Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

    Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!

    Verbose example, using Portuguese to English

    I’ll give you an example, using PT→EN because I don’t speak JP. Let’s say Alice tells Bob “ma’ tu é uma nota de três pila, né?” (literally: “bu[t] you’re a three bucks bill, isn’t it?”) . A human translator will immediately notice a few things:

    • It’s an informal and regional register. If Alice typically uses this register, it’s part of her characterisation; else, it register shift is noteworthy. Either way, it’s meaningful.
    • There’s an idiom there; “nota de três pila” (three bucks bill). It conveys some[thing/one] is blatantly false.
    • There’s a rhetorical question, worded like an accusation. The scene dictates how it should be interpreted.

    So depending on the context, the translator might translate this as “ain’t ya full of shit…”, or perhaps “wow, you’re as fake as Monopoly money, arentcha?”. Now, check how chatbots do it:

    • GPT-4o mini: “But you’re a three-buck note, right?”
    • Llama 4 Scout: “But you are a three-dollar bill, aren’t you?”; or “You’re a three-dollar bill, right?” (it offers both alternatives)

    Both miss the mark. If you talk about three dollar bills in English, lots of people associate it with gay people, creating an association that simply does not exist in the original. The extremely informal and regional register is gone, as well as the accusatory tone.

    With Claude shitting this pile of idiocy, that I had to screenshot because otherwise people wouldn’t believe me:


    [This is wrong on so many levels I don’t… I don’t even…]

    This is what you get for AI translations between two IE languages in the same Sprachbund, that’ll often do things in a similar way. It gets way worse for Japanese → English - because they’re languages from different families, different cultures, that didn’t historically interact that much. It’s like the dumb shit above, multiplied by ten.

    If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

    That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.


  • 22 yards in a chain

    What. I had to websearch this because it sounds too silly, but apparently it’s true.

    But, really, even if it used saner numbers (like 12:3:24:8:3), it still feels nothing like a “metric dozenal” would look like. It’s missing the two things the metric system did right:

    1. All prefixes are unit-agnostic, like they were numbers. For example you can plop “kilo” = 10³ on weight (kilogram), length (kilometre), volume (kilolitre), energy, (kilojoule), etc.
    2. All prefixes must be an integer power of the base. For example you could make a 10⁸ prefix, even if there’s none, and it would be OK; but you can’t make, say, a 10^(2.447) = 300 one.

  • Metric “dozenalisation” would be perfectly viable, and metric-dozenal units would still look nothing like USA units.

    I’ll use length for the example. All of them in base 10, just for clarity. (Also the name of the units would be different, but I’m not changing them for this example.)

    • metric-decimal: 10⁻³ km = 10⁻² hm = 10⁻¹ dam = 10⁰m = 10¹dm = 10²cm = 10³mm
    • metric-dozenal: 12⁻³ km = 12⁻²hm = 12⁻¹ dam = 12⁰m = 12¹dm = 12²cm = 12³mm
    • USA units: 1/1760mi = 1yd = 3ft = 3*12 in = 3*12*6 P = 3*12*6*12 p

    Are you noticing what the USA units do? They don’t stick to a base.


  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzConverting numbers is easy
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    4 days ago

    People are focusing on the Excel part, I’ll focus on the maths.

    I wish our societies picked base-12 instead of base-10. Divisions in base-12 give you repeating digits less often, and being able to split exactly by 3, 6, 9 and 12₁₀=10₁₂ is far more useful than doing it for 5 and 10₁₀=A₁₂.

    Plus 4chan would stop arguing if 0.999… = 1. It would argue instead if 0.BBB… = 1.





  • Who was this written by, a Brit?

    Nope. Likely an American.

    When cooking, people in general like to use round numbers, like “200°C”, since a difference of 5°C in oven temperature is not a big deal.

    And yet they went with some oddly specific 205°C. That only makes sense if they’re used to Fahrenheit, eyeballed a round value (like 400°F), converted it into Celsius (204.4°C), and then rounded it up to discard the decimal.

    I’m also going to say they’re completely clueless when it comes to cooking - 200°C is the oven temperature. The chicken itself reaches a far lower temperature, in the 70~80°C range. By the time the chicken reached 200°C, it’s already dry and close to catching fire. (The self-ignition temperature for biological stuff is typically between 200°C and 250°C.)