I’m not at all bothered by “swear words,” and I’ll use them occasionally (mostly when I think it’s funny), but it’s somewhat rare. I just don’t find it very necessary most of the time. I can usually make my point just find without, but sometimes the emphasis seems right out, again, it seems funnier.

I’m confident you won’t regret it. I read quite a lot of SF, both older and newer. There’s a lot of classic SF that’s really good, but you have to constantly keep in mind the time it was written in because the story or the characters or the dialog is dated. There was zero of that with that book, it could have been written yesterday (the setting kind of insulates it culturally and technologically). And the sensibilities are so, so far ahead of its time.

I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it’s such a great book. Nothing in it is dated. It was written in 1969, and it’s not just about hermaphrodites; the people of that planet are essentially genderless except once a month when, if they get together with someone else also going through it, one becomes female and the other male essentially randomly - it could switch next time. She takes that situation and explores what a society like that would be like. Further, it’s told through the eyes of a more traditional male who seems somewhat misogynistic. It’s an amazing piece of work, and it’s amazing it was published when it was.

I’ve always told my family I like to build up “cart karma.” You get karma by bringing a cart in with you from the parking lot, or returning the one you use after. You lose karma by leaving your cart in the parking lot. Even if I’m going in for a single item, I’ll take a cart in from the parking lot with me and leave it in the rack by the store.

I don’t really care about cart karma, it’s just a way of saying that it seems like the nice thing to do.

It does, but that’s invaluable too, and you get used to it pretty quickly. It let’s you see if there’s a space (dot), tab (arrow), line wrap (bent arrow), or whatever. Very useful if you deal with documents a lot.

It’s better to use sections or paragraphs formatted as starting on a new page. Using page breaks or lots of blank lines to get to get things paginated is how you end up with wonky formatting like blank pages.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.

Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.

No, they replaced half of the sodium chloride with potassium chloride. It really is half salt. No one is being taken advantage of.

There are a lot of words on packaging that are unregulated, but “organic” isn’t one of them. If they use it, it has to mean what the FDA says it means, and that’s not the opposite of inorganic.

LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.

At least it doesn’t say organic… since salt is an inorganic compound and that’d be straight up silly.

Except that, in food, “organic” just means no pesticides or synthetic chemicals were used in making it.

No fillers, just two ingredients: iodized sodium and potassium chloride.

Understood, but if you did this same graph for most books made into movies, they’d look vastly different. I mean, think of The Shining.

They can’t call it a salt substitute because it still has salt. Some people are told to cut down on salt, so would be attracted to something that tastes salty but has less salt in it. I get why it’s funny, but it seems reasonable to me.

Yeah, I saw the image and thought it was going to be bad, but it’s not like you’d expect any of them to be exactly on the line. They all generally track - I don’t see any giant outliers.

Same thought. I see this headline and think, “Oh no…”

Young teenagers murdering people. So crazy.

Yeah, in in my 60s, so old. When I was in my mid 20s, I was in a bad marriage and needed some escapism. One of my coworkers was a reviewer for Locus Magazine, which is a major SF publication. I asked him for recommendations, so he went with me to the bookstore and said “Try that one, that one, to and that one.” One of those first was Neuromancer. I chewed through them, and it became a routine to go to the bookstore with him.

I eventually got divorced, and didn’t need the escapism anymore. My reading went way down, maybe a few books a year. Now I’m heading towards retirement and I’ve been reading more than ever.

More detail than you wanted.

I’ve read them all, but Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive I haven’t read since the late 80s, so I don’t remember them well. Broadly, I think they were all worth reading. Count Zero was nominated for all the big SF awards, but I didn’t think Mona Lisa was as well received. I’m not sure I could even tell you the plots of them other than the second book has a lot about AIs, and the last one about online identities or something.

Great, I’m glad you liked it. I hope you like neuromancer, it’s one of my favorites. Stay away from the audiobook read by Gibson though, it’s awful.

I think the difference is likely that this is a trial. The woman likely didn’t pay for it, and they didn’t want her to because they don’t want anyone owning their tech while it’s being developed.

Yeah, that sucks. They’re the ones that (as adults) carry that red meat allergy thing, right?