oats_son
13hr ago
Wow, you too? I find Gemini translates stuff really, really well. Or at least, I think it does, I cross-reference everything I put into it with Google Translate and sometimes it will apparently misunderstand something, or I'll open up a new private tab and have it translate it back to me and it's come out a little differently than I wanted it. I was told DeepL was supposed to be the best, but I somehow doubt it could be better than Gemini. I could be wrong.
The power of AI might shake up the closed nature of different language spheres of the Internet someday, I think. I had the fanciful idea that humans in other cultures would see things significantly differently from me, but I was surprised by how similar the lines of thought run. In almost every non-Arab country in the world, it seems that traditionalism is fighting a bloody battle against liberalism, and mostly losing.
oats_son
16hr ago
I have 16 GB of RAM, a GTX 1660 Super, and a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU. Far from ideal hardware, I know. Mixtral 7B runs fine, though.
oats_son
1d ago
What is the best LLM for translating to and from CJK? Please give an answer for both online stuff (Gemini, Claude, Copilot) and local stuff.
I tried Mistral 7B, but it seemed to be doing a much worse job than Gemini.
oats_son
3d ago
My God, man. I'm sorry to hear that. I thought you were being overly narrow, but I see it's a response to my ban state comment. I had no idea it was like that anywhere in the country. That's really disturbing.
oats_son
3d ago
Yes, this is much of the same experience I had. I expected him to be the same type of irreverent, obnoxious right-winger like Crowder, or the Hodge Twins, or those videos from PragerU, or whatever other person with spicy-sounding one-liners gets posted to Facebook, judging from what I had heard of him from all those TPUSA memes. Unlike the others, I don't feel like he put out useless platitudes with no thought behind them. He actually had a masterful understanding of when an argument would or wouldn't apply, based on the reasoning put forward by the debaters. That's part of what made it shocking even reading right-wingers posting here on The Motte, with people downplaying him as being some milquetoast guy who didn't believe in anything. Even the right-wingers here had not watched him and had no idea who he was.
I notice a similar dynamic with Joe Rogan. People who listen to Joe Rogan know that he's not particularly political. He's an MMA weed smoker who is genuinely curious about all kinds of things, making him an excellent interviewer. But some former acquaintances from college said they would never listen to him because of how extreme he is. I fear that this is one of the most damaging ways that the "lefties don't understand righties but righties understand lefties" study can take effect. Just learn about who people are from osmosis, what could go wrong?
oats_son
3d ago
Wow, I had no idea it was that unconstitutional. I think it's the same way when you're buying a gun privately in Illinois; everyone would want to see your FOID card, even though no one would know if the FOID card was not checked. It seems there is some effectiveness, but I wonder how much, if you're thinking about throwing your own life away on an assassination.
oats_son
3d ago
Okay. That's strange to me. How can they enforce the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practicioner you have ever seen since birth with an additional two unrelated adult references, if it's a private purchase? Who's going to check? Did anyone put any thought into this law?
This does relate to my original post. AOC wants more of these gun laws implemented in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, even though they don't save anyone and are trivially overcome. When they inevitably don't save anyone, they'll want more gun laws. This is not a new observation, but it is part of the reason why the usual rhetoric of "well he accepted deaths from guns, guess it's ironic he died." He was actually more willing to confront the truth than them, by far, because they still believe that they wouldn't need to repeal the 2nd Amendment and ban every gun and zealously swipe up and destroy every gun they can find over the course of decades to get what they want.
oats_son
3d ago
This is what I expected someone like you to say, except I didn't expect you to come out and say it so quickly rather than waiting the amount of time it took for another murder of a public figure to bring it up, hoping that nobody remembered what you said last time.
So, when you said this,
Sure, when violent leftist groups go around doing a bunch of murder instead a single attack by a brainrotted young man, I'll acknowledge that it's an issue.
it was actually a complete, bald-faced lie, used entirely in service of excusing your own rhetoric and downplaying future crimes like this, to be used once and then discarded in favor of whatever new convenient argument you come up with. You are exactly who my original post is talking about. I am still in complete amazement that I still have to go through the exact same dishonest rhetorical tactics with even a murder like this. There is no awful crime that would make you not argue like this. You are permanently broken from politics, and there are a LOT of people like you. There are so many people like you that every comment thread on this site is filled with your rhetoric, even here, on this site that is vastly skewed towards right wingers.
To answer your dishonest question, I am not as scared of white supremacists taking over the US, because their rhetoric is still far outside of the Overton window, and their tragic targets are seemingly random and sadly not as important as YouTubers who get millions of subscribers, and they form part of a background radiation of horrific crimes committed by crazy people similar to the killing of Iryna Zarutska, which while heartbreaking, is not a huge deal like this murder, which was a totally unjustifiable murder for nothing that is getting sanewashed by people like you every day before he's been even put in the ground yet.
I hold no hope of ever convincing anyone like you of anything anymore, so I'm not going to reply to you after this.
Yes, exactly. I expect the ghoulishness from the proper Marxists, but seeing the exact same bullshit from "respectable" center lefts that we saw during BLM, covid, and Gaza is mind-ruining. Seeing Wikipedia, Snopes, the LA Times, all jumping through the same hoops as before as if nothing has changed, it's genuinely impossible to comprehend. I saw an NBC article talking about the response to his murder, but right in the subheader, they threw in that he was known for saying extreme things online, justifying it right there with something that isn't even true. This is just who they are. There is no crime that could be committed by their side that will make them set aside the bullshit. They are now the bullshit. They can never not be the bullshit.
oats_son
3d ago
No, I'm not. You know this. This is the second of the political murders. Brian Thompson was the first. That makes two. That makes a trend. I will lose even more faith in humanity if this happens again and you say this exact same line.
oats_son
3d ago
For buying a gun from a federal firearms licensed dealer, right? Just drive to the nearest red state and make a friend. Or, hell, 3D print one yourself. We're talking about murder here, so a federal gun crime is small potatoes, and it's easy to do with so many guns in the country. But this is a pretty narrow point, because that's two states out of fifty.
oats_son
3d ago
So what? I live in Illinois. You need a FOID card to buy any gun, sure, but it's easy to get besides the wait time. Otherwise, you could just buy it on the private market in another state. And both this murderer and Luigi Mangione are the types to not have a rap sheet, so a FOID card is easy.
If they turn the internal organs of Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, and Matt Walsh's all into mucilage, it would still be a very low rate of political violence on paper. It turns out that you only need a very small handful of people willing to kill for the cause to have a massively outsized influence on the entire landscape of the country. The more celebrating I see, the more likely that is to happen. Tens of thousands wishing for the death of just a small handful of people is a very concentrated amount of violence. You should fear the reaction very, very much.
oats_son
3d ago
Your rdrama.net-style "get over it, it's not a big deal. These things happen all the time." viscerally disgusts me, and I hope you know that your words here are exactly why this is going to get worse, not better. I hope you realize that before it's too late, if it's not too late already.
oats_son
3d ago
Look, I don't think you're doing something grisly here, unlike my other examples. You clearly just want to reduce my level of mental pain. That's cool and all, but I still think you're missing the point here. When JFK died, did you see a wave of celebratory people throwing parties in the street? There are multiple people in my small town alone who have gotten fired for celebrating this on Facebook under their real name. They're real. They represent real people who live in the world and do things.
Liberalism is holding? That's great. But the gate has just been hit by a massive battering ram, and the battering ram seems to want to smash into it again, so again, it's a little rich that you think this is a point of comfort. I've been seeing that there's a massive loneliness crisis, that young people can't buy houses, and increasingly sign out of life to pick pineapples. What do you think happens when these societal losers see what they can become with a $400 bolt action rifle that you can buy in any ban state?
oats_son
3d ago
I don't know what to tell you except to tell you that I just straight up don't believe you when you say that it isn't real. Everyone told me the Brian Thompson shooting last year was just edgy chest thumping, too, and now look what happened. It's extremely rich that you are saying that political violence is extremely rare right after Charlie Kirk just bought the farm and tens of thousands of people are publicly declaring they want more, at expense to themselves when they actually have jobs. Do you really think that it will continue to be extremely rare, after seeing the huge waves of support that this murderer got?
How many times have I heard that crime is down, when these I Fucking Love Science fans are forced to confront right afterwards that murders are way up, actually? That the crime was revised in 2021 and 2022 to show that crime increased instead of decreased? When, exactly, do I get to express extreme discomfort with this? Or will I forever be told that nothing is happening when it's something I'm concerned about, instead of what I'm supposed to be concerned about?
Am I supposed to feel happy that we got through the 70s just fine? If I just told you that we were going to go through a wave of leftist violence similar to what happened in the 70s, would you go "wow, what a relief"? Do you think that the country is so cohesive that it can survive an unlimited number of highly televised and celebrated senseless murders? I think you would think again if it was something that happened to someone you respected, and you wouldn't be so quick to downplay everything so much.
oats_son
4d ago
I agree with this, but I think the reason more is about a Hanania article that goes "Liberals read, conservatives watch TV". Obviously, reading just about any comment here on The Motte is a lot more insightful than letting the YouTube algorithm take you away. And if you're a conservative who likes to read, you're just not going to have any opinion on him at all, because he was more of a TV personality. Since you're trying to understand deeper aspects of the culture war, and most credible news sites are left-leaning, you will have much more to say about all the news articles with framing that pisses you off, rather than Charlie Kirk, who while his argumentation was good, he was still just using the same statistics and lines of argumentation we've seen many times and showing it to people outside of this bubble.
oats_son
4d ago
I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling.
I personally listened to this guy debating all kinds of people in the background of other things I was doing. I was impressed by how there were very few below-the-belt attacks on the interlocutors, and multiple bouts of praise from Charlie Kirk for the debaters being brave enough to step up and be material for content. I wished I was as skilled as he at setting up such angles of argument so quickly.
When I heard he was shot, it was like I was punched. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe he's dead. It got even more unbelievable with the second video showing blood flowing out of him like a fountain. I wept upon seeing this. This murder is the closest thing to pure evil that I've seen in my life, ala No Country for Old Men. It makes absolutely no sense, he was making arguments that I genuinely agreed with, he was so young, he had kids, he was a good Christian, you've almost certainly heard all this before. He was upholding the values of this country by engaging in such public discourse. Democracy does not die in darkness, it dies in broad daylight in front of thousands of people, in front of its family, viewed by millions online, everyone powerless to do anything as it bleeds out.
None of what happened afterwards was what I expected at all. Immediately, celebrations, dark ironic pitiless humor, and hideous one-liners with no thought put into them started everywhere. It was official, the Hermann Cain Award logic about when it's acceptable to dance on the graves of your enemies extends about as far as certain leftists want it to. If you have certain values, and you express them, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would love to see you get decorated with your own blood, watch you exsanguinate, a chunk of mineral tearing through your vital structures, turning you into a pile of meat instead of a man. Your entire life will be characterized by years-old quotes picked out of a mountain of words you've spoken over the course of your short life.
Today, after gathering enough stock of public reactions, I've come to an even more disturbing conclusion: there are even more people out there who will run cover even for this awful behavior. Here's a small collection of everything I've witnessed: They're all bots. There aren't that many of them. They're only online. It's because of Trump's escalation of rhetoric. It's because this was where this would lead for the kind of life he lived. He was a white supremacist. He wanted gays to be stoned to death. He accepted gun deaths and became one, such a natural consequence. The shooter wasn't one of us. He was a groyper. We can talk about cooling the rhetoric once the 2026 elections happen. Until those go well, it's perfectly understandable why people talk this way. Let's talk about something else, let's talk about January 6th again. Let's talk about Epstein. Let's talk about the Minnesota lawmakers. Anything but this topic. Even many of the moderate lefty politicians couldn't muster up much other than "political violence is bad", saving face in an easy way. Almost none of them did the difficult thing that Gavin Newsom or Cenk Uygur did and confronted the real issue at no small cost to their own image. Some of them even used it to forward their own agendas. AOC put something out in favor of gun control. That's right: we shoot you, and then we use your death to try to convince you to lay down your issues and let us win. Ilhan Omar doesn't believe that anyone genuinely liked the man or is being genuine. After seeing all the downplaying, I have no doubts that she will lose barely any support, because it's tacitly approved.
So many of my own friends, too. I've tried to reach across the aisle for years. I've even discounted some of my true beliefs to coax out some admission that I really wanted to see. I've always tried to model fairness in my political arguments. It got me nothing. All that goodwill, swallowed up, like water falling on the dusty ground.
I thought such a clear case of senseless murder would make people snap out of the usual sanewashing, but no, and in fact, there's so much on this website, too, even among people who are much better than the median social media poster at understanding arguments and taking context into account. I am incredibly sad that there's actually nothing that could happen that could get people to agree with each other without clearing their throat before doing it. The entire internet is a /r/watchpeopledie thread. There's video, and then there's the awful comments under the video. There's no good ending to this. It's painful. This discourse is a grueling journey to the ugliest end of the country imaginable. This discourse is the cumulative societal hangover from more than ten years of a cancerous outgrowth of the most toxic kind of politics, and just like a regular hangover, the world doesn't stop for you. You have to go back into work in the morning and do it all over again. It's unbearable. I was not willing to believe a large portion of the other side was evil up until now. I hope someone cooler-headed than me can make some headway on this issue somehow, because I will go insane if I think about this any more.
oats_son
4d ago
I misinterpreted your endorsement to mean that I could make a separate thread discussing Charlie Kirk specifically. I did not notice that you thought I was talking about moderator policies until now. If you don't want that thread, then I will delete it and just post it as a top level comment here.
oats_son
4d ago
I really appreciate the apology, no joke. I've had such extreme emotions lately, I've tried so hard to get people to understand, I've left so many communities today... I thought I was going to be writing a long response to your reply proving my genuineness and self-doxxing myself even more with a tear-drenched keyboard.
I understand that it would be very damaging to relax every rule in the face of such emotional appeals. But I do think it might make sense to make a separate thread about this. Can I create a separate thread about this?
oats_son
4d ago
You are truly not who I thought you were. Where is the kindness? Why is this so antagonistic? Why are you so hostile to me? This isn't even what I want to do, dude, I've never gotten warned for this offense or anything, I just feel pretty sad for some guy getting an actual ban for something so easy to do. You are incredibly uncharitable, and that's sad. Everything is incredibly sad right now.
oats_son
4d ago
It's not an insurmountable barrier for someone who's smart and posts here a lot. But those people can't provide coverage of everything here. From the way I see it, @yunyun333 is being punished because he posted in the wrong arbitrary thread, instead of the nonexistent megathread that should have been created (no seriously, why is there not a megathread about this? this is the exact use case for a separate thread), and some leniency should have been applied even if he posted in the wrong place, a gentle redirecting to the right place (which doesn't exist), because of how deeply hurtful this event was and continues to be.
oats_son
4d ago
Once again, the rules of this site are extremely tiresome at times. I know you're sick of reading this same complaint, and I'm sorry for that. But this news was going to get posted here one way or another, and forcing people to jump through hoops to talk about current events while they're happening right now is bad. /r/moderatepolitics relaxes its topic ban about transgenders when a relevant court case with immediate political consequences comes around (Skrmetti was the last time, I think), and this website, too, needs to chill out during tumultuous times like this. He did not damage the quality of the discussion or the mission of the website. This was a bad ban.
oats_son
4d ago
Reading what you said, I agreed to the point that I would put down a (virtual) bet, but thinking some more, I've seen some crazy, crazy deflections and downplayings from people I thought were normies. I think certain leftists are extremely uncomfortable with the facts that are being put forward here, and they refuse to accept the framing of right wingers at all. In these circumstances, I could easily see many of them try to redirect in the fashion he means, similar in the ways that his image is tarnished - on this very site! - with out-of-context quotes in a mad attempt to make this seem more like a natural outcome of the line of work he was in, rather than the pure evil murder it was. Will anyone buy it? I'd argue probably a lot of people. The left was willing to swallow anything to ignore all the utterly insane activists calling for the police to be defunded during 2020.
If you've successfully translated Chinese novels, can you recommend a model for translating from Chinese, but for someone that lives in China and doesn't want to use a VPN? I think Gemini is off-limits for them, and ChatGPT fucks with the writing style too much.
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