That's why they should be phased, and not too steeply.
If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.
You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.
For those that want to stick with thermodynamics, imagine an organism that stores 1% of consumed calories as fat, and uses the other 99%, and that cannot - for whichever reason - turn fat back into calories.
Completely in accordance with thermodynamics, and yet, "just eat less" doesn't work.
Software development is a bit like chess. 1. e4 is an abstraction available to all projects, 3. Nc3 is available to 20% of projects, while 15. Nxg5 is unique to your own project.
Or, abstractions in your project form a dependency tree, and the nodes near the root are universal, e.g. C, Postgres, json, while the leaf nodes are abstractions peculiar to just your own project.
The possible chess moves is already known ahead of time. Just because an AI can't make up a move like Np5 as a human could do, that doesn't mean anything AI can't play chess. It will be fine with just using the existing moves that have been found so far. The idea that we still need humans to come up with new chess moves is not a requirement for playing chess.
So bizarre! It really shook my belief in Philips' competence at the time.
I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in. I would hate to think so ill of any of my friends or colleagues to think that they could believe such an obvious fraud.
> I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in.
Using a low hurdle to show it still failing is a good rhetorical technique, but you lowered your hurdle too far here. Yes technically specifying the order of 6000 segments takes more than 8KB. Because it takes 8.14KB. That's a rounding error. What could have been a useful argument is now a nitpick. And what if the movie was only 98 minutes, now it fits? What a mixed message.
It's a good reference point, but I'd replace "is not even enough" with "would only be enough".
Is it a sort of reversible pseudo-hashing function even possible? Or something like a seed in a deterministic procedural generator. You could store arbitrary data in a few bits. 8kb for all the redundancies and metadata even.
On a second thought, the compression alone would destroy information. NVM.
Gentle reminder that the Netherlands has lots of very smart software engineers that prefer to stay there, especially if there were more interesting software companies active there.
Another gentle reminder that the Netherlands has a 50% income tax (for swe salaries, at least) and a number of other non-trivial taxes like a wealth tax. I personally know people who found Dubai an interesting alternative to Amsterdam.
No, it's 50% marginal income tax rate on income over 75k EUR. With a median SWE salary of ~85k EUR you would be taking home 55k a year, that's an effective tax rate of 35% [1]
And that's before we even start talking about what kind of life that country and salary affords you, i.e. the thing that people actually care about, and not just materialistically but also culturally.
"According to investors, today's value of Nvidia's expected future profits over its lifetime equals the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a medium-sized country in a year."
Don't compare market cap with GDP, when you spell it out it's clear how nonsensical it is.
Until the day when I can right-click on a folder and create a folder inside that folder, I'll consider the Finder inferior to the Windows 98 explorer. Come on, that's an absolute basic feature!
The right-click context menu of a folder has 15 items! Most of them I've never used! Colors, tags, quick actions, compress, make alias? But no "New Folder"?
But I moved to the mac, in 2005, because of the unix terminal. I had been using Cygwin for years, but an OS that had it included, natively? On good hardware? Yes, please.
I'm never moving back to Windows (ads in the OS??). To switch to linux it would take great hardware with 100% support. Not holding my breath, but it might happen one day.
Whatever the economic merits and demerits of this deal, politically it's a disaster, as this article indicates. There wasn't even an attempt to sell this to the public. But as there are no elections until 2028, I expect major changes in strategy in a year or so, otherwise the center-right parties in charge now will be wiped out in favor of the anti-American factions of the far right and far left.
My suspicion is that there's a quid-pro-quo regarding Ukraine. Economically, the EU is in a strong position, but militarily, a mercurial US has the EU over the barrel due to the Ukraine war.
I predict that Europe's notoriously hard-nosed negotiators (Brexit) will ramp up the pressure as the midterms get closer and if the situation in Ukraine improves.
The kind of conditions for peace Russia seems to be going for allows them an unfair position to restart the war in a few years, or pressure Ukraine to become a satellite state for Russia with threat of a new invasion.
This is via demanding Ukraine imposes restrictions on their armed forces, Ukraine giving up territories Russia doesn’t even control today but which are awfully convenient invasion grounds in a potential future attack on Kyiv and declaring Western peacekeepers in Ukraine post-war as a dealbreaker by their FM.
Not to even mention denying any future entry to an alliance like NATO.
And all this by a country that has a record of breaking such agreements time and time again.
I note in the lost war, Russia at its peak controlled 27% of Ukraine in 2022, and now after three years and ~1m casualties controls 19% and is having problems with its oil industry blowing up.
agreed but I think you are underselling it. “loosing the country” sounds like an administrative detail. I know you probably do not mean this at all, but I’d like to remind everyone: reports coming from (previously) russian occupied areas are horrifying. Loosing the country would mean the situation of these areas extends to all of Ukraine.
Even if the war ends, Russia will continue to run a regime of terror and brain washing to make sure no one ever even thinks of regaining independence again, ever.
Russia is free stop killing Ukrainians at any minute they want, why are you suggesting that Europe's support should stop and Ukraine must cease their defence?
That is always funny how ruzzian supporters follow victim blaming patterns.
Ukrainian war could be ended anytime, ruzzians can simply go home instead of dying for $20000.
The second option to end the war is for Ukrainians to surrender. To surrender their country, culture and future. And become in 10 years a part of ruzzian occupation army somewhere in Estonia.
> Who went to Ukraine on behalf of USA to scuttle peace talks?
There was nothing to scuttle. To this day, Russia stands by the original demands of taking over Ukraine's government, disbanding its army, and blocking foreign aid to Ukraine. Or in other words, unconditional surrender.
> USA wanted this war. Putin's mistake was taking the bait.
After the invasion stalled in March 2022, I predicted that in ten years' time, Putin would be blamed for being a CIA agent sent to destroy Russia. Looks like we're halfway there. :)
They’ve occasionally given signs they’ll accept “just” keeping Crimea, a big swath of Eastern Ukraine, and structurally weakening Ukraine and blocking it from outside alliances.
Which also amounts to unconditional surrender, but with extra steps.
To wear down Russia to manageable size: get the Ukrainians to pay in blood and the EU to pay for the bombs. Bonus: Germany crippled because cut off cheap gas supplies, and prevents Russia Germany alliance turning into rival superpower to USA. Another bonus is EU crippled with war debt.
This war is about geopolitics. Not morals or ethics. The USA wanted this war to wear down Russian power. Putin took the bait.
Who scuttled the early attempt at a peace deal? Boris Johnson, on behalf of USA. Because the USA wanted this war.
But now Russia and China are allies. That's a bad geopolitical outcome for USA.
Dude, just stop. You're embarrassing yourself. They're not really going to give you an extra potato for every karma point you rack up. Maybe when Prigozhin was still running the show, but not now.
I used to be just like u. I was outraged when Putin took Crimea in 2014. I watched the Maidan protests live. Then I dove into the history of Ukraine. And i began to learn things the news media doesn't tell you. I began, GASP, to change my mind.
People ALWAYS resort to insults when you say the war is lost for Ukraine. Even if i was to be wrong why always the insults. Cant people disagree without resorting to insults?
> European security depends on winning the Ukraine war.
This is absurd.
Before 2021 and people were told to "care" about it, Ukraine was a "Westworld" type place for Europeans and others.
If European security depends on Ukraine, why didn't Europe sent any troops there?
This is very new, we fight an existential war now without sending any troops, money should be enough.
Anyway the fact is almost 4 years in Ukraine is probably dead demographically. You can't really reboot a country after having so much of its "fighting age" male population dead. Especially because the one who will be left will be deranged, violent and addicted to all sort of things.
And then having this type of nightmare on or within your borders is another pandora box.
So now whether the EU declares it wins or looses the war, it has lost anyway.
On the EU internal politics side, we are literally living in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. No need for much explanations.
> Anyway the fact is almost 4 years in Ukraine is probably dead demographically. You can't really reboot a country after having so much of its "fighting age" male population dead.
You should actually look up the facts before making assumptions. Or, for example, actually visit Ukraine. Currently conscription is between ages 25 and 55; mobilization of younger men is not done specifically to ensure the next generation is not depleted, and men of all ages are fighting. You're actually more likely to get called up if you are in your 30's and 40's than if you are younger.
There's about five million males currently in Ukraine in that age range, of which under 100,000 have been killed and under 500,000 wounded. That's just not an existential crisis at all. Germany the country survived WW2, and about half of their male population died in the war.
This matches the on-the-ground reality: I've visited plenty of Ukrainian cities during the war, and there are plenty of males of all ages. Including young males. Any crisis they face is the same birthrate crisis that all developed countries face. And hopefully, the psychology of war will help reverse that --- Israel also has a notably high birthrate.
> Especially because the one who will be left will be deranged, violent and addicted to all sort of things.
I personally know quite a few Ukrainian soldiers who have seen action. They're all well functioning people. Combat when you're on the side of good rather than evil doesn't have the psychological toil people think it does. It's not nothing. But the supermajority of people recover just fine and go on to lead productive lives.
An important part of that is recognizing that Ukraine is up against an irredeemably evil enemy. You were killing orcs, not men.
>I personally know quite a few Ukrainian soldiers who have seen action. They're all well functioning people.
What kind of "action" did they see, pushing pencils? Because all soldiers who I saw coming out from action on the front line, meaning killing and seeing your friends get killed under firearms, drones and artillery shells, all had various forms of PTSD. There's no way sane normal people don't get affected witnessing that and can just bounce back to be "well functioning people" as you claim. So maybe they lied to you about their action.
> Combat when you're on the side of good rather than evil doesn't have the psychological toil people think it does.
Then why are so many men deserting and dodging the draft to leave the country, if fighting so chill? Some often almost die trying to cross the border to my country. That pretty much tells me everything.
> What kind of "action" did they see, pushing pencils?
Frontline trench warfare, including getting wounded.
A high % of the young male population saw combat in WW2. What followed was some of the most successful economic growth and society advancement in human history, especially the US. People are more resilient than you'd think, especially when society as a whole has your back.
This isn't Vietnam or Afghanistan. The mission is crystal clear and vital. Every day at 9am all of Ukraine stops to remember the dead. I've seen this first hand. Cars stop, people get out and stand, and they honor what soldiers are doing for them. It makes a big difference.
>A high % of the young male population saw combat in WW2.
Sugarcoated way of saying "most of them died". I wonder what their opinion would be if the dead could speak.
>What followed was some of the most successful economic growth and society advancement in human history
So every 50-100 years or so, we need to kill a lot of people in a world war, so that whoever remains alive in the rubble, gets to see massive economic prosperity because of the labor shortage that follows? Basically, the same thing Mussolini and Hitler were advocating for in their speeches.
Not sure I'd sign up for that. You can keep your "economic growth", I'd rather live mediocre but not die in a war for the elites.
And how will Ukraine achieve this hypothetical growth when all of they're youths moved to Europe? Most Europeans didn't have this luxury of moving to a safe country during and after WW2 but they were forced to fight for their country and then stay and rebuild it. Most Ukrainians are not forced to stay or even if they are, they can smuggle/bribe their way out with money, skills, connection or sheer determination, and can just pack their bags and go shopping for the best country that fits their desires via the asylum system. There was no asylum system of this generosity for Europeans in WW2.
I sure hope you are right but I wouldn't trust too much the official numbers we are told. We know during a war every incentive is there too minimize the causalities of one side. The real number usually appear long after and are always much larger.
> Germany the country survived WW2, and about half of their male population died in the war.
One way to see it is Germany and Europe did not really even survived WWI. The demographic shock and the trauma then lead directly to WWII. At the end Europe has been a shadow of itself since. Most of the problems Europe have today are rippling effects of the deep traumas of the two WW.
Let's say just a third or half the men between 25 and 55 are dead/badly wounded/traumatized/addicted, it will destroy the next generation and society.
Just look on much smaller scale at what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did to the US in the last 20 years. Even the few professionals and volunteers who fought it abroad brought back a lot of problems still clearly visible in today american society.
This is why those type of wars need to be avoided or stopped at all cost.
>Most of the problems Europe have today are rippling effects of the deep traumas of the two WW.
Can't agree on this when I see what China managed to do starting way worse than Europe and with no marshal plan to help. You can't keep endlessly blaming the distant past. How far in the past does the blaming go?
China is even more shocking example of the consequence of the WWs (and what happened before). Just the cultural revolution was an extreme aftershock of the wars.
They did then had their "Marshal plan" with almost the entire world massively investing in their economy.
In Europe for example I vaguely heard the French government collapsed again. One of the reasons is usually that for decades they can't reform their retirement system. This retirement system was designed for the lost and greatest generations demographics after the war but totally unsustainable after that.
After 80 years of "never again" because of the WWs Europe dangerously under invested in its military capabilities, now it is panicking and the pendulum is swinging in the other direction.
Wars create demographic and societal shock waves, this is one of the reason historian focus so much on them.
> I sure hope you are right but I wouldn't trust too much the official numbers we are told.
I don't have to trust the official numbers. I've been to Ukraine both before and after the full scale invasion. Yes, there are easily visible differences (like the big increase in the number of men you see with visible war wounds). But this isn't a society in collapse. Not yet. Overall, Ukraine is winning this fight and what they're getting in return for that sacrifice is a future.
> Let's say just a third or half the men between 25 and 55 are dead/badly wounded/traumatized/addicted, it will destroy the next generation and society.
Again, we've been through this before. It simply does not destroy society.
> Just look on much smaller scale at what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did to the US in the last 20 years. Even the few professionals and volunteers who fought it abroad brought back a lot of problems still clearly visible in today american society.
No. America's biggest problems have nothing to do with veterans. It wasn't a veteran who killed that Ukrainian refugee...
> This is why those type of wars need to be avoided or stopped at all cost.
Do you have a better plan? Russia isn't invading Ukraine out of some religious dispute. They're just war criminals who just want to plunder and steal. Negotiations have been tried over and over before: Russia just violates every agreement ever made. The only solution is to defeat Russia. And the fastest way to do that is to crush Russia's economy... which is exactly what Ukraine is (finally!) doing with their strikes on oil and gas infrastructure.
If you want less harm to be done, help Ukraine win faster.
> If you want less harm to be done, help Ukraine win faster.
That was my point.
What I find disgusting is those type of proxy wars where one side say we fully support you but won't send any troops or really work on a diplomatic solution (see my original comment).
So the war continues for years and kill the population.
This isn't a proxy war. Russia is invading Ukraine because they want to invade. That has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else; Russia is not a proxy.
Ukraine has exactly one choice: defend themselves, or be subjugated and killed. There is no diplomatic solution. It's very helpful that Ukraine has outside help. But that doesn't make it a proxy war. Regardless of whether or not Ukraine had outside help, they'd still be fighting.
The fact is that the #1 thing Ukraine is doing right now to win is destroying Russian industry with Ukrainian made weapons. They're doing that themselves. Again, that's not a proxy.
Dunno. European security since WW2 has depended on the principle that you can't just go invade and take over other countries because you feel like it and are militarily strong. If Russia takes over Ukraine they'd likely force Ukrainians into the Russian army and then threaten to take over the baltics which are part of the EU and NATO. It's easier to defend Ukraine now than face that.
My guess the negotiators had somehow the information that the tariffs will soon be declared illegal so would be smart to let the narcisist think he won, I hope I am right and there is still rule of law in USA.
>The negotiators agreed to demands under threat of tariffs that they believed would soon disappear? That makes no sense.
It buys time, the negotiators also have no power to force each country to implement the stuff , or make the agreement some law.
It would make sense to assume illegal tariffs will be declared illegal with 95% of the chance and just buy time and let the nariisit idiot think he won and go ahead and fuck with someone else for now.
Compared to who/what/when? The US? China? Not a chance. Economically, the EU is as weak now as it ever was.
About 2 decades ago, EU had the same GDP as the US, or even slightly more. Now it's at half of the US and stagnating or even shrinking due to a series of issues it has no solution to, since a lot of it's economy hasn't recovered much post-2008 crash. The EU knows the economic deck is not staked in its favor so it has to bend over to the US now. 2 decades ago the EU would have been able to fend of such actions from a hostile US administration and even more so fron China. But it can't today because it's twice as weak and the US and China are much stronger.
And it's actually very easy to understand why we're here in this situation. If you look at the government budgets in most EU countries today, about a third everywhere is going to welfare and retirement spending with retirement spending dwarfing absolutely everything else in the country by far, with some pensions being higher than some full time wages, which is absurd IMHO. Now, caring for the people and the elderly is noble and all, but you can't win any competition against nations that take that third of GDP that you spend on retirees and they spend it on on economic and military development instead. You just can't win like this, straight up, the math doesn't math. Eventually over the long run, they'll economically or militarily conquer you. So you'll have to choose between spending on providing a cushy lifestyle for retirees, or ensuring a prosperous future for your country.
EU fell asleep at the wheel for over two decades and woke up today that it needs to start the fire again, but it has no money to do so because it's in a economic downturn, an energy crisis, a demographic crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, political extremism crisis left and right, and war next door needing to fight all these fires at once. Very bad timing for EU, and China, Putin and Trump know this and are taking full advantage of "buying the dip" now in Europe the same way European powers were "buying the dip" in their (former) colonies in Africa and across the world. All, and I really mean ALL countries, engage in economic imperialism every chance they get, and Europe somehow forgot its own lesson thinking they are somehow untouchable.
The EU economy is $20T vs USA $30T, so 60%. Also, Britain was part of the EU 2 decades ago. The EU economy has almost doubled in that time, with large regional differences (Ireland, Poland on fire, southern Europe flat), but the USA has done better than the eu average.
Is there such a thing as the "anti American far right"? As far as I can tell, all these wannabe despots are buddy-buddy with Trump, Musk and MAGA in general.
This trite comment obscures the long history of transatlantic ties on the far right, from American businesses supporting Nazi Germany[1] and Hitler drawing inspirations from America's immigration, segregation and eugenics policies[2] through the murky events around Operation Gladio later in the 20th century[3] and into the 21st century "dark enlightenment" hyper-online right[4].
Well, the American far right is now also anti-American...
Just as it was in the pre-WWII timeframe. Henry Ford could have taught Elon Musk a thing or two about racial purity. And if there's even a smidgen of truth to Smedley Butler's testimony about the so-called Business Plot...
None of what's happening now is new. We just forgot, that's all.
There are clearly in the EU some far-left parties who believe that being part of NATO and/or following the foreign diplomacy of the US is not in our best interests.
I am leftist of the opinion that being in NATO is against european interest. However, I don't see it (and I don't think I am alone in that view) as an antiamerican position as such, more like internationalist position of rejecting imperialism. I believe all countries would benefit by having less nuclear weapons, for instance.
I wouldn't mind "security in exchange for better economic treatment" deal, but I don't understand how anybody still trusts US in terms of security. They clearly showed that they fear Russia, plus Trump made several allegations that they may not provide military help even to NATO allies. I am from Poland, theoretically we have US troops stationed here but over 70% of population (including myself) don't believe they will stay here long once we're attacked.
US got concrete economic concessions in writing in exchange for words about security.
A good example we just saw today. Countries with security arrangements with the USA can be bombed freely by those with more favor with the current US leadership.
Just using common sense, if we had a genius, who had tremendous reasoning ability, total recall of memories, and an unlimited lifespan and patience, and he'd read what the current LLMs have read, we'd expect quite a bit more from him than what we're getting now from LLMs.
There are teenagers that win gold medals on the math olympiad - they've trained on < 1M tokens of math texts, never mind the 70T tokens that GPT5 appears to be trained on. A difference of eight orders of magnitude.
In other words, data scarcity is not a fundamental problem, just a problem for the current paradigm.
If we can reduce the precision of the model parameters by 2~32x without much perceptible drop in performance, we are clearly dealing with something wildly inefficient.
I'm open to the possibility that over parameterization is essential as part of the training process, much like how MSAA/SSAA over sample the frame buffer to reduce information aliasing in the final scaled result (also wildly inefficient but very effective generally). However, I think for more exotic architectures (spiking / time domain) these rules don't work the same way. You can't back propagate a recurrent SNN so much of the prevailing machine learning mindset doesn't even apply.
It’s not clear that the inefficiency of the current paradigm is in the neural net architectures. It seems just as likely that it’s in the training objective.
Right. The objective is "correctly predict the entire training set", where that training set contains literally everything. So the objective becomes to speak every human language, every programming language, to understand every topic, to master every weird sub-genre of culture. That's an inherently very inefficient training objective if you just want an AI that can do some specific tasks. It's the whole insight behind models specific to summarization, text extraction, patch merging etc.
And don't forget the noise. If you look at the Anthropic papers it's clear from the examples they give that the dataset is still incredibly noisy even after extensive cleaning efforts. A lot of those parameters are being wasted trying to predict garbage outputs from HTML scraping gone wrong.
Yes - we train only on a subset of human communication, the one using written symbols (even voice has much much more depth to it), but human brains train on the actual physical world.
Human students who only learned some new words but have not (yet) even began to really comprehend a subject will just throw around random words and sentences that sound great but have no basis in reality too.
For the same sentence, for example, "We need to open a new factory in country XY", the internal model lighting up inside the brain of someone who has actually participated when this was done previously will be much deeper and larger than that of someone who only heard about it in their course work. That same depth is zero for an LLM, which only knows the relations between words and has no representation of the world. Words alone cannot even begin to represent what the model created from the real-world sensors' data, which on top of the direct input is also based on many times compounded and already-internalized prior models (nobody establishes that new factory as a newly born baby with a fresh neural net, actually, even the newly born has inherited instincts that are all based on accumulated real world experiences, including the complex very structure of the brain).
Somewhat similarly, situations reported in comments like this one (client or manager vastly underestimating the effort required to do something): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123810
The internal model for a task of those far removed from actually doing it is very small compared to the internal models of those doing the work, so trying to gauge required effort falls short spectacularly if they also don't have the awareness.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Are you saying in order to make LLMs better at learning the missing piece is to make the capable to interact with the outside world? Give them actuators and sensors?
"How could a telescope see saturn, human eyes have billions of years of evolution behind them, and we only made telescopes a few hundred years ago, so they should be much weaker than eyes"
"How can StockFish play chess better than a human, the human brain has had billions of years of evolution"
Evolution is random, slow, and does not mean we arrive at even a local optima.
They're not saying that LLMs should be better than smart teenagers; they're saying that smart teenagers can solve some problems without needing massive amounts of data, so apparently those problems are technically solvable without those amounts of data.
Yes. It is astonishing that LLMs can solve problems that only a handful of very smart teenagers can solve, but LLMs do it by consuming a million times as much content as those teenagers. Running out of data is not a reason for despair.
Also consider that during training LLMs spend much less time on processing, say, TAOCP (Knuth), or SICP (Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman), or Probability Theory (Jaynes) than on the entirety that is r/Frugal.
20 thick books turn a smart teenager into a graduate with a MSc. That's what, 10 million tokens?
When we read difficult, important texts, we reflect on them, make exercises, discuss them, etc. We don't know how to make an LLM do that in a way that improves it. Yet.
To be fair, GPT-5 didn't start off as a blank slate. The architecture probably encodes a lot, much like how DNA encodes a lot. The former requires human writing to decompress into a human-like thing, the latter requires the Earth environment and a woman to decompress into a human organism.
But it's indeed apples and oranges. There's no good way to estimate the information encoded by the GPT architecture compared to human DNA. We just have to be empirical and look at what the thing can do.
Neural precursor cells literally move themselves from where they first differentiate to their final location to ensure specific neural structures and information dynamics in the developed brain. It's not declarative memory, but its a memory of the neural architecture etched out over evolutionary time.
They're born with neural hardware whose architecture has been optimized by evolution. Any choice of architecture imparts some inductive bias, making some problems easier and some problems harder to learn, and humans have the advantage that people with bad architectures (those not matching properties of the world we live in) were more likely to die or to not mate.
You're right that we don't call those inherited thought patterns memories; we call them reflexes, emotions, region-specific brain functions, etc.
This sentence really struck me in a particular way. Very interesting. It does seem like thoughts/stream of consciousness is just your brain generating random tokens to itself and learning from it lol.
Exactly. Books are still being translated by human translators.
I have a text on my computer, the first couple of paragraphs from the Dutch novel "De aanslag", and every few years I feed it to the leading machine translation sites, and invariably, the results are atrocious. Don't get me wrong, the translation is quite understandable, but the text is wooden, and the translation contains 3 or 4 translation blunders.
GPT-5 output for example:
Far, far away in the Second World War, a certain Anton Steenwijk lived with his parents and his brother on the edge of Haarlem.
Along a quay, which ran for a hundred meters beside the water and then, with a gentle curve, turned back into an ordinary street, stood four houses not far apart.
Each surrounded by a garden, with their small balconies, bay windows, and steep roofs, they had the appearance of villas, although they were more small than large; in the upstairs rooms, all the walls slanted.
They stood there with peeling paint and somewhat dilapidated, for even in the thirties little had been done to them.
Each bore a respectable, bourgeois name from more carefree days:
Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg
Anton lived in the second house from the left: the one with the thatched roof. It already had that name when his parents rented it shortly before the war; his father had first called it Eleutheria or something like that, but then written in Greek letters. Even before the catastrophe occurred, Anton had not understood the name Buitenrust as the calm of being outside, but rather as something that was outside rest—just as extraordinary does not refer to the ordinary nature of the outside (and still less to living outside in general), but to something that is precisely not ordinary.
Can you provide a reference translation or at least call out the issues you see with this passage? I see "far far away in the [time period]" which I should imagine should be "a long time ago" What are the other issues?
Waar heb je het over? "Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg" is volkomen cromulent Engels.
For what it's worth, I do use AI for language learning, though I'm not sure it's the best idea. Primarily for helping translate German news articles into English and making vocabulary flashcards; it's usually clear when the AI has lost the plot and I can correct the translation by hand. Of course, if issues were more subtle then I probably wouldn't catch them ...
If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.
You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.
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