u/OOPSStudio

I see only two possibilities with a company outsourcing their localization to Crowdin:

1. They're either going to get extremely bad translations because the people writing them lack context and coordination, so terms become jumbled and tone is completely lost, or
2. They're going to have people put in the necessary amount of effort required to properly manage all the terms, preserve tone, adapt translations to context, etc.... And then essentially just have people working a full-time job for free (or extremely low wages)

Isn't this just a straight up loss for the industry as a whole? The quality of localization goes down and professional localizers have to compete with people willing to do their jobs for free.

When I look at games that were properly localized by professionals (E.g. Nintendo games) and compare them to games that were localized by Crowdin, the difference is night and day. The Nintendo game has character, charm, wit, and very good use of emotions and tone to make the player feel things. The Crowdin game feels like reading janky Google Translate output. In one scene this character is treating you like their best friend and in the next scene they're speaking like a robot

Am I missing something?

I have never watched or shown interest in this type of video, but for the last ~10 days or so my home screen feed always includes at least a few videos about death and I don't understand why. I would really like to get rid of it as it's not fun to think about tragedies while trying to wind down before bed.

I'm talking about stuff like "Real footage of a person in the 'actively dying' phase" or "Intense gunfight footage (extremely graphic)" or "My dog just died. These are the signs they gave for 3 days prior" or "Suddenly single. A single mother who woke up to a dead husband" or "Watch the life of an inmate on death row"

This type of stuff shows up in both of the languages I speak. All I use this account for is ASMR, vlogs, and STEM content.

I want to translate about 100 screenshots of UI with text in them. That is, block out the existing text in the image and replace it with new (localized) text. Currently I have no need to heavily modify the existing image and am fine simply blocking the old text with a colored rectangle and pasting the new text over the top.

I did a few images using MSPaint and it works just fine, but it's very cumbersome to do it that way for several reasons (the main one being that once you place a piece of text it cannot be edited again).

I'm sure you guys know of software that makes this easy as I'm sure this is a common task for some people, but ChatGPT was unable to give me any good ideas exept for Adobe Illustrator which is not ideal (and also incredibly expensive for me since I have no way of using it professionally).

Ideally the software would automatically identify the text in the image, automatically identify the font size and color that was used, and automatically block out the existing text and insert a textbox at that location that can then be edited, moved, and resized.

I haven't run into many struggles with conlanging yet aside from this one. Phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, writing systems, etc. are all pretty easy to handle simply with brute force and patience, but idomatic phrasing is something that seems incredibly difficult to the point where it almost seems impossible and I'm curious how other people handle it or if you all just basically ignore it because it's so complex and prone to errors?

For example, every language has completely different ways of expressing things. In one language it might be "There is a cat" and in another language it might be "A cat exists". One language might be "You can see the mountain from my bedroom window" and another language might be "In regards to the bedroom window, the mountain is doing visibility."

And those are just the simple ones. It becomes hundreds of times more nuanced and complex when you reach implied meanings and deep back-and-forth conversations. For example in Japanese you can imply massive amounts of nuance by simply sliding a は into a sentence (to imply contrast, to strengthen a negation, to imply distance, etc.) where such a thing does not exist whatsoever in the vast majority of languages. Or you can use certain grammatical structures to convey very nuanced and niche emotions like repeating ～ては to indicate urgency or frustration or throwing a も into specific locations to indicate excessiveness or surprise.

How can you come up with these types of incredibly subtle and unique structures when designing a brand new language? And once you've come up with one, how can you properly document it and ensure that you're using it properly in your writing? When you learn a new language for the first time it can take decades to properly grasp these types of subtle nuances and idioms - does it also take decades to get used to them in your own conlangs?

I can imagine a situation where someone tries to write 5-10 pages worth of text in their conlang and accidentally end up using completely disjointed phrasing and tone on every single page because they simply forgot that they should be using a specific nuanced grammatical structure or idiom.

Maybe it's just perfectionism, but this is the only thing currently standing between me and finishing my current conlang. I feel like I'm constantly speaking my own conlang as a foreigner who half-learned it as a second language and whose speech sounds incredibly disjointed and unnatural. I can't feel proud about building something with my conlang knowing a native speaker of my conlang would struggle to understand it

I'm an experienced pool owner. This will be my 6th consecutive year of maintaining this same exact pool.

I've never had issues with my pool on previous years. Every spring the pool turns deep green with algae, and every time I follow the basic steps to get it crystal clear over the span of a week or two and it stays that way until I close it at the end of the season.

But for some unknown reason this year is different. I'll provide all the details and hopefully someone can throw some advice my way!

• I've been working on opening this pool for the last 3 weeks
• I started by shocking the pool (>20ppm total chlorine held for 48 hours) and have maintained at least 3ppm total chlorine since then
• All chemicals have been at their current levels for at least the last 10 days
• Every time I test my free chlorine it is above 3ppm. At night, in the morning, and in the middle of the day
• Every time I test my combined chlorine it is below 0.2ppm
• My CYA is at 65ppm
• My salt is at 3,000ppm
• My pH is at 7.4
• My alkalinity is at 90ppm
• My calcium is at 90ppm
• I have never added any chemicals other than chlorinating liquid (for shocking), CYA, pool salt, and muriatic acid
• This is an outdoor above-ground Intex pool with a vinyl liner
• It is a saltwater pool with a SWG hooked up
• The pump, filter, and SWG are all Intex brand and came with the pool
• The SWG cell is new and working well (I can visibly see it working + chlorine levels are great)
• I am running my SWG for 12 hours per day
• I am running my pump 24/7
• The filter is a 77lb sand filter with fresh sand rated for 2,150 gallons per hour
• The pump is also rated for 2,150 gallons per hour to match the sand filter
• The pool is about 15,000 gallons
• The pump is fed by one floating skimmer + one underwater wall inlet
• The pump returns water through one underwater jet
• The water coming out of the jet comes out with high speed and force
• There is no air being sucked into the pluming (the tiny air bubble inside the pump stays consistent even after days of non-stop running)
• I'm backwashing my filter once per day. The backwash is usually about 30 seconds of cloudy white water before it turns clear. I let the clear water run for about 20 seconds and then do a 15-second rinse
• I'm taking all chemical samples using high-quality, accurate test kits and reagents (e.g. FAS-DPD for chlorine). No test strips or color matching tests

The problem is that the water in the pool is cloudy white. The water is 48 inches deep and when looking from above I can barely identify objects on the bottom of the pool (for example, I can make out individual pine needles but they're blurry). There is no hint of green in the water at all - it is blueish white.

What could be the problem?

My current hunch is that it's likely an issue with the filtration system leaving tiny particles in the water (dead algae, etc.). Today I ordered glass medium for the filter hoping that the smaller capture size will take care of the issue. I'm also going to try backwashing the filter less often (once every ~4 days) since some people say filtration ability is lessened just after a backwash. However I'm not too confident those things will fix the issue since I've used this exact filter with sand to get crystal clear water many times in the past.

I'm stumped! Any advice or ideas would help a lot.

I literally watched 3 YouTube tutorials and read 2 online step-by-step guides before starting. I then followed an additional step-by-step guide the entire time during the process

I just finished, come back inside, and read about the specific product I bought. It says, underlined in all caps, IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THAT YOU WEAR AN N95 MASK WHILE REPLACING THE SAND IN YOUR FILTER.

......kinda pissed ngl. How did every single guide I watched/read/followed up until now not mention this apparently very important step of the process??? Just looked it up and apparently #20 silica sand can literally cause COPD and/or lung cancer if inhaled in too large a quantity/for too long. I was leaning over the thing while pouring the sand for a solid 15 minutes

I am a huge stickler for proper protective equipment while working - especially when it comes to my ears and lungs. I use a sand filter largely because D.E filters require carcinogens in order to maintain and it sounded like a hassle. Apparently sand filters do too but online articles just decide to conveniently leave out that part?

I assume this won't be a big issue since it was just 15 minutes of exposure in a well-ventilated area (outdoors), but I still want to ask to make sure. Also would be good if more people were aware of this and included it in their tutorials/guides so that people aren't unknowingly inhaling hazardous materials like I just did

I've always thought America is a nice place to live and a nice country to boot, but I recently spent a month in Europe (for the second time this year - family affairs) and since then I've been reminded just how insanely beautiful this country really is and how blessed we all are to live here.

Of course America has many problems and I hope we can all work to fix them over time, but I wanted to compile a list of random things I've realized over the last few weeks that America does way better than the European countries I've been to. (I'll say "Europe" to refer to Italy, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Spain. Europe is large and my opinions might not apply to all of it)

1. The biggest, by far, is just the people. American people are just straight up nicer, more helpful, more accomodating, gentler, more patient, more personable, etc. compared to European people. Customer service in America is like making a new temporary friend. Customer service in Europe is like interacting with a moody robot who's in a rush and doesn't really want to talk to you. Europeans will say this is because "Americans have to be nice to earn tips or else they'll starve" but last I checked the cashiers at the supermarket and the employees at city hall aren't collecting tips and they're still 10x nicer than Europeans.
2. Tipping culture. A lot of people - especially Europeans - complain about American tipping culture and the fact that you're required to tip at restaurants and that employees depend on tips for their wages. What Europeans don't realize (or intentionally avoid talking about) is that nearly every single European restaurant has a mandatory % "service charge" added onto your bill + a flat-rate seating charge + you have to pay for your own water (usually 2-4 Euros per liter). So while it's not fun to pay 15-20% tip in the US, it's also not fun to pay a 15% service charge + 4 Euros per seat + 4 Euros per liter of water in Europe. And in my opinion, having the ability to choose how much you tip is nicer than having it forcefully added onto your bill against your will. Then that extends one step further in that your ability to reduce your tip also forces your server to provide good service which then leads to better customer service. It's a win-win. In Europe you can clearly see that the servers do not take their jobs seriously because they often forget to bring you what you asked for and are usually quite blunt and/or blatantly rude.
3. Being able to use the restroom for free and having the restrooms (usually) be stocked with toilet paper and soap. In Europe every single restroom requires you to either purchase an item or purchase admission into the restroom (usually 1 Euro). Also a massive portion (about 30%) of European bathrooms are absolutely filthy and/or unstocked. The public restroom in Capri, Italy, for example, had an operator who said "knock on the door when you want me to let you out because the doors don't open from the inside" before handing you your rationed 2 squares of toilet paper. That icredible service costs 1.5 Euros per person.
4. Being able to drink water for free (or incredibly cheap) whenever you need it. In Europe there are extremely few public drinking fountains in restrooms like are commonplace in the US (maybe 1 out of every 100 restrooms in Europe will have drinking fountains), and if you want to drink water from a shop it will usually cost you about 1.5 Euros per half liter. In the US you can request free water from almost any restaurant and the few restaurants that do charge for water will usually only charge about $0.25 for the cup with endless refills.
5. Better and more logical systems in general. This is a subtle one that has a huge impact on daily life. In Europe the systems are designed to be strict and "technically correct" all the time. Every citizen (and visitor) is expected to fully understand the (quite convoluted) rules and follow them perfectly all the time. If you make a mistake you will be penalized immediately with no tolerance or recourse. Contrast this to the US where our systems tend to be much more forgiving in ways that make sense. For example in Italy you need to purchase your public transit pass on the internet and then go in-person to get it printed. If you then lose your physical printout then you have permanently lost access to your ticket and need to buy a brand new one (36 Euros) even though it's a digital ticket. If you ask them to reprint it for you they will be extremely rude and tell you that you absolutely may not get it reprinted and it's your fault for losing it. Meanwhile in the US you can buy a ticket just by tapping your phone when you board public transit. And if you're caught accidentally riding without a ticket in the US they will give you 90 days to pay the fine or dispute it for free. If they catch you accidentally riding without a ticket in Italy - even if you can prove you purchased the ticket and just don't have it with you - then they will detain you immediately and not release you until you pay the 60 Euro fine. If you refuse to pay or cannot pay immediately then they will immediately take you to the police station and increase your fine to 300 Euros. Our systems in the US are very forgiving.
6. Wooden homes instead of stone. In the US we build our homes primarily with wood compared to the use of stone in Europe. A lot of Europeans think this is a bad thing because the house is more "fragile", but in reality building with wood instead of stone has tons of massive advantages that you don't notice until you experience both firsthand. For one, building with wood is cheaper, faster, and more flexible. You can build a more beautiful and complex home in a smaller amount of time and for less money. As a result of that, American homes can much more easily be torn down and rebuilt, making newer and more comfortable housing more widely available. Secondly, wooden homes lend themselves much better to quick repairs, modifications, and renovation. If you need to install a new sink in a wooden home you can do it by opening up a few walls. If you need to install a new sink in a stone home it will become a massive project. This leads to many European homes having very convoluted floor plans and outdated ammenities. For example one of my friends in France has had both of their showers leaking for the last 5 years but they cannot afford to repair them because of the stone construction. This has since lead to large cracks in the stone walls which they also cannot afford to repair, and the entire home will likely need to be torn down simply because of a plumbing issue (and tearing down a stone house is incredibly expensive). Thirdly, stone homes have much worse ventilation and climate control. They get extremely hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter, and they deal with very high humidity and standing air. Most of the European homes I went into smelled strongly of mold because of that. There are many more unforseen advantages of wooden construction but this is already too long so I'll leave it there.
7. Energy prices. Energy prices in the US (natural gas, gasoline, diesel, electricity) are less than half the price of Europe on average. This has many obvious benefits of course, but it also has many more subtle benefits too. For example in Europe hotels are not allowed to run air conditioners unless the guests are actively inside the hotel room (with their key card in the slot) in order to save precious electricity. This means that every time you return to your hotel room it's blazing hot and needs several hours to cool off (if you're lucky enough to have a hotel with air conditioning - about half of them don't have it)
8. Air conditioning. We're very blessed to have so much air conditioning in the US. In Europe (especially southern Europe) only about half of businesses have air conditioning and the ones that don't have it are basically just furnaces. You cannot escape the heat. Nobody can escape the heat. And nobody being able to escape the heat means everyone sweats a lot. And everyone sweating a lot means you get to smell them all the time. : ) It's very fun to cram into a regional train like sardines and have strangers pressed up against all sides of your body in a 95 degree tube with 400 peoples' body odors going up your nose.
9. Clothes dryers. This is another side effect of high energy costs, but in the United States we can wash and dry our clothes in under 2 hours. In Europe they usually opt for air-drying their clothes instead, which if it's sunny outside can be finished in just like 10 hours, but if it's raining outside you have to hang your clothes inside your own home and they will take at least 24 hours to dry (and all that humidity will go into your furiniture, walls, etc.). The clothes also usually end up crusty and slightly smelly after this process. You also have to look at other people's underwear and socks hanging out of their windows while walking the streets which is not very aesthetically pleasing. (There are some areas where the laundry overhead literally drips on you while you walk past lol)
10. Car-first transit. Being able to hop into your climate-controlled car straight from your bed and hop out at your destination is such a blessing. Car culture has a lot of downsides and it's not perfect by any means, but it has so many hidden benefits too. For example, having train tracks literally everywhere is extremely noisy and means that often when you need to cross the track you end up needing to find an underpass which makes walking (and especially driving) much less convenient. It also means you'll be woken up several times in the night by what sounds like a jet plane taking off outside your window. Also something most people don't think about: When you travel to a restaurant in a car you can arrive at any moment. 6:02, 6:05, 6:08, 6:15, etc. When you travel to a restaurant by train you have to arrive exactly when the train arrives, and everyone else also arrives at that exact same time. So you have to compete with massive lines literally everywhere you go because the line is in the same train and will get off at the same location at the same time. This also means you need to make sure you're at the train station before your train leaves, meaning you'll inevitably waste a few minutes waiting for it to leave. And if you arrive at the station too late you'll need to wait 30 minutes for the next train. Travelling in a car also has tons of other subtle upsides like the fact that you can store things in your car and always have them with you without needing to carry them in bags. I just drove somewhere and randomly remembered that I needed chapstick. I had it in my car - something that is simply impossible in most parts of Europe.
11. Speaking of carrying things on your person - pickpockets are much more common in Europe than in the US. We're very blessed to not have to worry about walking near other people so much
12. And speaking of car culture, the US has toll-free highways and Europe does not. Driving on the highway in Europe is a luxury. You need to stop at a pay station every single time you get on and take a ticket and then stop again every single time you get off to pay your ticket. And it is not cheap. It costs about $2 for 10 miles. In the US you can just get on and off a thousand times and drive from one corner of the continent to the other for absolutely free and without stopping.
13. Garbage processing. In the United States (most places) have garbage and recycle. That's it. And if you sort your trash incorrectly there are no consequences. And you dispose of your trash by putting it into a bin and moving that bin to a designated location once per week. In Europe they have 5 different sorting bins (organic, plastic and metal, glass, paper, and unsorted) and you get fined if you sort your trash incorrectly. In order to dispose of your trash you need to take out exactly 1 type of trash every single day of the week (e.g. organics on Sunday, plastics and metals on Monday, glass on Tuesday....). To dispose of your trash you take it outside your home and throw the bag on the side of the street. So this means that every single day you wake up to thousands of bags of trash on the street. : ) Some cities have more sophisticated trash collection systems where instead of putting your trash on the street you have to walk it across the city to a designated collection point every single morning between 8:00-10:00 AM. And if you miss the collection time window then you have to keep it in your house for a few more days until that type of trash is being collected again. Some accomodations literally include a 3-minute tutorial video on how to dispose of your trash during your stay because it's so convoluted
14. Newer and prettier buildings in general. Europe is full of old buildings which is definitely cool, but what's not cool is that the vast majority of their buildings look like they haven't been maintained in at least 200 years. Chunks of the buildings falling off, plaster peeling off, wooden shutters that are deformed with peeling paint and rusting metal, etc. Many smaller European suburbs look completely run down and quite ugly imo. American suburbs generally (not always) look much neater, most likely simply for the fact that they're newer
15. Better smells. This is a weird one but it makes a bigger difference than I expected. When I walk the streets of the US I am occasionally hit with the smell of perfume or the smell of flowers or laundry detergent or whatnot. When I walk the streets of Europe I get hit with extremely pungent and inescapable sewage smells about once every 4 hours. That happens sometimes in the US too, but it's far, far, far less common. In Europe almost every place smells like poop for some reason (honestly no clue why)
16. Fewer (and newer) motorcycles and scooters. Motorcycles are noisy and the people who drive them are usually obnoxious. Lucky in the US we have relatively very few of them and it's no big deal. In Europe they have 4-6 times more motorcycles than we do and they are everywhere. On top of this, they tend to ride much older and more poorly-maintained motorcycles that make incredible amounts of noise and smell terrible. The motorcycle drivers also help themselves to pedestrian-only pathways and lane sharing is legal so they're incredibly entitled and will zip around you dozens of times per day. Europe also has tons of scooters which do the same thing. We have almost zero scooters in the US. They also have far more bicyclists who like to go 10 miles per hour in front of you on the highway.
17. More organized traffic in general. Traffic in the US (outside of areas like Times Square) tends to be very orderly. We have strict traffic rules, we punish jaywalking, and we drive according to automated traffic lights and signals. In most of Europe they use roundabouts instead of traffic lights, pedestrians walk in the street anywhere they please, and drivers do not respect crosswalks or right-of-way laws. People cut each other off and honk at each other constantly, even in rural areas.

I hope American culture continues to prosper for a long time. We have a really nice thing going here.

I genuinely don't even know how to move forward in my career search at this point. I have SO many options and for every single option I can find people who say it's a waste of time and I can find people who say I should spend 24 hours a day on it.

1. Should I just be blindly applying to every online listing I see?
2. Should I customize my resume for every application?
3. Should I go in-person and speak directly to hiring managers?
4. Should I include cover letters?
5. Should I go to meetups, job fairs, etc?
6. Should I spend time building personal projects?
7. Should I focus deeply on a single technology?
8. Should I focus on many different technologies?
9. Should my personal projects be technically complex?
10. Should my personal projects focus more on uniqueness instead of technicality?
11. Should I get a lower-tier job first and work my way up? If so, what type of job? What type of company?
12. Should I be cold calling and emailing random companies that don't even say they're currently hiring?
13. ....the list goes on

I want to spend a ton of time pushing my career forward. I have the time, I have the motivation, I have the desire, I have the willingness and ability to learn, etc. But after years of doing what I thought was helping, I'm now finding people saying everything I've done is just a huge waste of time. So I get on the internet to figure out what I should be spending time on instead, find a good suggestion, and then find people saying that's also a waste of time.

I know people online can just be pessimistic and negative, but I also know firsthand that I've already tried about 8 of the things on my list and none of them made any progress at all.

So at this point I seriously, genuinely have absolutely no clue what to do anymore. I spend 10 hours working towards getting a job and feel like I literally made zero progress. I've sent out hundreds of applications and haven't even got an interview. I've gone into businesses to speak to the staff/hiring managers and they treat me like an idiot and then people make fun of me for even trying that because apparently it's a stupid idea. I send cold emails and they get absolutely ignored every single time. I made over a dozen complex and very unique/useful personal projects and nobody even looks at them. I got over a dozen certifications and they're all useless. I contributed to several open-source projects and nothing happens. I participate in multiple communities and group events and I get zero leads from them.

What am I supposed to be doing? I really don't understand.

I don't even care what field I get into anymore. My original goal was software development or web development (since that what I've been doing for the last 5 years) but at this point I'd settle for literally any IT-adjacent job. Tech support, internal tech management, tech installation - literally anything. But I'm getting rejected from all of it. I literally got rejected (not even an interview) from like 20 supermarket-stocker jobs. Like what the heck.......

I've never been interested in or interacted with this style of content in my life, but all of a sudden for the last 2 days about 30% of my homepage feed has been gory videos containing death or suffering of some kind. Videos of plane crashes, videos of people dying in combat, videos like "I followed an inmate to the execution chamber", "camera rolls as platoon comes under fire", "real footage of kamikaze strikes", "what execution is like in a Japanese prison", more plane crashes, real footage of the Challenger disaster, "real-life footage of the 'actively dying' phase"

Has anybody else got this all of a sudden or is it just me?

I'm really not sure how to describe this type of music and asking AI does not help lol. I'm looking for the specific type of music that someone would be blasting out of their open-top convertible at an unreasonable volume while cruising around downtown at 15mph after midnight. Extremely strong, thumping bass, high-pitched, primarily feminine vocals, chaotic/fast energy but simultaniously pretty chill (somehow?). Maybe some rapping throw in there. Not "I want people to think I'm cool" energy, but more like "I am absolutely, completely certain that I'm cool and I know you know it too" kind of energy. Like the person driving this car isn't even going to glance over at you. They're locked eyes-front and know you're going to stop what you're doing and stare at them while they drive past anyway. They might even have a hot boy/girl in the passenger seat who also won't look at you but knows you're looking at him/her. It's also rather tasteful music - not just blind swearing and sexual content, but a genuinely refined type of attention-seeking. Like maybe something you'd see in the 90s California car culture? But I'm not looking for old music by any means. I'm primarily looking for stuff released after 2000

Hopefully this description is good enough lol

Unfortunately I can't find even a single track that's similar to what I'm looking for (despite trying for 20 minutes), but I know I've heard this type of music before (maybe primarily in movies?). I drive a minivan and work in IT, so this music doesn't have any practical use to me other than being fun to listen to. :)

Closest matches to what I'm looking for so far:

1. Jessie Murph - Blue Strips [Almost perfect]
2. The Crystal Method - Ghost In The City [I wish the singing and bass overlapped more instead of being separate]
3. Princess Superstar - Perfect (Exceeder) [I wish the lyrics were slightly less feminine]
4. Pink $ock - Feminist Cowboy [I wish it had slightly higher bpm]
5. ABE THE BABE - Umm.. BRELLA [I wish the bass was slightly more prominent]
6. $uicideboy$ - Paris [Vocals aren't ideal but overall style is perfect]

I'm primarily applying to customer-focused roles, and specifically to companies that emphasize how much they value their customers (e.g. high-end retailers, banks, etc.)

When writing my resumes and cover letters I tend to lean more into the personable side of things - focusing on passion, motivation, friendliness, a love for people, finding joy in helping others, etc. My main goal is to communicate my personality and my love for helping customers, with my "proof" (hard numbers, statistics, accounts, etc.) taking a back seat.

When I search the internet or ask ChatGPT/Gemini for advice, everyone always says to tone down the "emotion" and instead focus on cold hard facts. "Include more numbers", "use more impactful phrasing", "be more professional", "remove the personal flair"

...is that actually good advice?

I feel like when I see these types of resume they all look exactly the same. Person #7,855 who says they "excel in fast-paced environments" and "collaborate well with cross-functional teams" and "increased customer throughput by 31%"

Don't hiring managers get tired of that phrasing? Do hiring managers really care how many percentage points you increased your stocking speed by? Wouldn't they rather hear about times when you made people happy or helped customers find exactly what they were looking for? Isn't that more important in a customer-service role?

I keep coming across job listings that perfectly align with my passions, but it feels like every time I talk about how passionate I am about the job ChatGPT tells me to just replace it with numbers and percentages instead. It feels counter-productive.

For example I'm currently applying to a job at a local Japanese retail store where they list "passion for Japanese and East-Asian culture" in their list of preferred traits. I've been studying the Japanese language and culture for the last 3 years and am extremely passionate about it, but ChatGPT says my cover letter is "too focused on cultural passion" and says I should replace that entire paragraph with "examples that demonstrate your skills with merchandise stocking and PoS machines" ??? I feel like retail stores get 50 applicants every day that can use PoS machines. I feel like my true value comes from my passion - not the fact that I can put boxes onto shelves and press buttons on a computer screen.

Am I wrong?

For example, imagine some third-party app needs to display my photos once each time I open it. The first time I open the third-party app it asks me to choose which photos to grant it permission to. I choose 10 photos and grant it permission. It accesses the photos just fine.

But then I open that same third-party app a week later - it no longer has access to the photos I granted it access to before, because the access expired after 60 minutes. The third-party app can no longer display those images.

Does this mean that the only way for this third-party app to retain access to my photos for longer than 60 minutes is for that app to download all my photos and permanently store them on its own servers?

If so..... Isn't that a step BACKWARDS in privacy? Now every single third-party app I use is forced to keep a permanent copy of every single photo I share with it? And even if I revoke that app's access to my Google Photos - it still keeps its copies of all my photos.

Aside from that very glaring issue, there's also the issue that now every single third-party app that has Google Photos integration now has the added infrastructure cost of manually storing and protecting terrabytes of sensitive user data, which means all of those services will become significantly more expensive to host = more expensive for end users. (for example an app I could host for $0.02/user/month last year will now cost me $0.90/user/month)

This seems like a REALLY big problem to me. I don't want 15 copies of my photos on 15 different companies' servers. At least in the past privacy-focused companies could opt out of storing my sensitive information if they wanted to. But now they're all forced to store my sensitive information and they aren't allowed to delete it for as long as I continue to use their services. That's objectively bad.