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  I have been trying to keep my little language business afloat, but the fundraiser hasn't gone particularly well, and new contracts remain frustratingly sparse. For most of my life, I could rely on my skills to make a living out of the things I love: languages, translation, teaching, working with words and people. I built my life around that, and I was rather proud of it. Now, I find myself deeply afraid that this chapter might be coming to an end. That the skills I spent years honing might...

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  RE: https://lgbtqia.space/@thepurpleoctopus/117554657821329919 Frantz Fanon it is then. This will be interesting...

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  🐙 Sunday Philosophy needs your intervention. I've written about Fromm, Adorno, Horkheimer and Lacan. Time to invite some new minds to the intellectual octopus tank. For the next Sunday philosophy post, I'm considering three rather different thinkers: 📚 Walter Benjamin: History, memory and the rather inconvenient question of progress for whom? 📚 Simone de Beauvoir: Freedom, responsibility and the business of becoming. 📚 Frantz Fanon: Colonialism, oppression and the psychology of libe...

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  The blue wave was a start, not an end. 💙 A victory is not a promise fulfilled. It is an opportunity to fight harder, organise better, and turn hope into material change. Queer rights, trans lives, reproductive freedom, economic justice. None of these are secured by one election. We celebrate. We breathe. Then we get back to work. Solidarity is a practice, not a hashtag. 🏳️‍⚧️

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  I have spent decades learning languages, studying their peculiarities and helping people communicate across linguistic boundaries. I am not particularly keen on watching that knowledge being replaced by a machine that occasionally thinks an idiom is a plumbing instruction. Keep translation human. 💜

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  AI is not sentient. It is not a person. It is not a ghost in a machine. It is Clippy with a GPU, Autocorrect with a venture capital fund, and a statistical prediction engine dressed up in Silicon Valley mythology. And that distinction matters. AI is not going to rise up and overthrow humanity. The people pushing AI are trying to. And they are sentient. They are people. They have names, bank accounts, political influence, and an alarming number of GPUs. We do not have a *Rise of the Machines*...

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  AI can translate words. It cannot translate what you meant, what you implied, what you deliberately left unsaid, or why you chose that particular slightly peculiar expression. Translation is not word substitution. It's communication. Human beings communicating with other human beings. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

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  Why I love Italian. 🇮🇹 Italian is one of those languages that makes my little linguist brain purr. And frankly, I refuse to apologise for this. There is something wonderfully ridiculous and beautiful about a language that has so much grammatical machinery and yet manages to make the whole contraption sing. Let's talk grammar, shall we? Because I am a complete nerd and you knew what you were getting into. Those verb conjugations! Person, number, tense, mood, aspect. An entire miniature bur...

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  Good morning, lovely people. 💜 The blue wave has arrived, and it came with a rather magnificent splash. Now let’s see whether the Democrats will actually improve things for queer people, especially our trans siblings, or merely offer us a fresh coat of electoral optimism. Globally, the fight is far from over. Authoritarianism doesn't take a day off, and neither can our solidarity. Stay kind. Stay vigilant. Keep fighting. 🏳️‍⚧️🐙

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  AI still sucks. Human translators still matter. And my fundraiser is still going. 🐙💜 Every donation, booking, and share helps me keep doing what I do best: turning human words in one language into human words in another language, with nuance, care, and absolutely no algorithmic word salad. Support the fight against translation slop: https://ko-fi.com/thepurpleoctopus

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  🐙📚 A little excursion into critical theory: Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School, and the appeal of authoritarianism Ever heard of Erich Fromm? Fromm was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of thinkers who set out to understand why modern capitalist societies produced not only technological progress and material wealth, but also alienation, conformity, and authoritarian politics. The Frankfurt School brought Marxist social cr...

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  Anarchists can organise. We can make plans, establish responsibilities, coordinate resources, and get things done. We just have this quaint little objection to turning the coordinator into an unquestionable ruler.

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  Capitalism has somehow convinced us that being exhausted, frightened about money, and too busy to enjoy our lives is the natural condition of adulthood. Remarkable propaganda. Terrible product.

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  The British don't speak German like that. Translation isn't just about precision. It's also about audience. A British character in a German translation often doesn't sound British. They sound like a German person's idea of a British person. The same goes for Americans. German audiences have cultural expectations about how British and American people speak. They expect certain rhythms, certain jokes, certain kinds of politeness, a particular flavour of sarcasm. And translat...

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  I am a soft creature with a hard boundary: People are not disposable. Not workers. Not refugees. Not queer kids. Not the poor. Not anyone the system has decided is inconvenient. Nobody is a rounding error. 🐙💜

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  One of the things AI translation is spectacularly bad at is character voice. A character in a novel does not merely say things. They have habits. Favourite turns of phrase. Odd little colloquialisms. A particular rhythm. Maybe they are dry, breathless, pompous, tender, sarcastic, provincial, flamboyant, or gloriously weird. AI tends to turn all of that into statistically plausible soup. A human translator can look at a character and think: No. This is how this person talks. And then recreate...

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  "We would like to help you, but you cannot be a freelancer." So you cannot help me. Okay. "It's for your own safety. After all, you could do something stupid" And... erm... employees could somehow not? Oh well...

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  RE: https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes/117309052859417965 It's video creators like this or translators like me, or writers, or musicians, the list is long. But we all suffer from AI and the people that use it. GenAI is theft. GenAI is killing jobs and destroying livelihoods. It needs to be stopped. Also, do watch Not Just Bikes stuff. It's great! :)

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  Finally deleted every last vestige of Windows and Microsoft from all devices in the household. Proprietary software is ultimately somebody else’s control over my machine and my data. I’d rather own the infrastructure I depend on. Google is mostly gone too. One legacy Google Photos instance remains, slowly being emptied. Then that goes as well. The freed-up space is going to local archives and proper, redundant backups. My data. My machines. My storage. My rules. 💾🌱

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  I think it is entirely legitimate to worry about antisemitic trends on parts of the German left. But there is a rather substantial distance between taking antisemitism seriously and comparing a left-wing candidate for Mayor of Berlin to Adolf Hitler, then suggesting that people should invest in companies making crematoria in case she wins. Which, for the record, is literally something I have just seen someone do. I personally think Die Linke has some housekeeping to do. That does not remotely...

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  A little good-night reminder before I disappear into the blankets: No matter how fucked up the world gets, there are always kind people around. People who help without being asked, who listen, who make space, who choose gentleness when they could choose cruelty. They may not always be the loudest people in the room. But they are there. And sometimes, they are the reason we make it through another day. Good night, little weirdos. Be kind to each other. 💜🌙

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  When you confront people with scientific facts and they tell you: "Well, I have a different opinion." Oh well...

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  @enatoni@tech.lgbt I have a feeling they are already upon us.

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  Just saw a person saying: "Why are people always so dismissive and hostile towards Nazis? I say we should give them a chance to govern, we can criticise them then, if they should mess up." This is not the universe I chose to live in...

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  I’m about to start a week I’m really not looking forward to. I’ve tried to get the money from the people who literally owe me money. They said they couldn't. I’ve done everything else I can reasonably do. And I’m still short. Quite a bit short. So, one last try. This is my donation link: [https://ko-fi.com/thepurpleoctopus/goal?g=14] This explains what is happening to translators thanks to AI: [https://ko-fi.com/post/The-Machine-Ate-My-Job-and-Apparently-Im-Suppose-A6V725QY58] It’s not...

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  Good morning :)

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  I increasingly distrust the language of “multiple crises.” AI-driven labour displacement. Climate catastrophe. Right-wing populism. Fascism. Racism. Sexism. The organised backlash against queer existence. We are encouraged to catalogue these as separate problems, each requiring its own specialist vocabulary, institution, funding stream and respectable panel discussion. But they are not unrelated phenomena. They emerge from overlapping structures of domination. The same political economy tha...

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  Good morning. 🌻 My fight to keep my fully human, no-AI translation business alive is still going. I translate. I teach. I work with actual words, actual context, actual people. No algorithmic word soup. No “close enough” machine sludge. No AI slop wearing a little business suit. What would help right now is a little support with my running costs while I keep fighting to make this work. If you’d like to support a tiny human business refusing to let AI eat its lunch, you can do that here: ☕ [...

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  …and behind everything, Vladimir Putin smiles. Nothing quite says “German patriotism” like voting AfD, Putin’s favourite little useful idiots. History really does have a fucked up sense of humour. #AfD #NoAfD #Antifascism #Putin #Germany #NeverAgain

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  Goodnight, everyone. 🌙💜 Not exactly a good day. Fascism is on the rise, my finances are a mess, I can't even pay my rent properly, and generally… ugh. One of those days where the universe really ought to consider getting a hobby. I'm tired. So tonight, I'm going to let myself be tired. Tomorrow is a new day. I'll pull my socks up and get going again. One stubborn step at a time. 🧦💜 Good night, everyone. Sleep well. Be kind to yourselves. We have another day to fight for a bet...