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I'm pretty sure it's your reading comprehension that's at fault here. Don't blame the article for you making a mess of it. > Page 2 seems to imply that part of

I'm pretty sure it's your reading comprehension that's at fault here. Don't blame the article for you making a mess of it. > Page 2 seems to imply that part of Lanier's dislike of digital culture stems from the fact that MIDIs can't represent saxophone music. from the article: Indeed, one of the foundations of Lanier’s critique of digitized culture is the very way its digital transmission at some deep level betrays the essence of what it tries to transmit. Take music. One of the foundations is a general process, and music is used as an example for that process. Which is so far from what you turned it into, I'd really suggest reading it all again. > Later on that same page, the article seems to imply that automatic translation is bad because "by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy." That is, because technology allows something to be done more cheaply, it's actually hurting the economy by shrinking nominal spending. What he actually says: [With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy. The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken. You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less. His argument isn't "it's bad because it's cheaper" -- rather your counterargument seems to be "that [criticism I kinda missed] is made up for because it's cheaper". And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents, because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that. > Isn't every other non-tech article on HN a critical piece? Critical, yeah. Self-critical (big difference) in the sense of "why I didn't succeed or how I could succeed harder", yeah. But in the sense of "wtf am I doing, why, and should I really be doing it?" -- not so much. You say every second non-technical article? Can you link me ten from the last 7 days? Not because I don't believe you, but because I want to read them, and at the very least I want to know what kind of article you think qualifies for this. Also, if the consensus here is that criticism is given too much attention (which doesn't even mean there's a lot going on, just that what of it is going on is already too much for some people - logic!) kinda confirms is point instead of refuting it. But it's not about criticism anyway, it's about being self-critical. Plus, HN isn't the whole industry. So how would that even be a valid counterargument if it was true? (which also makes me asking for those self-critical articles kinda moot; I just like to be throrough)

mniejiki 14y ago
>The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken. That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below for why this doesn't do any harm). Having a million people translate "I like cats" into French doesn't give you a million translations. It gives you one translation repeated a million times. That's 999,999 redundant translations. Nothing novel or amazing about those 999,999 translations. What is the difference between a machine doing those million translations and humans doing identical translations? Of course, there are novel translations and those would require human input but that's a minority. If the machine can do 99% of translations but requires humans for the additional 1% why is it better to have humans translate 100% rather than just that 1%. You end up with the exact same quality and quantity of translations in both cases. >You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less. The machine is lowering the cost of translations and thus may increase the amount spent on translations. The people who made translations got paid already. >And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents, because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that. Except that's not the situation. The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each. You can have that exact same bun forever from the new seller. Of course, one day you may want a new bun and, you'd argue, that there are no bakers left. But that's silly and utterly simplistic. Once there's not enough bakers with buns to copy that doesn't mean that new recipes will cease to exist but rather than an an alternative will be found. So the new seller will have simply hired some bakers to create a new recipes. Some bakers will continue to have jobs except that instead of wasting all their time on the repetitive tasks of baking they'll instead spend it on innovative tasks of making new recipes (or improving existing ones). You end up with the same diversity and quality of buns now and in the future but at a lower price. Of course, many bakers will lose their jobs but that's the consequence of all technology and progress. Light bulbs meant that many candle makers lost their jobs. Frankly I prefer light bulbs to candles. In their place many new jobs will have opened up via the money which people used to spend on buns or candles. That's in addition to all the jobs needed to keep the new bun or light bulb making infrastructure running. edit: Actually, the "perfect" machine translation would be superior to the average human translation for that 99% since it'd be based on the best human translation for every single piece of text. Needless to say machines are far from there yet but that also means human translators have little to fear job wise for now. Amusingly, the next hot thing in web translation probably isn't machines. It's humans. Using mechanical turk. So thanks to the web there may soon be more human translators employed than ever before. That's on top of the machines which, to be frank, rather suck at any translation that really matters.

mniejiki 14y ago

>The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken. That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below for why this doesn't do any harm). Having a million people translate "I like cats" into French doesn't give you a million translations. It gives you one translation repeated a million times. That's 999,999 redundant translations. Nothing novel or amazing about those 999,999 translations. What is the difference between a machine doing those million translations and humans doing identical translations? Of course, there are novel translations and those would require human input but that's a minority. If the machine can do 99% of translations but requires humans for the additional 1% why is it better to have humans translate 100% rather than just that 1%. You end up with the exact same quality and quantity of translations in both cases. >You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less. The machine is lowering the cost of translations and thus may increase the amount spent on translations. The people who made translations got paid already. >And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents, because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that. Except that's not the situation. The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each. You can have that exact same bun forever from the new seller. Of course, one day you may want a new bun and, you'd argue, that there are no bakers left. But that's silly and utterly simplistic. Once there's not enough bakers with buns to copy that doesn't mean that new recipes will cease to exist but rather than an an alternative will be found. So the new seller will have simply hired some bakers to create a new recipes. Some bakers will continue to have jobs except that instead of wasting all their time on the repetitive tasks of baking they'll instead spend it on innovative tasks of making new recipes (or improving existing ones). You end up with the same diversity and quality of buns now and in the future but at a lower price. Of course, many bakers will lose their jobs but that's the consequence of all technology and progress. Light bulbs meant that many candle makers lost their jobs. Frankly I prefer light bulbs to candles. In their place many new jobs will have opened up via the money which people used to spend on buns or candles. That's in addition to all the jobs needed to keep the new bun or light bulb making infrastructure running. edit: Actually, the "perfect" machine translation would be superior to the average human translation for that 99% since it'd be based on the best human translation for every single piece of text. Needless to say machines are far from there yet but that also means human translators have little to fear job wise for now. Amusingly, the next hot thing in web translation probably isn't machines. It's humans. Using mechanical turk. So thanks to the web there may soon be more human translators employed than ever before. That's on top of the machines which, to be frank, rather suck at any translation that really matters.