I live in a country where English is taught in school, as kids first foreign language. Most media gets translated - movies and series get translated and subtitled, with the original audio intact. Therefore I often experience the same media in both English and my native language.

I don't know much about actual romance novels, but the stereotype in media is that they would be full of double entendres, silly metaphors and puns.
Those are precisely the things that when they are translated badly -- it gets very noticeable. Especially puns and acronyms can not be translated directly, and the translator will often have to invent a new acronym or joke based on a skewed translation with carefully selected synonyms or other words that work in the context.
Sometimes there are cultural differences that colour the language that need to be taken into account.

Sometimes even the name of a character has to be changed altogether to make it work in the target language. For example the name "Lord Voldemort" in Harry Potter is anagram from an English sentence with another name, so that other name had to be changed: That is something that an "AI translation tool" would never understand that it would need to do.

I can not see how this would go well. Good translation takes effort.

A year ago I found that my pension fund used my money to invest in Microslop. That made me so angry, because it was obvious to pretty much everyone in the industry already then that the bubble is going to burst -- and then Microslop is going to be hit hard.

That Nadella is still under the delusion that his venture will succeed is mind-boggling.

Nicotine is legal only because of the large number of users it already has among the voters, not to mention among the politicians themselves.

Any politician trying to ban nicotine outright would see the end of their political career pretty swift

Meth is how the Nazi Germany was able to conduct their "Blitzkrieg" in Western Europe. When the drivers and soldiers did not feel fatigue or need to sleep they could go on all day and night, and the speed of their advance overwhelmed the enemy.

But as it took a toll, it could not go on forever. And the soldiers who showed signs of addiction were sent to concentration camps.

And I wonder about the amount of CO2 those rockets would emit.
Most rockets these days run on fossil fuels, massive amounts of fossil fuels.

One company in particular:

Funding AI companies, 1) whose demand for GPUs, SSDs and RAM drives up prices of computer hardware during a recession, so people can't upgrade, 2) which don't respect copyright.

And while at the same time asking people to upgrade their computers only so they can run a new version of your OS with new DRM (to enforce copyright) and with supposed AI features that nobody wants.

AI has been in games, since games have been around. Find the path algorithms, procedural generation, tuning encounter difficulty.

There are different things that have been called "AI" throughout the years.
In computing's early days, pretty much all interesting algorithms used to deduce or infer something fell under the "AI" umbrella.
All algorithms that control non-player characters in games have been called AI, regardless of what their origin is.
Procedural generation in games is most of the time just based on fractals from random seeds.

The type of"AI" that is hyped up today is different. It is based inserting a lot of data into it to "train" it.
The process has been likened to data compression, or higher-order statistics.

"Program an AI Agent to craft tools and build shelter before dusk falls in this iconic challenge!".

It's right there. Important skills for the future that the AI can teach you. /s

I read last night that some airlines had already finished their software updates yesterday and are flying today as normal.
This will be over soon, but of course it is not fun for those who had their flights right in the middle of it.

Meanwhile Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being "AI free". (non-paywalled link)

(BTW. "Sweeney" sounds like the Swedish word "Svinig", which means: disgusting, pig-like, often used to refer to someone's behaviour rather than their appearance.)

There are however some carbon dioxide-producing industrial processes which are difficult or impossible to replace with carbon-neutral alternatives.
For those specifically, you could install a carbon capture device in the flue.

And then you have to store that somewhere, only for it to seep out slowly. But it will seep out.

Installing carbon capture devices in oil, coal and gas-burning power plants is contemptible and ineffective, and will only prolong the problem.
And ... anyone who tends the proposition that you could capture carbon from thin air should be locked up in an insane-asylum.

How about: trying to get your money when you are the seller, nobody did anything wrong and nobody complained. I have heard plenty of stories throughout the years of artisans selling sculpts, casts and machined items to tens of other hobbyists and getting their accounts suddenly locked because they had too many sales in too short time.

In the country I live, they enabled a mandatory 2FA system without testing that it worked. It had interpreted the country code in my phone number as an area code, so I could not log in.
And you could not contact support unless you were logged in.
There was a phone line, but nobody was there to man it for over a year. When eventually I got through to someone, it was a new hire: a young girl who had only ever used cell phones and did not know what an area code was, so I had to explain it to her.

Also: Bitcoin.

Every time any action of mine has led to Google doing any AI "computation" has been unintentional. I never asked for it. Google just chose to bundle it with my search.

I usually use an address bar keyword that uses an URL with &udm=14 to avoid this, but sometimes I slip up.
And I've also noticed that Google have added an AI summary to image search has well... I never asked for a textual description of an image, that contains factual errors or pure guesses half of the time: I have my own eyes, and I'm not blind. And I can make uneducated guesses myself.

The catastrophe begins already at 2.0 degrees C.

That's when our food supply is going to start break down.

In my view, religion has often been used as a convenient excuse for committing atrocities when it has served the perpetrator's purposes. But those purposes have not stemmed from religious core itself.

For example, the crusaders raped and plundered their way to Jerusalem, paying little heed to which religion their affected had, including the sacking of Constantinople (which was Christian) in 1204.

North American slavers found entitlement to own slaves from some Bible text wherein some important figure had had a servant with dark curly hair.