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قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons. The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

Here are a few ideas trends that are affecting this: -Publishing is getting less profitable so there are less books being published by the big companies. -Publishing companies are grow 70-80% woman and are choosing female preferred books -Most published fiction readers are female (I'm not sure what came first women reading more books or publishes publishing less male friendly books) -Romance is the biggest genre fiction and that has heaps of dragons, werewolves and vampires (hence why those terms haven't dropped off) -Self published books aren't included in isfdb, lots of male authors self publish -Amazon best selling sci/fi, cyberpunk lists now have heaps of self-published books (maybe most) -Most of this stuff is pretty pulpy, but it is really common to have starships and space travel in these books.

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

I'm looking forward to having LLMs used for character interactions. It will be like that thrilling point in half life where the soldiers start talking about freeman and for the first time you realize that characters are responding to you in normal game play.

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

Your link shows that South Africa ranks below the US. It is ranked 43rd in the world, vs the USA which is at 28 (in 2024 the latest year).

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

Man, I suck at rhythm games. I've played about 50 times and the best I've gotten in 84%.

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

If you restart after a certain number of turns you get a pawn replaced by an extra queen. I won with four queens.

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

I wonder if the same thing is happening in genres like sci-fi. These trends sound familiar: Publishing books to appeal to critics, more prestige fiction published, less published white male authors, less published books on best seller lists (by published I mean published by a professional publishing firm). I am not sure that big authors of the 80's and 90's such as Iain Banks, Neil Stevenson, Peter F Hamilton would get published now days. I've noticed the big sci-fi awards seems to have a lot more books with social justice themes than I remember. I find I don't like a lot of the newly published sci-fi. I'm reading a lot more self published books amd, at least judging by best seller lists on amazon, so are a lot of other people. It is a pity, I think professionally published books are generally better written, perhaps it is the pipeline of authors writing about themes I like being broken?

قبل سنتينdiscuss

Cool, I like the other three, I'll give battleship chronicles a go.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

The key point in the article is that the polling shows that respect for universities has fallen, and fallen quickly since 2016. It obviously isn't just about Israel, as it happened well before 2023.

I put it down to a number of factors: -The replication crisis -Divergence of "Social Justice Leftism" (for want of better words) over main stream liberal and conservative ideals at universities. -over production of degree holders, creating a shortage of trades people and graduates who can't get jobs. You have many graduates who prefer to work in unskilled jobs rather than retraining into trades. -Increased expense of university. On average most attending university are better off. But there are a lot of people worse off. -Disappointing returns on research at universities. Commercial and Industry specific labs have a much greater return on investment, but the narrative has been about needing to invest in universities.

I'd like to see less places funded at universities. Less research funded at universities. More funding for research elsewhere. Pre registration of studies become the norm or mandatory (i.e. say before you do the work what you are looking to test in the data you collect). More prestige and funding for trade schools.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

I've built pilots of these kind of models for my government department (Victoria, Austalia). The prototypes in R using Random Forest models. Pilot version in Python using gradient boosting. We could have used deep learning models, but the increase in accuracy of the predictions is pretty minimal.

We haven't used these models outside of a pilot. There is a long lag to get other departments/services data and de-identify it and link it (we have a team that does this, it has a lot of safeguards to ensure privacy). Although old data is still quite predictive. A simple predictive score didn't help our workers do their job as they needed to justify their decisions with evidence. Giving the workers access to underlying information (they would need to have legal authority to view the data, so that excludes Homelessness support staff) often is missing what they need for their processes.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

"The CIO integrated data from seven different county departments, de-identified for privacy, including emergency room visits, behavioral health care and large public benefits programs from food stamps to income support and homeless services, according to Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab. The program also pulled data from the criminal justice system."

قبل سنتينdiscuss

It appears to be a very powerful influence tool. Ryan McBeth [1] made a video showing how easy it is to serve a message to small target demographics. This seems distinct to how, say, youtube works: serving adds to the targeted demographics and algorithm serving content based on prior. Tik tok seems to add a content creator being able target your content to an audience. This also seems to be able to be done without the public or any authorities being aware. It looks like a great tool to encourage discord. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7WzqUq4Nk

قبل سنتينdiscuss

I love Snow Crash. I was wearing my Black Sun night club (from snow crash) t-shirt to work today. That being said, it does feel like an early book. It is possibly over packed with ideas and possibly so edgy it feels like it is trying too hard.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I found this modelling really good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3lypVnJ0HM TLDR: Once you have a two to one ratio of straight men to straight women. Men get matched 1/2 as much, respond by lowering there standards and spamming women. Women start off with twice as many matches, but get choosier and match even less. Women feel overwhelmed and get chased off the apps. Men quit from not getting any interest.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I don't think there was much in the Geneva Conventions about targeting civilians until 1949 and the 4th Geneva convention. Maybe there was something about bombarding civilians from ships at sea.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I like how they summarise the content history, I wonder if you could get the Large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT-4 to do the summarisation once the token window was full?

I was thinking about how you could do something like this. Prime the LLM with description of the character and feed the dialogue back into it to generate realistic NPC dialogue. Have some logic behind it to update the chat log with events, perhaps quest prompts. Doable with the current price of$0.03/1k prompt tokens. Not sure you could do this on a triple A game with the dependency on an outside provider that might jack the prices and possible impossible to predict behaivour. But it might be fun in a small indi game?

I wasn't anticipating the interaction between the NPCs. That would make it even more immersive. I am also curious how they got the output in chat-gpt to influence the NPCs movements and actions?

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I wonder how much of it is secular. With populations weighted towards older workers demand for investment goods is high vs consumption goods where demand is low. As older workers are saving for retirement. As investment goods are not included in inflation measures like CPI. Low demand for consumption goods is causing low measures of inflation, causing central banks to keep rates low. While low interest rates and high demand for investment property is driving the value of dwellings up rapidly. I'd favour including property in CPI and increasing the deposit requirements...

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

CharGPT seems to me as sentient as a book. You could have the most convincing conversation you have ever read, written down within the book. But the book doesn't care about the passing of time, and it can't effect the world except in influencing people to change their behavior.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

From listening to the fall of civilization podcast, it seems that a lot of empires went down from too many heirs. From memory Mansa Musa lived very old and had more than 50 heirs as well. The Malian empire did not long last his death. https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

I was reflecting on this recently in the Chinese property bubble. I suspect firms that take customer deposits and use them to speculate of future growth grow much quicker in a boom environment than firms that handle the deposits responsibly. Crowding out responsible firms.

This has lead to Chinese property developers spending all the money they collected to build homes on new parcels of lands and even soccer teams instead of finishing those homes. After all there will always be new money coming in.

In the crypto space this has lead exchange firms that speculate with their customers assets to out compete the safe approach providing exchange services and collecting a commission.