Thanks!

Can you elaborate on these topics for someone not in the know?

No.

Watch as it does jack shit to inflation as the wage price spiral was always just a bogeyman to make sure a recession always only hits workers.

Yeah, lol no it isn’t, the whole submarine plot has been forced into it because Clancy can’t not write about submarines.

No, the loved one was actually the author, it’s a children’s book actually, light fiction, think early Harry Potter for example.

It’s a self-published hobby project, with a few dozen copies sold in the original language since there are relatively few speakers and light novels for kids are unfortunately a very small niche everywhere, and we didn’t really market it either since earning money wasn’t really the goal. The reason I’m mentioning that it was not professional work is that I’m not misrepresenting the amount of work done to someone paying me, and I’m actually interested in preserving the qualities of the original, I really don’t want to make more LLM slop, and I especially don’t want to make LLM slop out of something that has meaning to me personally. I’ve put at least a few hundred hours of manual work into it to make sure it isn’t.

But the idea is indeed to self-publish it and sell a few copies to people who are interested. It’s not about the income (the author actually has a regular job and is freelancing in 2 others, this is literally just a hobby), it’s more about the feeling of having made something that made other people interested enough to pay five bucks for it.

Responding to the other topic, one interesting thing about the translation that I’ve found out (and mistranslations from the LLM actually helped spark this idea), is if you can somehow convey the context to the reader, it can make it fresh and interesting and something they haven’t read before, and that’s true not just about idioms, but other cultural patterns as well.

Think how the world and themes of Witcher was something refreshing and new for most international audiences, while in its home country it was very recognizable where the author got his material from.

Russian marines and paratroopers

Apparently these are elite troops as well.

Yeah, I was just thinking “is KLM not working, or what”?

Rescue planes are usually for places where commercial air traffic has broken down and there is no safe way out of the country.

That’s a very good question.

• Yes, I have.
• It was not professional work but a private request from a loved one.
• It was actually their idea.
• And I was very, very sceptical about it at the idea at first and the output all throughout the process.

I have made extensive edits to the original LLM translation, as it got a lot of things wrong. To be honest, it got a lot of the stuff that is unique to the book and that made the book special wrong, both in words, or intent, and I had to correct it. My workflow was literally putting it in the prompt, taking the output, then putting the two texts next to each other and deciding, sentence by sentence, word by word:

• Is the translation any good? (around 95% was generally good, sometimes it trailed off, and I needed to find the point at which it started bullshitting)
• Does it use terms that are unique in the book consistently the right way (it almost never did, I literally had a dictionary of the most frequent mistakes)
• Could I have done it better? Do I know a way to better convey the intent? (this happened quite rarely, as it has done a near word-for-word translation, the biggest problems were idioms that made sense in one language but didn’t in another, or misgendered characters)

All in all, I think the LLM did the heavy lifting in remembering all the odd words and grammar, and it gave me a very flawed first draft. It was 80% of the time, but like 5% of the actual creative work that goes into a translation.

I spent 90% of my time outside the LLM, in my text editor.

So as a counterpoint to all the comments here, I absolutely see this working. I needed to translate a fairly long work of fiction, and an LLM made my work 10x as fast, since quite obviously my active vocabulary between the two languages differed.

It was much easier and faster to correct the LLM than to write the translation myself. Imagine this replacing workers not like 1 workplace becomes 1 LLM subscription, but more like 10 workplaces become 2 workplaces and an LLM subscription.

It’s explicitly a war crime, whether or not it was “targeted”.

https://lieber.westpoint.edu/exploding-pagers-law/

Yes it is, and not because of whether the attacks were targeted.

“It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.”

This is a US West Point essay BTW.

I’m just saying that you did a good job of summarizing that:

• young people in general feel disenfranchised, young white people as well, but the Dem party only focuses on culture war issues, so they are explicitly not fighting for you or even trying to represent you if you are poor and white
• that does not mean All Lives Matter wasn’t just a cynical attempt to muddy the waters around the police regularly murdering black people

Thanks for typing this up so I didn’t have to.

Welcome to Europe Squid!

Rule number one, the French are dicks.

Not for the side OSF is on.

Conservatives fear immigration, liberals largely don’t care. A small amount of people care deeply, providing a good enemy to bash who are sufficiently few to not cause issues but also sufficiently loud to keep the flames going.

Open Society Foundations, Center for American Progress, stuff like that, I guess.

As I see it, they are more active on idpol and immigration than the economy and the issues that were decisive in the US election this time around.

We will have to fight for it though. At this rate we will have to vote down chat control yearly for the next century, and Macron and Scholz are not infinitely better than the US dems either.

At least now, they see that immediate rearmament and asserting ourselves as an economic and geopolitic power is a necessity, even if our industry doesn’t feel like it and never wants to change.

The ACA, which brought US healthcare from an 18th century level to a 19th century one in 2010, was a half measure under Obama, he got reelected for it, he was president for 7 more years after he signed that.

First time voters today were 4 years old when it happened. What else has the Democratic Party been doing? How about the housing crisis? How about inflation? Oh, they got that one 1400 USD stimmy check passed after Trump looted the coffers for corpos big and small.

Look, I’m not saying Harris wasn’t the better, less destructive choice. I’m saying something had had to happen, and people didn’t turn out for a candidate who said the past four years and the way the world is going is good. Not as well as for someone who saw problems and proposed - admittedly monstrous and ineffective - solutions.

Are you drunk? Just because I would understand if you were drunk.