not_a_terrorist

It only reaches 35,000 feet.

They abandonned all development activity of their own rockets, shortly after Allen's death.

You will be interested by this free and open source software: duplicati.com

Yes, there are several grading systems. We don't use them. However, when I have to re-read a simple sentence or paragraph 4-5 times, and perharps read the whole text or even search about a product in order to understand what they are trying to say, then it's a pretty clear indication the text is muddy!

I am not trying to start a culture war or to pity the general English skills of recent immigrants and their family, far from it. They do their best, and we can only congratulate them for their efforts. I am not here to spew out racist generalisations, let's all stay very calm.

What I am saying is that we are seeing more and more locally produced Engrish, Chinaglish, RussianGlish, Penjabi-glish or who-knows-what-glish! And when I look at the name of the submitter of those texts, it's usually a typical recent immigrant name. But OF COURSE, we have Wilson's and Taylor's who write in horrendous English too.

I also am not saying all immigrants are idiots and cannot write in English, some are truly excellent, just as much as your typical "native".

What I am saying, is that with volume, that very occurrence of bad English is increasing. That's it. I can see how very unorthodox English style could be a challenge for AI.

Ouch you tell me!! A couple of our customers use high tech products manufactured in China and Japan, for which the manuals were badly translated from the native language to English, and then we have to mop it up from English to French, for example. It is very labor intensive to decipher what the intent is and then to translate it into direct French sentences, in the style most readers are expecting. Thanks for pointing it out! Again, I doubt a machine could do that kind of work.

Excellent answer, except your last paragraph!

I have used pretty much any and all cutting edge tools on the market. If anything in some instances, it creates even more proofreading/reviewing work.

That being said, as I explained to another commenter above, I foresee several useful use-cases for MT (and there are already are some!). I see them as mostly a separate field from human translation work, in parallel, with little overlap.

1) It's my impression, friend, I am not trying to propose a "New theory of bad English". I tell it like I experience it. We have customers in Vancouver and in some suburbs of Toronto from which some of the source texts are quite "interesting" to decipher (since you like political corectness, I will leave it at that). That type of text was no existent 20 years ago.

Maybe I am simply linving in a giant selection bias bubble, who knows. And by the way, I am not saying that multi-generation Canadian citizens are better at English writing. Please let's not start a discussion about generalising group attributes, it never ends well, and you know it.

2) Well, I did not want to bore our readers, but your description of transcreation is excellent! Bottom line: we do much, much more text reinterpretation and transcreation these days (and our in-country customers love it!). Again, maybe it's just a selection bias bubble, simply a refelction of the direction our business has evolved.

3) Again, you are right. I will even go farther: the majority of customers do not give a rat's ass about text quality! However, I am in a business where quality and precision of the info is paramount, and AI, with its "best fit" or "most probable" translation, does not cut it.

4) We are on the same page, I also can see several use cases for AI translation. Your examples are excellent.

In conclusion: I a translator who also happen to hold 3 STEM degrees/diploma, so you can be sure I jumped on the AI bandwagon, and I keep following what's new from up close. But as far as I can see, it can only by some kind of tool for certain use cases. It's almost as if it was going to be a separate field of its own. yo!

For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required.

I have been in the translation business field for about 20 years now, so I have seen the rise of desktop tools, then server-based solutions, and lastly, of course, cloud-based tools. While each generation is better than the previous, the increments are decreasing.

We are based in Canada, where we receive around 300,000 new immigrants per year. That's 6 million over those 20 years. Guess what? Those people are hitting the job market, and now, their children too.

Consequence: the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers. I notice the names, and they are not your typical English, French, German, Italian or Ukrainian names (traditional settler groups in Canada). We do more and more of what is called "transcreation", a fancy way to say complete re-interpretation of a text. We basically extract the main ideas, and re-write the whole thing, because basing the translation on the provided source text always yield disappointing results.

I really don't see how machines could distill the ideas out of a text and reinterpret them in a nice way.

I can see AI work for short, simple, well-written texts. Heck, even long manuals with repetitive blocks of text from manual to manual. But with creative, complex text: still a looooong way baby!

I'm still trying to figure out the best design for such a system.

Easy answer: distributed consensus, à la Bitcoin.

design trends

You are hitting your nail straight on the head, my friend.

Main culprit is: Unfinished ceiling/metallic ceilings (usually corrugated steel pannels, either square or triangular profile pattern).

It's very trendy now to have exposed mechanical equipment and venting, people do not bat an eye anymore. Been ok for about 25 years now. Source: me, working in the business, I specifically avoid any public place with such unfinished ceilings. I cannot stand it anymore!

please read.

not necessarily related to this thread.

for you own good. this is straight from satoshi. I know you hate him. I don't care.

https://fr.scribd.com/document/359522859/Bitcoin-Network-Top...

Your reply contains several errors, but I will pick one.

D) Bitcoin is still, objectively, centralized.

Not only you, but this whole thread is missing one critical word: incentive.

Miners are incentivised to play ball, as trying to play games will result in the rejection of their hashing work. Wherever they are, it does not matter (up to a point, ie geographical risk repartition). But in actuality, we know there are miners all over the planet, and that there are thousands of them.

Parenthesis: by the way, non-mining full nodes add precisely ZERO value to the network, and they actually slow it down. Before you guys start yelling, please see reference at the end of my comment for details. That's another urban legend purported by Bitcoin Core. Anyways, don't get me started.

OK, back to miners: yes, as time will pass, there will be mining consolidation, it's inevitable. But it will not matter. In addition to miners, there will be large service providers (thousands of them) who will be -incentivised- to run either small mining nodes (more secure) or non-mining nodes (less secure) for verification of their own transaction. That alone will be more than enough to ensure the security of the network.

From the start, Satoshi was predicting the apparition of large mining server farms, no farther than in the very FIRST email he wrote to the world!!

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/#...

quote: At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.

Bitcoin Network Topology Description (provides visual explanatino as to why non-mining nodes are totally useless, and even detrimental.

https://fr.scribd.com/document/359522859/Bitcoin-Network-Top...

there is an international airport in Kitchener-Waterloo (YKF)

P = Park

Took a course with a few classes that touched AI.

First thing the prof wrote on the board:

"Artificial Intelligence = Human Stupidity"

Spent a few hours analysing all aspects of that statement. Was entertaining.

tl:dr 100 pages:

1) People are fucking poor and hungry (extreme wealth inequalities) 2) Salafi/Wahhabi (Saudi) funding of islamism 3) Antediluvian hatred between people (it goes, way, way, way farther back than Sykes-Picot)

Grit and perseverence, however you call them, are important aspects to success, but not THE secret to success.

If you look at the subset of people who enjoy "success" in life, a large number of them will display those qualitites, no doubt. But some of them could have attained it by sheer luck, filial connections, or others.

Now, if you look at the complementary subset (people who do not enjoy "success" in life), I guarantee you will find plenty of gritee people in there, in addition to people who display personal qualities not conducive to success (which by no mean excludes them from enjoying success in live, given the proper circumstances - see previous paragraph).

That's the aspect I do not enjoy about those "secret to success stories: no one ever considers the people who did everthing rigth, but did not succeed. It happen much more often than we think. No one cares for the losers, whatever the cause, alas. This is the 'survivorship paradox' described by Cicero... Taleb called it the Silent cemetary evidence.

One more aspect, if I may: when can one determine someone else is a "success", or a "failure"? People certainly are entitled to more than one shot at success, and negative results are certainly a valid way to pinpoint your path towards success.

So, grit is not THE secret path to success, but if your goal is to be successful, then internalising a gritee spirit certainly demultiply the possibilities to enjoy success.

How stupid: "It’s like a backdoor with nine different padlocks on it"

It does not make it any harder to remove the hinges. Sigh. Classified in file 13.

First: Don't worry about. Starting unsuccessful software companies is very useful to other entrepreneurs, as it proves to them that they should not follow those footsteps and allocate their resources to more fruitful endeavours.

Second: About your final question, I run a decently successful business despite not being near the top of the totem pole in terms of technical knowledge. I have met plenty of smart people who just don't have it in them, typically they easily get lost in the details. People with some academic smarts backed by a healthy dose of street smarts appear to fare better. I feel one has to always set some type of goal (it does not even have to be clear, but there has to be a goal) to get going. As well that allows you to quickly gauge the opportunities you unexpectedly run by. That's how I roll anyways. Good luck.

wow, reading your comment, one would believe we were in the decade prior the iPhone years, where the carriers were trying to take control of all content, giving priority and exclusive access to their own content and services. Another decade later, the same temptation has survived. If history repeats itself: it will fail. Let's wish ourselves good luck!