planish

How much of this is "the model can read ASCII art", and how much of this is "the model knows exactly what word ought to go where [MASK] is because it is a guess-the-word-based computing paradigm"?

Zelda + Scat = Relaxing The Legend of Zelda Jazz Covers

The Uplift series isn't really that third picture but I can kind of see why this person did the cover art.

The last one actually reminds me of Saturn's Children where the cover is like a worse CGI version of that, but the book actually thinks it through in a way that makes this person a compelling point of view character.

I read them all. I think I liked the first book fine, it's more of a self-contained mystery, which might be better. The aliens are probably most prominent in the second trillogy; there's loads of them and I quite like the Commons of Jijo.

I feel like the series is sort of missing pieces? Like, across the five books it is in, WTF was going on with Streaker's discovery is never really explained, the whole the-galactics-aren't-being-honest-with-us thread is never satisfyingly resolved in the whole series, and at several points in the chronology it feels like there could have been a whole book about the stuff that happened since the last book.

The whole series is An Aesop on how science is good. Which is fine, doing science is good and you can spend a series reminding people of that if you would like. But it's strange to find that as the point of a series that otherwise seems to have all these frankly conservative ideas about colonizing space planets and about some people being just inherently more or less "uplifted" than others. Uplift seems to stand in for a person's moral value without what I would consider sufficient critique. Like, paternalism is bad when the galactics do it, but when humans just have full power over a dolphin person's entire life that's fine somehow, you need it to do Uplift, the thing the books are about. The whole Uplift concept has unavoidable parallels to European notions of "civilizing" people by using military force to make them act more like Europeans, which I don't think are fully examined.

I also remember them as having weird 1980s gender ideas in them, like the men are normal and the women are viewed through some weird filter and the other gender humans are entirely absent.

I think there are more interesting books to read about the structure of minds and the diversity of subjective experience. For example, Diaspora only comes out a year after Heaven's Reach, and also has all sorts of weird aliens, but it additionally has defensible gender politics and a much more cogent thesis on autonomy and what the powers of science may or must be used to do. Or, A Half-Built Garden is all about what happens when galactic society arrives to save the humans, and the humans maybe finally don't need saving.

Watch TikTok's US operation get sold not to the highest bidder, but to the American entity most intent on using it to destabilize society.

Plastic at the microscopic level, if they aren't doing anything chemically interesting, really ought to function about like "rock, but light". Most organisms don't run into trouble because there are tiny bits of rock in the world, so I would expect tiny bits of plastic not to be a huge problem. Which is sort of backed up by how we have noticed microplastics everywhere and we haven't seen huge problems resulting from it (most people are still alive, most children still develop to adulthood, etc.).

But it's entirely possible that some of these plastics are not chemically inert, and that they emit chemicals that do exciting and unwanted things in people's bodies. If we can't keep our plastics from becoming microplastics, we probably need to discontinue the manufacture of non-implantable plastics, since all the plastics will end up in someone's body at some point.

And it's also possible that the microplastics physically do do something interestingly bad. I think there was a recent study to this effect on heart disease. But at this point, that's the question we need to be asking. How many or what kind of microplastics does it take to give a ferret epilepsy? Not "are there microplastics in my all brands of peanut butter?"

$PIKACHU = $ZELDA + $CAT

Server “owners” do not own anything from a data security standpoint.

How can you tell that this is true?

"Yeah this sounds like a Phil Nash sort of problem, I'll just stick him in here."

The rust compiler produces a flawless understanding of your code, and then quits out because understanding that code is a Nightly-only feature and you're using the stable build.

It cheeses my beans so goram much that they took a perfectly good web site and made it terrible so they could sell it to "the public", notionally the same people who were using the site!!!

I can only conclude that this is some kind of scam and actually most of the thing is going to end up owned by deliberately nebulous "institutional investors" and not the community members who constitute and deserve ownership of the community. Or even the people at Reddit Inc. who did the work of making the thing.

DAE socialism?

But now, or soon, you can have one person with half an idea, like "what if The Rock had to save Shanghai from mole zombies", and they can grab a text generator to fill in most of the screenplay, and then dial in the number of synonyms for "exciting" used to describe the explosions, and come out with Day of the Living Moles, a 95 minute feature film, in a weekend. Without actually having to have had any traditional cinematography skills or breaking an artistic sweat.

There are categories of creative work that are throw-away; little sketches on napkins, improvised songs, quick sketches that an artist might think of are of no account to anyone. And the scope of what can be dashed off like that, with minimal time and effort, is growing because of more powerful tools.

Why should I watch Universal's superhero blockbuster when I can watch my buddy Jimothy's? What happens when the number of plausible films dramatically exceeds the time that movie critics have to watch them to sort out which are any good?