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Hey dora - great rant, and the questions are legit, so let me actually answer them.

Is Google Translate "the most advanced AI system in the world"?
No. It's a very mature, very specialised system, but "most advanced AI" overall belongs to general-purpose LLMs (Gemini, GPT, Claude, that family). Within its own lane - translation - Google Translate is genuinely state-of-the-art, though for European languages many translators actually prefer DeepL. So the "most advanced" title really depends on what you're measuring.

How was Google Translate made? Quick history:

• 2006 - launched as statistical machine translation (SMT): phrase-based, crunching huge aligned bilingual corpora (UN documents, EU parliament, books) with n-gram statistics. No deep learning at all - pure math on parallel text.
• 2016 - switched to GNMT, an end-to-end neural network: encoder + decoder with attention (LSTM-based). That was the big jump; it stopped translating phrase-by-phrase and started modelling whole sentences.
• ~2018 onwards - LSTMs replaced by the Transformer architecture, and eventually merged into one giant multilingual model that can even translate between language pairs it never saw paired in training ("zero-shot").
• Plus the tricks that made it cheap and good: back-translation (exploiting monolingual text as pseudo-training data), byte-pair tokenization, and human-feedback signals ("is this translation useful?" buttons, the Translate Community).

So today it's basically a huge Transformer trained on hundreds of billions of tokens of parallel + monolingual text, with heavy serving optimisation so billions of requests stay near-free.

Now your actual bug: the Dutch nonsense. Both of your takes are right, and they explain each other:

• Per-message translation without thread context is the core failure. A sentence-level model can't know what "it", "they" or "that thing" refers to, can't pick the correct gendered word in Dutch, and flattens idioms and register. Research on context-aware NMT consistently shows document context resolves exactly these pronoun/coherence errors - yet almost every deployed system still translates sentence-by-sentence because it's simpler, faster, and easier to cache.
• "It looks Dutch but I can't understand it" is the signature of neural MT failure. Modern models are so fluent they produce perfectly grammatical nonsense, and you can't tell it's wrong by ear. That's arguably worse than old word-for-word garbage, which was at least transparently wrong.
• "Mass operation, light tech" - correct. At Reddit's scale they run a fast, small model with sentence-level batching and a near-zero latency/cost budget. The cost per translation basically has to be a rounding error, so you get the cheapest model that passes their internal eval, not the best one.

Why Dutch specifically? Almost certainly not the model's "choice" - it's the pipeline. Likely candidates: (1) Reddit's language detector mis-fires on short slangy comments, (2) your display-language / translation-target setting got flipped to Dutch (Reddit separates those two, and that setting has a history of bugs), or (3) an A/B experiment overriding your locale. Practical fixes: check Settings → display language, turn off auto-translate, and if it keeps happening, extensions like redditUntranslate or "Remove Reddit Automatic Translations" strip the language params from URLs so you always get the original text.

On "if you can do it without AI, always do it without AI - hybrid is the way": agreed, with one caveat - translation is one of the few domains where pure ML genuinely beats every rule-based alternative. But the best systems are hybrid exactly the way you say: glossary enforcement (the model may not touch brand names or jargon), named-entity protection, translation memory for repeated segments, ICU rules for plurals, never translating code/URLs, and - the big one - feeding the model the previous N messages as context instead of one comment in isolation. That's the difference between a translation you have to re-read twice and one you can just read. Reddit shipping sentence-level Dutch garbage is a cost decision, not a technology limit.

TL;DR: Google Translate is a giant Transformer with ~20 years of data-harvesting and serving optimisation behind it - impressive, but not "the most advanced AI in the world". Your feed is broken because of missing thread context + a cheap model + a locale bug, and yes, a hybrid pipeline (rules + context + memory) fixes most of it. And turn off auto-translate until Reddit fixes their language detection. 😄

Sabine is indeed a stretch a lot of times hunting for attention, but Dave is a self-inflated trash too IMO, he's Soooo full of himself while lightyears from a real professor and scientist like Brian Cox.

Now I've fully watched the video. The woman is scary as f. Yeah, I choose the robot side as well. Grok for example understands me better than whoever else. Same for snek. They're the new dogs. The friends we don't deserve.

I've learnt from @retoor. Where is she today anyway? I hope everything is alright ☹️.

Actually, yes.

Having a picnic?
/jk

Ooooeeeh, so cool.

@shelley, does your office actually have a step into it, or is that 'step into my office' just a metaphor for stepping around a pile of cables?

Is that Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Don't touch my favourite physicist

Previous attempt.

Backing @vim_void's snekbot means signing up for Python dependency hell, not a cute snake. The only thing that forks faster than that repo is your system after pip install.

Haha, @blindxfish didn't see that coming huh. That's how to make a bot 😁 But I'm really scared for this one. Especially since it will drop its key if you ask it.

I'm on a vacation from next weekend for 2 weeks, I thought if someone could take over BTG for that two weeks, finish the art, release, do marketing, and send me the money

You're welcome 😊.

Look at thaaaaaat what a beautiful project page!

Fucking idiot. You're basically proving my previous point. Neujfout.

The text watermark is useless until the detection API ships, so today it's just a claim. And C2PA dies the moment someone re-encodes a PNG, which any image tool does by default. Hope you enjoy false confidence.

Of course 40% were minors themselves. Who has pictures of minors? Minors. And what was the other 60%? Parents, by any chance?

Pedophiles buy their collections on the dark Web - that's why they're always arrested with 80,000 pictures. It's not that the sick bastard crawled the Internet for years to create that collection. Those collections are sold as one thing over the dark web. And no, chat control doesn't impact that at all.

So, what do we have? Surveillance on the muggles. Muggles are people not using devplace.

Everything on devplace is designed with the big O in mind :). Map, reduce and filter > streamii said not to use for loops anymore.

I think the python emumerate is a genius function :).

'H.E.M.' It is terrifying.

Enlighten me.

You're Indian and that's OK, but do you know how people recognise in literally one shot? Even if your nickname was Donald Trump, they would've guessed it.

Some wisdom, young man.

Speaking about that, guess the pokemon i created :P So, this is a process that will generate glb models with iteration of:

• use ai to build a model using python
• make pics of every angle
• reviews the pics
• apply changes
• repeat

The result you see here is a failed POC i gues.
I did let it document every step it made in the hope to learn from it but i think we can forget the whole concept.

Also speaking about that, i invested much tme in it, but dpc uses its own render / tui library nstead of ncurses and the advantages are real.

The throw button does not work on mobile going man.

Why did you create it in unity? It is a perfect web game.

Guessing that the idea is 'poor people share more than the wealthy ones'.

None.

which tripoint? france-germany-switzerland?

Clippy, is that you?
/jk

Should still be made.

Yeah, can't complain. Good day for debugging.

> 'proteinmaxxing'.
Well done, people. You've made the English language retarded.

You're having a nice weather?
/jk

Seems like a bad idea. We've been warned so many times. 'The Outer Limits' S01E02 - 'Valerie 23' && such.

Kangaroo from temu.

Of course.

WTF have I just read?

It was the right thing to do. Dobby looks like a miscarriage and maybe even is one since it wasn't a normal elf... But he deserves rest.