Miyazaki’s so oldskool but he’s up against his own countrymen’s love of the totally artificial.

http://qz.com/859454/the-director-of-spirited-away-says-animation-made-by-artificial-intelligence-is-an-insult-to-life-itself/

A really good read. Machine learning had certainly come a long way in a short time.

The stuff about Google Translate is also great news for my daughters who both study Japanese. Google Translate has up until now been truly terrible at translating Asian languages but perhaps this is no longer the case. If so this is going to make a whole series of texts accessible for the first time instead of being comically opaque.

Here’s an example of the kind of unintentional linguistic comedy Google Translate has been previously famous for:

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/shibboleth-users/EjvS2Cgio6c

Originally shared by Roberto Bayardo

Long but good read about the Google Brain team’s work on language translation, and its implications on “general” (or at least “more general”) AI.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html

You tech-heads just don’t understand this stuff: real people don’t need to know how long their battery will last.

It just works until it doesn’t.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/13/13939278/apple-macos-sierra-new-macbook-pros-battery-life

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/08/the_vulture_capitalists_killed_pebble/?mt=1481374372285