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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2954 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 12, 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 still attempting Taylor's A Secular Age without much progress. Have been reading a lot of Theodore Dalrymple essays.

Still on Reverend Insanity. The translation is somehow getting worse. Still hooked. At the current pace, expecting to finish sometime in winter.

It's kind of interesting because you can't tell how much is just the author largely ignoring prose after a certain point and how much is the translator. And then there's the weirdness of the language itself, there's a lot going on in Chinese names that we barely even get to see since 'Feng Jin Huang' is just meaningless to us.

Can you not run it through an AI for cleanup?

I try to avoid AI outside of work.

I don't think running a bad translation through an LLM makes much sense, since the LLM may fix bad English but cannot fix mistaken meaning and inconsistencies between chapters.

Running the original Chinese through an LLM has been briefly discussed previously (1 2).

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