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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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

"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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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/

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.

I haven't seen him for a while. But I love the author's, Derek Lowe, work. His posts on Things I won't work with were some of the most entertaining science writing I have read. e.g. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

Dan Carlin did an history podcast on punishment and the spectacle of punishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oRv4NZzBKw He described a medieval central Europe scene where being broken on the wheel was punishment for some crime. The watchers were singing hymns and crying the condemned would sing along in a quiet broken voice and occasionally request a certain hymn, even after limbs had been shattered and broken. Somehow it was seen as necessary to save the persons soul.

I remember a joke that is something like this. The local pastor is talking to young poor child Timmy asking about his life. P: So Timmy what do you have for breakfast? T: Potatoes. P: How about Lunch? T: Potatoes. The Pastor is getting concerned and asks how about dinner? T: Potatoes as well. P: So all you have to eat is potatoes? T: Oh no Pastor: P: Oh, that is good, what else do you have. T: Well I've also got my spoon.

I'm curious. What is best practice here. Set up HR tribunals? Fire anyone who has a complaint made against them? Arrange counseling for affected parties? Offer voluntary arbitration?

Weird I find "Climate emergency" a poor use of words, but I think "Climate crisis" is fine. A crisis can take a long time to play out. Just look at the crisis of the 3rd century. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century> It took 49 years to play out.

This makes my head hurt! If the value of an asset is a reflection of it's total future income at net present value, then would 100% tax on the unimproved rent value of land mean unimproved land would be worth $0. The rent on a $0 item would be 0, wouldn't it? Would land become worth the value of the improvements on it? I guess there would be some smaller value obtained for having the right to use the land and the security of ownership, but I can't see how this would be valued. Would there be much difference? Wealthy people would be able to afford the capital to improve and exploit larger amounts of land than poorer people, and so exploit more land? In the situation in say a city, where land is scarce, rent values for properties would greatly exceed the returns expected on the value of the building alone. I would guess the would government calculate the market rent rate for the unimproved land (e.g. rent paid - (interest rate+acceptable profit %) * capital cost of building = unimproved rent)? If not the market value of unimproved land would still be close to zero, so how could you value the rent? Would it just be a tax on excess rental profits for landlords and a tax on owner occupiers? Would you depreciate the cost of the building each year? If a building was depreciated entirely over a 20 year period, would the government extract 100% of rents after that, effectively passing into the government's ownership? It sounds a bit like nationalizing all the land? Does China already do this by giving out 99 year leases? What effect would nationalizing the land have? Nationalizing other asset can lead to adverse effects "reducing competition in the marketplace, which in turn reduces incentives to innovation and maintains high prices. In the short run, nationalization can provide a larger revenue stream for government" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalization I'm guessing the closest analogy would be with natural resources. Nationalization of oil can end with good results like Norway (responsible management, investment of dividends) or bad results like Venezuela (diversion of resources to political ends, under investment and collapse). Would you see such divergent results with nationalizing land? Would it be in the interest of a government to restrict land usage to increase rents, like how Hong Kong sits on large land reserves and only releases small amounts of land for inflated prices to improve their budget (actually Canberra here in Australia does something similar). Sorry for rambling thoughts...

I enjoyed the Three body Problem. It reminded me of post war US science fiction novel. Simplistic aliens who are clearly our foes, heroic male leads, paper thin female characters and a bit of the confident can do swagger that comes with a booming economy.

I am not sure that comparing only sovereign wealth funds per capita tells the whole story. For instance Australia has a lot more private wealth saved up than Norway. At a lower GINI coefficient as well! I am also not sure that the major resource exports like iron ore and coal have the same ability to extract cartel rent extraction of oil, which is a lot more concentrated in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... Wealth per capita $USD 2021: Country Median Mean Australia 238k 484k Norway 118k 276k The Australian compulsory super-annuation scheme has made Australian long term pension sustainability much better than the rest of the world. How much of the wealth that could have gone into a sovereign fund has gone into private savings instead? I don't know if Norway or Australia did better.

I don't know the answer here. But this analysis includes a "comprehensive measure of their income that includes income from unsold stock".

Should unsold stock (or land value) gains be taxed? A couple of problems I can think of:

Fluctuations in stock values. From 1986 yo 2019 stocks have increased up to 37% and decreased by up 22% in a year (1).

Dillution of ownership: If you taxed stock values over time, founders would have their ownership rate dilluted over time. Is it desirable to have founders automatically lose their majority share over time? e.g. I'm thinking of the effect of a 3% wealth tax.

The analysis doesn't include company taxes: If a company is taxed at 21% of it's profits. Should this count towards the tax paid by the richest?

Should investments in capacity/capital be taxed at the same rate as profit. Often a company increases in value as it reinvests its income in productive assets. Should that be encouraged and given a tax break or not?

My current thinking is the 20th century system worked well before companies with strong network effects started making monopoly type profits and globalization allowed companies to invest surpluses outside of their home markets changed the game.

(1) https://www.thebalance.com/stock-market-returns-by-year-2388...

How has the French pacific strategy been wiped out? What was it?