I have worked with game designers, have been a translator, and am a developer. I have been a professional translator and had a friend who only did game translation. Yes I know designers hate AI and I understand it. I translated patents, corporate docs, scientific papers, manga, etc. Translation business has probably gone poof by now due to AI. But.. manga translation is actually really hard. Not only did the margins shrink to impossible due to lack of interest / budget for quality, it is also like translating film subtitles and sometimes even required historical research.

These days, I use Claude to check my Japanese before sending and sometimes to figure out obtuse emails sometimes. My written Japanese has improved. Claude is really good but I wouldn't use it for a final production film subtitle, game, or manga. For this purpose though, it would be amazingly fantastic as the sheer volume and the purpose of research means nobody overseas would be able to ever grasp a fraction of it or translate it all manually. As noted in the Ars Technica article: “Famitsu alone is over 1,900 issues, each with [a hundred-plus] pages,” journalist and author Felipe Pepe noted. “That’s one magazine from one country. [Human translation] would be ideal, but it’s impossible.”

I skimmed the GPL'd code, after 1500 lines got tired and got Claude to quickly scan it. It sounds like a really cool scanned document viewer with side translation viewer, but is not a translator at all. The guy in TFA apparently used some of the project's funds for translation of the scanned magazines which he mentioned were like $1 per issue which honestly, it is like 1000x cheaper than a human. No human could ever do it unless it was their lifelong hobby maybe. But, there must have been a lot of issues so I guess he racked up some charges and AI haters gunned him down, apparently.

If you really were learning Japanese (like I did long ago) you might try all kinds of scanning, OCR, online and offline dictionaries, and still not understand everything due to made-up fantasy words. You might have to corral some Japanese gamers to answer questions you cannot figure out. So this is not as good as having a Japanese otaku next to you but still pretty great and you could improve the translations too, couldn't you?

It looks like Nichols who hates anything AI deleted his post, and the person who spent tokens to translate is paying back to the project with his own money. And he made a GPL'd viewer which sounds nice. So it sounds like in the end, we have butt-hurt and afraid people, one honestly kind-hearted guy, some new OSS software, a free archive at archive.org, and a lot of translations this guy paid for. Hopefully other people might contribute translations either automated or not, so that people do not *at home* each pay for tokens to just translate their own copies of magazines that could have been just translated once and posted on the archive. I have no idea about copyright though I think one was from 1992. Nobody mentioned anything about that and if it is for historical research it sounds like fair use..

Okay enough searching.. way to get us excited. Apparently it is not done yet or at least no photos are shown of the finished building just a crane outside (off a LInkedIn page) and something being set up in the DC Hall (on the Astoria progress site) which is otherwise empty. The Interconnect site shows a cool photo of the European project so I guess we can imagine, it looks like a big substation..

Okay maybe they are talking about the DC Converter Hall mentioned on
https://chpexpress.com/ ? Seriously Google gemini overview is giving more interesting info. ..

The DC Hall is a key component of the Main Converter Building at the TDI CHPExpress Astoria HVDC Converter Station. Part of the 31-45 20th Avenue facility in Queens, it houses equipment for converting high-voltage direct current (HVDC) to high-voltage alternating current (HVAC). The station, including the DC Hall, is designed with GridLink Interconnector HVDC technology to efficiently transfer power.

TDI CHPExpress doc https://chpexpress.com/wp-cont...
GridLink https://gridlinkinterconnector...
note this site shows UK and France hall schematics

Function: The DC Hall, often part of the larger Valve Hall/Reactor Hall complex, is essential for the conversion process.
Location: Located within the Astoria Converter Station, a 2-story building (69 feet high) in TDI CHPExpress Queens.
Project Context: The station is part of the TDI CHPExpress Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) project, designed to convert renewable energy for NYC.
Status: The converter station is in the final stages of construction, with installation of high-voltage equipment underway as of early 2026.
Design: The structure is part of an TDI CHPExpress Electrical Generation (Occupancy Group F-1) facility.
Technology: Uses YouTube Voltage Source Converter (VSC) technology provided by Hitachi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The www.northsea-link.com converter station is crucial for connecting the 525 kV DC transmission lines from Quebec to the New York ISO grid.

Cantaloups, Dinosaurs, small humpback whales, Star Wars.. even the guy running it (who is that guy anyway?) says it is "mind boggling". This is a site for nerds. Is there a non-paywalled place to see this amazing room they are talking about? That's all I want to see! And how about using metric units for things? It's a thing! I am really worried that things being impossible to understand, mind boggling and far beyond human capabilities, is even a thing these days. Also for people running CUDA they might like to know if rates will drop toward what Canadians pay, ever.

I would certainly welcome a national fund (could even be multinational and accept donations) for an open weight AI with full ecosystem even including hosting, that is fully open source and available for local LLM use as well. Not a Canadian but just by building it, could benefit from network effects.Including info about the training set, training methods and system prompts and allowing it to be configured freely could usher in a eave if experimentation and support the growth of centers of excellence, and a Canadian respect for ethics and personal information protection while operating with an open and welcoming attitude would be a very nice way to express Canadian values while supporting side projects that leverage it for industry and academia.

...is why can't Apple make a full keyboard, or even just a wider keyboard, instead of jamming a small keyboard into a much wider case? M2 Max MBP user here, the world key is really hard to reach so had to remap caps lock to it. It feels like keyboards are not big enough if you have slightly longer fingers. Certainly prefer Keychron type MX keys for a lot of reasons too. As for TFA, I prefer words, though the first syllable or two is okay too. A lot of people don't understand the control, option, command and caps lock symbols, same with hamburger buttons. I think the Return/Enter and Shift symbols are probably well known but there are new computer users joining every year. Having to remember a symbol when it is easy to print the word that is already sounding in your head like "control-c" to copy, if anyone needs to think "okay where is the control key???" then it is bad design. I would add I miss my Japanese keyboard.. sure brackets are in good places on this one but jeez. And language switching has a delay using the world button too what a pain.

Disappointed no 256gb or 512gb Ram but have planned to buy it though actually my m2max is pretty sweet already
Not sure if/when ram prices will spike it. Will wait for stabilization, Tahoe fixes, tests and also to get the most out of my current machine which I am not yet doing.. really wanted an M5 Ultra MBP is that ever going to happen?

I really don't want my info going to Google, they already have way too much. And I use Claude, so if anything let me choose who to use.

First I love the magsafe on my MBP. But I am deathly afraid the (useless!) magnet in my kindle's cork cover could randomly fry anything with a magnetic stripe on it. ..Okay I proactively asked google search's gemini.

Apparently modern credit cards use high coercivity stripes and are safe. And magsafe card wallets shield them, the good ones at least. But gemini says:

The Real Risks
While your bank cards are likely safe, some items can be damaged:
Hotel Key Cards & Transit Passes: These often use "Low Coercivity" (LoCo) stripes, which are easily erased by a phone's magnets if they are in the same pocket.
Wireless Charging "Sandwich": Never place a credit card between your phone and a MagSafe charger while it is active. The electromagnetic field generated during the charging process is far more intense than the static magnets and can damage the magnetic stripe or RFID chips.
Practical Tip: If you frequently use magnetic swipe-only cards (like some gym memberships or older transit passes), keep them in a separate pocket from your phone.

At first I thought, does she still have a job? Now it looks to me like a cynically engineered PR stunt. Thing is, I want to feel bad for this clueless noob who has torpedoed her name.. unless she got paid the big bucks to do it and is not actually a security researcher. Who care about their trustworthiness and reputation. A lot of AI security research seems to involve engineered stunts ("It should go nuts" -> "It went nuts!"). I thought it was vendors mostly virtue signaling like science by PR. We'll know if we see more news of AI scares from Meta I guess. /

Thanks. So M5 Ultra MBP in November? I would buy it in May or June if they have it. The big question is, will Apple's theoretical RAM price lock-in last until end of the year. OLED and touch (does it open all the way?) would surely be nice to have but for me memory, bandwidth and thermals would be the main draws.

I hated to do it but had to be said. Claw wants a body. Give him a claw thing!
The end (of the world)
This is why we can't have nice things. Just claw things.. :/

Not an expert in this area. But apparently it is a thing. Funnily enough the feature they are worried about is actually a security attack... ha ha. Welp, this cat is out of the bag unfortunately, so now just the criminals will have it.
1. Foice - Generate voice based on an image as an attack on voiceprint systems
https://www.usenix.org/system/...
2. Speech2Face - the reverse process. https://speech2face.github.io/
3. Predict physical attributes from voice with ML
https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Dave was very supportive as the Internet began to grow in Japan in the 90s and a positive influence for many. He traveled here often and was greatly respected.

I am an AI developer but... yeah this doesn't sound bad /s
1. Invest in AI
2. Train AI on all the content
3. Block the content / Chatbot hell
4. Profit