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Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

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Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#71

Post by matsemann »

porbelm wrote: post #65
matsemann wrote: post #16

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make…

Hello, fellow mountain ape. I get Norwegian text in /some/ apps on the Mac even though Norwegian is 2nd in "preferred languages." I guess some use "Region" to decide instead of the logical setting. And setting the region to something else will cock up in other interesting ways by showing wrong units instead of the wrong language. Even the keyboard on my MBP is physically US ANSI, because if you've ever coded more tha…

Yeah, one additional thing is that for Norwegian apps, I want the Norwegian version and not the English one. It's hard to get right, I guess. But what I generally want could be summarized as "give me the original version of the app if in Norwegian, if not give me the English version".

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#72

Post by Moru »

School-Cotton wrote: post #63
master-lincoln wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it helps to push for Murica to finally adapt SI units. All American countries outside the USA already use °C https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/weights-an...

> Maybe it helps to push for Murica to finally adapt SI units. Nitpick: Celsius is not an SI unit. Answering the substantive point: it’d be nice if we switched to SI units (plus Celsius); personally my phone is already set to display those and I wish we’d join the rest of the world and do standard stuff. However, I think it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen. The deadlocked US political system makes it impossible to…

It's on the way :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#73

Post by serial_dev »

quintussss wrote: post #32

One thing that really annoys me is youtube translating video titles - why would I ever want the title of an english language video to be translated?

It does annoy me when I see it at my sister's computer, but I speak English. I can see how somebody who doesn't speak English would enjoy seeing some video titles in their own language.

Some videos really only need the title translated and can be now enjoyed by more people: Top 5 Mike Tyson KOs, amazing woodworking techniques, best trick shots of 2023 compilation, dash cam accidents.

If you visit YouTube with your account logged out, these videos are popular and always show up as a recommendation.

Also, some language combinations have pretty good "auto translate captions" experience, so you can turn on the subtitles, too, then you can even enjoy a bit more sophisticated content.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#74

Post by matsemann »

School-Cotton wrote: post #68
ginko wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the worst is that cal starts weeks on Sundays for some weird reason.

As long as the boundary doesn’t happen in the middle of the work week, I find it completely arbitrary whether the official first day is Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Why’s it any more weird to start on one or the other?

It just "feels wrong". Like, why is the weekend split in half? Doesn't map to my mental model of the world (which of course is influenced by how I'm used to seeing calendars).

Related, but a few years ago the Norwegian broadcaster NRK asked people how the visualize a year. https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually... (English version)

Quite interesting how different people are. Mostly it's a clock of sorts. To me however it's more of a sine wave, where each year is one phase (summer on bottom), but it's kinda fractally so if I zoom in it got bumps for the months, smaller bumps on there again for the weeks etc.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#75

Post by marcus_holmes »

masklinn wrote: post #2

> it is not immune to errors They’re pretty much part of the guardian’s dna: > Frequent typographical errors during the age of manual typesetting led Private Eye magazine to dub the paper the "Grauniad" in the 1970s, a nickname still occasionally used by the editors for self-mockery

My father still refers to it as The Grauniad

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#76

Post by Certhas »

lynguist wrote: post #40
mikewarot wrote: post #5

If you want "twice as hot" to be meaningful, you have to use an absolute scale, either Kelvin or Rankine. (1 K = 1.8 °R) Doubling absolute temperature doubles the pressure (at constant volume) or volume (at constant pressure) of an ideal gas. This gets really important when it comes to compressing and expanding air and other gasses. Room temperature is approximately 293 K, twice that is 586 K / 595 °F / 313 °C. Hotte…

Twice as hot is also useful in Celsius. For every increase of 10C chemical reactions happen twice as fast, it will literally, thermodynamically be twice as hot. Which will probably even match your subjective feeling. Celsius scales thermodynamically logarithmically. You can’t just double the numbers. (The same with sound etc.)

Reaction rates are approximately exponential in temperature, but there is nothing special about 10C. The doubling temperature difference depends on what reaction you look at.

This is as opposed to decibel for sound, where +10 decibel means X10 power exactly.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#77

Post by Moru »

banDeveloper wrote: post #43
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #19

GPT-4 correctly converts the difference to 36F. GPT-3.5 on the other hand gets crazy and decides that the difference is 154.4F. Same prompt. At this point I'm starting to believe GPT3.5 is dangerously stupid.

I worded the question as: "What's the temperature difference between 43°C and 23°C in Fahrenheit?" and GPT3.5 answered correctly.

I put in the original sentence and got 122°F first. If I tell it to rewrite and correct C to F I randomly get 20 and 68 every time I ask it.

If I say "recalculate the celcius to farenheit rewriting as little as possible in this sentence: Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 20C above average"

Attempt 1. Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 36°F above average.

Attempt 2. Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 68°F above average.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#78

Post by meithecatte »

alpaca128 wrote: post #69
Foobar8568 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know the pain until you move to Switzerland. Geolocalisation to German websites or language, numerical format is a mess (sometimes thousand separators are either ' or space, huge mess in excel), cloud Saas providers believe only fr-FR or de-DE exists. Just awful...

MS Visio refused to run in anything other than English on a PC I used because Windows was set to a specific flavor of German which Visio didn't have in its language list. As far as I could tell there was no way to change the program's language other than changing the OS language and reinstalling Visio. Now Firefox added stupid popups offering translating websites written in my native language because the OS is set to…

Pretty sure you can just click the dotted menu button on that popup and select "do not translate from $LANG".

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#79

Post by School-Cotton »

Moru wrote: post #72
School-Cotton wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it helps to push for Murica to finally adapt SI units. Nitpick: Celsius is not an SI unit. Answering the substantive point: it’d be nice if we switched to SI units (plus Celsius); personally my phone is already set to display those and I wish we’d join the rest of the world and do standard stuff. However, I think it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen. The deadlocked US political system makes it impossible to…

It's on the way :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...

Some stuff in the US is metric, and some isn’t, but as far as I can tell the situation of metric units in daily life is static and not changing much.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#80

Post by jjgreen »

bawolff wrote: post #21
perilunar wrote: post #3

Hard? So is using the degree symbol apparently: not a single one in the whole article. (68F is not a temperature — it’s a seat number.) https://degreeswhat.com/?68

This is taking being a grammar nazi to a whole new level.

That's grammar Nazi
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