Data science
fromMedium
20 hours agoContext matters... A lot
Large language models excel at tasks but struggle with context, leading to potentially misleading answers despite their capabilities.
The response was in Indonesian but shaped by values that centered individual autonomy over the consensus-building, social harmony and collective family dynamics that tend to matter more in Indonesian social life.
When respondents were asked which languages feel the most welcoming, Portuguese emerged on top, selected by 34 percent of participants. Spanish came in a close second with 33 percent of respondents calling it the friendliest, followed by Italian in third. Together, these languages form a clear cluster associated with warmth and approach.
Duolingo is confident that it can find ways to grow its subscriber base without adding more friction to its free tiers. Only about 10% of the language learning app's active monthly users pay for its services. Adding friction to the free experience has been the fastest way for Duolingo to increase monetization, but it came at the expense of daily active user growth.
Amidst this trend, , a platform for buying and selling digital businesses, is rewriting the script and dismantling those barriers. Under the leadership of CEO Blake Hutchison, the company has connected buyers and sellers across continents, linguistic differences, and price points, closing deals from $100,000 up to $10 million. Now, with the launch of its AI-powered multi-language Deal Room, Flippa is addressing what it sees as one of the last major points of disadvantage in global business deals and M&A, calling it the "Language Tax."
A glossy brochure is still one of the fastest ways to put your brand story in a buyer's hands. Trade-show attendees tuck it into a tote, hotel guests leaf through it while waiting for a meeting, and new distributors scan it to see if you're worth a call. When the same piece must work in Madrid, São Paulo, and Seoul, every headline, caption, and micro-copy line has to ring true in the reader's own language.
As explained by Meta: AI-powered translations for Reels are starting to roll out in more languages, including Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Kannada, on Instagram. These new additions build on our existing language support for English, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish. The addition of more of the languages spoken in India is significant, because India is now the biggest single market for both Facebook and Instagram usage, beating out the U.S. by a significant margin.
In fact, there are science-backed practices we can adopt to improve our adaptability, and the benefits go far beyond our careers. In practical terms, adaptability is being able to regulate and adjust your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors amid changing circumstances while staying aligned with your values and long‑term goals. True adaptability is not passive compliance: it's conscious ongoing calibration. Research links adaptability with higher life satisfaction and lower stress, especially when you add a sense of agency and social support.
While everyone is subject to their individual situations, for many, the process begins with an F-1 student visa, which they hold as they complete a Ph.D. over five to six years. After graduation, they may choose to transition to Optional Practical Training (OPT), which provides a year of work authorization, with a two-year extension for STEM graduates. Some may then transition to a H-1B temporary work visa, which provides for three years of work authorization and is renewable for another three years.
Over the past seven years, I've worked for multiple companies shipping blockchain integrations and production-grade financial infrastructure in Lagos, Amsterdam, and now Toronto. I started my career in Nigeria, where I was born and raised, and moved to Amsterdam in May 2023 after a short career break for a job as a senior software engineer. I returned to Nigeria after a year and worked until I received my Canadian work visa through my wife in October 2024.
My role was straightforward: write queries (prompts and tasks) that would train AI agents to engage meaningfully with users. But as a UXer, one question immediately stood out - who are these users? Without a clear understanding of who the agent is interacting with, it's nearly impossible to create realistic queries that reflect how people engage with an agent. That's when I discovered a glitch in the task flow.
On Wednesday, the Paris-based AI lab released two new speech-to-text models: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime. The former is built to transcribe audio files in large batches and the latter for nearly real-time transcription, within 200 milliseconds; both can translate between 13 languages. Voxtral Realtime is freely available under an open source license.
If you were building global teams in 2025, you wouldn't need me to tell you it was a crazy year. We experienced economic volatility and AI disruption. Plus, tightened borders caused companies to adjust and readjust their approaches. 2026 won't be calmer. But the elements we need to master to stay competitive are now coming into focus: Navigating mobility disruption, creating unity across increasingly distributed workforces, and building the transparent, compliant infrastructure needed to employ people anywhere.
Microsoft has abruptly announced the deprecation of Polyglot Notebooks with less than two months' notice, throwing the future of the .NET Interactive project into doubt. The deprecation will come into effect on March 27, whereupon bug fixes and support will cease, and no new features will be added. However, the extension won't be automatically uninstalled from a user's Visual Studio Code installation.
Flexible working is a hot topic that's rapidly making its way into the SME (small-medium-sized enterprise) market, especially after covid and all its repercussions on businesses Due to covid-19, many small to medium businesses have had to disband their in-house team, and those that were left working found themselves at home. This was especially prevalent in industries like social media advertising agencies, customer services relations, online-focused eCommerce brands and B2B businesses.
If old sci-fi shows are anything to go by, we're all using our computers wrong. We're still typing with our fingers, like cave people, instead of talking out loud the way the future was supposed to be. Have you ever seen Picard touch a keyboard? Of course not. And it's odd because our computers are all capable of turning speech into text by default. The problem? It just doesn't work very well. Or, at least, it didn't.
The dataset was created by translating non-English content from the FineWeb2 corpus into English using Gemma3 27B, with the full data generation pipeline designed to be reproducible and publicly documented. The dataset is primarily intended to improve machine translation, particularly in the English→X direction, where performance remains weaker for many lower-resource languages. By starting from text originally written in non-English languages and translating it into English, FineTranslations provides large-scale parallel data suitable for fine-tuning existing translation models.