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I was thinking about this comparison recently along a slightly different axis: One challenge when working with translations (human or machine translations) as t

I was thinking about this comparison recently along a slightly different axis: One challenge when working with translations (human or machine translations) as that you can't vet whether it's correct or not yourself. So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine, though I have had someone message me once to say "this translation of your article is so bad I feel like the translator did not put in a serious attempt" It's similar to vibe coding where the user truly doesn't know how to create the same thing themselves: You end up with output that you have no way of knowing it's correct, and you just have to blindly trust it and hope for the best. And that just doesn't work for many situations. So you still need expertise anyway (either yours or someone else's)

stevage 1y ago
Well no, you can run the output. That gives you some measure of correctness.
- danpalmer 1y ago
  No I think the original comment is correct. You need to be able to evaluate the result. The goal of software is not to compile and run, it's to solve a problem for the user when running. If you don't know enough about the problem to be able to assess the output of the program then you can't trust that it's actually doing the right thing. I've seen code generated by LLMs that runs, does something, and that the something would be plausible to a layperson, but that I know from domain knowledge and knowing the gotchas involved in programming that it's not actually correct. I think the comparison with translation is a very apt one.
eurleif 1y ago
You can kinda validate machine translation by doing a circular translation, A->B->A. It's not a perfect test, but it's a reasonably strong signal.
- ruszki 1y ago
  I’m learning German, and I quite often use this test. Google Translate fails this most of the times. This is true even between Hungarian and English. The difference with the latter one is, that I can properly choose between the options given to me, if there are, without translating it back. Especially, that that passed many times when it gave terrible translations. So this test fails many times, and even when not, the translation is still usually not good. However, when you don’t care about nuances, it’s still fine usually. And also translation seems to be better if the text is larger. Translating a single word does almost always fail. Translating a whole article is usually fine. But even there it matters what you translate. Translating the Austrian subreddit fails quite often. Sometimes completely for whole large posts. Translating news is better.
- numpad0 1y ago
  Round tripping is definitely better than nothing, but it lets through a lot of "engrish" errors with multi-meaning words and with implied perspectives. Cape as in clothing and cape as in pointy seasides, general as in military rank vs general as in generic, etc. e.g. "Set up database as: [read replica]" and "Database setup complete: [a replica was loaded.]" may translate into a same string in some language.
vasco 1y ago
> So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine Only because you think the machine will be incorrect. If I have a large multiplication to do it's much easier to trust the calculator than a mathematician, and that's all due to my perception of the calculator accuracy.

stevage 1y ago

Well no, you can run the output. That gives you some measure of correctness.

danpalmer 1y ago
No I think the original comment is correct. You need to be able to evaluate the result. The goal of software is not to compile and run, it's to solve a problem for the user when running. If you don't know enough about the problem to be able to assess the output of the program then you can't trust that it's actually doing the right thing. I've seen code generated by LLMs that runs, does something, and that the something would be plausible to a layperson, but that I know from domain knowledge and knowing the gotchas involved in programming that it's not actually correct. I think the comparison with translation is a very apt one.

eurleif 1y ago

You can kinda validate machine translation by doing a circular translation, A->B->A. It's not a perfect test, but it's a reasonably strong signal.

ruszki 1y ago
I’m learning German, and I quite often use this test. Google Translate fails this most of the times. This is true even between Hungarian and English. The difference with the latter one is, that I can properly choose between the options given to me, if there are, without translating it back. Especially, that that passed many times when it gave terrible translations. So this test fails many times, and even when not, the translation is still usually not good. However, when you don’t care about nuances, it’s still fine usually. And also translation seems to be better if the text is larger. Translating a single word does almost always fail. Translating a whole article is usually fine. But even there it matters what you translate. Translating the Austrian subreddit fails quite often. Sometimes completely for whole large posts. Translating news is better.
numpad0 1y ago
Round tripping is definitely better than nothing, but it lets through a lot of "engrish" errors with multi-meaning words and with implied perspectives. Cape as in clothing and cape as in pointy seasides, general as in military rank vs general as in generic, etc. e.g. "Set up database as: [read replica]" and "Database setup complete: [a replica was loaded.]" may translate into a same string in some language.

vasco 1y ago

> So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine Only because you think the machine will be incorrect. If I have a large multiplication to do it's much easier to trust the calculator than a mathematician, and that's all due to my perception of the calculator accuracy.