I did a bit, but honestly, my main point is that I can't stand Hofstadter's style, either of writing or thinking. It's not an ad hominem attack to prove some other point; it's intended as a criticism of the man himself.
I skimmed the article, but it seems the purpose of it would be better served as series of issue reports in the Google Translate bug tracking system than a full article.
I think it's not really that interesting to diss the state of the machine translation art in 2019, instead of looking where it could be in 2020, 2025, 2030.
You miss the point. The point is that the "deep" learning approach is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to proper translation no matter how many racks of GPUs you throw at it, since it lacks the "understanding of ideas" required to do it.
