Amazon is Testing an AI Tool That Automatically Translates Books Into Other Languages
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon just introduced an AI tool that will automatically translate books into other languages. The appropriately-named Kindle Translate is being advertised as a resource for authors that self publish on the platform.
The company says the tool can translate entire boo … ⌘ Read more
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Finally, new books arrived. Let’s see if Dead Silence is as good as it sounds. 😃
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This was a great read, btw. 😃 If you liked Event Horizon, this is for you. I’m gonna get her other two scifi books as well, that’s for sure.
Finally, new books arrived. Let’s see if Dead Silence is as good as it sounds. 😃
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ten stories or more are already very tall in my books. Not sure at which height I would start calling high rise buildings sky scrapers, but Wikipedia suggests around 150 meters, depending on region.
Oh, I just found https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Pier_17_2018-03_jeh.jpg and this really does not look all that high. I thought that this would be at least 50 or 100 meters up. I was completely wrong. :-D
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Speaking of manpages:
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@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:
https://www.troff.org/pubs.html
I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:
https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg
It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎
It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.
On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.
So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.
Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)
If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.
HTTP referrers are quite broken, aren’t they?
Because of that recent storm on my blog, I had a peek at them. There’s a lot of garbage in there. For example, https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/disks-virtual.html is supposed to refer to one of my blog posts …
What’s going on here?
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https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1935344122103308748.html Interesting article on how ChatGPT is rotting your brain 🤣
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About ChatGPT rotting people’s brains, similarly could be said about search engines, and reference books. Oh, also doom scrolling, and mobile devices, and the Internet… :-P
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — First Woman — Dream to Reality https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/21/first-woman-1.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Tag Team https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/14/tag-team.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — The Pink and Black Album https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/07/pink-black.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Meteorite https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/31/meteorite.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Sówka w świecie dnia https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/24/owl-world.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 4 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/17/pilogy-4.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/10/pilogy-3.html #freeculture #bookclub
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Sometimes things go wrong when buying CDs second-hand. I bought an album quite cheap – but as it turned out, they only checked the cover, not the content, so I got something else instead which is actually much more expensive. 🤣
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de a first edition signed Superman comic book, carefully folded just to fit, but not damaged enough to have lost its value?
On my blog: 0M — Remixed Classrooms https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/04/30m-free-education.html #3#0#million #books #diversity #education
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/03/pilogy-2.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/26/pilogy-1.html #freeculture #bookclub
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A visual flow chart diagram that illustrates how two different but very related concepts can lead to system accidents 👌 Media
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These ideas are dr the two books:
- Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems by Sidney Dekker (2011)
- Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson (2011)
The former I haven’t read. The later I haven’t finished reading 😅
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Secrets in the Static https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/19/secrets-static.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Nose Ears, part 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/12/nose-ears-3.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Nose Ears, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/05/nose-ears-2.html #freeculture #bookclub
@prologic@twtxt.net Fully agreed. I’m far more likely to buy such mediums when DRM-free. I never go near Amazon eBooks etc because of their lock-in, and I have a Kobo eReader which needs to have the books side loaded unless directly from the Kobo store. I prefer DRM-free files every time.
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Nose Ears, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/29/nose-ears-1.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Sulphur Nimbus https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/22/sulphur-nimbus.html #freeculture #bookclub
@prologic@twtxt.net I created a script for your book. i have only done the first two chapters. have to do some adjustments to the text so it sounds ok and that takes time..
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — electric (yang) https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/15/electric-yang.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — acoustic (yin) https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/08/acoustic-yin.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Stories by Matthew DeBlock https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/01/deblock.html #freeculture #bookclub
I agree. finding good writings on architecture is hard to find. I used to read architecture reviews over on the high scalability blog. i suspect the reason why is that the arch is how the big tech companies can build moats around their bases. I know in AWS world it only goes as far as how to nickle and dime you to death.
I have the books but they don’t grow much more past interview level.
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Cairn Wardens Guide, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/22/cairn-3.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Cairn Wardens Guide, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/15/cairn-2.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Cairn Players Guide and Background https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/08/cairn-1.html #freeculture #bookclub
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it. The beginning part about the history of life on Earth was fun to watch having just read Dawkin’s old book The Selfish Geene, and now I want to read more about archaea. The end of the talk about what might be going on on Mars made me a bit hopeful someone will find some good evidence.
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — The Man Behind the Machine https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/01/man-machine.html #freeculture #bookclub
Just leaving this book here for no reason 🤫
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... Still reverse proxying an Nginx web server tho 😅
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Skill Issues of course, but that's going away next as soon as I get my php-fpm shi_ together.
@prologic@twtxt.net I’d stumbled upon #FrankenPHP while reading through #Caddy stuff and thought maybe it’s bit overkill for what i need it for but then again, it will be just a “One container in for two out”, that’s win in my book 😆
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Blood of the Ancient Star, part 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/25/bloodstar-3.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Blood of the Ancient Star, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/18/bloodstar-2.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Blood of the Ancient Star, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/11/bloodstar-1.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Trans Girl Project, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/04/trans-girl-2.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Trans Girl Project, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/12/28/trans-girl-1.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Speciare Lunar Research Facility https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/12/21/speciare.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — 2048, Enkidu, and Plastic https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/12/07/enkidu.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Ancient Fire https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/11/30/ancient-fire.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Fully Automated! part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/11/23/fully-automated-2.html #freeculture #bookclub
Inversion by Aric McBay was another random library pick. Like The Fall of Io, it’s the most recent in a series, though I think this series is pretty loosely connected. In contrast, the villain in this book is simple and cartoonishly evil. The book presents a design for utopia which was interesting but a little cloying. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to want to live there, but I don’t think I do. I enjoyed the book as easy reading, and might try the others in the series some time. (4/4)
I read Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Enjoyable, like his other books that I’ve read. Somewhat sillier. (¾)
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Restoration Day, part 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/10/26/restoration-day-3.html #freeculture #bookclub