[sweisman]

So, he's commenting on something he didn't read and compares it to shit? Good to know. I'll ignore him. I understand his point. Still, obviously my rhetorical question had in mind that what I do is good enough quality to make the question worthwhile. Better than a "first draft". As mentioned in another comment, some works were translated up to four times as I refined the process.

[flir]

The thing with LLM-generated code is you can test it on a real CPU - that's a tight feedback loop with a cast-iron verification mechanism.

Translations of human language have no analogous mechanism. So yes, the translation might be perfect, but until a human puts their reputation on the line and says "I certify this translation is accurate", it's still shit. It's shit because of the way it was created, not its absolute accuracy (or otherwise). He doesn't need to read it.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to upset you, and I know I won't change your mind. We just have different philosophical positions on this, I think.

[sweisman]

I know what I know from experience. You know what you know from nothing at all.

Numerous people have commented to me about Hebrew and Latin works, who know what they are talking about, and none has criticized the fidelity of the translation to the source. The criticisms proffered are minor, while the praise extensive.

A couple years ago, I shared your opinion. Now I don't. You are the one who won't change your mind. Like you said, it's "philosophical" for you, while for me, it isn't. If you insist on calling it shit regardless, you are retarded.

[flir]

> You know what you know from nothing at all.

I've done it myself. Transcription of 19th century newspaper articles to markdown, mostly. Some earlier wills (which were an absolute pig - secretary hand). Oh, and categorisation of postcards. That's why I was poking around your pipeline - to see if I could learn anything. You're right, tabular data is hard. Also columns, and proper nouns.

Feeding the LLM a context-aware cheat sheet helped with the nouns. BTW, what I said about using multiple models for parallax was good advice.

Do you know you're very spiky?

[sweisman]

The biggest problem with hallucinations (or confabulations as Claude prefers haha) is from tables. Prose has context that anchors it.

Hebrew is also much worse than Latin, which uses Arabic numerals. Hebrew conventionally uses the letters for numeric representation too.

I am getting good (and improving results), but the token cost is heavy.

[sweisman]

No, because I don't know what spiky means.

[bawolff]

> Numerous people have commented to me about Hebrew and Latin works, who know what they are talking about, and none has criticized the fidelity of the translation to the source.

Have these people gone on the record saying that? What are their credentials?

I got to be honest, claims that some unnamed person privately told you they thought your product was good is pretty meaningless. I feel like that makes me trust you less not more.

[sweisman]

I got to be honest too.

At least my name is public and on the record, along with my work. You are irrelevant. So is what you say.

You haven't read anything. Are you retarded or disingenuous?

[flir]

But you can't read the original! That's why you built the pipeline in the first place! Only people who can read both versions can have a grounded opinion on whether or not the translation is accurate.

C'mon man, I know criticisms of your baby feel like attacks on you, but take a step back. You must see that "the name of the author of the pipeline is public knowledge" is not a sensible response to "nobody who can read both versions has attested to its accuracy in public".

Right now, everybody believes that LLMs can't self-correct (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01798) and that they hallucinate when asked to do OCR tasks. It doesn't matter if that's true or not, that's the prevailing belief you're working against. If you want to convince people your pipeline can self-correct, you're going to need to supply evidence. I see two possibilities:

(1) Pay someone to audit one of the translations publicly.

Crucially they need to answer the question: does the pipeline introduce inaccuracy? If it does then it really is worse than useless, because it tells lies. Clunky, inconsistent, partial translations would still be better than no translation - it's the risk of hallucination that's the killer.

(2) Are you doing test runs on similar documents that have also been translated by humans? (Preferably very recent translations). Publishing those test runs would allow poor uneducated slobs like me to line up a human translation and your machine translation and see for ourselves that your pipeline works.

This is meant as helpful advice - I'm trying suggest paths that respond to valid critique with something other than bluster. I wish you and your project well.

[sweisman]

By way of example, there are several comments by someone else noting a problem with terminology drift. This was genuinely constructive, and I fixed and repaired the problem, which I thought I had resolved months ago.

These are the kind of comments I also typically get regarding regressions. Problems with mostly mechanically repairable aspects of the translation, but not with the quality of the translation itself. From people who know of what they speak. That I do not put them on the record is not relevant, except to people like you. They are real, and their attestations are real.