161–170 of 408 posts
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... yet you still conclude "AI translation has gotten so good", so which is it?
I do think it's gotten pretty good. I'm just acknowledging my limitations in the matter. It's not a contradiction.
LLM's are in fact very good at translation and transliteration.
Even small, dumb, local models are excellent at translation already. Frontier models are on par or better than the human translations we've tested them against at work.
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> This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it. There is an interesting third group emerging: People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. This takes the form of people who spin up a lot of "agents" and give them personalities like security d…
I always imagine the model rolling its silicon eyes when it’s assigned a personality (“you are an expert growth hacker”) at the start of the prompt. Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?
The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…
> 2. AI is a terrible replacement for me - my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do. It’s a tool at best. Most? Perhaps it's depression, but I look back at my career and wonder if any code I've ever been paid to write is beyond what current AI can do. Sure, this leaves me with the non-coding tasks of UX taste, and cod…
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Well said. Everyone agrees AI can't do their job, so it ends up doing everyone else's. I'm not sure how to formulate it yet but it seems there is some Peter Principle/Gell-Mann Effect corollary that is AI-related we can say here. Perhaps: "AI rises to the level of its users' incompetence." Or: "Confidence in AI output is inversely proportional to one's ability to verify it"
>Well said. Everyone agrees AI can't do their job, so it ends up doing everyone else's. Its like basic income, everyone will stop working except from you.
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> often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art. As one of such people, I think there is a nuance to it. AI is great when you’re translating something to yourself. But when translating things for others, more caution and human judgement is needed. Espesially when translating instruction manuals, where bad wording could cause someone to injure themself.
Language is incredibly complex. I remember a TikTok from a bilingual English-Korean speaker comparing the English subtitles from a Squid Game scene to what was actually being said by the characters. The nuance and info density lost in translation made the subtitles feel completely remedial. Americans were basically watching a different show altogether.
I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about auditing. For example, I just read the Lawrence Ellsworth translation of The Three Musketeers, which I very thoroughly enjoyed. I don't speak or read French, but from my understanding Ells…
This is sort of missing the point-- people who dont deal with linguistics dont understand that there are multiple types of translation. There's word for word (which is what you're talking about) and sense for sense. If you let an LLM do all of your translation you're letting it interpret huge amounts of intent and context it doesnt (and probably cant) access. The ways in which this impacts the translation will foreve…
Assuming lots of material local to the context one is wanting to translate is included, why couldn't it potentially access that additional context?
Period.
You could do a machine translation if you want, but you better pore over every word in case you end up on the witness stand.
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> This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it. There is an interesting third group emerging: People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. This takes the form of people who spin up a lot of "agents" and give them personalities like security d…
I always imagine the model rolling its silicon eyes when it’s assigned a personality (“you are an expert growth hacker”) at the start of the prompt. Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?
However to me it seems completely reasonable that it would work, because my understanding of what happens is the model interprets what you said as:
Look for a group of people who are considered to be expert growth hackers by the world at large and answer my questions as though they were answering them.
So assuming that there are a set of questions that can best be answered by people that most other people identify as expert growth hackers then yes, I believe assigning a personality in this way should obviously work.
The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…
It seems to be a general principle: If AI is better than you at something, you use it. If AI is worse than you, you don't. Each time the frontier models get better, I see another wave of AI doubters suddenly become believers. People say things like, "AI couldn't code last year, but now I use it for everything!" Interesting. Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or wh…
There are large portions of my codebases that are essentially extremely verbose grunt work. My UI stack, IaC YAML, thin CRUD routes, etc.
I know what the code is supposed to look like when it’s done being written, but it’s going to take me for freaking ever to type it all out.
I can just few shot it now in an hour. Plan -> feedback loop -> build -> review loop.
Does it try to do weird stuff? Yeah. And then I’m just like “that’s weird, no, the components should be broken up like XYZ” and then it’s not weird anymore. Occasionally (1% of the time) I just do a quick refactor myself instead of trying to tell the agent harness what to do.
I can get something fairly close to the ballpark of what I would have done but in like single digit percentage of the time.
And the result is that I can spit out a bunch of purpose built tools (personal tools, internal tools for teams, etc.) that I never would have been able to justify building otherwise.