Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
This incredible banger of a bug against whisper, the OpenAI speech to text engine:
Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.
I'm confused by this. Didn't we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasn't perfect but at least didn't hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??
Transformers do way better transcription, buuuuuut yeah you gotta check it
I'm just confused because I remember using Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows 98 in the 90s and it worked pretty accurately already back then for dictation and sometimes it feels as if all of that never happened.
Discovered some commentary from Baldur Bjarnason about this:
On a personal sidenote, I can see non-English text/audio becoming a form of low-background media in and of itself, for two main reasons:
First, LLMs' poor performance in languages other than English will make non-English AI slop easier to identify - and, by extension, easier to avoid
Second, non-English datasets will (likely) contain less AI slop in general than English datasets - between English being widely used across the world, the tech corps behind this bubble being largely American, and LLM userbases being largely English-speaking, chances are AI slop will be primarily generated in English, with non-English AI slop being a relative rarity.
By extension, knowing a second language will become more valuable as well, as it would allow you to access (and translate) low-background sources that your English-only counterparts cannot.
do you keep count/track? the moleskine must be getting full!
I don't keep track, I just put these together when I've got an interesting tangent to go on.
Lol, training data must have included videos where there was silence but on screen was a credit for translation. Silence in audio shouldn't require special "workarounds".
The whisper model has always been pretty crappy at these things: I use a speech to text system as an assistive input method when my RSI gets bad and it has support for whisper (because that supports more languages than the developer could train on their own infrastructure/time) since maybe 2022 or so: every time someone tries to use it, they run into hallucinated inputs in pauses - even with very good silence detection and noise filtering.
This is just not a use case of interest to the people making whisper, imagine that.