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Friday Fun Thread for July 14, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Twitter removed it's login wall.

Not for me. Trying to access twitter.com/POTUS (for example) prompts me to sign in.

Don't know what to tell you:

/images/16893460614022179.webp

EDIT: Hold I think I know what happened - I think they reverted the login wall back to allowing people to see specific tweets, which allows Nitter to mostly work again. Try this:

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1679578947233742848

That works. Too bad that the profile page is still locked. I like the autotranslate feature which nitter lacks.

This site replaces all Nitter links with Twitter, or vice versa depending on your settings, so I can't give you a direct link, but just replace "twitter dot com" with "nitter dot net" (or check the URL in my screenshot), and you'll be able to view the profile. Much better way to use Twitter, IMO.

Ah I see the problem.

twitter DOT com single tweet: works

nitter DOT net single tweet: works

twitter DOT com profile: doesn't work

nitter DOT net profile: works

The reason I prefer twitter over nitter is because it has the feature of translating tweets and while chrome has integrated google translate support for every page, I use firefox.

It looks like on Firefox, there’s this extension that supports Google Translate and DeepL. Never used it, though, so I can’t vouch for its quality.

I've been surprisingly impressed with the Firefox Translations extension, which does the ML translation locally.

Apparently, that extension doesn’t support Mandarin or Japanese (among other languages), so I refrained from suggesting it (in case the OP’s primary use case for Twitter translation is, say, understanding what Japanese artists are saying on their feeds).

Regardless, the fact that it works locally for the languages that it does support is still a testament to the pace of NLP research. How does it compare to something like DeepL, in terms of translation quality?

I can't say I have too much experience with using machine translation, so I'm probably not the right person to give you such a comparison. It's reasonably fast and produces English prose that reads pretty naturally when I've used it.