Restoring a lost blogging streak

~ Veselin ~ 15 Comments

Last week I somehow saved a post instead of publishing it and my 4-month blogging streak ended. A couple of days later, I published the missing post with a date from the past, and the blogging streak resumed a day later. This sounds more like a bug than a feature but it worked for me.

AI Translate

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

The advancement of AI in translation tools makes my blogging more difficult. I get strange results when trying to find a word and get a clear reminder that I should not overly rely on this tech.

The Bulgarian word for “Cleaver” is translated as “Satyr” because of the proximity in letters. The Bulgarian word for “Wild Plums” is translated as “Junkies”. The Lungwort plant is translated as lungs recurringly over a variety of tools.

I tried ChatGPT and it’s better but still fails, and you can’t really trust a tool that fails for unknown words without checking elsewhere.

Bing Translate can do formal or informal translations but both are questionable. The 3 words above produced 4 different mistakes and 0 correct hits.

I’m switching back to using a dictionary for now. The type of assistance I need is not served well by AI-based translation tools. Convenience-wise, they’re super quick and convenient but not accurate yet.

Fennel Broccola and the Secret of the Cleaver

~ Veselin ~ 10 Comments

I catch myself valuing literature that’s not serious over serious but shallow. I’d rather read Matthew Reilly than Mark Manson. However, what do we say about literature that’s purposefully not serious, shallow, and cringe to extreme levels? The book in the photo above is a form of absurd comedy. It’s unlikely that it ever gets translated, or even published in enough copies so that anyone other than gamebook collectors reads it. But it exists and I think it’s nice that such things can happen. I enjoyed it for what it is.

So, the book is about an illegal vegan in a world where eating meat is required by law. He’s born with the mission to make the evil tyrant of the world eat veggies. He’ll meet cartoonish characters along the way and be tempted to eat ingredients that may contain animal products. It didn’t become clear to me if the author was mocking vegans or if he was vegan himself and wrote this piece as an act of defiance. Perhaps both? Who knows.

The book is unavailable in any online store, has no ISBN, and doesn’t exist on Goodreads.