What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

From back when I used to flip through a thick dictionary, taking a minute for each sentence, to now, when I use an LLM to write in English, people don't realize that I'm personally speaking to them in English for their sake. Honestly, I just want to speak in Korean. I hate English.

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I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@GargronEugen Rochko argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@GargronEugen Rochko notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @GargronEugen Rochko describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

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I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@GargronEugen Rochko argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@GargronEugen Rochko notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @GargronEugen Rochko describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

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Mein persönlicher Highlight ist, wenn Leute empfehlen, statt Lösungen von der Politik zu fordern, sich doch selbst um die Energiewende zu kümmern, in dem mensch das Häuschen besser dämmt, auf Wärmepumpe umstellt, Solaranlage drauf tut...

53% der deutschen Bevölkerung lebt zur Miete.

Leichter Widerspruch, ne? Aber über den eigenen Tellerrand zu denken wäre ja zu viel erwartet.

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【BUILT-IN PRO 電器專門店特約】社交平台X用戶Samuel McCrae近日分享一段惡作劇經歷,引起網民熱議。他稱因一直懷疑妹妹養金魚只是一時興起,於是趁對方不留意時,悄悄將魚缸內兩條金魚撈走,再放入兩條顏色及外形相近的紅蘿蔔條,測試妹妹是否真的有用心照顧寵物。

Samuel表示,紅蘿蔔放進魚缸後雖然顏色與金魚相似,但畢竟不會游動,只能一直沉在缸底。他原以為妹妹很快便會發現異樣,沒想到過了3天,對方仍毫無察覺,照常生活。

事件曝光後,不少網民要求Samuel交代後續。他其後再更新近況,指到第4天時,妹妹依然未發現魚缸內的「金魚」其實只是兩條沉底紅蘿蔔,表現自然得令人意外。

帖文隨即引來大批網民討論。有人認為兄妹互動荒謬又好笑,但亦有不少人批評妹妹對寵物過於疏忽,質疑她根本無心照顧金魚。有網民直言,連續數天都未察覺魚隻毫無動靜,反映她並不適合養寵物;亦有人關注原有兩條金魚的情況,擔心牠們被當成惡作劇工具。

面對外界批評,Samuel其後上載照片回應,表示兩條金魚目前安全無恙,並已為牠們換上更大的魚缸,提供較以往更寬敞的生活環境,希望平息外界質疑。

May be an image of ‎centipede, worm, isopod, reptile, guppy and ‎text that says '‎KN 哥哥偷走金魚換紅蘿蔔 妹妹4日未黎覺 望 網民轟無心養寵物 03.01 03.01-03.3 03.31 九龍灣 MegaBox 6樓3號舗 SAMSUNG BUILT-IN SAMSUNGBUILT-INPRO PRO 智能 智能「視・ 智能「視·活」體驗館 「視 活」 體驗館 ר Neo QLED NeoQLED8K 8K 低至 6折 折‎'‎‎
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Software Engineer's Never-Ending Backlog란 레포를 만들었다. 이름은 AI 벤치마크 [Humanity's Last Exam의 패러디이다. 자꾸 입개발만 하고 실제로 문제를 해결하는데 노력을 안하게 되어서 스스로에게 동기부여를 하고자 만들었다.

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