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.

If an organization has to issue a correction that should be all they’re allowed to say for at least a 24 hour period (basically, put them in timeout).

When I was a kid and I lived in a flawed but mostly functional democracy, I remember that sometimes even the biggest TV channels would air a black screen with a single sentence for hours of primetime:

“We have falsely claimed that […]. The truth is that […]. As per law […], normal programming is on hiatus for 2 hours. Programming will resume at […].”

This is how it should work.

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.

Your house, our choice

I thought this will be another housing crisis article.

Well, in most authoritarian countries they are also very well known to be bad around high windows, or liable to get lost for at least a few years after trying to go up against the ones with real power. When norms go out the window, shit gets real for everyone, not just us poors.

Just because your politics has managed to alienate young men the most, so they are the most likely to be voting for anything but establishment, does not mean military age men in general are “maldeveloped, entitled sex pests”. In fact, I would bet more military age men just didn’t vote than vote Trump, because they felt Harris doesn’t represent them, and not because she’s a woman. This is a wholly US culture war driven phenomenon. Fun fact, Orbán’s voters are majority female, most men vote for the opposition, especially among military age men.

Military age men historically have been the driving force behind the greatest examples of rapid societal progress. Military age men coming back from the hell of WWI have been the ones to destroy the divine right of kings and the feudal world order. Military age men fought in the revolutions against the authoritarian communist world.

Of course, a lot of governments did things to get rid of military aged men, but it was almost always because they were the primary threat to outmoded world views, not the ones to preserve it.

I mean, he explicitly wanted to turn it into an establishment vs. outsider election, and she went ahead and helped him! She wanted to win as “we are the establishment that made everything as it is” in a country with most people only agreeing on one single thing, the establishment being bad.

How stupid is that?

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.

And I was just making a lame joke about your spelling being exactly one typo away from two differently valid spellings.

IMO, the whole topic is nothing but a political tool, and most people wouldn’t care either way.

So there is this one playbook that the Russian-aligned right likes to play, which is: take an issue nobody but a very small minority of people care about, but it has to be something they can’t just let go. For example, the rights of trans people in the US, but in Hungary it has been the existence of one particular university at one point.

Then start bombarding your base with misinformation about how this thing is bad for society and has to be opposed, and introduce legislation. Finally, watch the small minority protest continuously and very fiercely for the issue that is existential for them, and lay back while this issue occupies public discourse for months and years, precluding other serious issues being discussed as you can comfortably be in a majority position while doing whatever you want without public attention.

The insidiousness is that the issue is really existential for the people affected, so you can’t tell them to let it go, and a lot of very loud people would demonize you for letting it go as well since it is existential for them.

So you have three options:

• Take up the fight in the issue and let it be the deciding issue for elections, driving turnout for your opponent - see gay and trans rights
• Try to take the opposite side and leave the minority group to fend for themselves, and lose them as voters - see funding the Gaza genocide
• Be a stereotypical politician and change the topic each time it comes up, which will blunt the first effect, but you will still get some of the second - this is unfortunately usually the good choice

But to actually win, what you have to do is:

• Use the tactic to your advantage and make your own attacks, keeping the topics on your talking points

Just off the top off my head, here are a few ideas the Dems could have done the same to the Reps, and I’m not a genius:

• Declare the KKK to be a terrorist organization
• Make it illegal to fly the Confederate flag on public buildings
• Institute a federal ban on child marriages

I know each of these would rile up some small segment of the Republican base, but that’s the point! You want to make them fiercely defend points that not all of them care about, as not all of them will turn out for all of these issues. You want the Mormons out in arms on the streets protesting the child marriage ban so you can be “tough on crime” and “crack down on the rioting Mormon paedophiles”.

Es ist entweder “Gesundheit” auf Deutsch, of “gezondheit” in het Nederlands.

Not the person who you were talking with, but I think it’s nuanced. Short term tradeoffs should be made for effectiveness, while long-term strategies should be relentlessly pursued for inclusivity.

E.g. as a man, I think that the women-only carriages in a lot of SEA countries are a necessary thing, but it has to be a short term solution with a healthier society should be always consistently pursued, for example with educational measures.

It is somewhat relevant, though. For example, it’s relevant for designing stuff so that everyone regardless of their phenotypical makeup is equally able to function in society. For example, if it didn’t matter at all if a lot of people have no penises, we could have urinals everywhere, or conversely for the opposite, we would have no need for urologists. Or if it really didn’t matter what colour someone’s skin is, we wouldn’t have to have differentiated medical care for people of different phenotypes, or we wouldn’t need to think about calibrating sensors for different skin colours for detectors so that every device functions for everyone.

But I get your point, a lot of the reasons people think biological differences matter are all made up and mostly bullshit.

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.

As long as they can do it.

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.

Of course he did. The problem is that Harris failed to even promise stuff.

The “moderate” experiment started in 92 needs to be over

It is over, one way or the other. Europe is also seeing neoliberal politics collapsing, since Pax Americana is over, and being a slow and steady parasite and passing all the hardship to the working class does not work when “other people’s money”, meaning the capacity of the public, runs out.

The question is whether our dear oligarchs realize that the only way to keep the current system where they are safe is to give power away and transition to something of a social democracy, like in the 50-60s West, otherwise it will be torn from them by a violent dictatorship where they might not even keep their lives.