ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝

I’ve perceived that things have never been better for American international order than under Trump/Biden.

The last few cycles have been a weird time for NATO, as the escalating Russian aggression revitalised the alliance, but the unreliability of Trump vastly diminished the status of the US. Europe is now actively trying to get out of the military subordinate role.

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.

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.

I think the point is that while you’re right that nobody cares about comparing policies to each other, what decides voter turnout is how much each candidate lives up to the ideal of their own side.

Harris had to be at least as inspiringly progressive as Trump had been inspiringly conservative to drive turnout. Instead, she did the equivalent of Trump declaring that he’s a bit of a socialist.

Yeah, courting far left people like Dick Cheney was the problem. Next time they will just run Ivanka Trump and if you’re against her, you are a misogynist.

Just kidding, they won’t run her until she’s at least 60, everyone knows people who are younger than that can’t politics.

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.

Fuck, are we really becoming the last beacon of freedom and liberty?

It’s a lost art, don’t worry.

Yes. The Dems lost this election more than the Reps won it.

And no, it’s not just Harris. It’s the fact they haven’t accomplished anything substantially changing the lives of people for dozens of years, and they fought more against people like Sanders than people like Cheney.

I think he’s heard about this champagne thing but is going to drink a bottle of shampoo.

Unironically, I think that was the thought process.

Hard to vote for someone who is telling you all is well and the people that got the country here are competent and mean well, when the country is going through 5 different crises, all preventing you from living a decent life.

Imagine calling stocks your economy.

Not all stocks, though, just the ones with sharp upward trends despite the fundamentals and no dividends or voting rights. How are they different from a big-tech backed shitcoin? You don’t get part of the economic output or even the influence, they are simply a token given to you by a random corpo saying it will be worth more next month.

Not election advice, they allege that one party committed election crimes using the FBI as a voice of authority.

Your comment does not make sense. In communist countries, companies still have CEOs, they just don’t have private shareholders, they are owned by the state. Not that I care about that.

And what I call a casino is the NYSE, when stocks offering no dividends are pumped to the stratosphere, with purely speculative buys.

The problem is that we judge its success by how much the wealthiest people bet on its success in a glorified casino instead of anything else, like its positive impact on society.

A plane can continue to fly without a pilot. The problem is not “continuing to exist”, but continued success or a spectacular crash.

Also, I’d bet on Dropbox being able to function quite well without its CEO.

You can actually, evolution is driven by selective reproduction, not selective survival. Yes, reproduction is usually tied to survival, but natural selection would still work even if everyone always lived to 80.

It would not select for traits useful for survival though, it would most likely select for traits that get you laid.

Yeah, the real difference is that Iron Man did more work in a 3-hour movie than Musk in his whole life.