[HN Gopher] What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding
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What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 275 points
Date : 2025-06-17 19:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ingrids.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (ingrids.space)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| In my limited experience, LLMs can have issues with translation
| tone -- but these issues are pretty easily fixed with good
| prompting.
|
| I want to believe there will be even more translators in the
| future. I really want to believe it.
| alganet wrote:
| > easily fixed with good prompting
|
| Can you give us an example of a typical translation question
| and the "good prompting" required to make the LLM consider
| tone?
| simonw wrote:
| There was a great thread about that here four months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42894215#42897856
| alganet wrote:
| Good, but not exactly what I expected for "easily fixed".
|
| It includes a lot of steps and constant human evaluation
| between them, which implies that decisions about tone are
| ultimately made by whoever is prompting the LLM, not the
| LLMs themselves.
|
| > "If they are generally in the style I want..."
|
| > "choosing the sentences and paragraphs I like most from
| each..."
|
| > "I also make my own adjustments to the translation as I
| see fit..."
|
| > "I don't adopt most of the LLM's suggestions..."
|
| > "I check it paragraph by paragraph..."
|
| It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of an
| already experienced translator, but far from being usable
| by a layman due to the several steps requiring specialized
| human supervision.
|
| Consider the scenario presented by the blog post regarding
| bluntness/politeness and cultural sensitivities. Would
| anyone be able to use this workflow without knowing that
| beforehand? If you think about it, it could make the tone
| even worse.
| nottorp wrote:
| > It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of
| an already experienced translator, but far from being
| usable by a layman due to the several steps requiring
| specialized human supervision.
|
| Just like programming. And anything else "AI" assisted.
|
| Helps experts type less.
| alganet wrote:
| Most of my time as a programmer is not spent typing.
| nottorp wrote:
| Do you like typing that boilerplate though?
| alganet wrote:
| Of course not. I don't like boilerplate code _at all_.
|
| I worked with Java for a couple of years. Lots of
| boilerplate required. The IDE handled them just fine. I
| never felt I needed something smarter in order to write
| verbose stuff.
|
| My style is completely different though. Whenever I can,
| I will choose languages and technologies that don't
| require boilerplate.
|
| https://wiki.c2.com/?BoilerPlateCode
|
| However, this is deviating from the subject (look at the
| original post again). We're not talking about dumb,
| automated boilerplate code. The discussion is much
| deeper, drawing parallels with tone in translations.
| We're obviously talking about non-boilerplate.
| darvinyraghpath wrote:
| Fascinating thought piece. While I agree with the thrust of the
| piece: 'that llms can't _really_ replace engineers ',
| unfortunately the way the industry works is that the excuse of
| AI, however grounded in reality has been repurposed as a cudgel
| against actual software industry workers. Sure eventually
| everyone might figure out that AI can't really write code by
| itself - and software quality will degrade.. But unfortunately
| we've long been on the path of enshitification and I fear the
| trend will only continue. If google's war against its own
| engineers has resulted in shittier software - and things start
| break twice a year instead of once - would anyone really blink
| twice?
| tartoran wrote:
| Maybe AI can't replace engineers but it surely can apply
| downward pressure on engineers' salaries.
| lodovic wrote:
| I don't believe that. Software has become so expensive in the
| last decade, that only very large enterprises and venture
| capitalists were still building custom applications (ymmv).
| LLMs make it cheaper and faster to create software - you
| don't need these large teams and managers anymore, just a few
| developers. Smaller companies will be back in the game.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Smaller companies will be back in the game.
|
| Smaller companies that can afford smaller salaries you
| mean?
|
| I'm not sure that is at odds with what the post you were
| replying to said
| krackers wrote:
| 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)
| Ninjinka wrote:
| For Google's Cloud Translation API you can choose between the
| standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model or the
| "Translation LLM (Google's newest highest quality LLM-style
| translation model)".
|
| https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating...
|
| DeepL also has a translation LLM, which they claim is 1.4-1.7x
| better than their classic model:
| https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Google Translate has actually been using neural machine
| translation since 2016 and integrated PaLM 2 (a large language
| model) in 2023 for over 100 languages, though DeepL does still
| outperform it in many benchmarks.
| AndroTux wrote:
| 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.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Translators are losing their jobs now though. Google
| translate wasn't very good for Japanese so a lot of people
| assumed that machine translation would never be a threat, but
| deepl was better to the point where a lot of translation
| moved to just cleaning up it's output and current state of
| the art llms as of the last six months are much better and
| can also be given context and other instructions to reduce
| the need for humans to clean up the output. When the dust
| settles translation as a job is probably going to be dead.
| tiagod wrote:
| I highly doubt LLMs will do a good job translating
| literature anytime soon.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Ok but that that's probably 0.1% of all translation work.
|
| It's the equivalent of llms eliminating everything except
| a handful of system architect jobs at FAANG companies in
| terms of programming.
| tkgally wrote:
| > ... 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 good. I say this as
| someone who worked for twenty years as a freelance translator of
| Japanese and who still does translation part-time.
|
| Just yesterday, as it happens, I spent the day with Claude Code
| vibe-coding a multi-LLM system for translating between Japanese
| and English. You give it a text to be translated, and it asks you
| questions that it generates on the fly about the purpose of the
| translation and how you want it translated--literal or free,
| adapted to the target-language culture or not, with or without
| footnotes, etc. It then writes a prompt based on your answers,
| sends the text to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google,
| creates a combined draft from the three translations, and then
| sends that draft back to the three models for several rounds of
| revision, checking, and polishing. I had time to run only a few
| tests on real texts before going to bed, but the results were
| really good--better than any model alone when I've tested them,
| much better than Google Translate, and as good as top-level
| professional human translation.
|
| The situation is different with interpreting, especially in
| person. If that were how I made my living, I wouldn't be too
| worried yet. But for straight translation work where the
| translator's personality and individual identity aren't
| emphasized, it's becoming increasingly hard for humans to
| compete.
| lukax wrote:
| Try Soniox for real-time translation (interpreting). With the
| limited context it has in real-time, it's actually really good.
|
| https://soniox.com
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Soniox.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I've been looking for that! Thanks
| felipeerias wrote:
| It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to
| provide additional context, ask follow-up questions, and reason
| about the text.
|
| I live in Japan. Almost every day I find myself asking things
| like "what does X mean in this specific setting?" or "how do I
| tell Y to that specific person via this specific medium?".
|
| Much of this can be further automated via custom instructions,
| so that e.g. the LMM knows that text in a particular language
| should be automatically translated and explained.
| tkgally wrote:
| > It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to
| ... ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text.
|
| Great ideas. I'll think about adding those features to the
| system in my next vibe-coding session.
|
| What I automated in the MVP I vibe-coded yesterday could all
| be done alone by a human user with access to the LLMs, of
| course. The point of such an app would be to guide people who
| are not familiar with the issues and intricacies of
| translation so that they can get better translations for
| their purposes.
|
| I have no intention to try to commercialize my app, as there
| would be no moat. Anyone who wanted to could feed this thread
| to Claude, ask it to write a starting prompt for Claude Code,
| and produce a similar system in probably less time than it
| took me.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm bad with names, so for any Japanese literature, I need to
| take notes; it's not unusual to see one character referred to
| by 3 names. Then you might have 3 characters that are all
| referred to as Tanaka-san at different points in time.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Maybe we should stop using advanced and somewhat hand-wavy
| vocabulary like "context" for that. The thing is that the
| prompt has to be _long enough_.
|
| The word "potatoes" in context of a specific 500-page book
| has little ambiguity. Same word but _extracted_ out of the
| same book and fed to a translator(human or machine) in
| isolation would be much more ambiguous. You probably don 't
| need the whole book, but the solution space do reduce as you
| give translators more out of the content or how it's used in
| the original as well as in other parts of translations.
|
| It's similar to how GPS works. With one satellite, your
| location is precise as "on Earth, I guess". It gets more
| precise as you add more satellites that further and further
| reduce margins of errors.
| bboygravity wrote:
| You just created the software for a profitable business. People
| would use that and pay for it.
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| but it is easy to build a competitor
| jiehong wrote:
| The problem with LLMs for translation is when they refuse to do
| so if the topic being translated isn't following their
| policies, even if the context shows it's fine here.
|
| It can be as simple as discuss one's own religion
| Jensson wrote:
| You can just turn that off, at least on Googles model.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I made a tool which translates sentences as you browse, for
| immersion[0]. I solved this by giving the model a code
| (specifically, "483") to return in any refusal. Then, if I
| detect that in the output, I fail over to another
| model+provider.
|
| I also have a few heuristics (e.g. "I can't translate" in
| many different languages) to detect if it deviates from that.
|
| It works pretty well.
|
| [0] https://nuenki.app
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I've ended up doing a lot of research into LLM translation,
| because my language learning tool (https://nuenki.app) uses it
| a lot.
|
| I built something kinda similar, and made it open source. It
| picks the top x models based on my research, translates with
| them, then has a final judge model critique, compare, and
| synthesise a combined best translation. You can try it at
| https://nuenki.app/translator if you're interested, and my data
| is at https://nuenki.app/blog
| tkgally wrote:
| Very nice! Thanks for the links.
| tanvach wrote:
| Very neat, love how there's a formality level selection!
| Google translate has such bad tendencies to use very formal
| language (at least when translating into Thai) that it's
| almost useless in real life. Some English to Thai examples I
| tried so far have been quite natural.
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| I assumed Google errs on the side of formality because
| being informal in an inappropriate context is worse than
| being too formal for someone who is obviously not a native
| speaker. Not for Thai in particular, just in general.
| anticensor wrote:
| Swedish has informal as the default register instead.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| What's your approach for dealing with a text too long for an
| ordinary context window? If I split it into chunks, each one
| needs some kind of summary of the previous ones for context,
| and I'm always unsure how detailed they should be.
| tkgally wrote:
| I haven't developed an approach to it yet. In my tests
| yesterday, I did run into errors when the texts were too long
| for the context windows, but I haven't tried to solve it yet.
|
| As a human translator, if I were starting to translate a text
| in the middle and I wanted my translation to flow naturally
| with what had been translated before, I would want both a
| summary of the previous content and notes about how to handle
| specific names and terms and maybe about the writing style as
| well. When I start working on the project again tomorrow,
| I'll see if Claude Code can come up with a solution along
| those lines.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| It's funny -- I independently implemented the same thing
| (without vibe coding) and found it doesn't actually work. When
| I ended up with was a game of telephone where errors were often
| introduced and propagated between the models.
|
| The only thing that actually worked was knowing the target
| language and sitting down with multiple LLMs, going through the
| translation one sentence at a time with a translation memory
| tool wired in.
|
| The LLMs are good, but they make lot of strange mistakes a
| human never would. Weird grammatical adherence to English
| structures, false friend mistakes that no one bilingual would
| make, and so on. Bizarrely many of these would not be caught
| between LLMs -- sometimes I would get _increasingly_ unnatural
| outputs instead of more natural outputs.
|
| This is not just for English to Asian languages, even English
| to German or French... I shipped something to a German editor
| and he rewrote 50% of the lines.
|
| LLMs are good editors and suggestors for alternatives, but I've
| found that if you can't actually read your target language to
| some degree, you're lost in the woods.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That doesn't match my experience at all. Maybe it's something
| to do with what your prompts are asking for or the way you're
| passing translations? Or the size of chunks being translated?
|
| I have been astounded at the sophistication of LLM
| translation, and haven't encountered a single false-friend
| example ever. Maybe it depends a lot on which models you're
| using? Or it thinks you're trying to have a conversation that
| code-switches mid-sentence, which is a thing LLM's can do if
| you want?
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| I'm using o3 and Gemini Pro 2.5, paying for the high tier
| subscriptions. The complaints I get are from native
| speakers -- editors and end consumers. The LLMs tend to
| overfit to the English language, sometimes make up idioms
| that don't exist, use false friend words (especially
| verbs), directly translate English idioms, and so on. I've
| translated several book length texts now and I've seen it
| all.
| jedberg wrote:
| > You give it a text to be translated ... and then sends that
| draft back to the three models for several rounds of revision,
| checking, and polishing.
|
| Interesting. Curious if you modeled the cost of that single
| translation with the multiple LLM calls and how that compares
| to a human.
| tkgally wrote:
| I had Claude Code write a module that monitored the incoming
| and outcoming token counts and display the accumulated costs.
| A Japanese-to-English translation that yielded about a
| thousand words in English cost around US$0.40.
|
| I didn't double-check the module's arithmetic, but it seems
| to have been in the ballpark, as my total API costs for
| OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google yesterday--when I was testing
| this system repeatedly--came to about eight dollars.
|
| A human translator would charge many, many times more.
| djaychela wrote:
| >creates a combined draft from the three translations
|
| How is this part done? How are they chosen/combined to give the
| best results? Any info would be appreciated as I've seen this
| sort of thing mentioned before, but details have been scant!
| Casteil wrote:
| > It then writes a prompt based on your answers, sends the text
| to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, creates a
| combined draft from the three translations, and then sends that
| draft back to the three models for several rounds of revision,
| checking, and polishing.
|
| RIP global power consumption
| philsnow wrote:
| The distinction between what people typically imagine a
| translator's job is and the reality reminds me of pixar movies
| being "localized" instead of just translated (green beans on a
| plate in the Japan release instead of broccoli because that's the
| food that Japanese kids don't like).
|
| Lacking cultural context while reading translated texts is what
| made studying history finally interesting to me.
| few wrote:
| Another infamous example is Brock's "jelly filled donuts" in
| pokemon https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brocks-jelly-doughnuts
| amake wrote:
| It's important to distinguish that from the Pixar thing.
|
| First, the Pixar thing was green pepper, not green beans:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-
| different...
|
| Second, the Pixar one is not "mere" translation; it is full
| localization because they changed the visual to match the
| "textual" change.
|
| The Pokemon one is where the change was limited to the
| "text". The translator's heart might have been in the right
| place (it would depend on how integral to the story it is
| that the item is onigiri) but didn't have the authority to
| make the full breadth of changes needed for such adaptation
| to be successful.
| archievillain wrote:
| It has little to do with authority and more to do with the
| effort/return ratio. Visual edits are expensive and
| dialogue changes are cheap, so it doesn't make sense to
| redraw frames just for an irrelevant onigiri.
|
| 4Kids was very well known to visually change the japanese
| shows they imported if they thought it was worth it, mostly
| in the context of censorship. For example, all guns and
| cigarettes where removed from _One Piece_ , turned into toy
| guns and lollipops instead.
|
| The most infamous example, however, has got to be _Yu-Gi-
| Oh!_. _Yu-Gi-Oh_ started as a horror-ish manga about a
| trickster god forcing people to play assorted games and
| cursing their souls when they inevitably failed to defeat
| him. The game-of-the-week format eventually solidified into
| the characters playing one single game, _Duel Monsters_
| (the _Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG_ itself in the real world), and the
| horror-ish aspects faded away, although they still remained
| part of the show 's aesthetic, based around Egyptian human
| sacrifices and oddly-card-game-obsessed ancient cults.
|
| When the manga was adapted to the screen, it started
| directly with a softer tone[1], especially because the show
| was to be a vehicle for selling cards in the real world,
| not dissimilarly to _Pokemon_ and MANY other anime from the
| era.
|
| Nothing that happens in the show is particularly crude or
| shocking, it had that kind of soft edginess that fit well
| with its intended target audience (early teens). I imagine
| watching _Bambi_ had to be much more traumatizing than
| anything in the show.
|
| But that was still not enough for 4Kids, which had a pretty
| aggressive policy of no violence or death. Kind of
| problematic when the show's main shtick was "Comically evil
| villain puts our heroes in a contraption that will kill
| them if they don't win." (You can imagine the frequency
| these traps actually triggered neared zero).
|
| To solve this, 4Kids invented the _Shadow Realm_. The show,
| thanks to its occultist theming, already had examples of
| people being cursed, or their souls being banished or
| captured. 4Kids solidified these vague elements into the
| shadow realm as a censorship scape-goat. Any reference to
| death was replaced with the shadow realm. Now, one might
| wonder why the censors thought that "hell-like dimension
| where your soul wanders aimlessly and/or gets tortured for
| eternity" was in any way less traumatizing than "you'll
| die", but I imagine it's because there was always the
| implication that people could be 'saved' from the shadow
| realm[2] by undoing the curse.
|
| The Shadow Realm was a massive part of the western Yu-Gi-Oh
| mythos and even today it's a fairly common meme to say that
| somebody got "sent to the shadow realm", which makes it all
| funnier that it is not part of the original show.
|
| A couple funny examples off the top of my head: - Yugi must
| win a match while his legs are shackled. Two circular saws,
| one for him and one for the enemy, are present in the
| arena. They near the two competitors as they lose Life
| Points, with the loser destined to have their legs cut off.
|
| In the 4Kids adaptation, the saws are visually edited to be
| glowing blue, and it's stated they're made out of dark
| energy that will send anybody that touches it to the shadow
| realm.
|
| - A group of our heroes fight a group of villains atop of a
| skyscraper with a glass roof. In the original version, the
| villains state that the roof has been boobytrapped so that
| the losing side will explode, plunging the losers to their
| death by splattening.
|
| In the 4Kids version, the boobytrap remained, but the
| visuals were edited to add a dark mist under the glass,
| with the villains stating that there's a portal under the
| roof that will send anybody that touches it to the shadow
| realm. This is made funnier when the villains lose and
| they're shown to have had parachutes with them all along,
| and they are NOT edited out.
|
| [1] Technically speaking, there was a previous adaptation
| that followed the manga more closely and got only one
| season, generally referred to as _Season 0_.
|
| [2] It does eventually happen in the anime that the heroes
| go in an alternate dimension to save somebody's cursed
| soul. Obviously, this dimension was directly identified as
| the Shadow Realm in the localization.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Is that beans example a real thing? If so, I would hate for my
| kids to be subjected to that. The best thing about watching
| films from another country is that you're exposed to the
| culture of that foreign place and learn about how it's
| different from yours - I don't see why we'd try to localize
| away the human experience as if these differences don't exist.
| the_af wrote:
| Same. I don't understand why people want (them and their
| kids) to be isolated from other cultures. If you're watching
| a movie set in Japan, India or China, have it be about their
| culture. If there's something you or your kids don't
| understand, make an effort to learn about it (and the green
| peas thing seems trivial to understand).
|
| Netflix also does something absurd with their subtitles. I
| was watching "The Empress" (which is set in the Austro-
| Hungarian Empire) with German language and English subtitles.
| I like listening to the real actors' voices, and learning the
| sounds and cadence of the language. So the characters speak
| in Italian for a while (subtitles say "[speaking in
| Italian]", and when they switch back to German the subtitles
| clarify.. "[in English]". The fuck, Netflix? Surely the
| viewer of this show understands they didn't speak in English
| in the Austro-Hungarian empire, so why write it's English?
| What the hell is Netflix even trying to achieve here? Seems
| robotic: "us = English speakers, therefore everyone's default
| must be English"?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Could that Netflix subtitle thing have been a one-off
| error? I don't think I've ever encountered such a mismatch
| before.
|
| It did remind me of watching "The Beast" (La Bete)[0] in
| the original French with subtitles and I was then surprised
| when I saw the subtitles say "[In English]" and I was, "Oh,
| damn, the characters did actually switch to English".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(2023_film)
| the_af wrote:
| It's consistent through The Empress, I just gave an
| example. But maybe it's a decision specifically for this
| show?
|
| For example, when Elisabeth is practicing several
| languages, each is subtitled "[in $language]", but when
| she switches back to German the subtitles readily
| explain... "[in English]". This confused the hell out of
| me!
| abrugsch wrote:
| Just saying "Pixar movies" was probably not a great
| example. They can be deliberately location ambiguous
| (Monsters Inc., Toy Story - though it's clearly _somewhere_
| in America, The Incredibles - a generic "metropolis"/50's
| futuristic city, lightyear, Elemental) or very specifically
| somewhere (cars - mashup of Route 66 towns, Finding Nemo -
| Sydney when on land, Ratatouille - Paris, etc...)
|
| It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in
| say Wall*E which was very location agnostic but not so much
| for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.
| the_af wrote:
| Good point.
|
| The localization of The Incredibles in Argentina was
| embarrassing, though someone must have thought it was a
| good idea. They used local voice actors popular at the
| time (though not so much today) with strong porteno
| (Buenos Aires') accents. They also referred to the
| streets with Argentinian names, e.g. "let's turn that
| corner of Corrientes Avenue!". The problem is that
| Corrientes Av is very typical of Buenos Aires, but
| nothing on screen looked anywhere close to it, so the
| whole thing was ridiculous and embarrassing, sort of like
| if the characters pretended they were in Tokyo and were
| Japanese.
|
| What if they had gone the extra mile (maybe possible in
| the near future) and reskinned every character to look
| more Argentinian, and rethemed the city to look more like
| Buenos Aires, would I have been happier? Certainly not --
| I want to see the original movie as intended, not some
| sanitized version designed to make me feel "at home" and
| not challenge me in the slightest.
|
| (I watched the movie in English as well, mind you).
| infecto wrote:
| I understand the sentiment and agree but for me there is a
| line and I am not sure Inside Out meets the threshold for
| exposing culture. The changes are too minor to me in a
| children's film that it has little impact. Broccoli to
| peppers is not a deep enough change. Now if the film had a
| Chinese new year celebration in it and they switched it
| entirely to a western new year celebration I would think that
| is a pretty drastic change that does hide cultural changes.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Erm... yeah, cool and whatnot but: 1) in case of pixar those
| are just animations that are mostly "generic" (or in
| fairyland) hence adapting them to the local nuance to pass
| some idea makes sense 2) as a Pole that had to be basically
| "brainwashed" by US made movies - while being exposed to
| other cultures is great, being firehose-fed by "dream
| factory" was IMHO one of the worst thing that happened to
| "post-commie" countries.
| dlisboa wrote:
| Localization is more important than you might think.
|
| My wife worked for a company that helped provide teaching
| content for schools throughout Brazil. They'd interview
| teachers all over the country and one of the complaints from
| teachers in isolated communities was that they had to use the
| same textbooks as other places in Brazil without any regard
| to their own situation.
|
| They reported that many examples for starting math for kids
| featured things like "strawberries" or "apples", things the
| kids had never seen or maybe heard. So now they needed to
| abstract over what is a "fruit" and a "countable object" as
| well as whatever the example was trying to teach. Teachers
| reported less engagement and it was more work for them to
| adapt it to local relevance.
|
| Try to teach kids about vegetables in the US midwest and use
| green beans and Bok Choy as an example, for instance. It
| doesn't make sense.
| wil421 wrote:
| They don't have green beans in the Midwest?
|
| We bought kids toys on Amazon and the fruits were strange.
| Not sure if they were Asian varieties or just made up.
| sodality2 wrote:
| 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 using AI
| to build apps previously would simply never have created an app,
| so it's not affecting software development as a career as much as
| you first expect.
|
| It would be like saying AI art won't affect artists, because the
| people who would put in such little effort probably would never
| have commissioned anyone. Which may be a little true (at least in
| that it reduces the impact).
|
| However, I don't necessarily know if that's true for software
| development. The ability to build software enabled huge business
| opportunities at very low costs. I think the key difference is
| this: the people who are now putting in such low effort into
| commissioning software maybe _did_ hire software engineers before
| this, and that might throw off a lot of the numbers.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| 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.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Also true! But that world is one where the vast majority of
| time is spent cleaning up slop code, so if there's a general
| shift towards that, I think that still changes the job in a
| significant way. (I don't have extensive history in the
| industry yet so I may be wrong here)
| MarkusQ wrote:
| <tired old fart voice>
|
| It's all cleaning up slop code. Always has been.
|
| </tired old fart voice>
|
| More optimistically, you can think of "user created code"
| as an attempt at a design document of sorts; they were
| trying to tell you (and the computer) what they wanted in
| "your language". And that dialog is the important thing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Seriously. Unless you're one of the vanishingly rare few
| working with true Greenfield projects that start with an
| empty text file, you're basically cleaning up other
| developer's legacy slop.
| ema wrote:
| I mean even when I'm working on my own projects I'm
| cleaning up whatever code I wrote when I didn't yet know
| as much about the shape of the problem.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| We still don't know what good code is. It is all
| contextual, and we can never decide what that context
| should be. We are influenced by what is hip today. Right
| now is static typing using Rust, tomorrow it might be
| energy usage with assembly, after that it might be Python
| for productiveness, after that C# for maintenance.
|
| We can never decide, we just like learning, and there is
| little real, impactful research into programming as a
| business.
|
| In two decades we will still collectively say "we are
| learning so much", ignoring that fact.
| scuff3d wrote:
| CAD, Matlab, and Altium made electrical and mechanical
| engineers more valuable, not less.
|
| The work got easier, so what we do got more complex.
| seventytwo wrote:
| They're all just tools. Use the tools or become obsolete.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Kind of a false dichotomy. A great example is debuggers
| vs print statements. Some people get by just fine with
| print statements, others lean heavily on debuggers.
| Another example is IDE vs plain vIM.
|
| Becoming obsolete is a fear of people who are not willing
| or able to learn arbitrary problem domains in a short
| amount of time. In that case learning to use a particular
| tool will only get you so far. The real skill is being
| able to learn quickly (enthusiasm helps).
| numpad0 wrote:
| So, "useless or dangerous tools" is not a self
| contradictory sentence.
|
| Gas powered pogo sticks, shoe fitting X-ray, Radium
| flavored chocolates, Apollo LLTV, table saws, Flex Seal
| for joining two halves of boats together, exorbitantly
| parallelized x86 CPU, rackable Mac Pro with M1 SoC, image
| generation AI, etc.
|
| Tools can be useless, or be even dangerous.
| camillomiller wrote:
| This has been a stable source of business for a while in my
| niche.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think you could extrapolate it and say folks are primarily
| using GenAI for things they aren't considered a specialist in.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Google translate is a good example too in terms of better-than-
| nothing to the completely uninitiated, helpful to someone with
| a little knowledge, and obviously not a replacement for a
| professional. That is - the more you know, the more you see its
| failures.
|
| I know enough Japanese to talk like a small child, make halting
| small talk in a taxi, and understand a dining menu / restaurant
| signage broadly. I also have been enough times to understand
| context where literal translation to English fails to convey
| the actual message.. for example in cases where they want to
| say no to a customer but can't literally say no.
|
| I have found Google Translate to be similarly magical and dumb
| for 15 years of traveling to Japan without any huge
| improvements other than speed. The visual real-time image OCR
| stuff was an app they purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had
| previously used.
|
| So who knows, maybe LLM coding stays in a similar pretty-good-
| never-perfect state for a decade.
| sodality2 wrote:
| > So who knows, maybe LLM coding stays in a similar pretty-
| good-never-perfect state for a decade.
|
| I think this is definitely a possibility, but I think the
| technology is still WAY too early to know that if the "second
| AI winter" the author references never comes, that we still
| wouldn't discover tons of other use cases that would change a
| lot.
| davejagoda wrote:
| If there is another "AI winter" it would be at least the
| third one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
| jf wrote:
| > The visual real-time image OCR stuff was an app they
| purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had previously used.
|
| Word Lens, by Quest Visual
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_Visual
| Miraste wrote:
| I think you're right, AI art and AI software dev are not
| analogous. The point of art is to create art. There are a lot
| of traditions and cultural expectations around this, and many
| of them depend on the artist involved. The human in the loop is
| important.
|
| Meanwhile, the point of software development is _not_ to write
| code. It 's to get a working application that accomplishes a
| task. If this can be done, even at low quality, without hiring
| as many people, there is no more value to the human. In HN
| terms, there is no moat.
|
| It's the difference between the transition from painting to
| photography and the transition from elevator operators to
| pushbuttons.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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. Before
| spreadsheets, everything that is today a spreadsheet was a
| program some programmer had to write.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Do you have a citation for that?
| ohthatsnotright wrote:
| What a strange thing to ask for a citation on when CEO
| pay, stock buy backs and corporate dividends are at all
| time highs while worker pay and honestly just affording
| to live continue to crater.
| saurik wrote:
| I mean, I hate a lazy "citation needed" FUD attack as
| much as (really likely way more than) anyone, but with a
| bit more context I do think a citation is needed, as the
| correct citation in the other direction is (as someone
| else noted) Jevon's paradox: when you make it easier to
| X, you make it so people can use X in ever more contexts,
| and you make it so that the things which previously
| needed something way harder than X are suddenly possible,
| and the result -- as much in software development as any
| other field: it seems like every year it becomes MUCH
| easier to do things, due to better tools -- always seems
| to result in MORE demand, not less... we even see the
| slow raising of "table stakes" for software, such that a
| website or app is off-putting and lame to a lot of users
| if it isn't doing the things that require at least some
| effort: instead of animated transitions and giant images
| maybe the next phase of this is that the website has to
| be an interactive assistant white-glove AI experience--or
| some crazy AR-capable thing--requiring tons of
| engineering effort to pull off, but now possible for your
| average website due to AI coding. Meanwhile, the other
| effects you are talking about all started before AI
| coding even sort of worked well, and so have very little
| to do with AI: they are more related to monetary policy
| shifts, temporary pandemic demand spikes, and that R&D
| tax law change.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| 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...
| djmips wrote:
| What is 'real hourly compensation'?
| em500 wrote:
| 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/
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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 much work as we can possibly do
| instead of 3X.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| That sounds like the famous lump of labour fallacy. When
| something's cheaper people often spend more on it (Jevons
| paradox).
| bgwalter wrote:
| This "fallacy" is from 1891 and assumes jobs that require
| virtually no retraining. A farm worker could ion theory
| clean the factory floor or do one small step in an
| assembly line within a week.
|
| Nowadays we already have bullshit jobs that keep
| academics employed. Retraining takes several years.
|
| With "AI" the danger is theoretically limited because it
| creates more bureaucracy and reduces productivity. The
| problem is that it is used as an excuse for layoffs.
| EZ-E wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| LLMs don't care you have to maintain the code, they don't
| get any benefit or loss from their work and are
| unaccountable when they fuck up. They have no skin in the
| game.
|
| They don't know the office politics, or go on coffee
| breaks with the team - humans still have more context and
| access. We still need people to manage the goals and
| risks, to constrain the AI in order to make it useful,
| and to navigate the physical and social world in their
| place.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| But when everyone started to produce SEO slop, the web
| died. It's harder than ever to find truly passionate,
| single subject blogs from professionals for example.
|
| The AI slop will make it harder for the small guys without
| marketing budget (some lucky few will still make it
| though). It will slowly kill the app ecosystem, untill all
| we reluctantly trust is FANG. The app pricing reflects it.
| alganet wrote:
| > everything that is today a spreadsheet was a program some
| programmer had to write
|
| That is incorrect, sir.
|
| First, because many problems were designed to fit into
| spreadsheets (human systems designed around a convenient
| tool). It is much more likely that several spreadsheets were
| _paper_ before, not custom written programs. For a lot of
| cases, that paper work was adapted directly to spreadsheets,
| no one did a custom program intermediate.
|
| Second, because many problems we have today could be solved
| by simple spreadsheets, but they often aren't. Instead,
| people choose to hire developers instead, for a variety of
| reasons.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm not sure we're really disagreeing about anything here.
| If you think spreadsheets didn't displace any programmers
| at all, that's contrary to my intuition, but not
| necessarily wrong --- especially because of the explosion
| of extrinsic demand for computer programming.
| alganet wrote:
| You say spreadsheet software replace programmer.
|
| I say spreadsheet software replace paper.
|
| That's the disagreement. You have intuition, I have
| sources:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#Paper_spreadshe
| ets
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#Electronic_spre
| ads...
| bgwalter wrote:
| I'm currently getting two types of ads on YouTube: One is about
| how the official Israeli Gaza humanitarian efforts are totally
| fine and adequate (launched during the flotilla with Greta
| Thunberg).
|
| The other is about an "AI" website generator, spamming every
| video at the start.
|
| I wonder what kind of honest efforts would require that kind of
| marketing.
| 15123123 wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| > The correlation here would be something like: the people
| using AI to build apps previously would simply never have
| created an app, so it's not affecting software development as a
| career as much as you first expect.
|
| I don't think the original point or your interpretation is
| correct.
|
| AI will not cause a loss of software development jobs. There
| will still be a demand for human developers to create software.
| The idea that non-technical managers and executives will do so
| with AI tools is as delusional as it was when BASIC, COBOL,
| SQL, NoCode, etc. were introduced.
|
| AI will affect the industry in two ways, though.
|
| First, by lowering the skill requirements to create software it
| creates a flood of vibe coders competing for junior-level
| positions. This dilutes the market value of competent
| programmers, and makes entering the software industry much more
| difficult.
|
| A related issue is that vibe coders will never become
| programmers. They will have the ability to create and test
| software, which will improve as and if AI tools continue to
| improve, but they will never learn the skills to debug,
| troubleshoot, and fix issues by actually programming. This
| likely won't matter to them or anyone else, however, but it's
| good to keep in mind that theirs is a separate profession from
| programming.
|
| Secondly, it floods the software market with shoddy software
| full of bugs and security issues. The quality average will go
| down causing frustration for users, and security holes will be
| exploited increasing the frequency of data leaks, privacy
| violations, and unquantifiable losses for companies. All this
| will likely lead to a rejection of AI and vibe coding, and an
| industry crash not unlike the video game one in 1983 or the
| dot-com one in 2000. This will happen at the bottom of the
| Trough of Disillusionment phase of the hype cycle.
|
| This could play out differently if the AI tools reach a level
| of competence that exceeds human senior software engineers, and
| have super-human capabilities to troubleshoot, fix, and write
| bug-free software. In that case we would reach a state where AI
| could be self-improving, and the demand for human engineers
| would go down. But I'm highly skeptical that the current
| architecture of AI tools will be able to get us there.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| As long as the person you are talking or writing to is aware that
| you're not a native speaker, they will understand that you won't
| be able to follow conventions around polite languages or
| understand subtle nuances on their part. It's really a non issue.
| The finer clues of language are intended for people who are from
| the same culture.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >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 correct its
| mistakes: as is the rule for all kinds of modern software, the
| machine thinks it knows best.
| simonw wrote:
| That doesn't sound like a problem with Google Translate, it
| sounds like a problem with Google Chrome. I believe Chrome uses
| this small on-device model to detect the language before
| offering to translate it: https://github.com/google/cld3#readme
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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_.
| jjani wrote:
| 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.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| While it's just anecdotal evidence, I have translator friends and
| work has indeed been drying up over the past decade, and that has
| only accelerated with the introduction of LLMs. Just check any
| forum or facebook group for translators, it's all doom and gloom
| about AI. See this reddit thread, for example:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/comments/173okwg...
|
| While professionals still produce much better quality
| translations, the demand for everything but the most sensitive
| work is nearly gone. Would you recommend your offspring get into
| the industry?
| tossaway0 wrote:
| I imagine even for professional teams with clients that need
| proper translations, LLMs have made it so one person can do the
| work of many. The difference between the quality of former
| automatic translations and LLM translations is huge; you
| couldn't rely on auto translation at all.
|
| Now a professional service only needs a reviewer to edit what
| the LLM produces. You can even ask the LLM to translate in
| certain tones, dialects, etc. and they do it very well.
| neilv wrote:
| Some additional things that translators do (which I recall from a
| professional translator friend, put in my own words):
|
| * Idioms (The article mentions in passing that this isn't so much
| a difficulty in Norwegian->English, but of course idioms usually
| don't translate as sentences)
|
| * Cultural references (From arts, history, cuisine, etc. You
| don't necessarily substitute, but you might have to hint if it
| has relevant connotations that would be missed.)
|
| * Cultural values (What does "freedom" mean to this one nation,
| or "passion" to this other, or "resilience" to another, and does
| that influence translation)
|
| * Matching actor in dubbing (Sometimes the translation you'd use
| for a line of a dialogue in a book doesn't fit the duration and
| speaking movements of an actor in a movie, so the translator
| changes the language to fit better.)
|
| * Artful prose. (AFAICT, LLMs really can't touch this, unless
| they're directly plagiarizing the right artful bit)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This is like the worst comparison since generative AI is far
| better at conversational translation than google translate
|
| LLM's will tell you idioms, slang, and the point behind it
|
| You can take a screenshot of telegram channels for both sides of
| a war conflict and get all context in a minute
|
| In classic HN fashion I'm sure I missed the point, ok translators
| are still in demand got it.
|
| Google Translate has been leapfrogged by the same thing that
| allows for "vibecoding"
| noname120 wrote:
| 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
| BergAndCo wrote:
| 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.
| ryao wrote:
| > 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?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| roxolotl wrote:
| 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| A non sequitur perhaps?
| noobermin wrote:
| 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 today" or more
| Midwestern (could I get a latte today etc) in singapore because
| people would just get confused. Same with being too polite when
| recieving things. There's ways to be polite but it usually
| involves less words because anything else confuses people.
| sudahtigabulan wrote:
| > 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.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| American - I fully agree with your interpretation. Throwing
| on the time component gives up all pretense of being
| polite.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Tone of voice and mannerism matters here a lot
|
| To me (Canadian, not American) "Could I get a latte today
| actually" sounded something like "Normally I get something
| other than a latter but actually today I would like a latte
| instead"
|
| Not rude at all, but kind of assumes some context
| zzo38computer wrote:
| 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.
| ryao wrote:
| It makes sense if you are a regular and today, you want
| something other than your usual.
| rr808 wrote:
| 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.
| ryao wrote:
| Coincidentally, I am in NY. That said, "I want..." when
| ordering seems fine to me too.
| jjani wrote:
| 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"!
| danpalmer wrote:
| > 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 experience in UK/AU.
|
| There are some other parts of American English that may be
| considered polite, I notice a lot of US folks addressing me
| as "sir" for example, but this sort of thing comes off as
| insincere or even sarcastic/rude.
|
| I know this is how people communicate so they don't really
| bother me, I'm used to them and accept that different people
| have different expectations. I also understand that Americans
| might believe they are being polite and consider _me_ to be
| rude, but I think this is why blanket statements like
| "Americans are extremely polite" are just missing so much
| cultural nuance.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| America is not a monolith. Spend a day in New York and a
| day in Seattle. Language is the same but politeness carries
| widely.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| As native-born American who has always lived in a
| Midwestern part of the States where visiting people often
| remark upon our unusual politeness:
|
| I've never ordered a latte " _today_ ".
|
| A simple statement of "I'd like a latte" fits fine in our
| regional vernacular.
|
| I think that "I'd like a latte _today_ " would appear a
| weird bit superfluous of specificity, unless it comes from
| a regular and familiar customer who might normally order
| something different and/or random.
|
| I mean: "Today"? As opposed to later this week or
| something? It's implicit that the latte is wanted as soon
| as they can get around to it. (Unless yesterday's order was
| something different, and then adding "today" may make
| sense.)
|
| ---
|
| But English is fucked up, and I'm getting old, so I've
| spent a lot of time observing (and sometimes producing)
| slight miscommunication.
|
| In terms of things like ordering food or drink at a
| counter, it still works fine as long as nobody gets grumpy,
| and the desired item is produced.
|
| I'm reminded of a local festival I went to as a little kid,
| with my parents, sometime. I was getting hungry and they
| were asking me what I wanted to eat. There were a lot of
| pop-up food vendor there, mostly with tables and stuff
| instead of the now-ubiquitous "food truck."
|
| In the corner was a gyro stand with amazing-looking racks
| of spinny-meat. I wanted to try whatever that was.
|
| The big banner said "GYROS" and we got in line.
|
| Discussions were had between my parents about this "GYROS"
| concept, which they'd never seen before either. Was it a
| singular, or a plural? How many "GYROS" might a boy
| reasonable want? How was it pronounced? It looks like
| "gyro" as in "gyrocopter" but it seemed to them that it
| must be Greek, so they went through some variations on
| pronunciation as the line moved forward.
|
| As we got closer, some of these questions were answered:
| The sign definitely referred to a plural offering, and
| seeing people leave it became clear that [unlike things
| like chorros or tacos or donuts] one was plenty.
|
| And when we got to the front, the conversation went like
| this:
|
| Parents: "Our son wants one of these... but we're not sure
| how to say it. Jye-roe? Hee-roe?"
|
| "They're just gyros," he replied to them to them
| dismissively in a thick Greek accent, and motioned for his
| staff to produce 1 gyro.
|
| And then the man looked at me, with his skin sweaty on that
| hot sunny day and a thick gold chain around his neck, and
| said to me in his very best and most careful English
| something to me that I can never forget. "I call them
| gyros. But listen to me, you can call them whatever you
| want. Jye-roe? Hee-roe? Yee-roe? Sandwich? Whatever you
| say, and however you say it: If you get what you expect,
| then you said it right. Alright?"
|
| My trepidatious nods made sure that he was understood, and
| the awesome fucking sandwich-taco I had that day changed my
| entire perspective on food -- and ordering food -- forever.
|
| So, sure: Ordering "one latte _today_ "?
|
| It sounds weird to me, but if it is understood and you get
| what you want, then it works. Correctness? Politeness?
| Whatever. Despite seeming weird: It works.
|
| (Up next: There's a lot of ways to mispronounce
| approximately everything related to ordering pho, and none
| of them are wrong.)
| strken wrote:
| As an Australian, I'd modify my order with "today" if I'd
| asked for a flat white or a piccolo the last time I was
| in the shop. It would be a way to highlight that my order
| has changed, and said to a barista who knows me and is
| likely running on autopilot.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > folks addressing me as "sir" for example, but this sort
| of thing comes off as insincere or even sarcastic/rude.
|
| That's news to me! In my part of the world I call even the
| janitorial staff "Sir". I'm not aware of anyone ever
| thinking that was rude.
| einarfd wrote:
| When people call me Sir, I find it uncomfortable. I know
| it is a thing in English and specifically in the USA. But
| it is so far from the Norwegian cultural norms I grew up
| with, that I'll probably never get used to it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It would also depend on the tone of voice and even body
| language used.
| koala_man wrote:
| I'm Norwegian and concluded that she meant when ordering, such
| as for a choice of potatoes or pasta.
|
| This makes sense since the context is translation for tourism.
|
| Otherwise, the normal, casual way would be "kan du sende
| potetene?" i.e. "could you pass the potatoes?", lit. "can you
| send the potatoes?"
|
| (This assumes it wasn't physically possible to simply reach
| across people to grab it yourself with what's known as "the
| Norwegian arm")
| jezzamon wrote:
| 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 article is so bad I feel
| like the translator did not put in a serious attempt"
|
| It's similar to vibe coding where the user truly doesn't know how
| to create the same thing themselves: You end up with output that
| you have no way of knowing it's correct, and you just have to
| blindly trust it and hope for the best. And that just doesn't
| work for many situations. So you still need expertise anyway
| (either yours or someone else's)
| stevage wrote:
| Well no, you can run the output. That gives you some measure of
| correctness.
| danpalmer wrote:
| No I think the original comment is correct. You need to be
| able to evaluate the result.
|
| The goal of software is not to compile and run, it's to solve
| a problem for the user when running. If you don't know enough
| about the problem to be able to assess the output of the
| program then you can't trust that it's actually doing the
| right thing.
|
| I've seen code generated by LLMs that runs, does _something_
| , and that the something would be plausible to a layperson,
| but that I know from domain knowledge and knowing the gotchas
| involved in programming that it's not actually correct.
|
| I think the comparison with translation is a very apt one.
| eurleif wrote:
| 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.
| ruszki wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Round tripping is definitely better than nothing, but it lets
| through a lot of "engrish" errors with multi-meaning words
| and with implied perspectives. Cape as in clothing and cape
| as in pointy seasides, general as in military rank vs general
| as in generic, etc.
|
| e.g. "Set up database as: [read replica]" and "Database setup
| complete: [a replica was loaded.]" may translate into a same
| string in some language.
| vasco wrote:
| > 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
|
| Only because you think the machine will be incorrect. If I have
| a large multiplication to do it's much easier to trust the
| calculator than a mathematician, and that's all due to my
| perception of the calculator accuracy.
| autobodie wrote:
| "Behold the impeccable nuance of my opinion"
| Kiro wrote:
| > 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.
| banq wrote:
| LLM=Google Translate +Context
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Hopefully it tells everyone to never use this douchey term again.
| camillomiller wrote:
| >> For what it's worth, I don't think it's inconceivable that
| some future form of AI could handle context and ambiguity as well
| as humans do, but I do think we're at least one more AI winter
| away from that, especially considering that today's AI moguls
| seem to have no capacity for nuance, and care more about their
| tools appearing slick and frictionless than providing responsible
| output.
|
| Fantastic closing paragraph! Loved the article
| Seanambers wrote:
| Prompting and context solves this.
| nottorp wrote:
| There was a fun one on OSNews:
|
| https://www.osnews.com/story/142469/that-time-ai-translation...
| yoden wrote:
| Machine translation is a great example. It's also where I expect
| AI coding assistants to land. A useful tool, but not some magical
| thing that is going to completely replace actual professionals.
| We're at least one more drastic change away from that, and
| there's no guarantee anyone will find it any time soon. So
| there's not much sense in worrying about it.
|
| A very similar story has been happening in radiology for the past
| decade or so. Tech folks think that small scale examples of super
| accurate AIs mean that radiologists will no longer be needed, but
| in practice the demand for imaging has grown while people have
| been scared to join the field. The efficiencies from AI haven't
| been enough to bridge the gap, resulting in a radiologist
| _shortage_.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Just a note on the radiologist part, the current SOTA radiology
| AI is still tiny parameter CNN's from the mid-late 2010's
| running locally. NYT ran an article a few weeks about this, and
| the entire article uses the phrase "A.I.", which people assume
| means ChatGPT, but really can refer to anything in the last 60
| years of A.I. research. Manually digging revealed it was an old
| architecture.
|
| We don't know yet how a modern transformer trained on radiology
| would perform, but it almost certainly would be dramatically
| better.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| That wouldnt be that much different than current CNN/labeling
| methods used on medical imaging. Last time I got a ct scan
| the paperwork had the workstation specs and the models/nueral
| network techniques used.
| demosthanos wrote:
| > We don't know yet how a modern transformer trained on
| radiology would perform, but it almost certainly would be
| dramatically better.
|
| Why? Is there something about radiology that makes the
| transformer architecture appropriate?
|
| My understanding has been that transformers are great for
| sequences of tokens, but from what little I know of radiology
| sequence-of-tokens seems unlikely to be a useful
| representation of the data.
| fhd2 wrote:
| On the surface, radiology seems like an image
| classification problem. That's indeed something a small NN
| can do, already 15 years ago. But it's probably not really
| all it is.
|
| I can only imagine what people picture when they think
| about AI and radiology, but I can certainly imagine that it
| goes beyond that. What if you can feed a transformer with
| literature on how the body works and diseases, so that it
| can _analyse_ (not just _classify_) scans, applying some
| degree of, let's call it, creativity?
|
| That second thing, if technically feasible, confabulations
| and all, has the potential to replace radiologists, maybe,
| if you're optimistic. Simple image classification, probably
| not, but it sounds like a great help to make sure they
| don't miss anything, can prioritise what to look at, and
| stuff like that.
| ptx wrote:
| > _What if you can feed a transformer with literature on
| how the body works and diseases, so that it can _analyse_
| (not just _classify_) scans, applying some degree of, let
| 's call it, creativity?_
|
| Then it would make up plausible-sounding nonsense, just
| like it does in all other applications, but it would be
| particularly dangerous in this one.
| ptx wrote:
| Do you still have the links to what you dug up manually?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| https://www.mayo.edu/research/labs/radiology-
| informatics/ove...
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31089974/
|
| https://mayo-radiology-informatics-
| lab.github.io/MIDeL/index...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Machine translation is a great example. It's also where I
| expect AI coding assistants to land. A useful tool, but not
| some magical thing that is going to completely replace actual
| professionals.
|
| I can say from experience that machine translation is light
| years ahead of 15 years ago. When I started studying Japanese
| 15 years ago, Google Translate (and any other free translator)
| was absolutely awful. It was so bad, that it struggled to
| translate basic sentences into reasonable native-level
| Japanese. Fast forward to today, it is stunning how good is
| Google Translate. From time to time, I even learn about
| newspeak (slang) from Google Translate. If I am writing a
| letter, I regularly use it to "fine-tune" my Japanese. To be
| clear: My Japanese is far from native-level, but I can put
| full, complex sentences into Google Translate (I recommend to
| view "both directions"), and I get a reasonable, native-
| sounding translation. I have tested the outputs with multiple
| native speakers and they agree: "It is imperfect, but
| excellent; the meaning is clear."
|
| In the last few years, using only my primitive knowledge of
| Japanese (and Chinese -- which helps a lot with
| reading/writing), I have been able to fill out complex legal
| and tax documents using my knowledge of Japanese and the help
| of Google Translate. When I walk into a gov't office as the
| only non-Asian person, I still get a double take, but then they
| review my slightly-less-than-perfect submission, and proceed
| without issue. (Hat tip to all of the Japanese civil servants
| who have diligently served me over the years.)
|
| Hot take: Except for contracts and other legal documents,
| "actual professionals" (translators) is a dead career at this
| point.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Also, Google Translate is really not a particularly good
| translator. It has the most public knowledge, but as far as
| translators go it's pretty poor.
|
| DeepL is a step up, and modern LLMs are even better. There's
| some data here[0], if you're curious - DeepL is beaten by 24B
| models, and dramatically beaten by Sonnet / Opus /
| https://nuenki.app/translator .
|
| [0] https://nuenki.app/blog/claude_4_is_good_at_translation_b
| ut_... - my own blog
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| > Hot take: Except for contracts and other legal documents,
| "actual professionals" (translators) is a dead career at this
| point.
|
| Quote from article:
|
| > it turns out the number of available job opportunities for
| translators and interpreters has actually been increasing.
| p3rls wrote:
| I just posted that Google is translating words that should be
| translated like "bastard" in foreign pop music (in this case, a
| member of the most popular boy band in the world, BTS) as racial
| slurs like the n-word. This is pretty much the worst case error
| scenario for a translation service.
|
| https://kpopping.com/news/2025/Jun/17/Google-Translation-of-...
|
| It's amazing more people aren't talking about this stuff, how
| incompetent do you have to be to allow racial slurs in
| translation, especially with all the weights towards being pro-
| diversity etc that already exist?
|
| Just more enshittification from ol Sundar and the crew
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I've done freelance translation in two different language pairs,
| for 20 years (mostly as a side thing). A few thoughts on this:
|
| - Google Translate has always been garbage for professional
| translation work, which is why human translators have been
| needed.
|
| - LLMs can write in a way that sounds native (at least in
| English), which is something that ML translation software was bad
| at. They can also understand context to some degree and can adopt
| tones. This is a huge leap forward that makes it suitable for a
| large majority of translation work _between common language
| pairs_ (Hindi to Thai is probably safe).
|
| - The vast majority of translation work is commercial in nature,
| and most cases, "decent" is good enough. Cost is prioritized over
| occasional mistakes. Prices have been falling for years already.
| Many agencies now pay peanuts because they expect you to use AI
| and "just" do some light proofreading. Except that often the
| "light proofreading" was actually "heavy editing" that often took
| more work than translating from scratch. It's not worth it.
|
| - Do not lump translators and interpreters together when
| discussing this subject. Interpreters aren't going away and their
| job is much more difficult to replace with AI (for a variety of
| reasons). What they do is very different than translators (some
| do both of course).
|
| - There are some exceptions to "decent is good enough", where: 1)
| context/localization is critical (a major advertising campaign),
| 2) accuracy of the message is critical (a government
| pronouncement), 3) linguistic excellence is critical (a novel).
| This may be the most visible parts, but also a very small
| fraction of the overall market.
|
| My conclusion is that translators won't disappear altogether but
| their ranks will shrink considerably.
| voxleone wrote:
| >>For what it's worth, I don't think it's inconceivable that some
| future form of AI could handle context and ambiguity as well as
| humans do,
|
| Absolutely! AI might get better at context, but there's still no
| substitute for a seasoned dev who's had to untangle a 2 a.m.
| deployment gone wrong. As for vibe coders -- hey, good vibes are
| great, but they won't refactor a legacy monolith on their own.
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