Eternal September came up in conversation today about how users don't do effort posts any longer, they just want to leave funny comments below reaction videos and then swipe to the next one.
Anyone got any good effort post oases I can lurk and help out in?
If you frequently write the same characters, it's straightforward to create your own keyboard layout that matches your usage, using https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
When I occasionally use MTL into a language I'm not fluent in, I say so. This makes the reader aware that there may be errors unknown to me that make the writing diverge from my intent.
OTOH I am participating in a wonderful discord server community, primarily Italians and Brazilians, with other nationalities sprinkled in.
We heavily use connected translating apps and it feels really great. It would be such a massive pita to copy every message somewhere outside, having to translate it and then back.
Now, discussions usually follow the sun, and when someone not speaking, say, Portuguese wants to join in, they usually use English (sometimes German or Dutch), and just join.
We know it's not perfect but it works. Without the embedded translation? It absolutely wouldn't.
I also used pretty heavily a telegram channel with similar setup, but it was even better, with transparent auto translation.
Reddit would be even worse if the translations were better, now you don't have to waste much time because it hits you right in the face. Never ever translate something without asking about it first.
When I search for something in my native tongue it is almost always because I want the perspective of people living in my country having experience with X. Now the results are riddled with reddit posts that are from all over the world with crappy translation instead.
I think we should distinguish between the feature being good/hated:
1. An automatic translation feature.
2. Being able to submit an "original language" version of a post in case the translation is bad/unavailable, or someone can read the original for more nuance.
The only problem I see with #2 involves malicious usage, where the author is out to deliberately sow confusion/outrage or trying to evade moderation by presenting fundamentally different messages.
I think the audience that would be interested in this is vanishingly small, there exist relatively few conversations online that would be meaningfully improved by this.
I also suspect that automatically translating a forum would tend to attract a far worse ratio of high-effort to low-effort contributions than simply accepting posts in a specific language. For example, I'd expect programmers who don't speak any english to have on average a far lower skill level than those who know at least basic english.
That's Twitter currently, in a way. I've seen and had short conversations in which each person speaks their own language and trusts the other to use the built-in translation feature.
Thank you for providing actual source! Ever thought of creating and running an alternative to CNBC?
Funny how most of the comments in this submission assumes it's about Israel, telling in more ways than one. This is why reporting has to be accurate :)
Yeah it does seem there’s some confusion. Here is the similar proposal referencing Israel from earlier this year (perhaps a source of some of the confusion):
Some more context, KSA is spending up large, think 100s of projects a week, for their vision 2030 where they will have spent 100b on software systems and AI.
These are govt contracts and a lot of them have strict data sovereignty restrictions. Google has a big data center there for the exact reason to mop up this work. They also have an AI lab there.
If that's the case, let it be a feature of image editing packages that can output formats that are for the web. It's a web standard we're talking about here, not a general-purpose image format, so asking browsers to carry that big code load seems unreasonable when existing formats do most of what we need and want for the web.
People generally expect browsers to display general-purpose image formats. It's why they support formats like classical JPEG, instead of just GIF and PNG.
Turns out people really like being able to just drag-and-drop an image from their camera into a website - being forced to re-encode first it isn't exactly popular.
> Turns out people really like being able to just drag-and-drop an image from their camera into a website - being forced to re-encode first it isn't exactly popular.
That’s a function of the website, not the browser.
> That’s a function of the website, not the browser.
That's hand-waving away quite a lot. The task changes from serving a copy of a file on disk, as every other image format in common use, to needing a transcoding pipeline more akin to sites like YouTube. Technically possible, but lots of extra complexity in return for what gain?
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