My boss is pretty decent. He gets dumb ideas (like we all do), but he recognizes when they fail and doesn’t try to force them for face-saving. It’s because of that that we survived the COVID-19 disasater and the pivot away from American clients (my initiative) without disappearing. He doesn’t appear to have the usual ego of a businessman.

… Really? Please explain.

It’s not “Distance Raptor” or “Time Raptor” or even “Veloci Raptor”. It’s Distanceraptor. All one word. Or Timeraptor or Velociraptor.

I mean otherwise it would be:

Distanceraptor

Timeraptor

And that leaves us with:

Dstanc

Tm

My boss tried to get everybody to use LLMbeciles for work. He was taken in by the fakery and set up a commercial OpenAI account.

I refused to use it. Ever. Like to the point that I never even collected my ID and password.

Others used it, but it was, as always, a time-waster where it looked like they were making gains at the start, only to get bogged down when important details entered the picture. So I quietly got my work done while others wrestled with AI. Then by the end of six weeks nobody was using it and my boss quietly shut down the account.

They actually believe their own press and think their “reasoning” models say anything meaningful when they “explain” their “reasoning”?

Wow! I could be a top AI researcher too and I don’t even know how to begin programming a computer!

Not me. The Democrats are not a whole lot better. I mean make no mistake they’re better than the Republicans … but not by as much as they should be.

I was unaware that I have to justify a preference. Silly me.

It depends on the book.

If it’s a book I will be cherishing and valuing, paper. If it’s a book I’m just going to read and toss, or if it’s a book I’m going to use for reference purposes, ebook.

Is this necessarily a bad thing?

Yes.

Yes it is.

Being a poseur has always been a bad thing and always will be a bad thing.

Those ridiculous, unserious human (presumably) beings?

They probably honestly didn’t think it was a threat. It is a common delusion in the USA that everybody wants to be American.

I’m sure the boycott will soften somewhat after Trump leaves (presuming he isn’t made President for Life and heralding a new era in American governance) because people have short memories and will forget that almost all American officials at every level were either directly working for his platform or just sitting ineffectually at the side pretending to do anything but not really stopping it.

But it will only soften. It will not be over. Not for most Canadians alive today. The USA poisoned its brand but good and by the time Trump has stopped raging like a bull in a china shop, Canadians will have found new favourite brands and suppliers and such and American brands will be dead anyway.

Because once I find something I like, why would I go back just because the old brand says “but we’ve chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanged!”

I understood about one word in five of that article.

Which means I’m about one word in five ahead of that highlighted idiot. He’s acting as if the Spicy Autocorrect understands things. As if it knows what a database is, what code is, what rules are, etc.

I’m not just technically declined, I’m a borderline technophobe and even I know this is bullshit.

Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home is an intriguing approach to novel writing. Some can’t get into it because it looks more like an ethnologist’s report, but there is a story there (and I don’t mean the segments with Stone Telling: the entire novel has a story that rewards those who pay attention).

Tesla simps are just so draining to watch.

I think of the major awards the one that matches my tastes best (and still only at an about 25% hit rate) is the Nobel Prize. After the various scandals and fiascos of Worldcon (especially the Chengdu fiasco) I will not ever trust the Hugos ever again (and even before that they maybe had a hit rate of about 10%).

I’m with some of the other posters I’ve read here, though. In general I think industry awards are essentially self-love in the grotty sense of the term.

De Santis Dachau?

People have said alarmist things like this with every new thing introduced in history. Even Chess was derided as harmful to its players!

LLMbeciles are terrible technology capable of all kinds of harm. This is not one of them in any meaningful way. People get addicted to, get psychotic over, and stories get told of people going overboard with, literally every new thing that has been introduced to society in all of history.

Including. Chess.

What is “the normal UTF-8 space”?

You space the endash, not the emdash.

The repetition between chapters happens because the storyteller of a given story doesn’t know if you know the origin story or not. (It’s like how every damned Superman or Spider-Man or whatever movie always has to show how Superman/Spider-Man came to be.) Within chapters it could be part of an oral recitation thing with the repetitions being vestigial choruses. There is a lot of scholarship around this novel, and I’m not really deeply involved in any of it. I’m a situation- and opportunity-driven dabbler.