Lvxferre [he/him]

One of my favourite instances of adaptation got to be Ted Woolsey’s “son of a submariner! They’ll pay for this…”, for the English localisation of Final Fantasy III / VI.

In the game, Kefka (the villain) is saying this as the heroes escape him, but the original only says “ヒーーー　くっそー！このかりは必ず返しますよ!”; literally “heeee shit! I will definitively return this debt” or similar. However:

• That “ヒーーー” interjection has no meaning on its own. It’s only there to highlight the character’s emotional state. It could be safely removed, without loss of meaning.
• くそ / 糞 kuso “crap! shit!” is vulgar, but by no means as vulgar as English “shit”. Specially given the 90s, and this game being marketed to kids. But it means the villain is being rude towards the heroes (makes sense, right).

So, translating it as simply “hey you!” or similar would mutilate the original, by removing the rudeness. But at the same time, Woolsey couldn’t use “shit” or “crap” or similar. So he looked at the context:

• Kefka is crazy, and the way he uses Japanese in the original is odd. For example, he uses the pronoun “ぼくちん” bokuchin to refer to himself, as if he was a kid - and yet he’s a court mage of an empire dammit. (It’s a bit deeper than that, but let’s focus.)
• a bit before Kefka says this, there’s a city in the desert also fleeing Kefka - by going underground instead, as if it was some sort of “sand submarine”.

So Woolsey went with “son of a submariner!”, something he likely made up on the spot. And you know what? It’s perfect - it’s completely on-character for Kefka to insult people in such a weird way.

It’s a bit more complicated: if you’re dealing with the sounds it’s transcription, if you’re converting from writing system into another it’s transliteration.

So for example, what you did is transliteration. But if you were to record some Japanese guy speaking and wrote it down (in kanji+kana, Latin, or even IPA), or if you handled how it’s actually spoken, it would be transcription.

For each 1kg of cheese you need around 10kg of milk. Add labour and storage costs - specially relevant for aged cheeses.

Any fuckin windows?

No. But at least some of those doors are cardboard. You need to test it out before claiming it’s impassable. And, sure, once you pass through someone is bound to screech “WHY DID YOU DESTROY THE CARDBOARD DOOR, YOU VANDAL? It took me a day to build it!”, but that’s part of life.

Because she’s a con[ifers] woman.

This was damn cute.

I hate poorly made security/identity systems in general, but by far the worst is poorly made 2FA.

No, I’m not giving you my number; and if using your site requires it, I’m probably giving up using your site. Ask my email and I’ll provide my burner account.

Nor in the pic: the lab technician going to jail for murder. Or the broken centrifuge.

Those two are hilarious!

I don’t know the rootstock variety’s name; I got the seeds from my BIL’s neighbour, he calls it “ball pepper” (it is not Catalan ñora) or “tree pepper”. The fruits are round, 3~5cm large, red, medium heat.

The grafts will be:

1. Dedo-de-moça - C. baccatum, medium heat, finger-shaped, ~8cm large. Kind of a default pepper where I live, but it has a nasty tendency to die in winter (like mine did).
2. Yellow bell pepper. Market stuff.
3. Chocolate-coloured habanero. Hot as hell, but the strain I got is bloody delicious.
4. Biquinho - C. chinense, no heat, drop-shaped, ~1cm tiny. Extremely fruity.

The first three are part of a breeding project of mine. I want to create two new varieties:

• a yellow jalapeño-like: large, low heat, thinner than a bell pepper. Mostly for stuffing and pizze. It’s a rather simple dedo-de-moça x yellow bell pepper hybrid; I actually got the seeds for the F1 already, I’m just waiting the weather to get a bit more stable to plant them.
• a large and extremely hot pepper for sauces. Preferably finger-shaped and brown (for aesthetics). It’ll be probably a hybrid of the hybrid above, plus habanero.

I’m also considering to add the rootstock to the breeding, since it’s a hardy plant with high yield and it survived winter just fine.

Yes, but I think the ones you’ll see past the bubble burst will be a bit different. For example, incorporating the current attempts of natural language processing, even if in a simplified way.

I use those quotation marks because IMO they’re better described as large token models than large language models. They have rather good morphology and syntax, but once you look at the higher layers (semantics and specially pragmatics) they drop the ball really hard. Even if those layers are way more important than the lower ones.

For a rough analogy, it’s like a taxidermised cat - some layers (the skin and fur) are practically identical to the real thing, but it’s missing what makes a cat a cat, you know? It’s still useful if you want some creepy deco, but don’t expect the taxidermised critter to ruin your furniture or to use your belly as sleeping pad.

I shouldn’t be talking so much about taters. Someone will eventually realise I’m too emotionally invested into food 🤣

Completely off-topic, but in the meantime I’m trying to graft an orange sapling into a lemon tree. Kind of hard to get the timing right, too; I need the tree to get a branch with just the right thickness, so it’s like “too thin [next day] too thin [next day] fuck, now it’s too thick!”. Same deal with my pepper plants.

That’s interesting. Is its meaning similar to the one the AI outputted?

It’s doing better but not by much, though. It shouldn’t be speculating as much, given the lack of info on the potential saying.

A family saying or regional expression

Speaking on that I tried a few sayings from other languages. It seems to be hit-and-miss:

• “Bread is bread, wine is wine” (Italian) - recognised properly as similar to “call a spade a spade”
• “A good fish swims thrice” (Polish) - recognised properly as a recipe-like saying (the fish swims in water, then butter, then wine)
• “Do you think mango core is soap?”, “Mango core is not soap” (Portuguese; specially common in Brazil) - it failed really hard. The rhetorical question / saying roughly means “this is blatantly absurd, why are you denying the obvious?”, or perhaps “cut off the crap”. But here’s the output:

Wow, his potato parable actually makes sense - unlike Gemini’s couple therapy take. (The character in question isn’t even a therapist, but a lawyer!)

Do you want my guess? The current “fight” will go on, until the AI bubble bursts. None of the current large token models will survive; they’ll be simply ditched as “unprofitable”. Instead you’ll see a bunch of smaller models popping up, for more focused tasks, being advertised as something else than AI (perhaps as a “neural network solution” or similar).

So Grok, Gemini, GPT, they’re all going the way of the dodo.

That’s just my guess though. It could be wrong.

Yup, pretty much. And the field is full of red herring terms, so they can mislead you into believing otherwise: “hallucination”, “semantic” supplementation, “reasoning” models, large “language” model…

And it was really, really invested on the lie, to the point it argued why potatoes would be more active!

After some search, I actually found the prompt and output; I asked Bard (before Google renamed it to Gemini) two years ago, in Portuguese. I’ll provide both the original and a translation; emphasis mine in all cases.