Every single person who can effect change and publicly opposes the cartel gets killed. Every single one. There is a list [0] of the ones killed in 2024 alone. Even outside of politics, you can't even really joke about the cartel while in Mexico, no matter who you are. They torture and kill entire families over nothing.
>I don't trust AI to translate anything accurately to are from a language outside of maybe Spanish and German.
But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
>Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work
Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
>But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
I often prefer fan level over professional level because they are targeting different audience. As far as quality goes, there is a range and sometimes I skip something because the quality is too low, but I see plenty that does a good enough job.
Part of it is that there is no such thing as a perfect translation because there isn't an exact equivalent in another language. For someone with no knowledge of the original culture or language, there is some translations that will probably work best, but the more one knows about the language and culture, even a small amount picked up just from consuming other items, the the more likely a different translation works better. For a definite concrete example, how should one handle honorifics like chan, san, and kun.
> Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
This isn’t correct from what I’ve studied in both Japanese and Mandarin.
> For example, Chinese verbs are not conjugated and only have one form, whereas Japanese verbs have a wide range of conjugations and particles.
Plus, Chinese is an SVO (Subject+Verb+Object) language just like English, so sentences are easier to make and interpret.
Vice versa, Japanese is an SOV (Subject+Object+Verb) language, meaning you do not say: "I eat sushi" but "I sushi eat".
You're absolutely right -- though, while Mandarin’s SVO structure does align with English in basic sentences, what’s interesting is how flexible word order and grammar in general can become in practice, thanks to its reliance on context and particles rather than rigid syntax. For example:
Mandarin often moves the object to the front for emphasis, creating an OSV or SOV structure (e.g., 寿司你吃, "Sushi, you eat" or 你寿司吃了吗 "You sushi eaten?"). This isn’t true SOV grammar but highlights how meaning shifts through word order in ways English can’t replicate without rephrasing.
The nuance in Mandarin often comes from particles that take on very different meanings depending on how they are used (e.g. 了, 的) and contextual cues rather than conjugation. For instance, 吃 "eat" becomes past tense with 了 (吃了), future with 会 (会吃), or continuous with 在 (在吃)—no verb changes needed. But if you say 要吃了, it actually means future tense of "will eat soon"!
Meanwhile, Japanese relies heavily on verb conjugations (食べる→食べた) and postpositional particles (は, を) to mark grammatical roles, in a way making its structure more rigid and easier to interpret. Personally I found Tae Kim's interpretation of "Japanese isn't SOV, it's actually V!" to be useful.
Both languages share subject-drop tendencies (like omitting "I" or "you" when contextually clear), and compound-word formation in both languages from the use of Chinese characters (kanji) adds another layer of contextual interpretation.
I think this isn't about subtle nuances but blatant errors that require full multimodal input to notice. Most MTLs(including LLMs) are done by divorcing text from content and processing it in CSV-like lists, and there's just not enough data in text by itself. This routinely lead to outputs doing something completely different from input.
Not in manga space, but Microsoft had been notorious for nonchalantly shipping crazy MTL errors for past 3-5 years, e.g. "Copilot Child Adoption Kit", "Reply in cost estimate", or "Print in scenery". For manga and entertainments, more likely modes of errors would be wildly fluctuating pronouns, genders, personas, formalities almost in styles of Monty Python satire.
These are less likely to manifest with language pairs that are closer together like English and German, and less likely with human translators who can trivially go through pages to read with full context and/or write with consistency.
>IMO it's the other way around – because OpenAI doesn't focus on any particular market, they'll be launching stuff that later will be easily reproduced by market leaders that have not only know-how, but they have the whole platform where the AI can be easily added.
this is under appreciated. I remember people declaring Perplexity.ai doomed when ChatGPT search came out. Yet Perplexity is doing better than ever, with a service that lets you search with any major LLM, even DeepSeek R1.
Aidan McLaughlin, who now works for OpenAI, wrote a nice essay about this:
It can be a totally different experience if you have a chronic illness that affects your schedule, or if you don't have a car. In my case it's been both. Currently, lack of reliable transportation and a driver's license is the main issue.
I've been struggling to even get an interview in junior software dev for over a year now. Tried some help desk as well and never heard back. I've had my resume looked at quite a few times now, so I doubt that that's the problem.
If you go to r/jobs and related subreddits, there are plenty of people who are losing their minds after applying to thousands of jobs for the last 2 years without even getting a prescreen. Some are even being rejected by temp agencies. I assume that this is an anomaly and 2023-24 had a uniquely terrible job market.
I had a long gap between employers where I lived off of saved money and explored new tech with a hope that I'd be able to improve my standing in the market. It made it nearly impossible to get anyone interested in my application because the gap was years.
Once I'd finally changed that by working a temp gig (having now achieved recent employment), I started getting calls. The job I took required visiting clients on-site from time to time. They didn't think to ask me if I had a car or license. When they found out (as I took a company-paid Uber 25m in my second month), I sensed that they realized they'd left a huge gap in their interview process. I was reassigned to only visit clients that I could get to via a combination of train and ride-share or short ride-share.
Had they asked about long-distance on-sites and my ability to get there myself, I'm confident I wouldn't have been hired.
How can I do it without capital, straight out of college, with only around 2 years of real-world experience and no network? Honest question.
The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.
From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.
Find a good local problem that you have connections with people who'd buy it.
Doesn't need to be a software, many small businesses start as sole proprietor working for himself and slowly growing the company by hiring help.
No cheap programmer would copy your "fixes-fences-in-Boston.com" idea. A lot of local services aren't sold properly on the internet, so if you combine the two you can get something out of your time and labour.
Also local bureaucrats love to "regulate" and automating local compliance is also a good niche. Now with all LLMs around the scope of what is possible has grown, thus the niches where it could be applied have grown too.
Don't drink the VC/YC combinator cool-aid, that you "go big or go home". It's better to own 100% of your comany, than 3% of a VC based startup most of the time. You see outliers like Facebook, Airbnb & etc... but as 37Signals has proved for the majority of startup founders the risk/reward ratio is skewed not in their favor.
There are many local problems that require local knowledge and serving local customers.
I have a friend with a business for California vehicle compliance reports. Some stupid paperwork that needs to be updated yearly when the rules change. It's super local and he has 10 employees supporting clients remote and on site. It grew very slowly but it's in 11th year now and revenue is not bad at all. Nothing to compete globally, knowledge is local, clients need local services.
What do you do for a living? That's my natural schedule too. Flexible dev jobs are not as common as I was led to believe, and this has affected my life deeply.
I found job to be an easy part - eventually, everyone got used to not expect to see me in the office before 10 AM. When I switched to remote work for a team in a different timezone, it got even easier (occasional flying in to the office get tricky, though).
It's the family bit that's hell, with a partner who lives on almost a perfect 06:00 - 22:00 schedule and can adjust that to waking earlier if needed, and now kids who also don't like to sleep past 07:00. I'm now stuck in a limbo of family forcing me to get up early, and all my body and mind and soul making me stay up late. A tug of war that's been going on for years now.
Every single person who can effect change and publicly opposes the cartel gets killed. Every single one. There is a list [0] of the ones killed in 2024 alone. Even outside of politics, you can't even really joke about the cartel while in Mexico, no matter who you are. They torture and kill entire families over nothing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_politicians_killed_dur...