A demo video in Japanese https://www.youtube.com/live/rk6-2Y3zU0A?si=2Og1szp6WWKlER-S...
Need a 3D Japanese input device: https://landing.google.co.jp/double-sided/
Wow they've done loads of these https://youtu.be/gAgOnQqyDz0?feature=shared
What's this? Japanese version of April 1st?
Google Japan moved their annual input device jokes to October 1st, which is keyboard day (10/1 -> 101 keys)
Also the furthest date from April 1st.
I like that "(experimental) psychedelic mode, for when you are feeling resigned":
https://github.com/mitoma/kashiki2?tab=readme-ov-file#%E5%AE...
This kind of effect works especially well for Japanese, with its curved strokes inside square character boxes.
So this does not get flagged: https://github-com.translate.goog/mitoma/kashiki2?_x_tr_sl=a...
Also, hotkey(s) for a set of predefined isomorphic camera views would seem useful; maybe I am not seeing it? https://github.com/mitoma/kashiki2/blob/main/kashikishi/asse...
Translation is difficult at the best of times. I thought it was interesting how Google Translate seemingly kept coming up with different translations for the name of the program. Under “Features”, it suddenly decides the name is “Takigami”, as one example. By the end, it even goes so far as to say: “When you start up the cooking program, the following screen will be displayed.”
I asked ChatGPT 4o to translate the README: https://chatgpt.com/share/6700bed9-1198-8004-8eed-07f5055d07...
The translation seemed largely consistent with what Google Translate provided, but some of ChatGPT’s translation differences seemed more plausible to me, and it certainly reads more coherently. It also doesn’t keep forgetting that it’s dealing with the proper name of the program.
I didn’t try Gemini for this, but I imagine it has to be decent at translation too, so I wonder if/when Google will use Gemini to assist, replace, or otherwise complement Google Translate.
I think I would prefer a slightly worse translator program than one that potentially hallucinates new information onto the page
Google Translate hallucinates as well.
It’s particularly obvious if you translate between languages with vastly different grammar, e.g. Korean -> English, since Korean doesn’t require a subject per sentence but English does – so Google Translate then sometimes just inserts random subjects from its training data into the translated text. ChatGPT, by understanding more of the context before each sentence in a long text, seems to do this less.
For stuff like French -> English or German -> English where there is “no missing info” per sentence to create grammatically correct sentences, so that it doesn’t need to rely on context to translate correctly, Google Translate is great.
I stopped using GT for larger texts when (having finally achieved some rudimentary literacy in my target language) I noticed it was rather cavalier about inserting or deleting not, changing the sense of sentences completely.
Sure, in translation one always has issues of sarcasm or irony, but I felt the tool was probably hallucinating more than being a useful work instrument.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCABnWlN8E
EDIT: and yes, I also prefer the older behaviour of translation programs, whose output was noticeably disfluent where it was poor instead of just bullshitting to stay fluent.
I've been talking to a lot of Chinese people using machine translation recently, and noticed that inserting and removing "not" is very common for all translation tools I've used, from Google Translate to DeepL to ChatGPT. I'm not sure if it's particular to Chinese ←→ English, or if it's a common problem across all languages.
A priori, it seems like a pretty huge issue, because it changes a sentence's meaning to its opposite. Fortunately, it's usually easy to notice. But then again, I obviously wouldn't know about any instances I haven't noticed.
Chinese ←→ English? any chance you might be willing to recommend a better test for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696289 ?
I don't have a good idea on how to objectively test this, but subjectively, my impression is that most regular people in China don't know a lot about any countries outside of East and Southeast Asia.
Even something like Halloween, which apparently triggered this discussion, is not something most people, including kids, seem to be particularly familiar with. When I mentioned to a Chinese friend that we were celebrating Halloween last year, she advised me to be careful when inviting ghosts into my home. She was unaware that it is mostly a fun children's holiday where they dress up and get candy.
Halloween is of Western, Christian origination and so knowledge of it wouldn't be something to expect in places not heavily influenced by the West or Christianity.
Despite already having our own (week-long, springtime) holiday involving dressing up in costumes, Halloween has taken a firm hold here over the last couple of decades. Kids have never yet showed up at our door, but they're definitely out trick or treating.
I'd blamed chinese factories needing more places to sell their plastic halloween gear, but now it sounds like it just comes down to US media saturation?
Then again, we should all be stealing more holidays from each other; a more syncretic world is a less boring one.
[My german teacher in high school said the best thing about growing up in southern germany was that they got all the holidays (both protestant and christian) off from school]
Google Translate frequently makes plenty of errors/hallucinations. I pointed out several above in this very thread!
When accuracy is absolutely critical, don’t depend on machine translation alone, and especially don’t depend on a single machine translation without cross checking it. As it is, I have anecdotally only had good experiences when comparing GPT-4o’s translation quality to Google Translate. I would love to see objective research into the topic, if someone were offering it, but not trite dismissals that imply Google Translate is somehow immune to hallucinations.
Why do you assume that google translate is anything other than an LLM in 2024?
Human translators can "hallucinate" new bullshit too, sometimes deliberately.
Source: Was fansub translator, partook in many translator flame wars over translation disagreements and we all shook heads at the work of craplators.
Also, I will tell you most professional translators are shit at their job.
I can't wait until computer programs can practically take over translating, it's a thankless sweatshop line of work.
As a note, for Japanese text deepl is widely used even by Japanese people. From eng to jpn it may not choose properly nuanced words though, but it largely produces acceptable translations.
It's better than Google Translate but it still leaves out a lot. GPT is the best at translating.
If you're going that far, why not build something for a VR/AR setup?
If you've got an iPhone or iPad, I've got an AR prototype for glyph based rendering like this you might enjoy playing with: https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat
Alpha release builds an AR app to pull code, render in space.
I skipped around the video trying to see an example, but all I saw was 2D flat plane text.
I think the last couple gifs from their gh are good examples.
https://github.com/mitoma/kashiki2/blob/main/doc/assets/psyc...
https://github.com/mitoma/kashiki2/blob/main/doc/assets/ar-m...
Japanese is my favourite written language, I love English but I'm definitely jealous of the beautiful glyphs and the vertical writing. From what I've seen, vertical writing is often poorly supported in software though, which is a shame.
I'm partial to Mongolian.. It also has top to bottom but has an Arabic lace like cursive style which makes it flow much better than Japanese.
Wow, that article makes me appreciate how far we've come in 20 years in terms of font rendering and text layout.
That is quite beautiful. Thanks for sharing. Are you familiar with Japanese grass script? It has quite a different feel than the Mongolian, but it's a type of Japanese cursive that flows really nicely IMHO:
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%8D%89%E6%9B%B8%E4%BD%93#/m...
which is actually a fairly legible example. Admittedly, the more flowing styles that you see in old poetry and the like effectively require specialized training to read. Beautiful, though!
It does look nice. The letters still look discrete though which is beautiful in itself but different from what attracts me to cursive style hands like Arabic.
That's a very cool script! And it looks remarkably like Arabic.
At first I thought it was a descendant from Arabic, but a Wikipedia detour shows that the most common ancestor is actually Aramaic script.
Yeah. Another one I like but not quite as much is Tibetan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_script
It looks like some kind of alien runes. It's not vertical and has discrete letters but nevertheless, looks nice.
English had beautiful writing, but it was destroyed by technology. First by the printing press, then by typewriters, then by low-resolution computer monitors. All of the human character and calligraphic qualities of the script have been mechanically stripped away in order to better accommodate what are now outdated legacy technologies, but everyone is so used to the status quo that we don't even realize what we've lost, and instead just accept that English script happens to be uglier than Japanese or Arabic or Devangari. In an alternate universe, we could be reading this in a script reminiscent of, say, the Uncial script used in the Book of Kells (which is what inspired Tolkien's beautiful Tengwar script).
I would argue the opposite, Japanese is suffering more than English thanks to computers.
For instance a lot of the obvious brush stroke is gone such as: うえらおや
The upper line is supposed to either look like a droplet of water or like ふ upper part
Certain details are gone: にこ no longer has the half arrow you can see exists vertically on the horizontal line.
ふ lost a lot of its details.
Still I would argue it looks better now for the most part.
Not buying it. Japanese has also gone through the same tech tree.
In such an alternative tech free universe, I guess most of us would be illiterate farmers.
Alternatively, we've made things a lot more legible for people from different backgrounds to understand. Deciphering modern fonts is a lot easier than deciphering cursive script, and hand-writing complicated scripts just raises the barrier of entry for people to communicate in written form
Good traditional handwriting is not less legible. You're just not as used to it, or you have only seen bad examples (like handwritten letters written by older people with shaky hands, or poor spelling, or misaligned lines). If you spend a little time with it, it's just as easy to read as the block characters we use in digital media and print.
Haha can you read Japanese though? It's beautiful for sure and it even feels a little different when reading it as if you're, in a way, sorta sounding about pictures. But man is it a pain in the butt to learn!
Same, kanji is also the hardest for me, I have a much easier time learning new words by sound/hearing. But, I know some people that are the complete opposite & can't learn enough kanji, ymmv
でもやはり高低アクセントはもっと苦しいと思います。あれは無理ですww
全く私も思います。二年前から勉強していますけどまだまだです。
まだまだ indeed…
So まだまだ。全くまだまだ。
As a Japanese-American, both languages are beautiful when used properly and ugly when used horribly.
Growing up speaking German and learning Japanese later, while spoken English, German etc can be easily as beautiful as spoken Japanese, I have to say there's a beauty in the Kanji/Hanzi writing system that just doesn't have an equivalent in our languages.
I started out learning Japanese because I liked Japanese culture like a lot of people and never was a "language guy", but at some point I just got addicted to learning kanji. When you can start to just guess what a Kanji means and you don't even know why that's such a satisfying experience.
Think of kanji not as characters but as words (because they literally are) and you will realize English and other Latin/European languages share the same trait.
You speak German and English, so you can probably appreciate that you can "generally" understand other European languages even if you don't speak them if they share a common root like Latin. Kanji is like that.
I'm not familiar with Japanese script systems, but this looks fantastic.
"to cook paper"? That's at least what it seems to translate to.
Would love something like this in VS Code so I could smoothly zoom in and out of my code rather than scrolling and clicking tabs.
Say more! How does the existing zoom function not do enough?
See also https://www.raskinformac.com/features.php
Or if anyone wants to do an IDE like this, take it as an inspiration. Raskins thought it through very well.
THIS! So much this!!
With the jump from 2D screen to AR-based UI, we have the chance to re-think all of the conventions that have gripped UI/UX design over the past few decades. How many apps would benefit from being able to visualize data in a 3D space? How many new ways could we interact with computers, if we could reach out and touch things? Text editing, video editing, image editing (visualizing Photoshop layers?), 3D modeling, sketching, gaming: all revolutionized by a new input paradigm. That's partially what I thought Apple would accomplish. They have a history of totally rethinking every part of software when a new input device comes around. I mean, think about the jump from the iMac to the iPhone. ["I just take my finger, and I scroll."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSv5x3V_KHY) I shudder to think how many drugs Apple employees had to take in order to think around traditional desktop conventions and come up with this stuff. I figured with the Vision Pro, we'd see traditional apps reformed to a new, never-before-seen standard, but I have unfortunately seen very little of that. If you scrape off all of the high-budget polish, Vision Pro feels like a device that another company would create that Apple would then do correctly. By extension, the Meta Quest lineup feels the same way.
But this is the kind of thing I absolutely want to see more of. There's a physicality to this text editor that feels intuitive, but more importantly, it feels comforting. When things appear and disappear on screens instantaneously without any animation, it triggers our brains that something is wrong, because that's unusual behavior. There's a purpose for animation, it's not always all for show. Bringing physicality like this to a 3D interface in mixed reality is, in my opinion, the next step in UI design. This text editor isn't getting super crazy with its effects, but in my opinion, you can already see the potential. As these devices come down in price and more developers get their hands on them I hope to see more like this. Hell, seeing this is the closest I've ever gotten to splurging on a Meta Quest so I could whip up a 3D modal text editor. I want a digital kitchen timer I can physically wind and unwind for Pomodoro timing. I want to pick an album to listen to on Apple Music from a stack of records projected onto my floor. Impractical? Perhaps. But look at early skeuomorphic iPhone apps and tell me those are practical. If all we cared about was using computers to get from point A to point B, we'd all work in TUIs, and r/unixporn wouldn't exist.
I don't know what it is, but feel a fundamental lack of interest in this new input paradigm, both from companies like Apple & Meta and from developers. Hopefully open source projects like this will show people the real potential of this new hardware.
This might interest you too: https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat
Missed opportunity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AduxwY3m87M
suggest to merge with https://github.com/st3w/neo
The trippy parts look like something from Lain (http://0x0.st/XEMi.webm). Which is a cool thing in my books.
zed then
"Sakishi is based on Emacs key bindings. There is a very deep and logical reason for this, but for the purposes of this document, I will just state it as my preference."
I genuinely love Emacs people.
I once set out to learn Emacs, but the stupidly multi-key bindings for very basic things (Ctrl-X Ctrl-C to copy, etc) turned me off. Deep and logical my ass.
I once set out to learn Vi, but the absurd modal editing and convoluted key combinations for basic tasks made it a nightmare. Efficient and logical, my ass!
I find it hard to believe you encountered a single key combination when starting to use vi. Maybe you got far enough to see "ctrl-v"? There are 108 unmodified choices before you'd ever need a combination.
: is shifted on almost every keyboard layout, so saving or quitting would require at least one key combination (OK, arguably you can quit with caps lock, Z, Z, caps lock).
But I suspect he meant "sequence of keys" by "key combination" in what was clearly intended to be a humorous parody of the previous comment.
I always remap : (colon) to ; (semicolon) in vi clones to avoid having to use the shift key.
Furiously spamming ctrl-c trying to quit ?
ctrl-f and ctrl-b are the one I use frequently and amongst the first ones I learned.
I also like Ctrl-o and Ctrl-i for fast-travel between positions (even across files), and especially that they make sense with an out/in mnemonic.
I don't mean this to be a striking criticism of Emacs, however, I had the exact same experience. To be fair I've been using Vim for many years so that may have influenced how difficult it was for me to understand the Emacs key bindings. I didn't even have enough time to check out all the cool extensions
As an emacs user I genuinely believe vim bindings are better, but emacs is more powerful than at least vim (I can’t speak for neovim).
Edit: and I really do wish there was more unbiased content relating to the pros and cons of either.
Emacs has a very long tail indeed of elisp extensions which Neovim has yet to fully catch up with. Neovim is well on its way however, and uses a programming language which many people already know and which is in any case familiar and easy to pick up. Lua has its quirks, elisp is pretty weird even for a Lisp (credit where credit is due, the elisp documentation is fantastic).
I've used Emacs off and on for years, and lately have settled on Neovim. The Spacemacs / Doom style configuration gives Emacs a fairly nice user interface, but I've never managed to hit a sweet spot of running all the fancy stuff I want to run, and not having the editor randomly pause / stutter.
With Neovim I've found that I can load it up and it still starts in under half a second, keeps up with typing/scrolling under all circumstances, and so on. For me that's the right tradeoff, ymmv.
All I want is a cheatsheet between "how you would do it in vim" and "how you would do it on Emacs"
When a long time then use up and I want to give emacs a proper go, but I really can't live without some conveniences like "change inner string" or what have you.
How the hell do you do that in emacs, I cannot find out
In my experience LLMs are pretty decent at this, i.e. explain step by step how do I do X in Emacs/VIM.
It's not great, but right 4/5 times which is still faster than googling.
Actually it's M-w to copy. C-x C-x is to quit.
C-x C-c exits. C-x C-x moves point to the opposite end of the current region.
"Text editing is still plagued by poor user interfaces: when you press the "A" key, the letter "A" appears on the screen without any interaction, when you press "Delete" it disappears in an instant, the cursor disappears to the right edge of the screen, then suddenly appears on the left edge" Maybe I'm old fashioned, but this is exactly what appeals to me regarding text based interfaces.
From the translated page:
"Although Japanese is primarily written vertically, there are not many text editors that fully support vertical writing. However, you can gain deeper insight by reading a text vertically or horizontally, or by flexibly changing the layout and rereading it. With Sakishi, you can instantly switch between vertical and horizontal writing while editing a document."
That was my "aha!" moment when reading this. Japanese has been made to fit Western convention a lot of the time, but it's good to have another option.
The author is probably half-joking in that part of the README. There's a slight hyperbolic tone in the original text that's lost in the translation.
Always remember who your target audience is. If it's people who actually use a computer for writing, instead of just looking at cat pictures on the internet, then they probably don't care about fancy transitions and animations. They want to get shit done and they need their workflow to be optimized.
If it's just for normal people, then go wild with all the useless, CPU-wasting frills. Feel proud about it, even. In 2024 a snappy user interface only requires a few GBs of RAM, several intercommunicating processes and the ENTIRE FREAKING WEB STACK.
Checking out this repo just made me realize that a good way to prevent getting spammed pull requests in your repo is to maintain it in a langauge other than English.
I've worked for maybe ten years in the open source space, as a maintainer and contributor. I've seen thousands of pull requests in that time. Some great. Most ok. Some terrible. All made by people who want to contribute in some way for free.
I've seen close to zero spam pull requests. Are these common?
Why are there so many "Update Reamde.md" pull requests ? They all are named exactly the same, and most of the time add a single line to the readme with the name of the commit author. I guess some git tutorial somewhere shows how to open a PR with this repo as an example, and people actually do it.
Wow! That spam seems so bad and dumb that it seems unlikely this would be deterred by the repo being in Japanese.
There are certain companies that “rate” candidates based on e.g. number of open source contributions. Some people then try to game this system by submitting a whole bunch of super minor errors to a lot of repos, e.g. small grammar mistakes / typos.
Depends heavily on the area. I've seen a bunch of bots correcting nonsensical "textbook" issues in languages like Java. The more common the topic among new learners, the more random PRs you get. But apparently even projects like linux kernel aren't safe https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclose... (for context, this repo doesn't accept PRs as development happens in mailing lists)
In addition to what the other replies have said, just a couple of years ago some company or group was running a competition which gave away something and caused a bunch of nuisance PRs adding almost literal garbage to READMEs. After criticism the ones running the competition eventually said repository owners could opt-out. This is only from recollection so I might have some things wrong about it. Fortunately it hasn't repeated itself.
This sounds like Hacktoberfest with Digital Ocean, specifically. I could also be wrong, but that is the one that stood out to me.
Japan is somewhat a world of its own when it comes to open source projects. (And also commercial software, I suppose.) Mostly due to the language barrier. There's some wonderful stuff out there that's unfortunately only documented in Japanese. Even the Ruby language took about five years after becoming popular, to cross the language barrier and become used outside Japan.
It’s also a good way to prevent getting useful pull requests.
Also true!
At least it's better than getting spammed issues.
Yeah, bot generated nonsensical issues is pretty common. :(
