I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world in 2015 and 2019, in Mariana and Brumadinho.)
The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
You forgot to mention what may be the most serious water problem in Brazil. Agribusiness invests heavily in the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna. In the Cerrado originate the vast majority of Brazilian rivers, which supply water to almost all of Brazil. Its trees, with deep roots, retain the scarce water of the region. This entire region has been deforested for the production of soybeans and cattle ranching. Brazil is a great exporter of water, which it currently does in the form of meat, soybeans, coffee, and paper.
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
Yes, that is right. I didn't forget to mention it, just thought the Minas Gerais case was the most unique geologically as opposed to the far-too-common negative externality problem as is the agricultural excessive use of water + deforestation. But you are completely right. I actually live deep in the Cerrado region now, in Brasília, and I can see first-hand the negative effects of over exploration of water in the region.
Wow. That’s a hydrological feature I’ve never come across in my studies. Thanks for sharing.
Short tangent: I want to stop and admire that you shared an article in Portuguese and in seconds I could read it with Safari’s translation feature. It even translated labels on the images, and got the hydrologic cycle figure right! (However, I think “Rio de 28 Old Women” is probably an error.) This makes me feel connected with you in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.
I feel like machine translation is the unsung hero of the recent AI wave. Gone are the days of just barely being able to discern the meaning of Google Translate. Now I can just read it.
I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!
Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom.
However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.
It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.
Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all just publishing documents." But the beauty of HTML eventually clicked for me: it's describing the semantics of a structured piece of data, which means you can render a perfectly valid view of it however you want if you've got the right renderer!
I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).
I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)
This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!
The parent comment is essentially correct that translations of the same material into different languages represent different views of the same data. A human translator must put in quite a bit of effort establishing what underlying situation is being described by a stretch of language.
Machine translations don't do this; they attempt to map one piece of language to another piece of (a different) language directly.
Relatedly, I tend to think of translations somewhat similar to a lossy system like those used in (say) image compression.
ie a compressed jpg of an image can retain quite a lot of the detail of the original, but it can introduce its own artifacts and lose some of the details
For things where the overall shape and picture is all that's required, that's fine. For things where the fine details matter, it's less fine.
Not sure that every browser advertises English, but mine certainly does. However, as I'm in Portugal, many websites ignore what my browser says and send me to translated versions, I assume based on my IP. That causes problems because the translations are often quite bad, and they do it with redirects to PT URLs so I can't share links with people who don't speak the language.
I have the same problem in Argentina. Worse, I'm pretty sure that Google and other search engines decide that I don't deserve to receive good information because I live in a Spanish-speaking country, so they send me to terrible low-quality pages because often that's all that's available in Spanish.
Does "advertises" in this context mean what's put in the "Accept-Language" HTTP header? Might be worth seeing what that value specifically is the next time this happens. A "clever" IP-based language choice server-side seems far too complicated and error prone, but I guess that's what makes it so "clever."
Yeah I've seen this a few times on the backend that decides this. The standard should be to use the accept-language header, but all the time when people write their own code on top of frameworks (or maybe use niche shitty ones) they just geoip for language.
For business use cases sometimes it's based on the company's default language that you're an employee for.
Try to use any Google site while traveling. I have two languages in my Accept-Language header, but Google always give me language based on location if I'm not logged in. There are also many other sites that does the same, often without any option to change language
Yeah! I don't know what methods Safari on iOS uses, but in general translation has become pretty magical. It feels like we've kind of slepwalked through the invention of the Universal Translator. I just haven't heard as much gushing about it as I feel it deserves. I can just effortlessly read a sciency news article originally written in Portuguese!
A nice thing with LLMs is that you can ask them for a more comprehensive and detailed translation, and explain the nuances and ambiguities rather than trying to match the style of the original. This is great for things like group chats in a foreign language, where it’s full of colloquial expressions, shorthand, and typos.
I'm also from Minas Gerais. Mariana and Brumadinho were truly devastating... The sludge is still visible in the rivers to this day. What gets me is how unnecessary it was. Could have been prevented.
Yes, it was heartbreaking. The gut-wrenching book "Arrastados"[0] by Daniela Arbex does a good job of retelling some of the stories from the Brumadinho disaster.
[0] For those that do not speak Portuguese: I think the book title can be translated as "The Dragged Ones".
Never on which table? “Exporting” environmental degradation is an incredibly widely discussed issue. Especially for South America, due to illegal rainforest clearing for soy farming to feed the NA/EU cattle industry, and lithium mining in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
Not just soy farming, a part of which is surprisingly legal in the Brazilian Amazon. Some of the largest problems we have with respect to illegal rainforest deforestation involves logging or, even worse, artisanal gold mining.
Always interesting when people select an environmentally friendly technology that will help the transition away from destroying the environment somewhere or indeed everywhere else as the "villain" in this discussion. As if oil or coal extraction were without their controversies.
The problem is allowing the companies doing any natural resource extraction to get away with not paying the full cost of the environmental degradation they cause.
NB: "West" is less a term of hemispheric fidelity (Australia and New Zealand are typically seen as "western" countries, despite being in the eastern hemisphere), than it is of cultural derivation (on which Brazil has additional claims, via Portugal), and far more prominently, geopolitical and industrial significance, focusing on the industrial, colonial, and financial powers of the world, largely the US, western Europe (a large portion of which is ... in the eastern hemisphere), AU and NZ as mentioned, and arguably Japan.
The term is often used to avoid (or sometimes conflate) what have become problematic and/or obsolte terms, including colonial empires, advanced vs. undeveloped countries, NATO vs. Soviet Bloc states, or the similarly cardinal-directed "Global North" vs. "Global South".
Pedantry on the point (my own included) isn't particularly illuminating or interesting.
That's ... somewhat freighted as well (less in the positive than the implied negative framing).
"G-n", where n is typically in the range of 6--20, and most canonically refers to the G7 nations of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, is another formulation, though that omits Australia (reasonably significant) and NZ (a small country, though quite "western" in a cultural sense). Other significant exclusions are of course China, as well as South Korea, any South American states (Mexico and Brazil would be the most likely candidates), as well as numerous European states which aren't as dominant but are still internationally significant commercially and politically, though those last can claim some inclusion under the EU, the "non-enumerated member".
The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
[0] https://www.projetopreserva.com.br/post/os-raros-aquiferos-d... (in Portuguese)