Found in Translation

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Clarissa

July 23, 2025

Grok started to translate non-English comments in my feed without me having asked for it. Several times today I thought, “how come he’s suddenly an English-speaker?” only to notice the Grok notification.

It’s weird.

In what concerns the protests in Ukraine, they are a way to let people have a good night’s sleep for the first time in months. Russians don’t bomb during protests because they believe their own propaganda that the protests favor them. Ukrainians report having finally slept through the night.

But the original reason for the protests is very good. An effort has begun to dismantle the most corrupt institutions in the country. I think it’s done to ingratiate Trump but whatever the reason, it’s a great thing to do.

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8 responses to “Found in Translation”

cliff arroyo

July 23, 2025

“Grok started to translate”

I’m noticing a lot of unsolicited translations not just on twitter but on youtube and lots of other places…

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1. methylethyl
  
  July 23, 2025
  
  I feel like I scored a major victory this week when, almost accidentally, I stumbled across an option to make my email “go back to the old format” that it used before it tried to be a clone of gmail. I was like HECK YEAH and reverting it to my oldschool inbox magically got rid of the unwanted AI summaries of my emails, shoehorned in at the top of each email.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    July 23, 2025
    
    “I stumbled across an option to make my email “go back to the old format”
    
    A couple of years ago my university switched email providers in the middle of the semester and the default format was horrible with ‘threading all the emails from the same person and subject line (and sometimes just from the same person) would be hidden under a single email and I functionally lost a couple of months worth of correspondence and it was getting worse until I figured out how to undo the new system’s horrible unworkable defaults.
    
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    1. methylethyl
      
      July 23, 2025
      
      We already reached peak internet and computing functionality. Now, every update is a downgrade.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        July 23, 2025
        
        One million times this. I’m seeing it in university systems where every update is downhill from what was there before.
        
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2. Clarissa
  
  July 23, 2025
  
  Dude, when my phone overheats (which is all the time with the weather we’ve been having), it starts to translate my voice conversations with my mother into Spanish. Meaning, it speaks over us in a mechanical and cheerful voice. The first time it happened, I thought there was some Hispanic psychopath on the line.
  
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  1. random reader
    
    July 23, 2025
    
    You need a new phone. Also, how does that happen – is there some application you have installed that turns on when the phone is overheated?
    
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Demotrash

July 24, 2025

Websites “helpfully” do more and more things automatically for you. 10 years ago, it was trivially easy to switch to another country’s version of the website. Now the website detects my ISP and chooses for me and won’t let me change it. If I can’t buy from a website from my country I can’t look at it at all. Etc.

Youtube is especially terrible with this. Their latest awful fearture is auto dubbing into English that you can’t turn off. There’s absolutely no way to choose your language, and the concept of bilingualism is totally foreign to them.

Language is just one example of the internet’s transformation into an overbearing parent, it’s everywhere.

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