I'll pull a number out of my ass and will claim that in at least 95% of all translation, quality and emotion does not matter at all.

Maybe you think of translating a masterpiece, a best-selling book. They are outnumbered by an order of magnitude by apps, websites, technical manuals, policy documents, reports, all mass-produced by every business out there and require translation but no one cares about the details.

Reminds me of a quote from the book High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic:

Any experiment involving semiconductors at a frequency of 10^-12 Hz will (eventually) reveal that they do not function. It takes so long to run an experiment at 10^-12 Hz that the circuits turn to dust. Viewed on a very long time scale, integrated circuits are nothing but tiny lumps of oxidized silicon.

If it's only photo ID images 2 years old, then everyone is safe! No need to worry about a thing.

My photo ID and driver's license information is of course completely different now compared to two years ago. I'm sure everyone has moved and changed their looks enough in two years to make that information virtually useless.

This is actually less than expected. Low enough that I think this is too optimistic.

Then again, the cost is not so much labor, but energy, raw material, and land use. I wouldn't be surprised if cost of property and energy is actually comparable between Taiwan and Arizona, so there's only the extra shipping and a bit higher salary for a few workers.

This reminds me of the people who are impressed that there are (potentially) asteroids made of gold, and how much that would be worth.

Well, here you are, proof that Mars is worth about twice as much as gold! Just build a railgun on Mars and keep shooting rocks down to earth! We'll all be billionaires!

They've been crying wolf so many times.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

It's pathetic that news outlets just go with it. The headline should have a bunch of questions marks, not full stops.

My inbox is already "decluttered" because I don't randomly subscribe to newsletters I don't want.

Maybe a lot of people still need this, because they can't read what they click on, and that makes me sad.

The only place where a gun would have a valid use for self defense is when people are screaming.

But maybe you just want to ban guns.

Pretty sure Clint Eastwood will win a bar fight with Mel Brooks, even at the ripe old age of 90+. He'll probably beat me up, easily!

A typical student's kitchen must be good hunting grounds for a microbiologist!

Reminds me of the real mechanical turk (not the Amazon crap), which was a 16th century contraption supposedly using advanced mechanical intelligence to play chess.

It was really just a guy in a box.

That status is slowly going down though. Still absolutely the largest reserve but... shit can happen.

I hated this bullshit from the first time I saw them popping up, and they've managed to insert themselves into so many retailers here.

"Larger customers like DuckDuckGo told Wired they won't be affected."

... for how long? While it is obviously a little ironic that DuckDuckGo routes the searches through Bing (and I was surprised the first time I read about it), it's still a sound idea and I'm glad DuckDuckGo can do it.

Or does DuckDuckGo pay dearly for the service, enough to compensate Microsoft's actual costs? Follow-up thought: If Microsoft no longer cares about Bing, will that cause DuckDuckGo to get worse over time?

A good start but it always helps to put this in perspective.

They made $350 billion in revenue 2024. Over $100 billion in income.

I assure you they make a profit breaking these laws. $1.4 isn't a small amount though, if it keeps happening.