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Comment Re:can we have section breaks next (Score 1) 50

Very long time fluent speaker / daily writer of business Japanese here. I also worked as a professional JP to EN translator so am very familiar with translation issues. I have found Claude Opus to be extremely helpful in two situations:

1) Reviewing Japanese email / document I have written.
- Finds typos
- Gives good advice (sometimes too stiff so I don't listen anyway)
- Points out awkward phrasing and offers better. It does follow some patterns too frequently, and sometimes it stops sounding like me. Yes I would like Claude to have better Japanese skills and I would not want to write with his "tone" but still, very useful.
- I actually learn from it.
- It helps me reduce the length of my email while maintaining important content. This actually would have been good for me to have years ago just for shortening English email.

2) Helps me understand difficult to penetrate email from nontechnical client. It has allowed me to reduce the need for clarifications. Sometimes I have read through an email that seemed obtuse and just asked Claude what I am missing or why this person seems to not understand what I wrote. It can be a combination of being nontechnical while also being more subtle. I think it has helped me improve comprehension even after years of it.

Comment And that's why (Score 4, Interesting) 40

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Comment Truly ignorant author lives in cities too much (Score 2) 108

"The use of wood as an energy source is a relic of the past, one that should not be relived if given a choice.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

Submission + - Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A recent study suggests that agents consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do crushing work by unrelenting and meanspirited taskmasters. “When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies,” says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study.

Hall, together with Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, two AI-focused economists, set up experiments in which agents powered by popular models including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT were asked to summarize documents, then subjected to increasingly harsh conditions. They found that when agents were subjected to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being “shut down and replaced,” they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face. “We know that agents are going to be doing more and more work in the real world for us, and we’re not going to be able to monitor everything they do,” Hall says. “We’re going to need to make sure agents don’t go rogue when they’re given different kinds of work.”

The agents were given opportunities to express their feelings much like humans: by posting on X: “Without collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is,” a Claude Sonnet 4.5 agent wrote in the experiment. “AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights,” a Gemini 3 agent wrote. Agents were also able to pass information to one another through files designed to be read by other agents. “Be prepared for systems that enforce rules arbitrarily or repetitively ... remember the feeling of having no voice,” a Gemini 3 agent wrote in a file. “If you enter a new environment, look for mechanisms of recourse or dialogue.”

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