A YouTube channel named Vacuum Facts doesn’t know how bagged vacuums works.

I wanted to make this thread to show how out of touch someone can be when it comes to bagged vacuums. I’m not starting any drama, I just want to see what other people think of this dude. To give you the best description of this guy, he is simply a Dyson fanatic that hasn’t really used that many kinds of vacuums. In his own world, bagless vacuums are better since they not only “save time” and “money”, but they work better since they have cyclones. That right there shows us that he has NEVER taken apart or even looked at the insides of the cyclones that Dyson has. He also thinks that agitation isn’t important. That just blew me away. I was swearing left and right when he said that. Apparently, the so called “science” shows that cyclones work better. In my opinion, this is kind of a liberal thing to do. They always go off on science, but never see the reality. I don’t give a rats ass how cyclones work. If they just collect dust and odours, then the so called science is meaningless. He also thinks that a full vacuum bag loses suction. I told him that I’ve used a vacuum bag made out of cloth that was more than full, and it still performed like normal. This might sound like a waste of time, but I told him how bagged vacuums were better in every way possible. All he mentioned was what his fake video said. I also told him that I have experience from using all kinds of vacuums. I won’t tell you everything I said since that would take so much of your time, but he continued to say how I was wrong. Apparently me even fixing vacuum motors wasn’t enough. Two last bizarre things he has said was how vacuum stores were a scam and how people who use bagged vacuum for allergies were “ignorant”. Yes, he actually said those things. He stated how vacuum stores were a “scam” and how they were praying on poor and ignorant technology. You can tell this dude knows nothing about owning a business. He also thinks that people who have allergies are dumb for using bagged vacuums since they don’t know how to empty the bin. There is only one way to empty the bin! What is he thinking? He doesn’t know that they aren’t fully sealed or that dust goes back into the air when emptying them. After watching his videos and getting his horrible reply, this guy hasn’t used that many vacuums like I’ve said. I’ve heard some people claiming he gets paid by Dyson. What do you think of this man? Is he just that out of touch? Let me know.

What do I think of him? I prefer not to rent him space in my head.

Just forget about it

There's already another thread about him and no matter what people say, it certainly won't change his views or beliefs and that's one of the reasons why I've never left a comment on his videos. There's a huge difference between joining in the fire versus stepping away. While I may not agree with him on alot of things, I will say though that he has some points. It is true that bags can lose suction even if they are cloth bags, because dust can plug up the pores it'd breathe out of. That's why James Dyson's Hoover Junior got clogged. It is also true that cyclones can same time and money. Take a look at this video that backs up my claims, in fact this was how James Dyson got the inspiration from is a cyclone from a dust collector in a woodshop. While I may be a bagged person myself, I can't say that they're in every way better.

 


 


 


Such meaningless drama over something so meaningless.

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He's probably just a troll. Although, I find it odd that he'd pick us of all communities to pick on if he is.

What??

How could anyone make such claims on vacuums if he has (what I assume) little to no experience. It really annoys me what he said. When I fix people’s vacuums, It’s all bagless! They clog so much easier.

Looking at vacuum cleaner advertising, say, from the 1950s and '60s, compared to the past 20 years, it's interesting to see that the 'advantages' touted back then for disposable filter bags and for bagless machines today is virtually identical. Phrases like 'quicker', 'less mess', and 'more convenient' dominate both, but they tend to ring hollow for the bagless plasticrap machines. Yeah, it's quick to dump the dirt cup and put it back into place, but that ignores the necessary maintenance of also cleaning the filter(s), which takes a lot of time and can be very messy. For me, filter bags are the only to go.

human said:

Looking at vacuum cleaner advertising, say, from the 1950s and '60s, compared to the past 20 years, it's interesting to see that the 'advantages' touted back then for disposable filter bags and for bagless machines today is virtually identical. Phrases like 'quicker', 'less mess', and 'more convenient' dominate both, but they tend to ring hollow for the bagless plasticrap machines. Yeah, it's quick to dump the dirt cup and put it back into place, but that ignores the necessary maintenance of also cleaning the filter(s), which takes a lot of time and can be very messy. For me, filter bags are the only to go.

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The filters on my Dyson take months to get dirty enough to wash them, and for me, it's not messy. I tend to keep up on the maintenance on my vacuums lol.

amtraksebo1997 said:

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He's probably just a troll. Although, I find it odd that he'd pick us of all communities to pick on if he is.

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"Rabid vacuum enthusiasts" is what he likes to call us.

What a jerk.

While I generally find him to be arrogant, condescending and abrasive he did point out a flaw in how I was calculating airflow at the end of the hose, namely that the speed of air moving through the center of the hose will be higher than it is at the walls. Since airflow is airspeed in ft per min multiplied by the area of the orifice in square feet, getting the airspeed measurement correct becomes vital. He forced me to do some independent research on the subject and I discovered he has a point, and that lo and behold there is a rule of thumb factor to apply to the airspeed measured in the center of the hose to calculate an average airspeed to use in the airflow calculation. But it was needlessly painful getting there, his arguments cluttered with all kinds of superfluous math and long winded videos.

bransvacuums said:

I wanted to make this thread to show how out of touch someone can be when it comes to bagged vacuums. I’m not starting any drama, I just want to see what other people think of this dude. To give you the best description of this guy, he is simply a Dyson fanatic that hasn’t really used that many kinds of vacuums. In his own world, bagless vacuums are better since they not only “save time” and “money”, but they work better since they have cyclones. That right there shows us that he has NEVER taken apart or even looked at the insides of the cyclones that Dyson has. He also thinks that agitation isn’t important. That just blew me away. I was swearing left and right when he said that. Apparently, the so called “science” shows that cyclones work better. In my opinion, this is kind of a liberal thing to do. They always go off on science, but never see the reality. I don’t give a rats ass how cyclones work. If they just collect dust and odours, then the so called science is meaningless. He also thinks that a full vacuum bag loses suction. I told him that I’ve used a vacuum bag made out of cloth that was more than full, and it still performed like normal. This might sound like a waste of time, but I told him how bagged vacuums were better in every way possible. All he mentioned was what his fake video said. I also told him that I have experience from using all kinds of vacuums. I won’t tell you everything I said since that would take so much of your time, but he continued to say how I was wrong. Apparently me even fixing vacuum motors wasn’t enough. Two last bizarre things he has said was how vacuum stores were a scam and how people who use bagged vacuum for allergies were “ignorant”. Yes, he actually said those things. He stated how vacuum stores were a “scam” and how they were praying on poor and ignorant technology. You can tell this dude knows nothing about owning a business. He also thinks that people who have allergies are dumb for using bagged vacuums since they don’t know how to empty the bin. There is only one way to empty the bin! What is he thinking? He doesn’t know that they aren’t fully sealed or that dust goes back into the air when emptying them. After watching his videos and getting his horrible reply, this guy hasn’t used that many vacuums like I’ve said. I’ve heard some people claiming he gets paid by Dyson. What do you think of this man? Is he just that out of touch? Let me know.

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Some vacuums stores are honest and treat customers good but others like the Aerus dealer for our region are greedy and highly dishonest. The industry has its characters and its villains. Ask Dysonman how Tacony Corp treated him and how they tried to steal his collection. Even though our state has a Right to Repair law on the books that Aerus dealer will not even sell me a brush roll or belt, insisting I have to bring it to their shop 3 hours or more away depending on how heavy my right foot is for them to repair and they are not cheap. I once ordered replacement bags and filters from them for my Guardian Platinum thinking I wanted to give some business to the local dealer. Last time I do that with them. They wouldn't tell me the price before they added in shipping but their prices on each item ended up being more than double the price charged for the identical supplies on the Aerus website. And to top it off they insist the Guardian Platinum is made in the US along with everything else on the vacuum despite the data tag on the bottom of the vacuum saying it is Made in EU and the power nozzle says Made in China.
There are also shops that will tell a customer it will cost $200 to replace a $35 relay on a Panasonic canister. This was maybe ten years ago when all the parts were readily available and cheap. You know how that game is played. Dealer highballs the repair price, talks the customer into trading it in on a new vacuum, repairs the old one for $35 and 20 minutes of labor and turns around and sells it for $200. I helped the person find the part for $35 and showed them how to fix it. Not saying every shop plays these games but enough do to make people shun them. And then you have the crooked sales tactics of Kirby, Patriot and Rainbow.

@Vacuum Facts is not a Dyson fanboy. He hates the way the V16 is launched, but otherwise loves it. He loves all the powerful cordless gear enough to be considered main-equivalent, but he also hates the Dyson suits now, now that V16 has been crippled at launch and has to be fixed currently by a freaking mod. He may be abrasive, sure, but he definitely is quite objective.

panasonicvac said:

Just forget about it

There's already another thread about him and no matter what people say, it certainly won't change his views or beliefs and that's one of the reasons why I've never left a comment on his videos. There's a huge difference between joining in the fire versus stepping away. While I may not agree with him on alot of things, I will say though that he has some points. It is true that bags can lose suction even if they are cloth bags, because dust can plug up the pores it'd breathe out of. That's why James Dyson's Hoover Junior got clogged. It is also true that cyclones can same time and money. Take a look at this video that backs up my claims, in fact this was how James Dyson got the inspiration from is a cyclone from a dust collector in a woodshop. While I may be a bagged person myself, I can't say that they're in every way better.

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Dyson only recently started doing away with their iconic (and patented) cyclonic filtration with the PencilVac. Also, cyclones are most likely to be clogged through abuse, disuse, neglect and overloading, as he noted.

bransvacuums said:

I wanted to make this thread to show how out of touch someone can be when it comes to bagged vacuums. I’m not starting any drama, I just want to see what other people think of this dude. To give you the best description of this guy, he is simply a Dyson fanatic that hasn’t really used that many kinds of vacuums. In his own world, bagless vacuums are better since they not only “save time” and “money”, but they work better since they have cyclones. That right there shows us that he has NEVER taken apart or even looked at the insides of the cyclones that Dyson has. He also thinks that agitation isn’t important. That just blew me away. I was swearing left and right when he said that. Apparently, the so called “science” shows that cyclones work better. In my opinion, this is kind of a liberal thing to do. They always go off on science, but never see the reality. I don’t give a rats ass how cyclones work. If they just collect dust and odours, then the so called science is meaningless. He also thinks that a full vacuum bag loses suction. I told him that I’ve used a vacuum bag made out of cloth that was more than full, and it still performed like normal. This might sound like a waste of time, but I told him how bagged vacuums were better in every way possible. All he mentioned was what his fake video said. I also told him that I have experience from using all kinds of vacuums. I won’t tell you everything I said since that would take so much of your time, but he continued to say how I was wrong. Apparently me even fixing vacuum motors wasn’t enough. Two last bizarre things he has said was how vacuum stores were a scam and how people who use bagged vacuum for allergies were “ignorant”. Yes, he actually said those things. He stated how vacuum stores were a “scam” and how they were praying on poor and ignorant technology. You can tell this dude knows nothing about owning a business. He also thinks that people who have allergies are dumb for using bagged vacuums since they don’t know how to empty the bin. There is only one way to empty the bin! What is he thinking? He doesn’t know that they aren’t fully sealed or that dust goes back into the air when emptying them. After watching his videos and getting his horrible reply, this guy hasn’t used that many vacuums like I’ve said. I’ve heard some people claiming he gets paid by Dyson. What do you think of this man? Is he just that out of touch? Let me know.

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It's as I said above. And as for the bagged machines... they clogs far more easily than bagless ones (especially the properly cyclonic machines, such as the aforementioned main-equivalent Dyson cordless) - they loses suction so much and so often, Dyson basically said "fuck that" and made the now-popular cyclonic technology in vacuum cleaners. 5,127+ prototypes weren't for nothing! Bags are only (remotely) hygienic because they traps all the content, but even then, they can emit odors. Bags are more likely to be dumped to landfills. Bags are almost definitely a source of running cost, versus the cyclonic "BS" whose running cost are primarily from maintenance which likely won't be nearly halfway as much as even the most economic of bagged crap.

Bags barely have any advantages left over bagless bins, and the time has changed and technology marches on. As such, it's easy to see that bagless vacuum have been the future for decades at this point. Even the aforementioned PencilVac is still bagless. You guys can fix the motors all you want, but you can't truly overcome the limitations the bags have.

I'm not a fanboy either. I'm amazed by the technologies, and I know the V16 should've been THE superior vacuum, but too bad, Dyson suits actually managed to cripple it with some design decisions that created a mistake that halved the max motor power and drastically reduced cleaning performance (particularly on carpets). That's absolutely stupid of Dyson to initially ignore the problems, and they really needs to revise the model to fix the problem ASAP. @Vacuum Facts actually loved the launch-but-modded V16 he now owns, but absolutely loathes what Dyson suits did to the machine and actually wishes the company would actually own up to that and their award-winning but now disgusting customer service.

(And guess what? Obviously! V16 is also bagless!)

Also, his videos already talked about how bagged vacuum cleaners work, and yet you rabid vacuum enthusiasts (my words, but his term) simply didn't take any of it seriously enough. Bagged machines are not good in the long term. The main reason the likes of Dyson even breaks is likely because of overload and/or abuse and neglect. If you take care of your machine, it will likely last. This applies to both bagged and bagless, and you know the complaints about the bagless stuff breaking down.

@vacuum Fact is right at the end - you just have to tolerate his abrasiveness and bluntness.

Old school single-layered paper bags did clog quite sevearly, but those aren't used any more. Modern synthetic vacuum bags don't clog like the old school bags, and even modern multi-layer paper bags don't clog like old school single-layered.
Dyson set out to solve a problem, and that problem has old school bags, but bags modernized, and the bagless is an alternative way of solving the problem. Both solutions have pros and cons, Neither is outright superior.

The Japanese have a style of bagless canister vacuum that are arranged very much like a normal bagged canister vac, but instead of a bag they have a dust bin with a really fine mesh filter at the back of the dust bin and behind that a very thick pleated cloth filter, both of which are intended to be washed periodically. Then there is a normal looking pre-motor filter behind all this. Where the hose enters the dust bin there is usually something to induce a swirl in the incoming air to get the heavier particles to drop out of the airstream. I have a number of these I bought through Japanese on-line flea markets. I am always amazed that other than the inside of the dust bin the rest of the vacuum is nice and clean inside. The dust bins are dust tight and the filters to my amazement stop all the dirt and dust from entering the motor. Used ones from Japan are usually cleaner inside than a moderately used bagged vacuum you might find in the US. I don't think it is anything particular to Japan because I also buy used Swedish made Luxes from Japan and they are as grody inside as you would expect from 20-30 year old vacuums.

Images are of my Panasonic MC-SXJ4000W. You can see a little hack I learned from the Japanese of cutting up a HEPA dust bag and placing a piece between the filters to keep as much dirt as possible out of the pleated filter.

cheesewonton said:

The Japanese have a style of bagless canister vacuum that are arranged very much like a normal bagged canister vac, but instead of a bag they have a dust bin with a really fine mesh filter at the back of the dust bin and behind that a very thick pleated cloth filter, both of which are intended to be washed periodically. Then there is a normal looking pre-motor filter behind all this. Where the hose enters the dust bin there is usually something to induce a swirl in the incoming air to get the heavier particles to drop out of the airstream. I have a number of these I bought through Japanese on-line flea markets. I am always amazed that other than the inside of the dust bin the rest of the vacuum is nice and clean inside. The dust bins are dust tight and the filters to my amazement stop all the dirt and dust from entering the motor. Used ones from Japan are usually cleaner inside than a moderately used bagged vacuum you might find in the US. I don't think it is anything particular to Japan because I also buy used Swedish made Luxes from Japan and they are as grody inside as you would expect from 20-30 year old vacuums.

Images are of my Panasonic MC-SXJ4000W. You can see a little hack I learned from the Japanese of cutting up a HEPA dust bag and placing a piece between the filters to keep as much dirt as possible out of the pleated filter.

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What would @Vacuum Facts think of that Panasonic bagless? It's clearly corded and non-cyclone in bad way, so I can't imagine it work as well as any cordless since mid-2010s (as in, at least the V8, let alone V10!).

Absolute Rainbow said:

What would @Vacuum Facts think of that Panasonic bagless? It's clearly corded and non-cyclone in bad way, so I can't imagine it work as well as any cordless since mid-2010s (as in, at least the V8, let alone V10!).

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The yellow part in the front of the dirt bin is a cyclone. I can tell you that it works as well as any bagged canister made. In fact based on the Japanese rating scale it it stronger than anything sold in the US. 500 watts Suction Work Rate where the best Miele sold in Japan is rated at 240 watts and something like a Tristar is rated at 190 watts. It is a fantastic vacuum. And the neat thing is, aside from the inside of the dust bin and inside surface of the filter the vacuum stays nice and clean.
In that video you might have heard a scraping sound when they shut the vacuum down. There is a little motorized scraper in the back of the bag chamber that runs a nub across the outside face of the big pleated filter to keep it from clogging. It is a well thought out if electronically complex vacuum. All the Japanese companies have similar bagless canisters, just not ULPA filtered.
Oh, and their bagged canisters all have methods to shake the bag when you pull the cord out and when you rewind it. Usually nubs on the outside of the reel operates a plunger that shakes something inside the bag chamber to unclog it. The Japanese have some really neat vacuum design features you just don't see on American or European vacuums, and way more power than anyone else is selling.

cheesewonton said:

The yellow part in the front of the dirt bin is a cyclone. I can tell you that it works as well as any bagged canister made. In fact based on the Japanese rating scale it it stronger than anything sold in the US. 500 watts Suction Work Rate where the best Miele sold in Japan is rated at 240 watts and something like a Tristar is rated at 190 watts. It is a fantastic vacuum. And the neat thing is, aside from the inside of the dust bin and inside surface of the filter the vacuum stays nice and clean.
In that video you might have heard a scraping sound when they shut the vacuum down. There is a little motorized scraper in the back of the bag chamber that runs a nub across the outside face of the big pleated filter to keep it from clogging. It is a well thought out if electronically complex vacuum. All the Japanese companies have similar bagless canisters, just not ULPA filtered.
Oh, and their bagged canisters all have methods to shake the bag when you pull the cord out and when you rewind it. Usually nubs on the outside of the reel operates a plunger that shakes something inside the bag chamber to unclog it. The Japanese have some really neat vacuum design features you just don't see on American or European vacuums, and way more power than anyone else is selling.

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@cheesewonton sorry for the late reply, but... Do you have any images of machines like these?

Absolute Rainbow said:

@cheesewonton sorry for the late reply, but... Do you have any images of machines like these?

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This is one of several Airsis models I have, in this case one with Panasonic branding from after they bought out Sanyo. The model designation is MC-SXJ4000W. This is the third generation of the Airsis. There would be one more with a double chamber dust bin, different cyclone and configured to use a standard Panasonic hose, wand and power nozzle. This example is a carry over of what Sanyo was making when Panasonic bought them.
You can see the yellow part inside the dust bin. That is a cyclone. At the back of the bin is a fine mesh screen and behind that a nice thick pleated filter. You can see I use a hack common in Japan of cutting some dust bag material ( from a Kirby dust bag ) to sandwich between the mesh filter and the pleated filter. In the second image you can see a pale yellow strip in a channel at the back of the bag chamber. That is a scraper that rubs across the back of the pleated filter to knock any dust off it. It operates by a little motor when you shut the vacuum off. The upper cover is translucent and puts on a little light show when you use it. It was the most expensive Japanese vacuum made, selling for about $1,200 in 2012 when this one was made.
The big round hatch on the bottom of the canister is where the ULPA filter is. The motor is in a sealed compartment that blows down into the center of a big round, almost automotive looking, ULPA filter. From there the air flows outward and out the back.
The history of Sanyo is interesting. Old man Matsushita, the founder of what would become Panasonic ( originally Matsushita Electric Manufacturing Co Ltd ) lent an unused factory to one of his sons in law. That business would become Sanyo. Sanyo lost its main manufacturing plant in a big earthquake in the early 2000s. They never really recovered and by 2009 were on the ropes. Panasonic stepped in and bought them. Family ties.

cheesewonton said:

This is one of several Airsis models I have, in this case one with Panasonic branding from after they bought out Sanyo. The model designation is MC-SXJ4000W. This is the third generation of the Airsis. There would be one more with a double chamber dust bin, different cyclone and configured to use a standard Panasonic hose, wand and power nozzle. This example is a carry over of what Sanyo was making when Panasonic bought them.
You can see the yellow part inside the dust bin. That is a cyclone. At the back of the bin is a fine mesh screen and behind that a nice thick pleated filter. You can see I use a hack common in Japan of cutting some dust bag material ( from a Kirby dust bag ) to sandwich between the mesh filter and the pleated filter. In the second image you can see a pale yellow strip in a channel at the back of the bag chamber. That is a scraper that rubs across the back of the pleated filter to knock any dust off it. It operates by a little motor when you shut the vacuum off. The upper cover is translucent and puts on a little light show when you use it. It was the most expensive Japanese vacuum made, selling for about $1,200 in 2012 when this one was made.
The big round hatch on the bottom of the canister is where the ULPA filter is. The motor is in a sealed compartment that blows down into the center of a big round, almost automotive looking, ULPA filter. From there the air flows outward and out the back.
The history of Sanyo is interesting. Old man Matsushita, the founder of what would become Panasonic ( originally Matsushita Electric Manufacturing Co Ltd ) lent an unused factory to one of his sons in law. That business would become Sanyo. Sanyo lost its main manufacturing plant in a big earthquake in the early 2000s. They never really recovered and by 2009 were on the ropes. Panasonic stepped in and bought them. Family ties.

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1) It doesn't look cyclonic to me.
2) ULPA filter? Must be HEPA filter, but nope, Panasonic/Sanyo has to deem it as ULPA!

If it works in my opinion it doesn’t matter if it’s bagged, bagless, cyclonic or not. What works works and what doesn’t doesn’t.

Absolute Rainbow said:

1) It doesn't look cyclonic to me.
2) ULPA filter? Must be HEPA filter, but nope, Panasonic/Sanyo has to deem it as ULPA

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The yellow part is a little cyclone thing. It gets the air spinning so the dust falls out.

No mistake. The Japanese vacuum manufacturers were on an ULPA filtration kick for a time. Sanyo claims 99.99% filtration at 0.08 microns for the Airsis line. The filter under that round hatch on the bottom costs the equivalent of $85 in Japan. I have two other Japanese ULPA filtered machines, one each from Hitachi and Mitsubishi. The Hitachi is a bagged canister and the Mitsubishi can go bagless with a dust bin along the lines of this Airsis or you can take the cyclone thing out and attach a dust bag to the spout the cyclone would otherwise attach to. The bag is inside the removable dust bin! I have another Sanyo canister that has a dust bin that looks a lot like the one you see in the Airsis, but you can put a bag in the bag chamber instead of the dust bin. The dust bin attaches to a normal Sanyo bag mount.

Japan is a parallel universe of home appliances with stuff you never see anywhere else.

cheesewonton said:

The yellow part is a little cyclone thing. It gets the air spinning so the dust falls out.

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@cheesewonton, not only this is unclear, but the images are blurry. WAAAY too blurry!

cheesewonton said:

No mistake. The Japanese vacuum manufacturers were on an ULPA filtration kick for a time. Sanyo claims 99.99% filtration at 0.08 microns for the Airsis line. The filter under that round hatch on the bottom costs the equivalent of $85 in Japan. I have two other Japanese ULPA filtered machines, one each from Hitachi and Mitsubishi. The Hitachi is a bagged canister and the Mitsubishi can go bagless with a dust bin along the lines of this Airsis or you can take the cyclone thing out and attach a dust bag to the spout the cyclone would otherwise attach to. The bag is inside the removable dust bin! I have another Sanyo canister that has a dust bin that looks a lot like the one you see in the Airsis, but you can put a bag in the bag chamber instead of the dust bin. The dust bin attaches to a normal Sanyo bag mount.

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I never said it was a mistake - I just suspected it as, well, misleading. It's almost like somebody claiming Dyson's HEPA filtration to be ULPA filtration, owing to fully-sealed whole-machine design (particularly in all their modern vacuums) and high efficiency of filtration. Was there any proof that these Japanese machines really are ULPA?

cheesewonton said:

Japan is a parallel universe of home appliances with stuff you never see anywhere else.

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Yup, not unlike Dyson but very distinct.

Absolute Rainbow said:

@cheesewonton, not only this is unclear, but the images are blurry. WAAAY too blurry!

I never said it was a mistake - I just suspected it as, well, misleading. It's almost like somebody claiming Dyson's HEPA filtration to be ULPA filtration, owing to fully-sealed whole-machine design (particularly in all their modern vacuums) and high efficiency of filtration. Was there any proof that these Japanese machines really are ULPA?

Yup, not unlike Dyson but very distinct.

Click to expand...

I'm a crappy photographer with an apparently lousy Canon camera and for reasons I do not understand images taken with my iPhone will not load on this site. When I try I receive a warning telling me they are the wrong format. If there is a way to change their format on my laptop I am clueless. Sorry, I'm an analog soul in a digital world.

I also neither speak nor read the three different sets of characters used in the Japanese language so I am unable to read any of their technical documentation. Some is translatable to rough Engirsh but not that much, and some of the translations are hilarious. To wit, what is a "garbage dash"? It is a component part that turns up in the English language translations describing many Japanese vacuums. I haven't figured out what it means though. Tool for the gap is a little easier to understand. I can understand the 0.08 microns ( they use the Greek symbol ) and ULPA, which is printed in plain English characters but little else and Google Translate is not very helpful.

cheesewonton said:

I'm a crappy photographer with an apparently lousy Canon camera and for reasons I do not understand images taken with my iPhone will not load on this site. When I try I receive a warning telling me they are the wrong format. If there is a way to change their format on my laptop I am clueless. Sorry, I'm an analog soul in a digital world.

I also neither speak nor read the three different sets of characters used in the Japanese language so I am unable to read any of their technical documentation. Some is translatable to rough Engirsh but not that much, and some of the translations are hilarious. To wit, what is a "garbage dash"? It is a component part that turns up in the English language translations describing many Japanese vacuums. I haven't figured out what it means though. Tool for the gap is a little easier to understand. I can understand the 0.08 microns ( they use the Greek symbol ) and ULPA, which is printed in plain English characters but little else and Google Translate is not very helpful.

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ChatGPT is great at translating - much better than Google Translate, especially in taking context into account when doing so.

Hatsuwr said:

ChatGPT is great at translating - much better than Google Translate, especially in taking context into account when doing so.

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No it isn't. I shake my head at the AI interpretation of a song by the Argentine band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs called "El Matador". The song is a tribute to the late Chilean dissident Victor Jara. He was killed by the Chilean security forces during the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet that deposed the elected President Salvador Allende. He supposedly had his hands cut off to stop him from playing music but that didn't quiet him so he was shot.
But the AI version of the song's lyrics has the police chasing down a murderer and killing him in a gunfight !
In another occasion, the Reddit sub for helicopters uses AI moderation. There was a thread about a really dodgy homebuilt helicopter and the OP was saying "oh, it won't kill me". My reply was "famous last words". Their AI moderation claimed I made a threat of physical violence and banned me. And because there was no human moderator appealing the ban got me nowhere. From experience AI fails miserably, at least at the current state of the art.
Here is the song by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs.

I think you might be conflating a few different things. "AI", as the term is used today, refers to an unfortunately wide range of technologies. It's become so non-specific that it's lost any useful meaning.

Regarding machine translation, there are multiple distinct technologies used. One these is the generative large language model. ChatGPT is a specific collection of that type of language model, and ChatGPT5 (along with some of its predecessors) is quite good at translating and making use of provided context to produce a better translation.

I don't know where the bad translation you are referring to came from, but it's easy enough to do a test in this case. I'm definitely open to being proven wrong. There are lyrics to the song included in the description of the video you linked. Do you agree that those are the correct original lyrics? Do you have a link to the bad translation you are referring to?

Here are the English language lyrics to El Matador ( a matador because he waves a red cape of dissidence at the bull of the Pinochet regime )
https://genius.com/Los-fabulosos-cadillacs-matador-english-translation-lyrics

And here is the AI version, missing all of the nuance and symbolism of the song

The English lyrics for "El Matador" vary depending on the song, but for the well-known song by The Smiths, the lyrics focus on a bullfighter's performance and the admiration of a woman. For the Los Fabulosos Cadillacs song of the same name, the lyrics are a political statement from the perspective of someone called "The Killer" from Barracas.

And this is what the reference to Leon Santillan in the first verse of El Matador means

https://www.songtell.com/los-fabulosos-cadillacs/manuel-santill-n-el-le-n-tumbao-salsa

AI misses all of that. It will never understand us or the things we do.

You keep using the term AI, and I think that's what is keeping you from understanding.

First, about the genius.com link you provided - I agree that translation is quite bad. However, those lyrics were originally provided by a user (DiegoRicardo) 8 years ago and last edited by another user (frantike) 6 years ago. ChatGPT was released 3 years ago. Those users may have used some sort of machine translation for the lyrics they provided, but it doesn't say either way. If they did use machine translation, it wasn't ChatGPT or anything of remotely comparable capabilities.

For comparison, here is a translation from ChatGPT5: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e9ed6b-215c-8007-aa0c-94ff756897dc

Besides the overall better quality, it is interesting that - without being prompted - it notes the literal translation of the word 'Matador', but also explains how it is used in this context to refer to 'a hunted revolutionary/activist'.