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.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody ever accused voters of being smart. That said, Harris lost a lot of Biden’s 2020 voters, so this is the exact good time to go super critical on her campaign.

So the North Koreans didn’t even send weapons with those troops? Sounds a bit weird, why train the troops with new gear? NK gear should be compatible enough that they can keep them supplied with older Russian ammo, right?

I also don’t think it will be that drastic, but I can totally see the Russians pushing inexperienced North Korean troops in the thick of the fighting.

If there are any significant changes in direction from the election, that should take effect in February next year, right? The current admin could still sign over the whole army to Ukraine next month, even if the Russians got literally all the votes in the current US election.

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

The Swedish furniture company

You mean the Dutch charity that pays almost no taxes?

Thank you very much!

Don’t get me wrong, I was not advocating for nazism. I know you by reputation to be knowledgeable about history, so if you could recommend some literature into it, I’d love that.

What I’m saying is more a kind of fear I have instead of a statement, I just saw that nazi regimes seemed like able to channel economic productivity into some societal goal - even though that goal was utterly despicable and evil, like a war - instead of just having the economy grow as a cancer.

I guess that’s my point, the economy should be a means to societal progress, and I feel a lot of people pretend it works the other way around.

Corporations should be slaves to bettering our lives, instead of our lives being slaved to bettering corporations.

I would really love to have a conversation about how the Nazis had a great economy, capable of going from rebuilding from WWI to starting WWII in 20 years.

I feel like worshipping the economy, and having it be the sole measure of society, inevitably leads us to the far-right. China is not going to magically crumble, and economic prosperity is achievable without societal progress.

We need to have societal progress as the goal, not some magic by-product of line go up.

Details: […] Geolocated footage suggests that Russian forces may have previously regained positions east of Novy Put, while Ukrainian forces appear to hold positions southeast of the settlement. The front line in Kursk Oblast remains unchanged.

This is another “Russians captured another hedgerow, lost another platoon” article.

I wonder if they like Sabaton.

Still a deadlock at the frontline
Where the soldiers die in mud
roads and houses since long gone
still no glory has been won
know that many men have suffered
know that many men have died

Six miles of ground has been won
Half a million men are gone
And as the men crawled, the general called
And the killing carried on and on
And on
What’s the purpose of it all?
What’s the price of a mile?

Do they also have this thing where boomers vote for this one party out of force of habit, and the main effort of the one party is to make other parties seem worse instead of actually governing? Or is that only Eastern Europe?

The image really illustrates the gains well, when one of those “offensive arrows” that usually span regions or even continents spans the area of like 15 parking spaces in a mid-sized car park.

I would just like to point out this paragraph from Wikipedia about Levadne:

According to the 1989 Ukrainian SSR census, the settlement had a population of 19, consisting of fourteen women and five men.[3] In the 2001 census, the settlement’s population would drop to only one person,[4] who spoke Ukrainian.[5]

And from the article about Shakhtarske:

At that time, Russian forces attacked the settlement near Shakhtarske using armoured vehicles and infantry. “In the afternoon, a convoy of eight armoured vehicles reached the village [of Shakhtarske] and attempted to break through towards Velyka Novosilka. One armoured combat vehicle was hit, forcing the rest to pull back. By evening, a larger convoy of over 15 armoured vehicles arrived and split at Zolota Nyva. Part of the convoy again tried to advance towards Velyka Novosilka, but after the lead vehicle was hit, they decided to retreat. The fate of the remaining vehicles in the convoy is unknown.”

So the news is: Russians captured another Ukrainian farmshed at Levadne, and were turned back twice at Shakhtarske after losing another two combat vehicles.