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What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

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Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#61

Post by eurleif »

jezzamon wrote: post #52

I was thinking about this comparison recently along a slightly different axis: One challenge when working with translations (human or machine translations) as that you can't vet whether it's correct or not yourself. So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine, though I have had someone message me once to say "this translation of your arti…

You can kinda validate machine translation by doing a circular translation, A->B->A. It's not a perfect test, but it's a reasonably strong signal.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#62

Post by roxolotl »

jvanderbot wrote: post #44
ryao wrote: post #39

> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”. I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?

When ordering, "I will have" sounds reasonable. When asking someone to pass them to you, just imagine them turning to you, looking you in the eye, and asserting "I will have the potatoes" like it's some kind of ultimatum. Yes, that is strange.

It’s such an anachronistic statement I laughed out loud reading your comment. I even was taught that you can’t pass things mid air. You place the potatoes down between each person required to pass them to the person who wants them.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#63

Post by EZ-E »

simonw wrote: post #27
tptacek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasonable concern people have about AI eliminating coder jobs is that they will make existing coders drastically more productive. "Productivity" is literally defined as the number X of people required to do Y amount of stuff. I'm not sure how seriously people take the threat of non-coding vibe-coders. Maybe they should! The most important and popular programming environment in the world is the spreadsheet. Befor…

I'm still optimistic that the net effect of making existing programmers drastically more productive is that our value goes up , because we can produce more value for other people.

I rather think that LLMs help to write code faster, and also enables folks that would not program to do so in some capacity. In the end, you end up with more code in the world, and you end up needing more programmers to maintain/keep it running at scale.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#64

Post by BergAndCo »

noname120 wrote: post #35

The article starts with a giant straw man and miscaracterisation, not sure that I want to read the rest of the article at this point

Literally the first example is an outright lie.

> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English). Google Translate just gives the blunt direct translation.

"To will" means "it is my will", i.e. to want to, which became the future tense in English. In Norwegian is still means "want", and Google Translate indeed translates it as "I want the potatoes." If you translate the rising (pleading) intonation on "potatoes", you then have an unwritten "please?", i.e. "I want the potatoes?...", which is passable English.

Most businesses think AI code is "good enough", and that machine translation is "good enough", which tanks the entire industry because there is now more supply than demand. He says there are still plenty of translator jobs, but then justifies it as because "it’s inadvisable to subsititute (sic) Google Translate for an interpreter at a court hearing." Meaning, the thing taking away all the tech jobs temporarily (unchecked mass-migration) is the same thing keeping keeping him employed temporarily.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#65

Post by not_a_bot_4sho »

danpalmer wrote: post #59
noobermin wrote: post #46

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…

> Americans are extremely polite Having grown up in the UK and living in Australia, I do not find Americans polite. To me, politeness is "please", "thank you", "may I have", etc, whereas "I would like a latte today" reads to me as a demand. In context it's fine (it stands out a bit but not in a problematic way), it's not particularly rude, but in general just stating your desires is not considered polite in my experi…

America is not a monolith. Spend a day in New York and a day in Seattle. Language is the same but politeness carries widely.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#66

Post by danpalmer »

not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #65
danpalmer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans are extremely polite Having grown up in the UK and living in Australia, I do not find Americans polite. To me, politeness is "please", "thank you", "may I have", etc, whereas "I would like a latte today" reads to me as a demand. In context it's fine (it stands out a bit but not in a problematic way), it's not particularly rude, but in general just stating your desires is not considered polite in my experi…

America is not a monolith. Spend a day in New York and a day in Seattle. Language is the same but politeness carries widely.

I agree. The parent comment was treating America as a monolith, and my point is that there are many different contexts around the world that will interpret the described use of language in a very different way, and often not read it as polite.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#67

Post by SoftTalker »

ryandrake wrote: post #41
dfxm12 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy has taught us that when there is an excess of worker productivity, it leads to layoffs. It certainly does not lead to raises.

No software company I have ever worked at had an excess of worker productivity. There were always at least 3-5X as much work needing to be done, bugs needing to be fixed, features that needed to be implemented than engineers to do it. Backlogs just grew and grew until you just gave up and mass-closed issues because they were 10 years old. If AI coding improves productivity, it might move us closer to having 2X as muc…

I don't think you can judge "work needing to be done" by looking at backlog. Tickets are easy to enter. If they were really important, they'd get done or people would be hired to do them (employed or contracted). 10 year old issues that never got attention were just never that important to begin with.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#68

Post by SoftTalker »

ryao wrote: post #39

> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”. I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?

It would also depend on the tone of voice and even body language used.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#69

Post by ruszki »

eurleif wrote: post #61
jezzamon wrote: post #52

I was thinking about this comparison recently along a slightly different axis: One challenge when working with translations (human or machine translations) as that you can't vet whether it's correct or not yourself. So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine, though I have had someone message me once to say "this translation of your arti…

You can kinda validate machine translation by doing a circular translation, A->B->A. It's not a perfect test, but it's a reasonably strong signal.

I’m learning German, and I quite often use this test. Google Translate fails this most of the times. This is true even between Hungarian and English. The difference with the latter one is, that I can properly choose between the options given to me, if there are, without translating it back. Especially, that that passed many times when it gave terrible translations.

So this test fails many times, and even when not, the translation is still usually not good. However, when you don’t care about nuances, it’s still fine usually. And also translation seems to be better if the text is larger. Translating a single word does almost always fail. Translating a whole article is usually fine. But even there it matters what you translate. Translating the Austrian subreddit fails quite often. Sometimes completely for whole large posts. Translating news is better.

Re: What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

#70

Post by numpad0 »

devnullbrain wrote: post #16

>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…

IMO, it's still not too late and it'll never be too late to split and reorganize Unicode by languages - at least split Chinese and Japanese. LLMs seem to be having issues acquiring both Chinese and Japanese at the same time. It'll make sense for both languages.

The syntaxes aren't just different but generally backwards, and, it's just my hunch but, they sometimes sound like they are confused about which modifies word which.

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