this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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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.

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[–] aio@awful.systems 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Dan Luu's "A discussion of discussions on AI bias", about techbros trying to gaslight the rest of the world into thinking ML models don't have problems

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Another example which doesn't make a good viral news story is my not being able to put my Vietnamese name in the title of my blog and have my blog indexed by Google outside of Vietnamese-language Google — I tried that when I started my blog and it caused my blog to immediately stop showing up in Google searches unless you were in Vietnam. It's just assumed that the default is that people want English language search results and, presumably, someone created a heuristic that would trigger if you have two characters with Vietnamese diacritics on a page that would effectively mark the page as too Asian and therefore not of interest to anyone in the world except in one country.

the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I run into this exact problem so often with music: it’s extremely fucking annoying to convince search engines or other kinds of things that, yes, I do in fact want that turkish/finnish/russian/brazilian/thai/irish/….. result set from this english query, and there’s just almost zero affordance for it

they segment things into de facto silos and if you don’t already happen to have some way in which to pull on a string to lead the way there (or can input the desired query in the applicable language and spelling) you’ll have a bitch of a time. check a couple of those items from my entries on the music thread a while back for references to test with

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