Since 2018, a huge amount of text has accumulated on my website, and I suddenly felt the urge to translate this entire corpus of materials into English. You see, sometimes when chatting with an English speaker, I’d mention that I have a site with materials on ancap, they’d get curious and go to the address, only to find Cyrillic. And there wasn’t even a button to switch to English. It felt kind of silly. Well, now there is a button.
For this task, I mastered vibe-coding, built a WordPress plugin plus a set of Python utilities that connect to this plugin, and of course, API calls to an LLM—how could I do without them. It was terribly fascinating, and I even managed to limit myself exclusively to free tools. I’ll need a few more days to finish translating the very earliest posts and run a script to replace internal links in the translations from Russian to English. But, of course, this will be a purely neural-network translation, and native speakers might cringe at certain phrasings. On the other hand, if the English version of the site is presented not to Americans, but to say, Germans, there’s a chance they won’t notice anything at all. However, if any readers are willing and able to proofread not all posts in a row, but at least the most valuable ones, that would be wonderful. Once the English version of the site is finished, I will create a Serbian one in the same manner, and we’ll see where it goes from there.
Actually, I didn’t just dive into this activity for no reason; it’s because this autumn I am finally moving to Serbia. Montenegro is introducing visas for Russians, and all the ways to live in the country legally are becoming too expensive for me. Moreover, the government’s rhetoric leaves no doubt that they don’t plan to stop, and squeezing out foreigners before joining the EU is their conscious policy. So I see no reason to cling to this country until the end; I’d rather try to start from scratch in the neighboring one. And if Montenegro is Montelibero, then Serbia is Liberland. This means there will be a lot of communication with an English-speaking audience, which means a site translation is needed—that was roughly my train of thought.
That was the second piece of news, and the third is even more exciting. I’m planning to give birth around mid-April. And the fact that I won’t have to rely on the famous Montenegrin medicine already fills me with great joy, so everything is working out perfectly.
Due to the pregnancy, I am becoming less fit for physical work, so I’ve started looking for remote work. So far, I’ve laid out my “Libertarian Theory of War” for the Svoboda Publishing House; the client liked it and gave me a new book, which I’m currently working through, and we’ll see how long their queue of orders is. It’s unlikely this one side job will be enough to live on, but it’s a start. If you have any other interesting remote work options, please suggest them. But even if you don’t, you can simply donate to the development of the project, as you can see, it is indeed developing.
