This problem can be solved with a crowbar and a couple of hours alone in a room with the zuck.
Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
81–90 of 98 posts
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would consider obvious it'd be enormously advantageous for Israeli police to have, at least, a basic understanding of Arabic. It's like a Miami policemen without any Spanish/Portuguese knowledge.
A lot of them do, it's very common for Israeli's to be fluent in Arabic. But not all of them obviously. And in this case, considering what someone with evil intent and a bulldozer can do, I can understand arrest first, figure out what's going on second. It's not like arresting someone after the fact - in that situation you can take some time. Here it's before the fact, and seconds count.
You'd think they'd take the 30s required grab literally the first person in the office they could find who can understand the language it's written in.
Moreover, how did they arrest him without someone speaking a modicum of Arabic? Or did they just run into his home and snatch him by force?
I personally find this kind of behavior by the armed representatives of government to be horribly undemocratic.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#83Given how ridiculously common the phrase "Good morning" is in Arabic, (I mean, look at any Arabic 101 textbook, the Sabah Al-khair / Sabah al-noor exchange is one of the first things they teach you), it's puzzling why Facebook's translation algorithm didn't see that as a fixed phrase, rather than trying to translate it word by word. So much for machine learning.
More importantly, why are police in a multilingual nation relying on buggy machine translation to make arrests. It's not like it was a post in some obscure language from PNG or something.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#84Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#85Given how ridiculously common the phrase "Good morning" is in Arabic, (I mean, look at any Arabic 101 textbook, the Sabah Al-khair / Sabah al-noor exchange is one of the first things they teach you), it's puzzling why Facebook's translation algorithm didn't see that as a fixed phrase, rather than trying to translate it word by word. So much for machine learning.
I have to play the native Arabic speaker resident here and weigh on this controversy
1) The guy wrote يصبحهم (non standard Arabic) but it was picked as يذبحهم by FB which translates to (He slaughters/slays them)
2) The smaller problem lies in that the word يصبحهم is not standard Arabic and probably Palestinian slang like in Egypt we got many variations on the morning greeting like صباحو or صبّح صبّح etc etc
3) The bigger problem was why FB translator went out of its way to change the letter from ص to ذ instead of returning a "Not Found" or "Please double check spelling and try again" or "Did you mean ....?"
It's really very strange.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#86Note that in Arabic there are no vowels. Also note that it's not the common "good morning" (Sabah Al-khair), but a rarer term: one word, 6 letters, no vowels. The equivalent in english would be "gdmrng".
Actually, good morning صباح الخير has a strong vowel right there "ا" in the first word.
One of the problems people face with learning Arabic is that weak vowels are implicit by nature and you need to know them by heart in order to read the words properly.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#87The predator will not eat a bad tasting butterfly, but we can trick it to do so. They talk about a "linguistic translation" error in the attempt to deflect focus away from the meta data triggers that this person generated. Cyber phrenology is real. https://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/
An amusing read, but the overbearing narcissism (I did this; something happened; that something is therefore caused by my action) makes it hard to read as a rational argument and not a psychoanalysis case study.
This is where I saw the author being a blackhatter parading as a greyhatter. Or maybe even worse, a blackhatter who doesn't know he's a blackhatter.
The idea that increasing the noise/signal ratio (ie: "make them eat more butterflies") is going to cause Facebook and their ilk to see the flaw in reasoning is not only malicious (Milo's 20,000 fake followers + residuals did not go away), but it also betrays a profoundly scary naivete over the subject matter.
It makes it worse when you write off your body of work as "for research" but fail to set up a methodology more complex than "provoke social justice people into attacking each other, algorithmically."
The entire piece neglects to consider the "rm monkey" ie: the trolls that don't have such motives but chaos. Some of us, growing up, just liked to see systems implode. He surrounds himself with them on 4chan but fails to recognize the complexity of their brigading.
The author, a self-perceived "arbiter of truth" waving his scepter (an infantile of scripts), finds himself far more intelligent than both his merry band of trolls on 4chan, Google/Facebook, and protected groups all at the same time - but he may be wrong on all 3 accounts.
Dunning Krueger is not understanding that many on 4chan prefer the butterfly war.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spanish speaking people are definitely _not_ a minority down here in Miami hehe.
I took the time to look this up. Miami is 70% hispanic of any race according to 2010 census. Though that doesn't mean 70% of Miamians only speak Spanish. Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+demographics
However, it's quite possible that a plurality speaks at least Spanish.
Being able to know folks are saying around you is a survival skill for jobs like law enforcement.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
An amusing read, but the overbearing narcissism (I did this; something happened; that something is therefore caused by my action) makes it hard to read as a rational argument and not a psychoanalysis case study.
This is where I saw the author being a blackhatter parading as a greyhatter. Or maybe even worse, a blackhatter who doesn't know he's a blackhatter. The idea that increasing the noise/signal ratio (ie: "make them eat more butterflies") is going to cause Facebook and their ilk to see the flaw in reasoning is not only malicious (Milo's 20,000 fake followers + residuals did not go away), but it also betrays a profoundly…
The author performed all of this during a three year period, I believe.
If ego was the only driving focus, wouldn't he have revealed himself earlier? Especially during the rise of alt-right micro-celebrities? How can you be a mere narcissist with a Hollywood background and completely avoid intentionally giving yourself the limelight?
This strikes me as something far more methodical.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's even more 1984-ish is that the phrase "attack them" will get you arrested in Israel.
Only if you're not of the favored ethnic group.
Especially when you're part of the non-favored ethnic group that perpetrates and celebrates the routine murder of innocent men, women, and children. Murder that is some times committed using construction equipment.
Now if you were a cop, and just received a photo of what looks like a member of the non-favored ethnic group with a murder weapon, saying "kill them" I'd bet you wouldn't just shrug it off. You take action to save innocent lives. Ask questions later.