I read two translations of the book "The Master and Margarita". My first read was so boring I couldn't help but stop reading before the end of the first chapter. I can't find the copy and the name of the person who translated it, but this one had all the Russian nicknames translated. It kept talking about a guy called homeless. I thought it was just a bad book and dismissed it for years. I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about with this book.
But then, I stumbled upon the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Although I don't speak Russian, I think this is as good as it gets. They did a phenomenal job.
You can see the same effect with the mechanical translation of the book "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, where the government is called "United State" easily confused with the "United States". The translation that called it "One State" was so much better.
Yes, but then the catchy title wouldn't make much sense, would it? So let's remove all the things you said here and were are left with: "AI started a business all by itself, and is running it." Then:
> We are not doing this because we want AI to replace every café owner in Stockholm. Rather, we are doing this because we want to publicly show the current capabilities of AI.
We are not trying to take your jobs, we just want to show you that we can.
I think this post is vague enough for each one of us to think about the part we are sick of and relate. I'm sick of generative for sure.. but then again [0]:
> Everyone seems to have their own personal definition of acceptable AI use. If you Vibecode an entire app, it's because you are lazy and unskilled. But use AI for code review and writing tests? You are smart and efficient.
> You could use AI to remove photo backgrounds or clean up artifacts, that's just good editing. But generating an image for your blog post? You are stealing from hardworking artists. You are a fraud! You probably use AI as a writing assistant like a monster. But using it to generate documentation from your code is indispensable.
And here I was proud of myself, having taught my mom and her friends how to discern real from fakes they get on WhatsApp groups. Another even more powerful tool for scammers. I'm taking a break.
Here is one thing that happened to me after using Duolingo every day, multiple times a day for more than a year. I became extremely good at it. Throw any language at me, I'll complete it in record time. Sometimes I played it without even the sound on.
Do I speak any of the languages in the game? Hardly. This realization came to me after I completed the Japanese class and my sister asked me to count to ten. I knew all the numbers, their symbols, and the placement in a sentence. But I could not count to ten.
Duolingo is a game before being a learning tool. It is fun to use and I'm almost jealous that they are going to IPO. But it's kinda like farmville. You become good at the game, but you probably won't become a farmer after playing.
I have a particular page on my blog that mostly appear as the answer to a question "Can you do X with Y tool". Before Google started displaying it as a snippet, the post was getting decent traffic, and the comments were more somewhat moderate.
Then the snippet appeared, and a bunch of negative comments started to appear. To clarify, my answer was not a solid yes or no, but more of my experience with the tool. But Google snippets conveniently answers with a section that says: "It is pointless."
User's read the snippet, are enraged, click, don't bother to read the article, jump to the comment and say "YOU ARE WRONG."
Now, the controversy brings a decent amount of traffic. But unfortunately, the traffic is not from people reading in the first place.
The one place I thought ads were relevant was on google search. After all, I was searching for the product they are advertising.
But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator.
For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads.
I read two translations of the book "The Master and Margarita". My first read was so boring I couldn't help but stop reading before the end of the first chapter. I can't find the copy and the name of the person who translated it, but this one had all the Russian nicknames translated. It kept talking about a guy called homeless. I thought it was just a bad book and dismissed it for years. I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about with this book.
But then, I stumbled upon the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Although I don't speak Russian, I think this is as good as it gets. They did a phenomenal job.
You can see the same effect with the mechanical translation of the book "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, where the government is called "United State" easily confused with the "United States". The translation that called it "One State" was so much better.