A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
1–10 of 102 posts
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#2Oh this is absolutely delightful, both in how complex the bug is and the actual result.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#3If you think you understand software, think again. We are building complex machines upon towers of sand!
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#4Maybe twenty years ago, Google Translate had a fun bug with the word "amistad." In Spanish->English mode, it would correctly translate this to "friendship." If you added an exclamation mark, it would translate with the exclamation mark, so "amistad!" became "friendship!" If you added more, it would add to the translation, so "amistad!!!" became "friendship!!!" Except if you used exactly five exclamation marks, no more and no less, it would translate "amistad!!!!!" to "murder!"
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#5I'm wondering where the "forks" translation came from in the first place. Google Translate used to be fairly reliable for simple translations, but I've seen several examples in the last couple of years where it goes batshit crazy, including starting to loop hallucinating sentences on repeat. Is absolutely nobody checking how well it performs before deploying nowadays?
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#6FWIW, "forks" is "tenedores" in Spanish... not that that illuminates the mystery.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#7I run an app (Aerolith.org) for studying Scrabble words. For years I would get weird bug reports (https://github.com/domino14/Webolith/issues/331), where at the end of each round, when a user viewed the definitions, the words for definitions would get randomly replaced with other unrelated words. I double and triple checked the code; since I had recently moved the word-related logic to a Go microservice I assumed I had some crazy race condition. I remember trying to replicate it with many simultaneous requests, looking for memory leaks, thinking there was something wrong with the sqlite driver, etc.
Finally, I figured out that it was a Google Chrome auto-translation issue. For example the word JIBER was replaced with "BECAUSE OF" because JIBER means BECAUSE OF in Kurdish. There were many other similar ridiculous cases.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#8FWIW, "forks" is "tenedores" in Spanish... not that that illuminates the mystery.
Yes also means "Y"s in some dialects of Spanish, like the plural of the letter Y. Maybe since the Y looks like a fork there must be some bizarre neural network connection there?
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#9Maybe twenty years ago, Google Translate had a fun bug with the word "amistad." In Spanish->English mode, it would correctly translate this to "friendship." If you added an exclamation mark, it would translate with the exclamation mark, so "amistad!" became "friendship!" If you added more, it would add to the translation, so "amistad!!!" became "friendship!!!" Except if you used exactly five exclamation marks, no mor…
Probably around that time, Google once translated "Berlin" with "Paris" or something like that. IIRC, it was in a sentence about head offices. The training materials consisted of parallel documents, including manuals, where the German document would say "contact our head office in Berlin", and the French one "contact our head office in Paris." So it learned to translate capitals in certain contexts.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#10FWIW, "forks" is "tenedores" in Spanish... not that that illuminates the mystery.
Spanish youngster wants to learn English, and finds the office of a language school. He enters, finds the office of the principal, and knocks on the door. After a short while, he hears: "If, if, between, between!"