Here is the Kaisersaal in Berlin being moved on air cushions in 1996 [1]. And wasn't a better part of Chicago jacked up building by building some time in the 19th century to make room for a sewage system?
This Github star hunting—, CV padding—, make-it-big-and-BDFL-yourself—approach to open source that has crept in over the last decade is bewildering and rather unpleasant.
Make reasonable assumptions or provide good defaults.
Make them overrideable.
Make user settings stick.
I have the same problem, by the way — my phone is in English, which means I get to enjoy Apples hilarious English pronunciation of German street names while navigating.
Same here with Dutch: you could pretty much watch i18n degrade real time by observing the quality of the dutch translations for all major sites and tech products over the years.
Back in the 2000s, dutch wasn't very common but it usually was pretty good (my understanding is that one of the things that helped is that everyone followed the Microsoft style guide for dutch translations?)
Nowadays you get overly literal translations (meaning some form of MTL), translations that don't care for the length of the text (so it gets cut off with ... at the end for interface buttons) and so on and so forth. It all just reeks of automatic translation with little care put into the presentation. This is pretty much a universal experience across every single system I've ever used and why I usually just set all my devices to English. - It's simply not worth it to deal with the botched translations to try and figure out what was actually meant.
I've had the unfortunate mishap of having the perfectly fine English translation of a German site switch to auto translate Dutch crap due to one part using the language preference and the other the IP source, bit weird since as far as I know they usually only offer English. And I can perfectly fine read German so I usually immediately switch to that since some info is not available in English especially with the different Bundesambt websites.
What I would like is a browser and os which allows you to set which languages (multiple) never need translating and the site sticking to that.
Yeah, I think apps just should have a sorted list (/tiers) of languages they support, and pick whatever first has a match in the user preferences. If the app supports two languages equally well, then choose the one first in the user's preference list.
So for me having no,en (in the future where this works I would dare to have no first):
app is in english, has auto translated norwegian: choose english
app is in norwegian, has auto translated english: choose norwegian
app is in norwegian and english equally: choose norwegian
app is in french, has english translation: choose english
People figured this out when they specified HTTP 1.1 in 1997. A prioritized list of the languages the user knows. They even allow a q-factor weighing so the user can specify a factor of how comfortable they are with a language. All modern browsers already support this, but 99% of websites fail to use it properly including Google.
It's like modern apps have forgotten all lessons learned about internationalization.
Same in Windows. The "modern" system apps use just one setting (Windows language) for internationalization, ignoring the old date format and time format settings. So if I set my Windows language to English, I get AM/PM and dot as decimal separator in some parts of the UI and not in others.
Google is notorious for ignoring browser language preferences not only in Youtube but also in its main product, and inferring from the (often faulty) geolocation.
It's a crossover between busses and taxis; they operate on demand like taxis, but only get you roughly the most direct way (they can drive detours to pick up other passengers on the way) in a roughly predetermined amount of time (a 20 minute drive usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes due to the detours) from roughly where you are to roughly where you want to go (they are only allowed to stop on a virtual grid of bus stops spaced around 250 meters apart).
> a 20 minute drive usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes due to the detours
That variability makes the whole system much less interesting once a change is involved, e.g. if the on-demand shuttle is only supposed to operate across the local area, but not for longer journeys traversing the whole city, especially if the connecting fixed-route transport runs less than every few minutes…
Or even without changes, but when you have some other external schedule constraints, because in those cases you always have to budget for the longer journey time, negating the benefit of direct routing somewhat.
Heh, I just fed autoregex a regex from one of my projects, and it simply times out. It comforts me to know that billion dollar LLMs have to chew on those just as much as I do.
I think what's causing the hang is using the site. I gave it [a-f0-9]{8}(?:-[a-f0-9]{4}){3}-[a-f0-9]{12} and it sat thinking about things for a few minutes. So I tried the reverse and asked it "Match a UUID" and it sat and thought about things.
I'd imagine many nested named capturing groups may trip even the best automated system! I do like the solution though.
I would've probably approached it differently, trying to first get the 'inverted' match (i.e. ignore anything that isn't a currency-like pattern) and refine from there. A bit like this one I did a while back, to parse garbled strings that may occur after OCR [0]. I imagine the approach does not translate fully, because it's pattern extraction rather than validation.
Thanks for sharing! I have to admit I do not have the necessary brain cycles to spare today, but OCR processing is indeed of interest to me, and I will take a more in-depth look in the upcoming days.
The idea of an exclusionary approach sounds interesting as well. I'll have to think about that a bit.
And you don't need to spend very much money to do that. For example, buying a ticket once per year is sufficient. You can still dream about the win you'll get the next time you buy a ticket.
Group buys add a social context that has significant value too.
That feature is the single worst thing Apple has done I have ever encountered: it stole my music library.
At some point when migrating from one Mac to another, it "forgot" which songs were actually mine. It's all Apple Music now. I have songs that the application _knows_ were added to my library in 2003, but for which it steadfastly maintains they're Apple Music downloads. Worse: some songs have been replaced with other recordings. Other are "unavailable" for unexplained reasons.
Oof, I would be livid if that happened to me, too. Maybe I just threaded the needle and got lucky or something, but I'm disappointed to hear mine isn't a universal experience.
[1] https://www.bz-berlin.de/archiv-artikel/hier-schwebt-ein-den...
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