jdev - 2023-03-07


  1. moparisthebest

    > you can even have multiple <body/> elements with different xml:lang to send translations of your message! Yep, absolutely terrible antifeature for chat

  2. moparisthebest

    1. No one is going to manually type the same instant message in multiple languages, this isn't email 2. Privacy leak 3. Security problem and UX problem because other people may or may not be seeing the same messages you are 4. Automatic translation, if it's gonna be done, only makes sense to do at the receiving end

  3. pulkomandy

    For messages sent by humans, yes. But for bot services sending you a preset message, it may make sense to send you multiple languages rather than asking tou or querying your client which one you want?

  4. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    Or it could make sense in a multi lingual room

  5. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    You can ignore the languages you dont understand

  6. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    Or put the original and a translation in a multilingual room

  7. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    Instead of the english homogeny we have now

  8. jonas’

    _yes_

  9. jonas’

    multi-lingual rooms are a pain today

  10. jonas’

    though those technically don't need multiple <body/> elements

  11. Menel

    There are not many users in multilingual rooms. I guess there are only such rooms in the open federation. Most xmpp messages take place in private rooms or closed networks, and 1:1. Also *I* wouldn't want to ban one language from beeing seen, because others might still answer to that instead of ignoring it. If everyone from a different language is ignores, why not just have different rooms? All in all I just want to say: is it worth the effort?

  12. jonas’

    Menel, but what's cause and effect?

  13. jonas’

    I am not in multilingual rooms because they annoy me when I see languages I cannot read.

  14. Menel

    Better push "spaces"?

  15. Menel

    If one room only is somehow preferred

  16. Menel

    Because spaces are more flexible... Buy basically the same

  17. Menel

    (If it is Somehow better to have one chatroom instead of one per language)

  18. Menel

    Hm, or "thread" like cheogram challs it..

  19. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    You dont ban the language from being seen in the room. You declare your preference on your client to what you want to see. The thing it solves it that instead of me being on 4 different rooms with different languages, i am only in one. Then i dont have to find and maintain rooms for different languages

  20. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    There are not that many users in multilingual rooms *because* i have to see all the other languages i dont understand. If you could filter them it would workable

  21. jonas’

    ^ that

  22. moparisthebest

    You actually want to just silently not see messages in other languages? That sounds like the worst UI

  23. moparisthebest

    I'd rather see a local translator bundled with clients

  24. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    good thing you dont have to choose :)

  25. pep.

    There's theory and practice. It's easy enough to see there are multiple languages being sent, and if that's an issue then talk to the people. You know, communication, the thing we're doing everday around here :)

  26. Zash

    Hey pep. ! Can I interest you in somehow integrating https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-translations/ into a client? :)

  27. pep.

    "a client"? :P

  28. Zash

    a server would be fine too

  29. pep.

    fwiw a server would be more efficient for public rooms. When e2ee comes into play we'll have to do it differently probably

  30. Zash

    After much digging I found some giant C++ project and some models doing the actual translations, but it just translated everything to "Segmentation fault"

  31. pep.

    I doubt I'd work on something like this right away, but yeah that's one of the possible applications and it doesn't look too bad

  32. Zash

    (The giant C++ thing is then compiled to WASM and used in that Firefox addon)

  33. MattJ

    In the old days, HAL had a plugin that mirrored rooms into different languages

  34. MattJ

    It used the Google Translate API (the one that never officially existed), and it eventually got served captchas

  35. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    just a note but automatic translation sounds like tech solution to a social problem :)

  36. Zash

    That's why I was initially excited about the Firefox plugin, it's not a web service, it's running locally

  37. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    not that I am saying that it shouldnt be used of course

  38. Peter Waher

    It would be kind of cool if a MUC client could register language preferences with the room, and the room automatically translated group chat messages to that language (if registered) (for instance, using OpenAI)

  39. Peter Waher

    And each participant could chat using their own language

  40. Zash

    Peter Waher, that's one possible application, doesn't even need new protocol because we already have `xml:lang=""` on stanzas. Could record the language of join presence and use that later.

  41. Peter Waher

    (regardless what technology the client was built in/ease of access to translation APIs themselves)

  42. Peter Waher

    yes, but asking for translations, is not the same as using a language (xml:lang)

  43. Peter Waher

    Meaning, I chat in multiple languages; doesn’t mean I want everything translated, esp. if someone else chats in a language I also use.

  44. Peter Waher

    But it would allow people to chat using languages they don’t understand

  45. Peter Waher

    without each client having to do individual translations

  46. pep.

    fwiw I'd rather avoid feeding stuff to AIs

  47. Peter Waher

    (Typically, translation APIs use API keys, which have costs associated with them; so you don’t like to check in such keys into project repositories. But having the server do the translations for you, solves this)

  48. pep.

    So yeah the firefox project is more interesting here

  49. Peter Waher

    > fwiw I’d rather avoid feeding stuff to AIs Yes, it’s sensitive. Need to be done without disclosing participants identities of course.

  50. pep.

    Or not be done at all :)

  51. Peter Waher

    > So yeah the firefox project is more interesting here Sounds platform/technology-specific

  52. Peter Waher

    Well, it’s of course a simple choice not to register

  53. Zash

    https://github.com/browsermt

  54. Peter Waher

    It’s a difference between not participating, and making sure others cannot participate…

  55. Zash

    Peter Waher, > After much digging I found some giant C++ project and some models doing the actual translations

  56. Zash

    C++ compiled to WASM, it shouldn't be tied to Firefox in any way

  57. Peter Waher

    There are a lot of translators, and have been for ~20 years. But they are becoming better… and supports more and more languages. Non-English-languages typically have variable quality, to say the least…

  58. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    yep. tech is very very english centered

  59. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    so I wouldnt expect automatic translations to be any good

  60. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    for conversations at a chat that is

  61. moparisthebest

    > just a note but automatic translation sounds like tech solution to a social problem :) What's the social problem? Me not manually translating each of my messages into a bunch of languages I don't know? Otherwise what?

  62. Peter Waher

    still, it would be voluntary…

  63. pep.

    Well and english is the international language anyway

  64. Zash

    Doesn't need to be perfect, just needs to be good enough that people can understand each other

  65. Zash

    Just like language itself

  66. Peter Waher

    > Well and english is the international language anyway Perhaps where you live…

  67. pep.

    Peter Waher, you missed my xhtml-im marker :P

  68. Peter Waher

    probably…

  69. Peter Waher

    sorry

  70. moparisthebest

    I'd be mega opposed to automatically sending data off to central services but I see no issues with users doing it locally

  71. pep.

    I'm not saying I want it to be

  72. pep.

    moparisthebest, yeah I'd be opposed to that too

  73. Peter Waher

    Here, in Latin America, access to English resources is limited, mainly for language-reasons…

  74. Zash

    moparisthebest, what's that, it's all about control, again? :)

  75. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    > Well and english is the international language anyway we shouldnt expect everybody to know english

  76. pep.

    Peter Waher, right

  77. Peter Waher

    Having the room ask a service to translate, would not technically be centralized, more than then room is also centralized, as it’s still up to the room to select translation service…

  78. pep.

    Still, typical westerners expect english to be spoken when they do tourism for example

  79. Peter Waher

    But there would probably be fewer translations services, than rooms

  80. moparisthebest

    No one is, but generally people need to understand each other's languages to communicate with each other, unless there are translators (programs or people), I don't think that's gonna change

  81. Peter Waher

    > Still, typical westerners expect english to be spoken when they do tourism for example (Not if they want to survive here… 😆)

  82. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    > Still, typical westerners expect english to be spoken when they do tourism for example true. also a problem

  83. pep.

    https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/331 > A Vulnerability in Implementations of SHA-3, SHAKE, EdDSA, and Other NIST-Approved Algorithm

  84. Peter Waher

    thanks for the reference

  85. Peter Waher

    At least something: > The vulnerability described in this paper does not affect the SHA-3 standard (as specified in FIPS 202 ₁₂), and not all implementations of SHA-3 are vulnerable. Most notably, the implementation of SHA-3 in OpenSSL is not affected.

  86. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    yeah its python, php and ruby

  87. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    and they were all patched 6 moths ago afaik

  88. Menel

    > Still, typical westerners expect english to be spoken when they do tourism for example Depends where.. And also it is true for most of the countries you go as westener.

  89. Menel

    Also maybe they don't "expect" but just us eit because a try it better then only gestures

  90. Menel

    Also maybe they don't "expect" but just try it because a try it better then only gestures

  91. pep.

    When I was living in Japan people came speaking to me in english because I look european. That was funny at the beginning, quickly became annoying

  92. pep.

    (Also because I was speaking Japanese)

  93. pep.

    (Annoying also because I was speaking Japanese)

  94. Menel

    Jeah, but what do you expect? They all learn Japanese?

  95. pep.

    They?

  96. Menel

    "people that talked to you"

  97. pep.

    Japanese people came speaking to me in english

  98. Menel

    Sounds normal

  99. Peter Waher

    People who only speak English, or expect to speak English on their travels, would typically only go to places where they are able to speak English, at least barely… The world is bigger… It’s probably the same for chat rooms… It would be an interesting concept to be able to create chat rooms that are by default multi-lingual, as it translated input texts to preferred languages, if possible. Sounds at least sufficiently interesting to try.

  100. Menel

    My parents always tell japanese people were happy to try to practice English on them

  101. pep.

    That says something about english being the one accepted international language. I find it offensive otherwise, just talk to me in Japanese and then if I can't answer using the same language I'll look embarassed, then only try english?

  102. pep.

    Menel, yeah it's fine as a tourist when you're there two weeks

  103. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    i would still like tagging on messaging and filtering client side instead of automatic translation

  104. pep.

    Peter Waher, the first XMPP room I was in, we spoke many languages in there (no matter the xml:lang :p). I really miss these days

  105. MSavoritias (fae,ve)

    i feel like automatic translation creates more problem than it solves

  106. Peter Waher

    The first manual I had for the SNES platform (in the 90-ies) was a thick binder of machine-translated japanese technical reference documentation. It was difficult to process sometimes; you often had to try to figure out what the so called English was trying to say… but it was much easier than trying the japanese original…

  107. Zash

    What you say!

  108. Zash

    You have no chance to survive, make your time!

  109. Peter Waher

    as an optional feature, sounds interesting

  110. pep.

    All your documentation are belong to us

  111. Zash

    all your base64

  112. Peter Waher

    😆

  113. Peter Waher

    those were the days

  114. pep.

    "[smiling face with open mouth and tightly-closed eyes]" I'm thinking this could be done better with an alt attribute :x

  115. pep.

    Only those needing it actually reading it