• 25 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • That’s a very good answer.

    If I’m getting this right, this was a novel that you perhaps mentioned to your loved one, but a language barrier prevented them from reading it. They then suggested the use of an LLM to translate it, which you used as foundation to build upon. If I may ask, which story did you translate (it has to be good if you spent this much work on it) and which LLM did you use?

    I can’t see anything wrong with this. I’ve used this kind of approach using all sorts of machine translation tools going back over 20 years (not for entire books though). Let the computer do its thing, then fix mistakes - but this was always noncommercial, private use for myself, friends and relatives, as well as the occasional friendly online community. Although, I’ve also done entirely manual work, with no machine translation at all in situations when I wanted the best possible quality or where complexity and nuance made anything else impossible - like with a long list of “whisper jokes” from Nazi Germany, subversive jokes that people told each other under the punishment of death that require a ton of context no translation tool could possibly have.

    The point here is though that this is very different from a publisher doing this commercially - and you and I both know that these companies will not even allow for the bare minimum of time spent fixing mistakes made by the translation tools.





  • Everything the Nazi party did in Germany was legal.

    This is a common myth (just like “Hitler was elected”), but not true at all. The Nazi regime knowingly committed countless crimes that were illegal under their own laws, from corruption to mass murder - and after the war, Nazi officials were (at least sometimes) persecuted by German courts using laws that were in effect from 1933 to 1945 (since they couldn’t be persecuted for laws that didn’t yet exist, at least not by German courts).

    The key lesson here is different, but still highly relevant: Most of the laws of the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic (which in turn had inherited most of its laws from the German Empire, laws that are still largely in effect today), remained intact during the Nazi regime (which, among other things, allowed e.g. two parties to settle a legal dispute in a manner that was barely different from before the Nazis’ rise to power, provided none of the parties was Jewish, of course), but the appointed persecutors and judges were instructed to employ “gesundes Volksempfinden” (difficult to translate, but it’s roughly “healthy people’s subjective interpretation [of the law]”), which was just a fancy way of saying that both old and new laws had to be bent according to the directive of the regime (but the regime insisted that this was how “normal German people” would see the law). There were only a few attempts of both civil and military persecutors to act against crimes committed in the name of the regime, most of them unsuccessful and especially near the end of the war, show trials and kangaroo courts that made a mockery of legal procedure became commonplace.

    Judges appointed by Trump have already used questionable to downright illegal procedural tricks to get him out of trouble. This should have been a warning of what’s to come, how more and more appointed judges will both refuse to persecute crimes committed by Trump and his administration while at the same time weaponizing existing laws to use against his opponents, until even this pseudo-legal abuse of state institutions isn’t even necessary anymore.

    Here’s another important lesson from Nazi Germany: Within days of Hitler coming to power, so called “wild concentration camps” were created all over Germany. Political opponents, journalists, lawyers, Jews and often times simply people who were personal enemies of local Nazi figures were imprisoned, tortured and sometimes killed in a chaotic and uncontrolled manner. These camps were only temporary, but within weeks, a legalization of concentration camp system followed. New legal camps were built, “wild” camps closed or converted within years. The entire process was no secret, with multi-page spreads in newspapers praising them as “hard, but necessary labor camps that turn enemies of the state into useful people”. It was a sanitized portrayal, but even from the officially released photos you could tell that these were places of terror. Importantly, the torture and murder happening there was never legal and a state secret. Courts could now sentence people to be imprisoned at these camps - and anyone who was released (which was most victims, these weren’t death camps yet) had to sign that they wouldn’t talk about what they experienced or else they would be imprisoned again. I could imagine something similar happening in the US as part of the already broadly announced terror campaign against undocumented immigrants.


  • Technically it does, but not locally in the age of national governments. Before you’re saying it, the moment it stops being a local movement, it would work even less and lead to the organized repression I mentioned. To support my point, see how harsh government reaction has been to activists merely gluing themselves to the street (not to mention, how most people were happy about this crackdown).

    And no, I doubt “The Revolution” that magically solves all of our problems (unlike most revolutions) will be started by anti-AV riots.











  • Ready or Not is a thing and quite popular, although I haven’t tried it myself. As far as I know, it’s the closest to the old SWAT games and not exactly a low-budget Indie title. Similarly, covering the military side of things, there’s Six Days in Fallujah, which is considerably more aggressive and action-heavy than the titles of old, but similarly punishing.



  • As long as a majority of Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, Sanders’ economic policies have less mass appeal and offer more opportunities for attack ads than you think. It needs to be stressed that people voted for Trump not just because he’s a loud-mouthed racist and sexist and they like that, but also because he inherited the (irrational) image of Republicans being better for the economy.

    Public opinion on Israel was, even among college kids, very different in 2016, before the current wave of massed anti-Israel propaganda from Russian, Chinese and Iranian bot farms sweeping over social media - and even now most voters (as in: people who actually vote) are still more pro-Israel than pro-Palestine (which makes sense, given how important of a partner Israel is to the US) - and it’s still not high on the list of priorities for most, not even remotely high enough to be mentioned side-by-side with economic policy, which is and almost always has been the number one priority.

    where the majority of people feel very differently than the people in DC and on the news do

    Are you saying that the polls are completely wrong? What are you basing the idea on that the “majority of the people” (reminder: the majority of voters just elected Trump - he actually got the popular vote this time, which is deeply, deeply troubling) have left-leaning positions on the economy and Israel?