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Article views: 20,065 In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back—boxing and the pompously named “body sculpt,” which makes me discover muscles I didn’t know I had. It’s fun. I love it. But a couple of weeks ago, I ended up cancelling my second class—one of those nights when the first assignment landed in my inbox at 4 p.m., another one arrived while I was on my way to the gym, and a third one popped up right as I was standing in the locker room. All due the following morning, obviously. Welcome to the life of a freelance translator. Work takes priority over muscles. I headed for the lockers at the end of boxing class. “Are you leaving? You’re always taking this class!” I turned around. I was changing into my translator clothes—jeans and a T-shirt—and she was presumably changing into her gym clothes, except first, she was busy taking off her jewelry. Her look was very polished—the kind of polished that screams office day. Over the past few months, the generous pandemic work-from-home policy had been tightened, scaled back, amended and more or less rescinded in a desperate attempt to have employees single-handedly save downtown Ottawa’s many small businesses and general gloom by their mere on-site hot-desking presence. If you ask me, nothing can save downtown Ottawa or North American public transit. “I see you there every week!” Apparently, I owed her an explanation and possibly an apology. I didn’t remember her, but it’s a very full class and we all more or less look the same in gym clothes. “I’ve just received some work,” I explained. “I’m a translator and I have three deadlines by tomorrow morning, so I should probably get started.” “But… it won’t take long. Don’t you just upload the documents to ChatGPT?” I paused for a split second. Surely, she was joking. I looked up at her. She was not. “It… doesn’t exactly work like that.” “You should try it, it’s so much quicker!” Oh. My. Fucking. God. But hey, I parent a teen. I can recognize a teachable moment when I see one. “It’s not that easy, you know. Technically, ChatGPT will spit out a translated document. But first, there may be formatting issues. And most importantly, the translation will be questionable.” “Why?” “Because AI isn’t human, and it takes an actual person to understand what another human is trying to say—and how to say it so someone else understands it. I don’t just make grammatically correct sentences in another language. I adapt, I localize, and I find the best way to convey the original message so it makes sense and feels natural. I research terminology. I make sure it’s consistent throughout. I’m sorry, I’m better than AI.” We’re all better than AI. AI is just better at pretending it can do the job. Go ahead, ask me how I know. Yes, obviously, I tried translating with AI. Ah, you can’t fire me, I’m self-employed! I’ve been playing with AI since the fall, when it started stealing my job for real. I could either declare it evil and turn into one of those people who will never get a smartphone, or use it to my advantage. I’m practical. I chose the second option. AI can’t translate for me. It can’t write either—unfortunately, ChatGPT can’t vouch for the fact that this article is my idea, that it’s my gym, my ignorant civil servant and my punchline. Just take my word for it, pun slightly intended. And while this article is written by yours truly, you bet I’m going to spell-check it. I probably won’t use AI; I have Antidote. But maybe I will ask Claude’s opinion, and if one of the suggestions is smart—cutting a paragraph, for instance, or clarifying a sentence—I might accept it. When I started translating 15 years ago, we used to paste uncooperative sentences into Google Translate to see if it had interesting ways to phrase things differently. Then came DeepL—same idea. What do you think? That we’re translating with pen and pencil? That your accountant doesn’t use fancy Excel formulas? That your manager formatted the PowerPoint alone? That your favourite restaurant doesn’t Google trendy recipes? We are professionals using tools. But that’s just what they are—tools. One of my clients has insane style guides, plural. I’m talking about 500-page documents detailing the proper way to format quotes and the one true way to insert footnotes. I fed them to ChatGPT for the final checks—it can kind of flag when I break a rule. I’ve also used AI to extract specialized terminology from reference documents and build my own glossaries. It’s faster than Ctrl+F, and less likely to make me scream. But everything has to be double-checked, triple-checked. It’s another way of working, not a magic button. AI isn’t replacing me. Like a toddler, it needs to be constantly coached. It invents acronyms and organization names, forgets to translate entire sentences, ignores the provided terminology unless repeatedly threatened, and occasionally misses the point completely. Which is why we—translators, writers, editors, and other professionals—shouldn’t suddenly be paid less because AI exists. Should you pay your roofer less because he uses a hammer instead of his bare hands? But judging by her amused smile, my civil servant wasn’t getting the point. “But AI is getting better all the time!” “What do you do?” I asked, changing tack. “I’m the Director General, Human Resources and Corporate Services, but I’m currently in an acting position for Workforce Planning and Resources Management.” This actually made sense to my Ottawa brain. Told you, I’m a translator. “Great. So, do you use AI a lot at work?” “Oh, I can’t! It’s really not reliable enough.” For fuck’s sake. And she works in human resources! Please leave this field empty #### **♥ Curiosity makes for good stories.** Stories from the road and beyond. Thank you for subscribing. I'll send new stories your way whenever they're published. Making a Living Meanwhile... in Ottawa Share this article FacebookWhatsAppEmailXRedditLinkedIn

Attached: 1 image rafiki42.bsky.social 🦋💬 https://bsky.app/profile/unknown: #odemčeno https://respekt.cz/zahranici/mit-deti-musi-byt-zase-cool-politicky-tlak-nikoho-rodit-nedonuti Je spousta lidí, co obhajuje, že děti nemají a odvádějí přece do systému dost a nevidí důvod zvýhodnění (nebo znevýhodnění na druhou stranu) v odvodech. Ale odskáčou to naše děti ☹️ https://bsky.app/profile/rafiki42.bsky.social/post/3mifydjs7pk2f

_Turing Award winner and former Oxford professorTony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGOL, Hoare logic and so much more. Jim Miles gives his personal reflections._ --- Jill Hoare, Tony Hoare, Jim Miles. Cambridge, 7 September 2021 Last Thursday (5th March 2026), Tony Hoare passed away, at the age of 92. He made many important contributions to Computer Science, which go well beyond just the one for which most Maths/CompSci undergraduates might know his name: the quicksort algorithm. His achievements in the field are covered comprehensively across easy-to-find books and articles, and I am sure will be addressed in detail as obituaries are published over the coming weeks. I was invited in this entry to remember the Tony that I knew, so here I will be writing about his personality from the occasions that I met him. I visited Tony Hoare several times in the past 5 years, as we both live in Cambridge (UK) and it turned out that my family knew his. As a Mathematics graduate, I was very keen to meet and learn about his life from the great man himself. I was further prompted by a post on this blog which mentioned Tony a few times and summarised a relevant portion of his work. I took a print out of that entry the first time I visited him to help break the ice - it is the green sheet of paper in the picture above. Tony read the entry and smiled, clearly recalling very well the material of his that it referenced, and then elaborating a bit, explaining how vastly programs had scaled up in a rather short space of time and how they typically require different methods than many of those he had been developing in the early days. I was aware that Tony had studied Classics and Philosophy at university so I was keen to learn how one thing had led to another in the development of his career. He explained that after completing his degree he had been intensively trained in Russian on the Joint Services School for Linguists programme and was also personally very interested in statistics as well as the emerging and exciting world of computers. This meant that after his National Service (which was essentially the JSSL) he took on a job 'demonstrating' a type of early computer, in particular globally, and especially in the Soviet Union. He described the place of these demonstrations as 'fairs' but I suppose we might now call them 'expos'. In a sense, this seemed like a very modest description of his job, when in fact - reading up on Tony's career - he was also involved in the development of code for these devices, but perhaps that's a historical quirk of the period: being a demonstrator of these machines meant really knowing them inside and out to the point of acting on the dev team (AND, one might deduce, being fluent in Russian!). Tony would tell these stories with a clarity and warmth that made it clear that certainly he was still entirely 'all there' mentally, and that his memory was pinpoint sharp, even if there were some physical health issues, typical for anyone who makes it so far into their 80s (and, as we now know, beyond!). A story that I was determined to hear from the source was the legendary quicksort 'wager'. The story goes that Tony told his boss at Elliott Brothers Ltd that he knew a faster sorting algorithm than the one that he had just implemented for the company. He was told 'I bet you sixpence you don't!'. Lo and behold, quicksort WAS faster. I asked Tony to tell this story pretty much every time we met, because I enjoyed it so much and it always put a smile on both of our faces. To his credit, Tony never tired of telling me this story 'right from the top'. I had hoped to visit again in the past year and record him telling it so that there was a record, but unfortunately this did not happen. However, I discover that it is indeed recorded elsewhere. One detail I might be able to add is that I asked Tony if indeed the wager was paid out or if it had merely been a figure of speech. He confirmed that indeed he WAS paid the wager (!). A detail of this story that I find particularly reflective of Tony's humble personality is that he went ahead and implemented the slower algorithm he was asked to, while he believed quicksort to be faster, and before chiming in with this belief. It speaks to a professionalism that Tony always carried. About 50% of our meetings were spent talking about these matters relating to his career, while the rest varied across a vast range of topics. In particular, I wanted to ask him about a story that I had heard from a relative, that Tony - whilst working at Microsoft in Cambridge - would like to slip out some afternoons and watch films at the local Arts Picturehouse. This had come about because on one occasion a current film in question was brought up in conversation and it transpired Tony had seen it, much to the bemusement of some present. The jig was up - Tony admitted that, yes, sometimes he would nip out on an afternoon and visit the cinema. When I met Tony and gently questioned him on this anecdote he confirmed that indeed this was one of his pleasures and his position at Microsoft more than accommodated it. On the topic of films, I wanted to follow up with Tony a quote that I have seen online attributed to him about Hollywood portrayal of geniuses, often especially in relation to Good Will Hunting. A typical example is: "Hollywood's idea of genius is Good Will Hunting: someone who can solve any problem instantly. In reality, geniuses struggle with a single problem for years". Tony agreed with the idea that cinema often misrepresents how ability in abstract fields such as mathematics is learned over countless hours of thought, rather than - as the movies like to make out - imparted, unexplained, to people of 'genius'. However, he was unsure where exactly he had said this or how/why it had gotten onto the internet, and he agreed that online quotes on the subject, attributed to him, may well be erroneous. One final note I would like to share from these meetings with Tony is perhaps the most intriguing of what he said, but also the one he delivered with the greatest outright confidence. In a discussion about the developments of computers in the future - whether we are reaching limits of Moore's Law, whether Quantum Computers will be required to reinvigorate progress, and other rather shallow and obvious hardware talking points raised by me in an effort to spark Tony's interest - he said 'Well, of course, nothing we have even comes close to what the government has access to. They will always be years ahead of what you can imagine'. When pressed on this, in particular whether he believed such technology to be on the scale of solving the large prime factorisation that the world's cryptographic protocols are based on, he was cagey and shrugged enigmatically. One wonders what he had seen, or perhaps he was engaging in a bit of knowing trolling; Tony had a fantastic sense of humour and was certainly capable of leading me down the garden path with irony and satire before I realised a joke was being made. I will greatly miss this humour, patience, and sharpness of mind, as I miss everything else about Tony. RIP Tony Hoare (11 January 1934 - 5 March 2026)

Notepad hijacked by state-sponsored actors (notepad-plus-plus.org) 09:59  ↑ 182 HN Points

Elasto Mania is a cult classic indie motorbike simulation series, a colorful 2D racing experience, a retro game of balance, skill and style. Now on Steam.

A lively discussion about open source, security, and who pays the bills has erupted on Twitter.

The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe (techtrenches.substack.com) 10-09  ↑ 163 HN Points

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