15 minutes streaming each day does indeed sound manageable! Now I just need to remember how to set up a stream from my laptop (but that’s not a big enough excuse for me not to do it!)… and thank you - I really appreciate the encouragement 
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Aran, that is amazing. Thank you so much! That was unimaginably faster than I anticipated. This time last week, I was just hoping that someday there would be an SSiR.
I’m going to try to do an hour per day with the goal of going to Romania this Fall and using what I’ve learned.
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Wonderful! We’d absolutely love to see some videos of you using your Romanian, if you’re up for it!
Meanwhile, I’m hammering away at Greek, should have that ready for you before the end of the week 
Anyone have any requests for what you’d like to see after Greek?
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Cornish ha ha.
Yes, I know, the plan is for that to come when your revenue stream supports its creation and/or some Cornish body gives you funding to make it, as LLMs currently suck at Cornish.
FWIW, I think that energy politics permitting, the day is not far off when Cornish wil be doable too. Not far off as in like a year or two only. About 15 months ago, I asked Chat-GPT to line-by-line translate one of Nicholas Williams’ Cornish podcasts and gloss the vocabulary and the results were not pretty. A few weeks ago, I asked Claude to do the same and the results were… fairly useable.
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I’d love to see Armenian!
Or Russian.
I’m not worried about learning the scripts, just love to surprise my partner with some conversations.
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Hmmm - I’ll ask Tom about Claude - that’s our main tool, but our current set of options doesn’t include Cornish - we’ll see if we can run some tests, because we would dearly love to revisit Cornish - the first other language we ever tried to build for!
@mattcridland I’ve just fired up the initial build for Armenian, should have something for you to play with by the end of the week. I’ll be holding off on Russian until I’ve done all our Ukrainean variants (other languages for Ukrainean speakers as well as Ukrainean for English speakers etc).
We’ve got some plans for a tool to teach scripts, but it’s a slight distraction from the main work at the moment - will probably happen this year, though.
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Oh, uhh - I have bad news about Armenian - it breaks claude! let me go see if I need to cancel your initial build…
(for anyone interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1qwyr71/armenian_in_opus/)
I’m absolutely sure we can find a way around it, but it’s not a simple “firing up an initial build for Armenian” unfortunately! But I can add it as a side-mission
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I saw it was misbehaving, and Tom’s off for the rest of the day after pulling an all-nighter 
Diolch am edrych i mewn iddo! 
Okay, looks as though Claude has a known problem with Armenian - we’ll see if we can find a way around that, @mattcridland, but we may have no choice but to wait for a fix from Anthropic, I’m afraid. Sorry about that 
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Ok, ukrainienne then.
It’s the third language spoken in their home.
Skipping Russian seems a bit of an oversight though given how many counties that aren’t at war speak it, including Ukraine. (unless it’s a contract thing with the Ukraine gov)
Language does open up a window into more of the world after all.
It’s not like we’ve shied away from Imperialist languages.
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Seems a bit of an assumption to conclude that the release order is based on any kind of political stance, mate. I’m happy to be corrected if I missed it; but I haven’t seen anyone mention imperialism as one of the considerations for when to release the languages. It’s probably best to avoid politics on here IMHO. There’s enough of that IRL these days.
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Ukrainian build is up and running
It’s true, most big languages have got some pretty dark stuff in their national past, no two ways about that. At the same time, while there’s an illegal war going on, it just feels really off to be thinking about doing stuff with Russian (and I’ve been a fan of Russia and Russian literature all my life, and my heart breaks for all the good Russians who are suffering).
Martin, yes, it’s true that it can be a good thing to avoid politics - having said that, we’ve always had a rule in this community that anything can be spoken about, as long as the people speaking about it take particular care to be respectful and polite towards each other
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Here’s the kind of thing Claude generated for me:
Not perfect, but very useable. It was also quite helpful at providing etymologies to use as mnemonics and explaining historical facts, such as why the Bishop of Cologne would have an army.
Now, if I compare the mess that was Chat-GPT’s effort 15 months ago:
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Thanks for always assuming best intentions, there aren’t many community leaders, let alone business leaders who are capable of that. It’s why I keep coming back.
It’s a shame, and while I understand your reasoning I think it’s an opportunity to understand more of the conflict and the propaganda. But I will leave it there before it becomes too granular and in the weeds.
Back to the main topic:
I cant find ukrainien on either app, do I need to wait for it to propagate through?
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Oh wow, I’ve always hated “mate”, it always felt so dissmissive and gendered, especially when used in a disagreement.
I inferred the reasoning, it was an assumption, so for that I’m sorry, you were right to call me on that.
Politics and language are inseparable, especially when discussing which languages to choose across two sides of a conflict. Honestly politics and existence are inseparable, my existence anyway, it’s a position of privilege for those that can avoid it.
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An Armenian test is running as well! I’ve tweaked some stuff to use different models, and we’ll see how that comes out. No promises, it’s only an experiment right now
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I really appreciate those kind words, @mattcridland, means a lot
I can also assure you that Martin is not a first language English speaker and absolutely means ‘mate’ in a friendly way (although as a first language English speaker I know it can be weaponised!).
Ukrainian has only just started a build today (although it seems to be a bit stuck at the moment) - it’s going to take us a few days to complete the whole build, I’ll sing out in here when we publish
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That does look as though it’s getting close, and would be able to handle a lot of our stuff. We’ll have a chat about it in-house soon
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I take this point, by the way. I’m not stuck into ‘no Russian course’ for ever, because education and understanding always makes the world a bit better. My solution (for myself!) is that I want to have built a lot of stuff for Ukrainian before doing anything with Russian. And my plan to be able to read War and Peace in the original is also on hold for the time being (but it’s been on hold for quite a while, more because of laziness than wars).
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OK, well it wasn’t meant to be dismissive, that would be “pal” where I come from. I also was wrong to call you out on your assumption. I apologise for that. In view of what I’m going to write below, I want to stress that this apology is genuine. I should have minded my own business.
It’s not really true that politics and language are inseparable. It is true that it’s artificial to separate them; but we artificially bracket things all the time in certain situations to avoid conflict or friction or whatever.
I’m just sick of politics TBH as it is at the moment. One of the few good things about being in Vietnam is that much less of it elbows its way unbidden into my attention than back home.
Still, I will respect Aran’s rules. If you want to talk about politics, you have every right. I’ll just have to suck it up.
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