I wonder how much of the YA uptick is driven by adults who prefer less-challenging reading. If that's the case it just makes the picture appear even more bleak.
It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).
Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.
I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.
The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.
Man don't gate keep reading. I don't care if an adult is reading 'see spot run' so long as they're reading and enjoying it. Reading begets reading. It's a muscle that must be exercised.
That kind of issue is very much "eh" for me personally. They're reading. Not everybody's motivated to read "Ulysses" or "War and Peace". Probably a significant percentage move to reading more challenging material with time.
The issue a lot of people are talking about is the decline in reading comprehension, lowered reading scholastic scores, the overall lack of reading, and the consumption of entertainment that requires little reading.
Stuff like the "Treasure Island" (#34), "Oliver Twist" (#56), and "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (#66) still rates rather high up on Young Adult literature sales by Amazon's reported numbers, even if romance and such is the top 5-10. They're reading.
> on, 'Hey, doesn't the barkeeper look a little strange?', the LLM immediately seized on that and turned the barkeeper into an evil, otherworldly creature.
Though making it an evil otherwordly creature is a bit extreme, it's at least similar to what a flexible GM can do. In my DMing days, I would often develop new paths that integrated into the whole inspired by things my players noticed/suspected.
In my GM days, I had a lot of trouble with players that tried really their best to completely leave the path I prepared for them.
You are right though and it's not that I completely dislike the LLMs "flexibilty" and openness to suggestions. However, it's also super easy to use it for "cheating". E.g. it generated a scenario with an evil entity about to attack me and some friendly NPC and I could "solve" that problem by telling the NPC "remember the device I gave you last week and told you to always keep on hand? pull the trigger now!" (that never happend, at least to the LLMs knowledge) and the LLM made up some device that shot a beam of magic light at the creature and stopped it.
Estimated 1.5 billion vehicles in use across the world. Generous assumptions: a) they're all IC engines requiring 16 liters of water each. b) they are changing that water out once a year
That gives 24m cubic meters annual water usage.
Estimated ai usage in 2024: 560m cubic meters.
Projected water usage from AI in 2027: 4bn cubic meters at the low end.
what does water usage mean? is that 4bn cubic meters of water permanently out of circulation somehow? is the water corrupted with chemicals or destroyed or displaced into the atmosphere to become rain?
The water is used to sink heat and then instead of cooling it back down they evaporate it, which provides more cooling. So the answer is 'it eventually becomes rain'.
I understand. but why this is bad? is there some analysis of the beginning and end locations of the water, and how the utility differs between those locations?
Clean drinking water is actually de facto a finite resource. It does recycle through nature, but large reservoirs and water tables are slow to recharge, often taking millennia to form, so there’s a lossiness in that sense — our usage and loss of potable water can’t be higher than the overall recharge rate. So it’s something we could exhaust without big technical breakthroughs (converting salt water quicker than nature does in large quantities, etc). We rely on maintaining a sustainable rate of consumption to avoid setting up future generations for potential catastrophe, basically. Not saying data centre water usage could alone be the difference, but it’s not implausible if it increases exponentially. Another factor is existing reserves can be contaminated and made undrinkable, adding an unpredictable factor into calculations. It’s an interesting topic to read about.
Hot water disrupts marine life for one very very big problem.
Depending on the locatin of the hot water you can cause disruptions to water currents, the north atlantic waterway is being studied to how much global warming is affecting it.
If greenland melts, and the water doesnt get cold up there, then the mexico current to europe ends and England becomes colder than Canada.
If your AI model has a data center in the atlantic, it could be furthering that issue.
it takes work to get water from where it's missing to where it's needed. work takes water and other resources which will need to be moved, too, which takes water that isn't where it should be because obsession.
Could be true actually, thanks for the perspective. Though I still would not describe it as complaining, it's more like "Have you thought about that group of potential users?".
I'm not necessarily a fan of the original wording "shitty behaviour", but I do find it disappointing that half of the comment section is people complaining about the lack of code examples. It's just not very interesting feedback and makes the discussion worse.
And half those comments have been misinterpeted to literally mean code. More concrete illustrations of the concepts would have been nice. Not everybody is well versed in what Erlang-like actors are, or capabilities, and how they play so nicely in the single-threaded actors. I know what a thread is. I know what type safety is. But what in Pony make that? How is Pony different from other languages that provide these things? If you require your audience to first read a book to know whether they are interested, then your audience will be much smaller than necessary.
Instead of dismissing these comments as rants and shitty behavior, maybe consider them as an indication how things could be improved. You can inore that (free) advice of course, just like people are free to ignore you. Your choice to make.
> It was really great. Took what would have been about day's worth of work carefully figuring out from first principles how the template system was structured.. and made it into about half an hour of "get it to generate the next shim, verify that the shim does the right thing".
That also seems to highlight the disadvantage too - if you'd taken a day, you would have come away with a deeper understanding of the template system.
Fair point. In that particular circumstance I had no desire to learn the details of the system - the need of the day was to get in there, get the shims in, and get out to the other code that mattered.
If I hadn't worked for more than a decade with C++ and already been reasonably fluent in template semantics, there's a good chance I might have introduced bugs as well.
I think the issue is that these feel like incredibly safe tools because all they do is generate text, but at the same time it can lead to bad hygiene.
I personally never use AI to write prose (I'll keep my voice and my quirks thanks). And for code, I utilize the system specifically as a fancy pattern extension system. Even in well-abstracted code, about 90% of the structure of it can be inferred from the other parts. I let the AI complete that for me with tab-completions and verify that each line is what I would have otherwise typed before moving on.
I'm not comfortable engaging at a deeper level with these tools yet.
I think by this point in time, most people who are taking an active effort to remove advertising from their lives are well aware that the concern with "ads" isn't primarily about the requirement to see ads - it's the privacy-consuming infrastructure behind them.
Not to mention the attention-stealing flashing lights and popping up over the thing you want to see and all the other ways to make you think about something against your will.
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