Michaela DePrince in Swan Lake

Michaela DePrince sadly passed away on September 13, 2024. Her family has asked for people to donate to War Child, an organization she supported throughout her life. May she rest in peace and her memory live on.

Sans retour possible(1983) dir. Jacques Kebadian, Serge Avédikian

I straight up don't think white Usamericans get to claim things like Jazz or Blues or anything like that as "American Culture" so they can posture their ideas of American Exceptionalism because those things are not White American Culture. You don't get to hate Black Art since the dawn of time, kill disco because of how racist you all are, then get to go on here and be like "American culture is Jazz and National Park♥💞💞♥💓♥💞♥💞" like everything white americans claim is their culture is either something that didn't come from white people or is a by product of something horribly racist that's gotten good PR.

american culture is puritanism

I’ll be honest I’ve always wanted a conical woven hat like a non la. I’ve tried them on before and they are so much more comfortable than western straw hats and they always fit my big head because they’re one size fits all by design. And they look cool.

Asian cultures really popped off with this type of hat design. I really do adore it so much.

and i will continue to make fucking noise about the fact our representation is disappearing rapidly during a key moment in history!!

"Fuck this shit"

Seen outside The Linden, new Luxury Apartments in West Philadelphia. Most of the units and every store are currently vacant because the monthly rent is triple the rest of the neighborhood. A few days ago 17 windows were smashed and painted messages were left.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: The Affordable Housing Crisis, Explained

Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake

via @nailgun-nali

(x)

@spanish-blog I have an even better illustration of why machine translation sucks:

Here I asked google to translate 跌倒, a Chinese verb meaning “to tumble or fall down” into French. The translation google provides is “automne,” a noun meaning “fall, the season of the year between spring and winter.”

English is the only language where the word for “fall” (to tumble) is the same as the word “fall” (the season of the year). Neither Chinese nor French use the same word to express these very different concepts.

Google isn’t doing a bad Chinese-to-French translation here. In fact, it’s not doing a Chinese-to-French translation at all. What’s happening instead is google is doing a bad Chinese to English translation, followed by an even worse English to French translation. It’s playing a secret game of telephone, wherein requests to translate between two non-English languages are getting translated into English first, and then into the target language.

Yikes. 📞📱 🤙 💀

philip k dick wrote a novel called Galactic Pot Healer in 1969 and in it, some of the characters play a game where they run book titles recursively through machine translators and back again and the game is to guess the original title - our favourite one being “the cliché is inexperienced” which was originally “the corn is green” - and this is based on a genuine game using machine translation, the classic example from back then being

hydraulic ram -> water sheep

we mention this to make a point that in a lot of ways machine translation is barely better than it was half a century ago and that’s depressing

(also sidebar, as a kid we always added

hydraulic ram -> water sheep -> bahrain)

In my house, when something gets forgotten bc you didn’t see it, it’s an “invisible maniac,” bc of the apocryphal story about a machine translation of “out of sight, out of mind” into “invisible maniac”.

desperately texting my mom over whether she voted for no reason other than the fact that michigan’s sticker fucks so hard and they didn’t send me one for my mail in

SHE DIDNT GET ONE EITHER FUCK

my white whale……

any michiganders out there get an extra sticker i Will send my address to strangers over this

starting tomorrow, you can go to your local secretary of state office to pick one up if you didn't get one!!! (source)

(flight intercom) this is the pilot speaking. yeah we expect todays flight to be normal. um if you look out your window you shouldnt see the skull

(wizard intercom) good evening passengers. this is the wizard speaking. boy do i have a treat for you

Posts that make you drop everything you're doing and open Audacity

This is by Canadian artist Deirdre Sokolowska. You can buy a sticker of this piggy here on Etsy.

I see this reposted without credit all the time. Don't fucking do that! Respect artists whose work you love enough to share by sharing THEIR posts or at the very least crediting them and adding links to their socials.

@nenerobopistol noodles are ready

THIS IS SO FUNNY?? YOU COULDVE TEXTED ME??

CoPilot in MS Word

I opened Word yesterday to discover that it now contains CoPilot. It follows you as you type and if you have a personal Microsoft 365 account, you can't turn it off. You will be given 60 AI credits per month and you can't opt out of it.

The only way to banish it is to revert to an earlier version of Office. There is lot of conflicting information and overly complex guides out there, so I thought I'd share the simplest way I found.

How to revert back to an old version of Office that does not have CoPilot

This is fairly simple, thankfully, presuming everything is in the default locations. If not you'll need to adjust the below for where you have things saved.

This will roll you back to build 17726.20160, from July 2024, which does not have CoPilot, and prevent it from being installed.

If you want a different build, you can see them all listed here. You will need to change the 17726.20160 at step 4 to whatever build number you want.

This is not a perfect fix, because while it removes CoPilot, it also stops you receiving security updates and bug fixes.

Switching from Office to LibreOffice

At this point, I'm giving up on Microsoft Office/Word. After trying a few different options, I've switched to LibreOffice.

You can download it here for free: https://www.libreoffice.org/

If you like the look of Word, these tutorials show you how to get that look:

If you've been using Word for awhile, chances are you have a significant custom dictionary. You can add it to LibreOffice following these steps.

First, get your dictionary from Microsoft

Next, add it to LibreOffice

If you use LIbreOffice on multiple machines, you'll need to do this for each machine.

Please note: this worked for me. If it doesn't work for you, check you've followed each step correctly, and try restarting your computer. If it still doesn't work, I can't provide tech support (sorry).

This! Yes, go to FOSS!! Learn how to use FOSS, learn how to make FOSS better.

LibreOffice is HUGE and it's GREAT and you don't ever have to touch MS again if you know how to take care of your stuff. STOP DEPENDING ON BIG TECHS!

Also, if you really really need it to be MS Office, just pirate it. Get the 2013 version or something. Go to the internet, learn how to pirate safely. Learn about trustworthy sites, about VPN and the Scene. Learn how to get cracked software. It's not some deepweb, just like put an r/ in front of the 🏴‍☠️ word or something, maybe you'll find something interesting, I don't know. It's a fucking big tech, don't get sad about license stuff or anything. They don't deserve your money, they don't give you an option to opt out, so you do it yourself.

I'm convinced Mythbusters needs a reboot. Misinformation or mythinformation if you will, is at an all time high. We NEED the show that promotes critical thinking to come back. It doesn't need the same cast, in fact I think it would be better with some fresh faces. Imagine all the good it would do if you could just show your crazy uncle the Mythbusters reboot episode that debunks his anti-vaxx conspiracy in an easily digestible and entertaining format.

I initially read "Mythbusters needs a robot" and thought "seems reasonable let's see where theyre going with this"

A channel 4 dispatch has come out that indicates Prince William is a slum landlord. Earning millions while tenants live in fuel poverty with damp and mould on the walls.

This is... NOT gonna end the way you think

O_O

yikes

Some more links to why Betterhelp sucks (on top of the racism):

this is definitely NOT the moon girl episode with a trans character that disney shelved and has no plans on airing and i am definitely NOT advising you to spread it around like wildfire in retaliation to this stupid-ass chickenshit coward decision. i repeat, i am DEFINITELY not encouraging you to spread this episode around like crazy to show disney that trans people will not bow down to the whims of the people that want them dead. definitely DON'T do that. definitely

Here is the archive link in case the video gets claimed by copyright and taken down from youtube

I'm sure this has already been scrubbed by disney's lawyers but you should know that this is not the only case of this happening recently and disney is not the only studio who is guilty of it. despite all of the progress made over the last decade or so by endlessly brave people working in animation, the current state of US politics is causing a tangible backlash in what is being made and what is being aired.