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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1850 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 28, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Taylor's Hegel, a topic which seems long overdue.

Started on Reverend Insanity. The translation I found is horrible (is there a preferred one?), but I’m glued to it anyway.

Edit: if there is an adequate Russian translation, that would also work.

They're all absolutely terrible. The one I had got about 20% better after a few hundred chapters, but still very close to unreadable. I've read fanfic by 7th graders with better prose.

You kind of get used to it.

Someone should burn a couple of hundred million tokens and have a frontier LLM do a fresh translation or an extremely liberal English rewrite. Especially pretty much all original dialog needs to go. The problem is you probably need to supervise it, to keep all foreshadowing intact and all world building elements consistently named. That part of the translation was actually decent, the factions, Gu, ect. have passable or even good names.

While we're at it, liberally cutting all the superfluous explanations would probably help. Doing the absolute opposite of show-don't-tell got really annoying after the first million times he did it.

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