Live data from Hacker News

What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

ingrids.space

81–90 of 175 posts

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#81
post #12

This article is spot on about a lot of things. One thing I think it fails to address is this: > I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world without Google Translate; they’d have either not gone to Japan at all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are wont to do. The correlation here would be something like: the people usin…

Conversely, it may create jobs. Why? Because the more elephants you have in your parade, the more jobs there are for folks to walk behind them with a broom and bucket. For decades we've seen tools that "let users write their own software" and every one of them has driven up the demand for people to clean it up, make it scale, make it secure, or otherwise clean up the mess.

CAD, Matlab, and Altium made electrical and mechanical engineers more valuable, not less.

The work got easier, so what we do got more complex.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are extremely polite, and American English is replete with niceties in everyday speech. It's funny, having been a tourist abroad, it's only living in a significantly non American country for a few years that lead me to realise this. I even lived in another country albeit a former US colony for ten years and didn't even notice it there given American influence. I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte t…

> could I get a latte today actually To me (non-American) the above sounds like sarcasm, not politeness. Adding "today" and/or "actually" could mean you've had it with their delays. I like to joke that Americans always seem to find ways to get offended by innocuous things, but in this case the joke is on me.

I would think that it depends on the context.

To me it seems (without any context) that it might mean that you changed your mind about what day you wanted it. This does not seem to make sense in many contexts, though.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#83
> I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be unemployed in $ARBITRARY_TIME_WINDOW”, and from the other side flat-out rejections of the idea that this type of tool can have any utility.

No, the one side is saying that all their code is written by LLMs already and that's why they think that. In fact, I would say the other side is the former ("it works for throwaway code but that's it") and that no-one is flat-out rejecting it.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#85
post #5

> ... a translators’ and interpreters’ work is mostly about ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do. Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really go…

You just created the software for a profitable business. People would use that and pay for it.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#86
post #4

This seems like a terrible comparison since Google Translate is completely beat by DeepL, let alone LLMs. (Google Translate almost surely doesn't use an LLM, or at least not a _large_ one given its speed)

That’s absolutely not the point of this article. The point was that people said, once Google Translate was introduced, that translators would lose their jobs. Just like people say the same thing about developers with LLMs nowadays. The point is: they didn’t, and they won’t.

DeepL is not part of that point. Yes, maybe eventually, developers will lose their jobs to something that is an evolution of LLMs. But that’s not relevant here.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#87
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity is up and labor wages are up. That’s why I asked. It wasn’t an attempt at a rebuttal it was a request for reading material as it’s a heterodox view. The normal conversation is that productivity growth has slowed and the divide has increased, not that more productivity creates lower outcomes in real terms. https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/labor-compensation-l...

What is 'real hourly compensation'?

It's economic jargon for what people are paid per hour for working (which can include non-direct payments such as healthcare and pensions), adjusted for inflation (for economists, "real" just means divided by CPI, as opposed to "nominal" which are the actual dollar amounts in the past).

Data is collected through the National Compensation Survey: https://www.bls.gov/respondents/ncs/

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#88

>All this is not to say Google Translate is doing a bad job Google Translate is doing a bad job. The Chrome translate function regularly detects Traditional Chinese as Japanese. While many characters are shared, detecting the latter is trivial by comparing unicode code points - Chinese has no kana. The function used to detect this correctly, but it has regressed. Most irritatingly of all, it doesn't even let you corr…

It's only a matter of time before they have an LLM both 1. cheap 2. fast 3. good enough that they'll replace Google Translate's current model with it. I'd be very surprised if they'd put more than 1 hour of maintenance into Translate's current iteration over the last 12 months.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#89
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are extremely polite, and American English is replete with niceties in everyday speech. It's funny, having been a tourist abroad, it's only living in a significantly non American country for a few years that lead me to realise this. I even lived in another country albeit a former US colony for ten years and didn't even notice it there given American influence. I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte t…

Maybe its a NY thing I was shocked when I heard people in restaurants saying "I want...". Growing up outside the US "want" is a very impolite word. People in US are polite but direct, usually English/Irish people are much less direct.

To give you an even more shocking one; in Korean, known for its various formality and politeness levels, the standard form when ordering is saying "Give me X"!

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#90

This article is spot on about a lot of things. One thing I think it fails to address is this: > I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world without Google Translate; they’d have either not gone to Japan at all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are wont to do. The correlation here would be something like: the people usin…

yeah I think the case for AI art is very different. I see major brands, even those who has been very generous with artist commission like McDonald Japan. is now using AI art instead.
Post reply on HN