suppose it's better than counting lines of code, though.

my team has largely avoided AI; our sister team has been quite gungho on it. i recently handed off a project to them that i'd scoped at about one sprint of work. they returned with a project design that involved four microservices, five new database tables, and an entirely new orchestration and observability layer. it took almost a week of back-and-forth to pare things down.

since then, they've spent several sprints delivering PRs that i now have to review. there's lots of things that don't work, don't make sense, or reinvent things we already have from scratch. almost half the code is dedicated to creating 'reusable' and 'modular' classes (read: boilerplate) for a project that was distinctly scoped as a one-off. as a result, this takes hours, and it's cut into my own sprint velocity. i'm doing all the hard work but receiving none of the credit.

management just told me that every engineer is now required to use AI. i'm tired.

i can continue to row as a hobby, but i've been very lucky in that my work has always been something i genuinely enjoyed. now that it's become something that's actively burning me out, it's far harder to find time for hobbies and interests.

1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutting your contract than it loses in sales.

2. Translation jobs have been replaced with jobs proofreading machine translations, which pays peanuts (since AI is 'doing most of the work') but in fact takes almost as much effort as translating from scratch (since AI is often wrong in very subtle ways). The comparison to PR reviews makes itself.

suspect this happened because the reimplementation contained a number of standard/expected methods that we didn't have in our existing interface (because we didn't need them), so it was considered 'different' enough. but none of the code actually used those methods (because we didn't need them), so all this PR did was add a few hundred lines of cognitive overhead.

for a 1-1 name like yao ming, it's a little more difficult. some characters are definitely more common as surnames than others - the chinese term for 'common people' (百姓) actually refers to an old classic text where they compiled all the surnames they knew of! so when i see the name yao ming, i immediately recognize that 'yao' is a fairly common surname and 'ming' is not, and thus it's more likely (but not guaranteed!) that 'yao' is the surname here.

there's also some cases that are ambiguous when romanized, but not ambiguous in chinese. for example, consider the name 'wang chen,' where both 'wang' and 'chen' are common chinese surnames. however, if i saw it written out as 王, i would be able to recognize that 王 'wang' is a character that's primarily used for surnames, while 晨 'chen' is not.

this is also why the fansubbing scene is effectively dead - companies like crunchyroll get episode scripts early and can thus release subs simultaneously with the official release. most fansub groups now just fix/edit the crunchyroll script, if they even pick up series at all. there's no point in putting in the effort if no one's going to look at it, after all.

that's the main issue i have with 'more but worse' translations, honestly. you'll get more material, but the good translators won't just move to content that wasn't translated before - they'll just disappear entirely.

here's a study on how climate change is reducing the window for prescribed burns: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00993-1

that being said, i think most of these websites that ask for a kanji name will require you to show ID with that name when you show up in person, so you might run into trouble if you just pick random characters.

for me, it was debate club. i liked debate, but the form of it i participated in was a rich man's game and i was simply not a rich man. i didn't have the money to fly to the east coast every weekend to attend tournaments or pay people to assemble cases and evidence briefs for me. it wasn't worth the coaches' time to even listen to me practice because i wasn't wealthy enough to compete at a high level.

that feeling of futility persisted across other extracurriculars. i participated in the science fair, but my advisor instantly became dismissive when it became clear that my parents couldn't gift me a competitive research opportunity at their lab or hospital because they, y'know, didn't work at a lab or hospital. the school i went to had a lot of rich kids; i once spotted one of my classmates at the airport on their way to volunteer in uganda over the summer.

math team ended up my saving grace. perhaps it's because we weren't quite so competitive - we did well regionally but were not competitive at a state or national level - but there was something freeing in just solving math problems. afterschool math practice was free and open to everyone. there were a variety of different competitions, team and individual, geared for different skill levels and specializations. no one cared about what my parents did for a living, thank god. it was just about solving the damn math problem.

i think some of the recent posts are about a batch of salamander/axolotl hybrids, but if you scroll further down, there's more of the morphed axolotls they have.