I’ve perceived that things have never been better for American international order than under Trump/Biden.

The last few cycles have been a weird time for NATO, as the escalating Russian aggression revitalised the alliance, but the unreliability of Trump vastly diminished the status of the US. Europe is now actively trying to get out of the military subordinate role.

Don’t leave out the Harris campaign with the Cheneys and the DNC

Most people who speak about wanting to emigrate are not I assume, but most people who want to just “move countries” seem to be.

I’ve moved around across Europe, which should be “seamless and easy”, as soon as I move in I can vote, no immigration process no nothing.

Let me tell you how the Benelux works nowadays. You have to get a job before you move. Which seems reasonable as long as you don’t see that companies won’t even hire locals of a different culture nowadays, much less people who’d have to move from another EU country. Outside the EU? At best no answer, some recruiters will call you names.

Then the rental market. There are going to be like 20 apartments for rent, mostly okay, for around 40% of what you get paid after taxes. You have to schedule a viewing, you have to attend personally. There are going to be around 40 people to one apartment, and you will almost never get chosen. Would you pay more than the locals? Tough luck, that’s illegal, prices are capped. So you keep spending money to go to viewings you will most certainly not get a place at.

Even if you had some idea of what immigrating to the EU meant five years ago, it’s outdated, it got way worse, and will get worse.

Inflation was not high because of government spending, but because of a price spiral caused by monopolistic markets. The spending that the article criticises would actually help as long as the money ended up with workers, boosting wages.

This author is at least as wrong as the Harris campaign was.

Trump didn’t see any consequences in the old America either.

Yet.

Immigration is hard for most people.

Yeah, lol no it isn’t, the whole submarine plot has been forced into it because Clancy can’t not write about submarines.

Hungary. Yes, that Hungary. It isn’t like it used to be, this was during the late 90s early 2000s.

Insert only 90s kids know meme.

Musk?

No, the loved one was actually the author, it’s a children’s book actually, light fiction, think early Harry Potter for example.

It’s a self-published hobby project, with a few dozen copies sold in the original language since there are relatively few speakers and light novels for kids are unfortunately a very small niche everywhere, and we didn’t really market it either since earning money wasn’t really the goal. The reason I’m mentioning that it was not professional work is that I’m not misrepresenting the amount of work done to someone paying me, and I’m actually interested in preserving the qualities of the original, I really don’t want to make more LLM slop, and I especially don’t want to make LLM slop out of something that has meaning to me personally. I’ve put at least a few hundred hours of manual work into it to make sure it isn’t.

But the idea is indeed to self-publish it and sell a few copies to people who are interested. It’s not about the income (the author actually has a regular job and is freelancing in 2 others, this is literally just a hobby), it’s more about the feeling of having made something that made other people interested enough to pay five bucks for it.

Responding to the other topic, one interesting thing about the translation that I’ve found out (and mistranslations from the LLM actually helped spark this idea), is if you can somehow convey the context to the reader, it can make it fresh and interesting and something they haven’t read before, and that’s true not just about idioms, but other cultural patterns as well.

Think how the world and themes of Witcher was something refreshing and new for most international audiences, while in its home country it was very recognizable where the author got his material from.

If an organization has to issue a correction that should be all they’re allowed to say for at least a 24 hour period (basically, put them in timeout).

When I was a kid and I lived in a flawed but mostly functional democracy, I remember that sometimes even the biggest TV channels would air a black screen with a single sentence for hours of primetime:

“We have falsely claimed that […]. The truth is that […]. As per law […], normal programming is on hiatus for 2 hours. Programming will resume at […].”

This is how it should work.

Russian marines and paratroopers

Apparently these are elite troops as well.

Yeah, I was just thinking “is KLM not working, or what”?

Rescue planes are usually for places where commercial air traffic has broken down and there is no safe way out of the country.

Your house, our choice

I thought this will be another housing crisis article.

Well, in most authoritarian countries they are also very well known to be bad around high windows, or liable to get lost for at least a few years after trying to go up against the ones with real power. When norms go out the window, shit gets real for everyone, not just us poors.

Just because your politics has managed to alienate young men the most, so they are the most likely to be voting for anything but establishment, does not mean military age men in general are “maldeveloped, entitled sex pests”. In fact, I would bet more military age men just didn’t vote than vote Trump, because they felt Harris doesn’t represent them, and not because she’s a woman. This is a wholly US culture war driven phenomenon. Fun fact, Orbán’s voters are majority female, most men vote for the opposition, especially among military age men.

Military age men historically have been the driving force behind the greatest examples of rapid societal progress. Military age men coming back from the hell of WWI have been the ones to destroy the divine right of kings and the feudal world order. Military age men fought in the revolutions against the authoritarian communist world.

Of course, a lot of governments did things to get rid of military aged men, but it was almost always because they were the primary threat to outmoded world views, not the ones to preserve it.

I mean, he explicitly wanted to turn it into an establishment vs. outsider election, and she went ahead and helped him! She wanted to win as “we are the establishment that made everything as it is” in a country with most people only agreeing on one single thing, the establishment being bad.

How stupid is that?

That’s a very good question.

• Yes, I have.
• It was not professional work but a private request from a loved one.
• It was actually their idea.
• And I was very, very sceptical about it at the idea at first and the output all throughout the process.

I have made extensive edits to the original LLM translation, as it got a lot of things wrong. To be honest, it got a lot of the stuff that is unique to the book and that made the book special wrong, both in words, or intent, and I had to correct it. My workflow was literally putting it in the prompt, taking the output, then putting the two texts next to each other and deciding, sentence by sentence, word by word:

• Is the translation any good? (around 95% was generally good, sometimes it trailed off, and I needed to find the point at which it started bullshitting)
• Does it use terms that are unique in the book consistently the right way (it almost never did, I literally had a dictionary of the most frequent mistakes)
• Could I have done it better? Do I know a way to better convey the intent? (this happened quite rarely, as it has done a near word-for-word translation, the biggest problems were idioms that made sense in one language but didn’t in another, or misgendered characters)

All in all, I think the LLM did the heavy lifting in remembering all the odd words and grammar, and it gave me a very flawed first draft. It was 80% of the time, but like 5% of the actual creative work that goes into a translation.

I spent 90% of my time outside the LLM, in my text editor.

So as a counterpoint to all the comments here, I absolutely see this working. I needed to translate a fairly long work of fiction, and an LLM made my work 10x as fast, since quite obviously my active vocabulary between the two languages differed.

It was much easier and faster to correct the LLM than to write the translation myself. Imagine this replacing workers not like 1 workplace becomes 1 LLM subscription, but more like 10 workplaces become 2 workplaces and an LLM subscription.