basic life tasks, given that it’s a common well-known phrase in German and of course snakes can be standing around figuratively.
FireFox looked like it made a silly, overly literal mistake. But ChatGPT opens up the possibility that machine learning has a much deeper translation problem.
Consider how ChatGPT will probably never improve itself because fundamentally, like that intellectual theory depicting Berlin as a snake eating a hedgehog, the OpenAI ingestion machine stands at the bottom of a huge mine of complex shifting political and social sands.
Snake people? SNAKE PEOPLE? In 1945 Berlin? That’s saying something well-known but rarely said. To put it simply, Aesop’s simple fables might even be in the corpus being used to translate German.
Nazis are depicted as snakes because they are cruel, sinister authoritarians known for deceitfulness.
In that sense, the historian in me can’t help wondering about a dehumanizing 1945 SNAKE PEOPLE IN BERLIN caption that is… not as silly or innocent in translation as it would seem at first glance.
“We Will Eradicate the Spies and Saboteurs, the Trotskyist-Bukharinist Agents of Fascism.” Sergei Igumnov, 1937
The most notable thing to me in this risk forecasting story is the word SuperComputer.
A decade or so ago “cloud computing” (e.g. 1950s concepts of shared-time) was pitched to the market to replace SuperComputer forecast projects.
I vividly remember, however, executives at Amazon in a panic ringing phones off the hook to say “please stop sucking up all our compute resources, we can’t handle it”.
Why not?
We asked innocently. We were running simulations of what a big explosion would look like on the streets of San Francisco, and such insurance stuff using infinite scale was supposed to move to cloud (everything from pandemic modeling to misinformation spread).
So we had cranked up consumption of shared compute all the way to 11 and… ring, ring “go somewhere else, we can’t ramp selling knock-off brand underwear and cheap Chinese charging cables with you allocating all our server time to science and societal safety”.
Thus it’s interesting to read today’s SuperComputer news, evidence of dedicated and valuable engineering being very alive and well.
To calculate the CyberShake 22.12 hazard model, Maechling’s team used Pegasus, a workflow management system designed by research director Ewa Deelman and her team at the University of Southern California, or USC, Information Sciences Institute. Maechling’s team continuously ran a diverse collection of jobs on Summit over 10 weeks. Pegasus automatically managed 2.5 petabytes of data, which is equal to about 500 billion pages of standard printed text, including an automated transfer of 70 terabytes to USC’s archival storage.
Summit was born of the DoE CORAL program with an estimated $200m budget. Small potatoes to see 2,500 years into the future, or more powerfully, to avoid being constrained by a willful hyper-short-term ignorance culture of captalism.
