• 17 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2024

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  • Humans shopping online allows the seller to offer discounts, upsell services, create serendipity (“How about a lip gloss 50% to go with those shoes?”), and build brand loyalty. Or if you’re a techie, how about 50% off an SD-card with the purchase of a gadget?

    This is why retailers create these expensive e-commerce websites instead of just dumping their wares into E-Bay or Amazon. They also do things like web heatmaps and other types of analytics to optimize the UI/UX.

    Having an AI agent do the shopping means they lose all that. It’s any wonder they’re going to fight AI shopping agents. Be prepared for a lot more complex captchas when roaming around the web.



  • We used to read both versions in high school French class. There was much more slang in French. Many of these were replaced by silly puns in English.

    Even the names: Getafix the druid was originally Panoramix. Dogmatix the dog was Idéfix (this is actually a pretty good translation, keeping the core idea of single-mindedness, plus it has Dog in it).

    The chief and bard names are the worse. Abraracourcix is a reference to someone prone to violence in French, which is why he keeps getting angry and red-faced. There’s a whole plotline about him having to go to a spa so he can lose weight and relax. Not sure why they renamed him to Vitalstatistix in English.

    And the noisy bard goes from Assurancetourix (comprehensive insurance joke) to an unsubtle Cacofonix. But to answer your question, most of the bad puns were added in the English translation.

    FWIW, they did a reverse butcher job with Harry Potter books. The French versions literally translated the British expressions word-for-word to the point they made no sense.