I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit.
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Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.
Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!
Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?
YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s
Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!
I'm convinced the people who decide on features for YouTube don't use it. Auto-dubbing sounds like it could be great... until you click on a video with it applied.
> Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile.
"Ambient Mode" too. It's a big waste of resources. It won't hurt your ears, but it eats up battery for no reason.
I've just installed this extension, and confirmed that -- at least for now -- it works. The translated titles will be flashed first, then replaced by the original titles.
My configured primary language is English, but I regularly watch contents in Chinese and Japanese, where I have sufficient mastery over to not need YouTube's subpar translation. YouTube's insistence in displaying video titles in English, starting a few months ago, and now also auto-dubbing in English, is incredibly annoying.
Similar thing for me with Spanish and English. I consume both basically equally. I don't need audio or text translations for either, but Google insists on translating the english titles to Spanish completely ruining the entire meaning of what it is. Strangely I often get things in Portuguese for some reason even though I've never set a device to Portuguese, I just happen to have been to Brazil and Portugal.
I wish I could just say please never translate either of these languages, and while some apps have this many are very hostile.
I also have a weird setup where all my personal devices are in Spanish but my work devices and accounts are in English. It causes a strange mixup where I never really know what language I'm going to be served but its wrong more often than not.
> I'm curious if anyone has noticed a significant taste difference between Japonica rice and those imported from China, Korea, or Vietnam.
Yes, but it's like somewhere between mineral water and coffee. That is, most can tell the difference when directly compared, and may even prefer one over the other, but in many cases they are interchangeable.
> Is one generally considered better tasting than the others?
IMHO, no, but you tend to prefer the type you eat most often. Going back to the coffee analogy, most people have a roast / style they prefer, but few would claim that it's better.
Isn't that likely to be the other way around? You tend to eat most often that which you prefer?
Granted familiarity itself can play a role when considering something unfamiliar. But when it comes to both rice and coffee I purchase what I do because I significantly preferred it to the variants I tried before it.
I don't think so, because there are too many things, but not enough time in life to find out your true preferences for them all, so we all are (to varying degree of) indifferent to most things, and focus on only a few things we truly care about. For you, it's coffee and rice; for others, it may be monitor latency and keyboard switches.
I'd used coffee as an analogy, because it's something that almost everyone drinks, has many varieties, but most generally aren't too picky about it. Alas, I'd underestimated the population overlap between HN readers and picky coffee drinkers. :-P
I'll agree people exhibit varying degrees of indifference to things. But where I exhibit clear preferences it seems to me it's because I took genuine issue with whatever I tried before that.
That said, someone out there is purchasing the $1k gold audio cables and similar items. So I'll acknowledge that not all people fit that description.
Very interesting article, but this stood out to me:
> To re-familiarize myself with this bug [...] I downloaded the broken version [...] and tried it out in some virtual machines. Windows 2000 and XP ran it without any trouble on the first try, but Vista and 7 didn’t [...]
Amazing. Emulating an older system in order to debug emulating an even older system. The amount of compute / memory / storage readily available at our fingertips today is astounding. My first computer was a 68k Mac, and back then, I would never imagine such scenarios would be possible!
> Lets turn this around. Why would you ever want non-reproducible builds?
It's not about wanting non-reproducible builds, but what am I sacrificing to achieve reproducible builds. Debian's reproducible build efforts have been going for ten years, and it's still not yet complete. Arguably Debian could have diverted ten years of engineering resources elsewhere. There's no end to the list of worthwhile projects to tackle, and clearly Debian believes that reproducible builds is high priority, but reasonable people can disagree on that.
This not to say reproducible builds are not worth doing, just that depending on your project / org lifecycle and available resources (plus a lot of subjective judgement), you may want to do something else first.
Debian didn't "divert engineering resources" to this project. People, some of whom happen to be Debian developers, decided to work on it for their own reasons. If the Reproducible Builds effort didn't exist, it doesn't mean they would have spent more time working on other areas of Debian. Maybe even less, because the RB effort was an opportunity to find and fix other bugs.
Yes, the system is not closed and certainly people may simply not contribute to Debian at all. However, my main point is that reasonable people disagree on the relative importance of RR among other things, so it's not about "want[ing] non-reproducible builds" even if one has unlimited resources, but rather wanting RR, but not at the expense of X, where X differs from person to person.
"It's possible to disagree on whether a feature is worth doing" is technically true, but why is it worth discussing time spent by volunteers on something already done? People do all sorts of things in their free time; what's the opportunity cost there?
Just like the blog author, I updated two Macs, and one got the setup wizard and thus AI got re-enabled, while the other did not. Maybe it's a bug, or maybe it's A/B testing... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I opened an account with Yotta before they pivoted more heavily into the gambling aspects, because I wanted them to succeed and bring prize-linked savings account[0] into the mainstream. But I also wasn't born yesterday, so I'd only deposited money that I could afford to lose.
And lose I did: they were only able to recover less than a dollar. I'm not even going to bother claiming it.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ki...
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