Keith Whyte @keith@tic-ac.org

I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@Gargron argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@Gargron notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

Buenas tardes #Fediverso, si están en #Latinoamérica, si no, buenos días o noches.

¿Qué tal les ha sentado la noticia de que #Google pretende, casi casi, empezar con el proceso de "Apleizarse", de empezarse a volver cada vez más privativo en cuanto al #SistemaOperativo #Android?

https://keepandroidopen.org/es/

Quiero leer sus comentarios y opiniones al respecto...

¡Llegó la hora! 🕗

#2026 es el año para Dejar Windows de una buena vez! 💻

#DejaEl10

https://dejael10.cmxsl.org

Únete a Windows 11, si no tienes problema con ser el menu de tu computación.

No somo fans de las dicotomías, sin embargo 🤔

"La computación te sirve a ti, o tu le sirves a ella"

#NoMasCaciquesDigitales.

Con #SoftwareLibre puedes aspirar a una real #SoberaniaDigital

No estás solo, acércate a los grupos de usuarios y/o en
#Mexico al #CMXSL

Back in May 2019, we said goodbye to SVN and Bugzilla and migrated to Git and GitHub [1]. SinceOpenSouce accumulated 188 repositories. 🙀

We're now making a list to decide which ones we're moving to @Codeberg and which are going to archived and left behind.

While we're doing that, we signed NLnet Labs up as a Codeberg e.V. member!

[1] https://lists.nlnetlabs.nl/pipermail/unbound-users/2019-April/006130.html

#OpenSouce #FOSS #DigitalSovereignty #DNS #BGP

theintercept.com/2026/03/05/k... #KOSA #COPPA #Internet #Infosec #Privacy #Security

Congress Is Considering Abolis...

Instead of a WhatsApp group or whatever, my two oldest friends and me have a private non-federated Mastodon instance running on my laptop for some time now

It's all private and closed so only we 3 use it to communicate and share stories with each other!

You can just disable federation and set everything private so it becomes a little intranet for friends!

#Mastodon is really amazing

#AufBauLeaks #39C3

Canopy: ✅
Pretty lights: ✅
Sound system: ✅
New tables: ✅
Cosyness: ✅✅✅
Collection of Chaotic Creatures: 💖💖💖

All that is missing now is Congress... and you! <3

Three days until #39c3 and many people are preparing their first visit at Congress. Welcome! I know many of first timers are planning to help, especially when they got a friends ticket. We do not expect anyone to do work at the event when the have a friends ticket.

Being an Angel at a chaos event is fun but please die not make your whole visit about working there - especially when you are a first timer.

I wrote post about volunteering and fitting in https://jascha.wtf/angels-at-chaos-about-volunteering-and-fitting-in/

Das SIP und das DECT-Netz sind online. Wir haben alle Informationen zur Telefonie auf dem #39c3 in einem Blog-Post zusammengefasst.
DE: https://events.ccc.de/2025/12/23/39c3-poc/

The SIP and DECT networks are online. We summarized all information about telephony at #39c3 in a blog post.
EN: https://events.ccc.de/en/2025/12/23/39c3-poc/

#AmazingTimeToMarket #DECT

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@w0bb1t/115649194262658668

By this post of @w0bb1t (thx!) I realised that the #39C3 #fahrplan is out

Come and join my to discuss #fascism #cybernetics #society #tech #sustainability #resistance and #humanrights

Life tastes too good to leave it to #fascists

Can't wait to finish work to browse the Fahrplan :)

Like most talks this will be streamed and later available on www.media.ccc.de and @c3voc often provides #subtitles - and you can help them, if you like!

Admin: AI is here to stay
Me: so is herpes, but they shouldn’t get it in the classroom