adelie

hi! i live in SF. at trader joe's, these items would be priced at - $5 (bread loaf) + $5 (eggs) + $3 (yogurt) + $2 (onions) + $2 (tomatoes) + $1 (jalapeno) + $3 (parsley) = $21.

i'm rounding up on eggs and bread since you might be buying a more expensive variety, and guesstimating parsley because i haven't bought it from trader joe's before. everything else is pulled from my last few shopping trips.

if you're spending $50 on this, i would highly recommend finding a new grocery store.

logs suggest it's been 'critically failing' and 'blocked for 68 days' on farmhand introduction, although the logs don't go back far enough (and cut off too early) to really tell what's going on. https://proofofcorn.com/log

my company (mid-size, publicly traded) is mandating [x] hours spent on AI per week. i have no idea how they're planning on measuring this, and as far as i can tell, neither does management.

suppose it's better than counting lines of code, though.

i'm a senior engineer at a mid-size, publicly traded company.

my team has largely avoided AI; our sister team has been quite gungho on it. i recently handed off a project to them that i'd scoped at about one sprint of work. they returned with a project design that involved four microservices, five new database tables, and an entirely new orchestration and observability layer. it took almost a week of back-and-forth to pare things down.

since then, they've spent several sprints delivering PRs that i now have to review. there's lots of things that don't work, don't make sense, or reinvent things we already have from scratch. almost half the code is dedicated to creating 'reusable' and 'modular' classes (read: boilerplate) for a project that was distinctly scoped as a one-off. as a result, this takes hours, and it's cut into my own sprint velocity. i'm doing all the hard work but receiving none of the credit.

management just told me that every engineer is now required to use AI. i'm tired.

because my company is mandating that we use motorboats instead of rowboats.

i can continue to row as a hobby, but i've been very lucky in that my work has always been something i genuinely enjoyed. now that it's become something that's actively burning me out, it's far harder to find time for hobbies and interests.

I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech:

1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutting your contract than it loses in sales.

2. Translation jobs have been replaced with jobs proofreading machine translations, which pays peanuts (since AI is 'doing most of the work') but in fact takes almost as much effort as translating from scratch (since AI is often wrong in very subtle ways). The comparison to PR reviews makes itself.

it feels good because we've turned coding into a gacha machine. you chase the high from when it works, and if it doesn't, you just throw more tokens at the problem.

i've seen this fairly often with internal libraries as well - a recent AI-assisted PR i reviewed included a complete reimplementation of our metrics collector interface.

suspect this happened because the reimplementation contained a number of standard/expected methods that we didn't have in our existing interface (because we didn't need them), so it was considered 'different' enough. but none of the code actually used those methods (because we didn't need them), so all this PR did was add a few hundred lines of cognitive overhead.

language-based professions like translation have been dying for years and no one has cared; they're not about to start now that the final nail's been put in the coffin.

generally speaking for han chinese folks, surnames are one character and given names are one or two characters (with two being more common, usually). so if you see a name that's 1-2 or 2-1 (i.e. liu yifei) and it's not one of the few known multi-character surnames, then you can safely assume that's their given name.

for a 1-1 name like yao ming, it's a little more difficult. some characters are definitely more common as surnames than others - the chinese term for 'common people' (百姓) actually refers to an old classic text where they compiled all the surnames they knew of! so when i see the name yao ming, i immediately recognize that 'yao' is a fairly common surname and 'ming' is not, and thus it's more likely (but not guaranteed!) that 'yao' is the surname here.

there's also some cases that are ambiguous when romanized, but not ambiguous in chinese. for example, consider the name 'wang chen,' where both 'wang' and 'chen' are common chinese surnames. however, if i saw it written out as 王, i would be able to recognize that 王 'wang' is a character that's primarily used for surnames, while 晨 'chen' is not.

chinese names can absolutely be gendered - for example, if i met a 璐, there's a 99% chance that name belongs to a woman because of its meaning (beautiful jade) and its character composition (王 radicals tend to be feminine). i feel like gender-ambiguous names have become more common in recent years, but maybe that's just me not keeping up with naming trends.

my understanding is that there's a bit of a catch-22 with data removal - if you request that a data broker remove ALL of your information, it's impossible for them to keep you from reappearing in their sources later on because that would require them to retain your information (so they can filter you out if you appear again).

my impression is that you can't replace competent programmers with chatGPT, but that hasn't stopped companies from trying (or simply accepting incompetency).

i'm bilingual and have absolutely not experienced this. that being said, i think being bilingual - rather than a learner - does make it a lot easier to code-switch instinctively between different languages.

from my experience doing animanga-adjacent translations - readers also prioritize speed first, quality second. there are a lot of people who will happily read machine-translated work (and often awkward, typo-ridden MTL at that) rather than wait a day or two for better translations. same goes for general scanlation quality, like typesetting and redraws.

this is also why the fansubbing scene is effectively dead - companies like crunchyroll get episode scripts early and can thus release subs simultaneously with the official release. most fansub groups now just fix/edit the crunchyroll script, if they even pick up series at all. there's no point in putting in the effort if no one's going to look at it, after all.

that's the main issue i have with 'more but worse' translations, honestly. you'll get more material, but the good translators won't just move to content that wasn't translated before - they'll just disappear entirely.

'translationese' is a pretty common term for it. when you translate, it's really easy to mirror the source structure/syntax even when there's more idiomatic ways to say it in the target language.

i believe one of the issues with controlled burns is that there are specific conditions necessary for them to be controllable - and with the current state of the california fire season, it's actually really difficult to set them up.

here's a study on how climate change is reducing the window for prescribed burns: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00993-1

it's pretty likely that storebought stock is made with 'unattractive' produce that wouldn't otherwise sell, like how tomato sauce is made with ugly or bruised tomatoes.

you can't really have a 'nonsense' name - there's a list of around 3000 characters you're allowed to use in names, but in theory, you can put together whatever you want. you'll just get side-eyed for having a weird name, that's all.

that being said, i think most of these websites that ask for a kanji name will require you to show ID with that name when you show up in person, so you might run into trouble if you just pick random characters.

like the author, i burned out on the extracurricular grind necessary to get into an elite college and as a result, spent most of my university years severely depressed.

for me, it was debate club. i liked debate, but the form of it i participated in was a rich man's game and i was simply not a rich man. i didn't have the money to fly to the east coast every weekend to attend tournaments or pay people to assemble cases and evidence briefs for me. it wasn't worth the coaches' time to even listen to me practice because i wasn't wealthy enough to compete at a high level.

that feeling of futility persisted across other extracurriculars. i participated in the science fair, but my advisor instantly became dismissive when it became clear that my parents couldn't gift me a competitive research opportunity at their lab or hospital because they, y'know, didn't work at a lab or hospital. the school i went to had a lot of rich kids; i once spotted one of my classmates at the airport on their way to volunteer in uganda over the summer.

math team ended up my saving grace. perhaps it's because we weren't quite so competitive - we did well regionally but were not competitive at a state or national level - but there was something freeing in just solving math problems. afterschool math practice was free and open to everyone. there were a variety of different competitions, team and individual, geared for different skill levels and specializations. no one cared about what my parents did for a living, thank god. it was just about solving the damn math problem.

there's also an instagram user who specializes in rescuing morphed axolotls: https://www.instagram.com/salamanderwithasign

i think some of the recent posts are about a batch of salamander/axolotl hybrids, but if you scroll further down, there's more of the morphed axolotls they have.

these results are absolutely hilarious for chinese, where names are almost entirely freeform, gender is determined by character choice (not sound), and there's only a limited set of suffixes to choose from in the first place.

i think these are probably scraped from historical figures, since i see some very recognizable ones (i.e. enlai, zedong, jianguo), but there's also a data integrity issue because a lot of the masculine chinese names show up with , or £ in them.

i'm always a bit wary of parents treating childhood language acquisition as a project - language fluency requires practice and interest to keep up, and pushing a kid to learn a language when they don't care can be counterproductive. many of my second-generation immigrant friends are now effectively monolingual because of that.

personally, i was raised bilingual, switched to full english in grade school because my parents were concerned about my english skills, and now i'm in a weird limbo where i'm technically still fluent in two languages, but i have bad first language attrition in one and i'll always feel like a non-native in the other. that being said, i'm glad that i still have access to two languages, and i hope that his daughter can find continued success as she grows older.

you might enjoy this write-up of someone's yuru camp pilgrimage, then: https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/86c4rg/i_went_to_the...

i actually visited sendai for haikyuu! i enjoyed my time there a lot - there's a lot of beautiful day trips available like matsushima and yamagata - but i wouldn't recommend visiting it for haikyuu. sports stadiums are not that interesting from outside and most of the actual locations in the manga are based on a small town deep in the countryside.

doesn't 'nomad' imply you're moving from place to place? remote workers can settle down and integrate into an area, but the digital nomads i know usually only stay as long as their tourist visa lasts - which isn't long at all.

If you can't communicate with pinyin you can't communicate with the language, since it almost perfectly models the sounds.

hm, i'd say it's a bit more complicated than that. written and literary chinese has a different (often more concise) style than conversational chinese because certain things that would be ambiguous spoken aren't that way when written. similarly, japanese has a perfectly functional syllabary (hiragana), but people will use kanji anyways because it's a lot easier to parse at a glance.

genuinely, the fact that you're even considering this question as a signal for hirability is depressing. even if it's a useful signal, it sends a bad message.

my first exposure to programming was college and it was incredibly discouraging for me to discover that many of my peers had been programming for years; i felt like it was hard to 'compete' with my peers simply because my parents didn't encourage me to work with computers when i was a child. ironically, i ended up doing well on exams and getting a minor teaching position because i didn't have self-taught bad habits and could explain the coursework better than those who already 'got' the concepts from prior experience.

my main issue is the people making hiring and budget decisions aren't 3D artists, they're managers. my work might be objectively better than GPT's, but is that going to matter when my boss compares the cost difference and decides GPT is 'good enough'?

yep, exactly. the issue isn't that there will no longer be a need for human translators - machine translation makes subtle mistakes that legal/technical fields will need a human to double-check.

the issue is that many translation jobs will, and already are, being replaced with 'proofread machine translation output' jobs that simply don't pay enough. translation checking is careful, detailed work that often takes almost as much time as translating passages yourself, yet it pays a third or less of the rate because 'the machine is doing most of the work.'

i read the three-body problem in chinese, but didn't read the translation. my impression was that liu cixin's writing isn't very literary - he rarely uses rhetorical flourishes or idiomatic expressions, and his vocabulary is very simple outside of technical language. however, it's very straightforward and accessible.

someone else i know described the novel as 'clearly written by an engineer rather than a humanities student,' and i think i'd agree with that description.