Here’s an another uncomfortable statistic: most of ASOIAF was published before 9/11.

Personally I gave up after AFFC, which I read around a decade ago. The quality of writing had plummeted, and it was increasingly obvious the series is going to take way too long to be finished.

The guy should just give up, relive himself of the duty and the audiences of the frustration, and spend his remaining years peacefully writing Dunk and Egg stories.

Chiquita and Nestlé come to mind. Within tech industry, I’d say Amazon and probably Microsoft are worse as well, and there’s probably a ton of potentially even worse companies lurking in the shadows outside the top of the economic food chain.

I’m worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.

but it’s not a place you go for open and honest discussions between people from both sides of the aisle

Where do you go for such discussions anyway?

Admittedly that sort of censoring has been used online since forever. Stuff like “pr0n”, etc.

No, there is no default option, just a dropdown that offers docx, pdf, rtf, txt, odf…

I don’t get the impression there are even precise definitions of these generational labels.

And I don’t think they make any sense at all outside of USA and maybe west Europe.

Yes, Google Docs exports to ODF.

So, uh, what is the difference?

I don’t think this is the exact cause for the situation, but having more book related forks would probably just do harm by splitting up the audience. The book reading trackers are absolutely dominated by Goodreads, and any alternative desperately needs as much user concentration as possible.

BookWyrm was my first dip into the Fediverse, back when I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads.

This reminds me of the anti-wind-energy arguments about the turbines killing many birds…

Something of the sort has already been claimed for language/linguistics, i.e. that LLMs can be used to understand human language production. One linguist wrote a pretty good reply to such claims, which can be summed up as “this is like inventing an airplane and using it to figure out how birds fly”. I mean, who knows, maybe that even could work, but it should be admitted that the approach appears extremely roundabout and very well might be utterly fruitless.

Platypuses are mammals, but they’re weird enough

We probably wouldn’t consider them nearly as weird if they were more numerous than any other mammal species and lived all over the world. So their comparison to catholicism is weird.

and then it will turn out the monster was inside me all along

there’s only seven stories in the world

There isn’t. That’s a completely nonsensical statement, no serious scholar of litearture/film/etc. would claim something of the sort. While there have been attempts to analyse the “basic” stories and narrative structures (Propp’s model of fairy tales, Greimas’ actantial model, Campbell’s well-known hero’s journey), they’re all far from universally applicable or satisfying.

Yeah, I’ll shill for dbzer0 as the place to host the community.

Umm… based??

In Croatia, we call(ed) it ‘snow’ (snijeg).

Ehhhh, if you have expertise in ANY field outside of like programming, you can easily test various models and see that they produce a lot of crap. That doesn’t require you to understand how LLMs work exactly.