In 2017 I was talking to a recruiter who genuinely forgot about my application. As in I pinged them, things got moving again, and I actually got hired.
In 2021, I talked to a quantum startup and all indications were that the feedback was "overall extremely positive", and the final step would be talking to the CTO or CEO. For some reason HR could not get that meeting scheduled for two weeks, before telling me I didn't get the job. This seemed like a communication thing, but a few years later the whole company shut down, so I guess I dodged a bullet and/or they changed their mind about hiring.
There's a U. Minnesota spinoff company Priogen testing for chronic wasting disease. I saw them advertising on Reddit for hunters to test their deer meat. Here's a recent news story about the Pennsylvania Game Commission offering kits: https://www.fox43.com/article/news/local/pilot-project-chron...
A few months back, Cloudflare used AI to make a Rust rewrite of WordPress, but I doubt that they would have found or corrected issues like this on the way?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/
This is the worst one for me. I can maybe think of what it means, but I never heard it before, and could easily be imagining a meaning.
Some of the other Claude-isms (quickly googling, especially 'gate' and 'canonical') I feel the issue is they sound right, but aren't specific enough to why we are doing something.
Personally my least favorite is the overuse of "quietly" (e.g. "No tricks. No marketing gimmicks. Just one company quietly outperforming the others"), and the one that makes the least sense to me is "that's the wedge."
I'm curious how these become so ingrained. Then the uncomfortable part is humans start repeating it more (a colleague said "belt-and-suspenders" during brainstorming the other day).
I heard "belt and suspenders" at least 20 years ago (meaning multiple solutions to a problem with backup in case one fails), and maybe would be longer if I were older. You could blame Claude for overusing it or importing it to other cultures maybe, but it's not in the category of invented phrases or ones that only barely mean something in the specific context Claude used them.
I was in Dayton Ohio to see the Wright brothers stuff. There were sidewalk plaques for inventors and celebrities who lived in the city, and they had one for Thomas Midgley Jr. I was shocked!
Fun fact: during their time Dayton had the most patents per capita of anywhere in the US.
I have seen a few Ukrainian drone videos that cross over onto regular subreddits, and this subreddit is far more graphic. Do not take this 'NSFL' lightly.
Were schools banning search engines? I remember teachers recommending Dogpile (because it would combine search engines), and we did some computer lab stuff in the 00s, but there was no one saying that we should ignore search or the internet altogether.
In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.
WebGL is a major upgrade for maps. But as an old school web maps person, the obvious solution to the first problem (nearby points clustered even on the city level) is to use the maxZoom option which is in most clustering libraries.
I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
> often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
As one of such people, I think there is a nuance to it. AI is great when you’re translating something to yourself. But when translating things for others, more caution and human judgement is needed. Espesially when translating instruction manuals, where bad wording could cause someone to injure themself.
This. I put things through Google translate all the time and they're always unreliable. Sometimes they're correct, sometimes I need to know roughly what the original said. Infamously, Google used to say "geiler Typ" meant "horny guy" when it means "awesome guy". Google used to think "geil" meant "horny" in general, which it can but not usually
Google Translate is at the bottom of the barrel. All other AI translation tools are vastly superior. You'd want to evaluate those, and forget about Google Translate completely.
Googles machine translation team wrote the Attention is all you need paper that introduced transformers specifically to solve the problem that you can just model language by mapping one word to another. I'd be floored if they weren't using the tech they invented for intended purpose
Yeah. LLMs, machine translations, CJK keyboards, they are all the same technology; faster cars to each others, not cars vs horse drawn carriages. It'll be surprising if they didn't directly apply any applicable learnings back to Google Translate.
Language is incredibly complex. I remember a TikTok from a bilingual English-Korean speaker comparing the English subtitles from a Squid Game scene to what was actually being said by the characters. The nuance and info density lost in translation made the subtitles feel completely remedial. Americans were basically watching a different show altogether.
I was watching the Netflix show The Empress with Chinese subtitles that did a pretty good job translating the German. I switched to English subs for one episode and couldn't stop telling the people I was watching with "That's not what he said! That's completely different!"
There are translators and there are translators. Translating legal/business documents is a completely different thing from translating movies/books/games.
I can confidently say that LLMs do a better job than the average traditionally published fictions in my country, at least when the original works are in English. Every single time I watch a subbed movie there will be some lines noticeably wrong.
Yes, I've become very leery of artistic translation, in part because the paradigm of translators as adapters and localizers often ends up at odds with the job of faithfully and accurately representing the original material.
The most egregious example I came across recently was where a friend enthused about some manga he was reading and I agreed to read a few chapters, only to discover that the translator has decided to render the countryside accents of western Japan (engaging with a protagonist visiting from Tokyo) by having them say 'y'all' and 'bless your heart' and other Southern USA tropes. I get the aspiration of the translator, but it was excruciatingly unpleasant to read. At that point, why not just say the protagonist was from New York and on vacation in Florida, or draw in some meshback caps on some of the characters and add alligators here and there in the background?
Translators already started losing jobs due to machine translation a decade ago (e.g. DeepL), before LLMs. Remuneration going down made it more difficult to make a living as a translator already then, even if you still received offers.
Well it's more than acceptable to translate e.g. web pages for reading, but it's not something you'd want to professionally publish.
Kinda conceptually similar to how typos and grammatical mistakes aren't a big deal if you're shooting off a quick text or email, but publishing if you've got typos in your advertising copy, in your resume, on your medicine label, etc. it's a real bad look.
Not all translations are the same. Literary translations are often works of art in and of themselves, and automating them would be missing the point entirely, like automating homework or weightlifting at the gym. I don't really know what's the state of the art, but I do buy that, on the other hand, translating toaster manuals or generic copy could soon be automatic.
Yup. If you are bilingual, you quickly realize how some translations are very bad. How some translations are very good. And how hard it is to translate. With dry, simple text, it might be easy. But when it involves art?
Some jokes don't translate directly. There is pun. Sounds of words. Double meaning. Ambiguity. Cultural background. The creation of new words.
It can be reasonably argued that some poetry can be impossible to translate from some languages to others. A poem might be explained, but by a lenghty, dissecting explanation, that completely loses the point of it.
It'll be a similar theme for all facets of work involving any language, slowly - human or code. We'll parrot about humans in the loop this and that, but I think it'll be less humans in the loop over time and I think most people will even be willing to settle for a slightly more mediocre translation or coded project. It all comes back to our dopamine addiction, where we like fast feedback. And the oligarchs like tools to suppress wages. We will be our own demise for not advocating for either UBI or job protections, instead, happily using the technology while also rolling our eyes that it could never replace us.
On the other hand, a lot of people become extremely put off by the smallest sign of ai slop. And the llms have a tendency to impart their style to any text they touch.
I think the only people that genuinely think AI translation is viable are those that never read in the first place.
There are a number of games I've seen and played on Steam which use MTL to get the game playable in English and universally the translation is absolute shit. Sentences that don't transition into another, wordplay that becomes nonsense and a completely flat affect to everything.
In 2021, I talked to a quantum startup and all indications were that the feedback was "overall extremely positive", and the final step would be talking to the CTO or CEO. For some reason HR could not get that meeting scheduled for two weeks, before telling me I didn't get the job. This seemed like a communication thing, but a few years later the whole company shut down, so I guess I dodged a bullet and/or they changed their mind about hiring.
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