Professional writer who uses different writing apps for different occasions is me exactly. I’m also the (or at least a) guy who messaged you about inline comments. As soon as all the details of that feature are implemented, I’m buying it.
Yeah, but if you own something that’s in my brain, I can imagine you legally forcing me to pay you for it, but I can’t imagine any court in the world forcing me to let you cut my head open.
This is fascinating and harrowing, but I wish it contained more detail on why the devices were removed, particularly in Rita Leggett's case. The company that made her still-functioning device no longer existed, and trial participants were "advised to have their implants removed." But then she subsequently "tried to negotiate with the company?" And was then somehow compelled to have the device removed despite not wanting to--presumably due to some unarticulated consequence of not doing so; I don't think any surgeon would perform an operation like that without the patient consenting to it. I'd like to better understand how she was compelled to consent to the removal of something she "would have done anything" to keep. That seems like a relevant facet of the discussion of medical ethics.
This is a fun example of how much difference a comma can make. "How ChatGPT was built, from the people who made it" is what this article should have been titled. "How ChatGPT was built from the people who made it" means something very different.
>Of course I wasn't the first to think of it but that didn't matter, the joy is the same.
Exactly right.
When I was in undergrad physics, I signed up for the intro comp-sci course (which is recommended back then but not yet required). First we learned the basic syntax of C, and in the second unit we learned about sorting algorithms. The Prof introduced us to bubble sort, selection sort, and insertion sort, and also the idea that the efficiency of a sorting algorithm was proportional to how many comparisons it required.
Being a physics student, I knew that there were physical process, like driven granular systems, that sorted objects by size without mathematically comparing anything at all. I wondered if I could beat the efficiency of all three of the algorithms by programming the computer to do something similar, treating integers like differently-sized grains of sand.
Over the weekend I first coded an algorithm I called jostle sort that sent the unsorted integers flying across a 2D array a distance equal to their magnitude, then picked them up again from left to right, top to bottom. This worked, but slowly because it had to look at every cell of the 2D array.
Thinking about it further, I imagined tipping the 2D array up from the bottom edge, so that all the integers in a column slid into a pile in the top row. I realized I only needed the count of how many integers ended up in each column, not the columns themselves. I could just initialize a 1D array of zeroes the size of the max value to be sorted, and increment the value in index n whenever I encountered n in the unsorted array. This worked really well, easily beating the other three algorithms in the criteria we'd been asked to test on our homework assignment.
I'd invented counting sort.
I would later learn that I wasn't the first, but that didn't lessen my pleasure. It's still my favorite sorting algorithm, because of that joy of discovery.
Maybe try it with an app on the phone instead? I've been using Synology's photos app to automatically upload everything in my photos library to my NAS for a couple of months now, and it's been seamless. Other apps, like PhotoSync, seem to offer similar functionality in a platform-independent way.
Sometimes games don't do this due to genre conventions/player expectation.
In 2006 Square-Enix shipped a simple programmable system for gameplay automation with the gambit system in Final Fantasy XII. It let you put together a hierarchical list of if->then statements for how characters behaved during battle. It essentially let players "equip" a battle strategy the same way they would equip weapons or armor. This seemed like something highly desirable, since Final Fantasy (and JRPGs in general) had lots of repetitive, grind-y encounters where the tactics didn't change from battle to battle.
People hated it. The popular dismissive criticism was, "Who wants to sit and watch a game play itself?" Players were used to picking and timing all their actions by hand during battles. Many Final Fantasy players back then resented the game "taking away" something they expected and wanted in the game. (It didn't; you could turn gambits off at any time and play the old way, but players got mad anyway because the gambit system seemed like how you were "supposed" to play it.)
In the years since there's been a much more positive re-evaluation. As of the 2017 release of the remastered Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, most of the retrospective reviews had come around to "actually, the gambit system is really clever." But the initial response was so strongly negative that we've never seen the like again in a Final Fantasy game.
There are some games where things not being automated is, for many players, the whole point.
I remember reading this when it was published, as I was living in a college dorm at the time and strongly considered using this method to produce a master key. I didn't, because I couldn't think of anything I'd want to do with the master key once I had it. But I enjoyed knowing that I could make one if I'd wanted to.
Professional author here. Personally, this wouldn't be for me, at least not right now. But it may be for others, and it's neat that you built it!
Why it's not for me:
These days, the choice between self publishing and traditional publishing is really a question of what I want my job to be. If I'm willing to be a writer/editor/publicist/graphic designer/etc., then modern digital distribution means self publishing makes a lot of sense. It potentially also makes a lot of sense for people who already have largish followings, as it increases profits per sale. (People with following can also monetize those followings directly via things like Patreon, or likely your "paid subscribers" feature.)
For me, though, all I really feel comfortable doing is writing. I don't want to publicize, or format books, or cultivate a following that I can turn into patrons and monetize. I'm a slow writer, so unlikely to produce a steady enough stream of content to make a serialization/patron model viable. I also strongly dislike being on social media, which would really limit my exposure.
Being in control of publicity is empowering for some authors, but for me it would make the work harder, not easier. So I prefer traditional publishing, where my only job is to write the stories and have professional interaction with agents and editors. Self-advocacy isn't a major part of my job as an author, and I'm an author who doesn't want it to be. I'm to have (and indirectly pay) agents and editors to let me have a writing career without needing to do work I find onerous.
Best of luck to you, though. And things change, so who knows? Maybe someday something like this will be exactly what I need. I know a brilliant author who was traditionally published for decades, but has now reclaimed her rights and is self publishing to much greater satisfaction.
I already replied to the parent question explaining how authors of short fiction do, in fact, make money when their work is adapted.
The WGA is a union whose members pay dues based on their writing income. The guild is incentivized to maximize their membership, and to maximize the earning of those members.
I'm an associate member of the WGAw--someone who's worked in the industry, but not done enough work yet to qualify for full membership--and I've never encountered any of the exclusionary attitude you suggest.
If a short story is made into a movie, the first step is for the production company to secure the rights to the IP. This is usually done through an options contract, wherein the writer sells the production company the exclusive but time-limited write to make a film adaptation. When their option period expires, the production company has to either renew the option for more money, or give up on the project.
How much money an option sells for depends on the profiles of both the author and the producer/studio involved. My first option contract for short fiction was $2500 for a one year exclusive option--slightly more than I made when I published the story originally. My most recent option contract was $12,500 for an 18 month exclusivity period.
Authors with large backlists can have lots of option contracts always expiring and renewing, and often have this as a meaningful income stream even if nothing ever actually gets produced.
I've been quite happy with MXroute. I've only once had an IP blocking problem with them, with a friend who hosts using Migadu. It was cleared up in under a day.
"Opinionated" is a very good word for them, though. I think Jarland Donnell is legitimately passionate about running a good email services, and has strong opinions about what that means. In my experience, it's meant something no-nonsense, with good technical transparency, that delivers exactly what it promises and nothing more. Perfect for my needs.
As a fiction author who spends hours worrying about individual sentences and whether they're carrying their weight in the overall story--is it advancing the narrative, or deepening characterization, or delivering important information, or furthering my thematic goals, or (ideally) doing more than one of these things at once?--I'm pretty resistant to your claim that books are "often teeming with filler content." Possibly too resistant; perhaps your attempted reading is biased such that this is actually true. Maybe you're trying to make it through lots of things that were originally published as serials, or lack good editing, or have some other reason for the author to have emphasized sheer length over the qualities we usually find motivating. Maybe this is an accurate representation of your experiences.
But I'd like you to consider the possibility that, rather than huge swaths of those books you disparage being pointless, they are instead doing things that you have not cultivated an awareness for. It may be that, rather than being "filled with so so many words that were just exercise in language use for the author and carry barely any information," they are instead filled with passages offering information that you are not currently sensitive to, like music played on a frequency you can't hear.
Fully engaging with art requires an active interest. Art is generally made by people who are deeply interested in their form, and made in ways that reward said interest being matched. The less commercial the art form, the more this is true. Even within specific art forms, there are distinct traditions and modes. Its unreasonable to expect that you will appreciate everything about a particular work of art without developing literacy in those things.
For example, if I say that I find fighting video games boring, that's a perfectly defensible position. But if I say that fighting video games are boring because the developers don't in enough effort to make something other than a thin story about who wins a tournament, then I'm simply wrong. That's a failure to engage with the art on its own terms. Fighting video games aren't about narrative, they're about zoning and rushdown and combos and various other game mechanics. The developers put in lots of effort, but their focus was on gameplay, not narrative. Expecting the focus to be narrative would be an error on my part.
If I made that error, I might also say something like, "Why do these fighting games have so many characters? The tournament story barely changes no matter who you play as. All these extra characters are useless filler." In saying that, I would reveal myself to be insensitive to the vastly different move sets and mechanical plusses/minuses that are the desiderata for the large casts of most fighting games.
(As it happens, I do think fighting games are boring. But that doesn't mean the games are flawed, just that not all art forms are enjoyed equally by all people.)
(And while the large casts of fighting games aren't filler, there are, of course, video games with filler. Triple-A video games often have filler, to be able to boast about, say, 100+ hours of content. Anime series based on ongoing manga often have filler, to maintain their viewership without running out of material. When things have filler, the reason is usually commercial. When The Hobbit was adapted for the screen, it wasn't split into three movies for artistic reasons. Filler is all about money. Most fiction authors are not lucky enough to have any reason to produce filler.)
A quotation attributed to Lord Dunsany: "I see now that keen interest can illuminate anything, and that anything, moreover, has something worth illuminating in it, and that without that interest gates carved by Benvenuto Cellini from two diamonds would merely look chilly."
Things grow in our estimation with the attention we invest in them. Your "rising standard on what feels interesting" could, instead, be a diminished capacity or willingness to invest a keen attention in things that don't immediately capture your interest. When all the things you struggle to focus on are also things that seem, to you, to be fully without merit, then how could you distinguish between those two states?
Perhaps those books you tried are filled with thing that, even when engaged with actively, would still not be to your taste. But when you say they carry barely any information, it's hard for me not to think of "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster:
The air-ship was crossing another range of mountains, but she could see little, owing to clouds. Masses of black rock hovered below her, and merged indistinctly into grey. Their shapes were fantastic; one of them resembled a prostrate man.
“No ideas here,” murmured Vashti, and hid the Caucasus behind a metal blind. In the evening she looked again. They were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She repeated, “No ideas here,” and hid Greece behind a metal blind.
He comes off as fully professional and measured in that link. Describing that as character assassination makes you seem like someone nursing a grudge, not someone with a legitimate grievance. And at least he’s left his response up for people to judge for themselves, while you’ve deleted everything you put in that Reddit thread.
If lots of other people really agree with your impression of working with Clem, point us at these other, similar opinions you mention. So far this is just “the lurkers support me in email.”