lordleft

Not only Linux/BSD, but MacOS. Not that Apple isn't annoying either, but it tends to avoid the windows bloatware stuff.

Forgive my ignorance; I'm not a Sanskrit speaker (Malayalam is my first language) -- but I love the sound of Sanskrit.

I have lots of questions: what's the use case for this? Primarily religious / liturgical? It also seems that the fact that this tool works means that any arbitrary Sanskrit sentence can be translated into a chant by some sort of procedure (dare I say algorithm)? I'm terribly curious and fascinated by this!

Got a message that I owe 37 million on an account that I haven't used in probably...6 years?

Naomi is an awesome writer and she's been doing many of these deep dives into literary journals. She's also reviewed entire historic genres (like old westerns), IIRC. She has a really unique ability to plainly grasp what's special about a group of related writing.

Beware the Sea Peoples

All Cambridge Elements volumes are made free to download 2 weeks after publishing.

I remember burning this on a CD as a preteen. It's what got me into Linux. It blew my mind that an OS could be live-loaded off a disk. Ever since then, I tried to daily drive linux, but came back to Windows again and again for gaming...until this year.

I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.

You’re not wrong, but then we ought to pump the brakes in telling everyone and their mother to hop onto arch based distros that make installing AUR packages seem as safe as any other action (via Shelly on cachyos for example)

This is especially gnarly as more people have been picking up arch distros as of late (like CachyOS).

I sincerely hope this man get seek redress for this disgusting miscarriage of justice.

IIRC, Bell ended up wanting to spend his life after inventing the telephone as a scientist and a researcher, rather than tending to the running of Bell Telephone and AT&T.

The return of Xenix :)

I had no idea Boox made these. I have two of their tablets and one of their e-readers. I can't wait to see e-ink progress as a technology.

Yep. And it doesn't help that the people selling AI products act as if they're going to build God. Going, "well AI can't do that" isn't going to fly when you are lax about communicating its limitations!

I love Orwell, he ranks as one of my favorite writers, especially his non-fiction. Unfortunately, I think too many writers take his famed writing advice as doctrine, and ignore the possibilies of a richer and more elaborate style.

I've started doing this as a kind of creative and mental exercise. It can imbue even a day filled with drudgery with something worthwhile.

I knew vaguely that Troy had many layers of settlement, but I didn't realize that Troy had an extensive life in antiquity that extended into the classical Greek age (Post-Bronze Age) and Early Roman Age. It's funny to think of Roman and Greek Tourists visiting Troy VIII in 300 BC.

I live in Brooklyn and have spent about a grand outfitting my apartment with ACs. I would absolutely take advantage of this if the law passed.

There's a dark irony in start-ups appropriating names from the work of a devout catholic attached to beautiful, old modes of life.

I've used a kindle for years and have bought hundreds of ebooks through Amazon's platform. The convenience of being able to carry a library with me in a single device is undeniable. ~14 years of support seems reasonable, especially in the context of modern tech. And yet decisions like this always upset me. For all the limitations of physical books, I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. As long as I tend to the book, I have it. The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks, for all their advantages, makes me feel like we are somehow going backwards, despite our progress technologically. Instead of a future where products get unambiguously better, the future seems filled with products that come with significant trade-offs. The trade-offs are beginning to not feel worth it to me.

Pushkin is eternal, to writers and mathematicians alike

I genuinely don't understand how one company can be so bad at naming products for multiple decades. It makes Sony's names for its headphones seem downright catchy.

I don't disagree that reading news articles online today is a deeply unenjoyable experience. At the same time, I think not enough people acknowledge that the decision to put so much content online for free is how we ended up in this hellscape. Even when a website has a paywall, the cost of the paywall often dwarfs what you would have paid for a print equivalent of the same paper or journal, which is what enabled the flourishing of journalism in the 20th century.

We like writing because the fact that we can create good writing says something about ourselves. If AI can create writing that surpasses, say, a Tolstoy or George Eliot, that will fundamentally change our self-perception. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Well, let's first cross the bridge of an LLM writing War & Peace and see how we feel.

One thing I'll note about this is that the writing reminds me of the much contested "MFA workshop" style that has launched a thousand think pieces.

---

The story was decent! I thought it was insightful and it made me reconsider some aspects of AI use. I am skeptical that an AI could write something on par with the Iliad, or Anna Karenina -- but perhaps I will be disabused of that notion someday. Still, this is a level of quality I am surprised to see to come out of an AI (though, as in your story, the LLM seemed to require its own "choreographer" in the form of your editing and polishing). Very thought provoking.

I strongly recommend abebooks for buying physical texts.

Hyperion was a wonderful sci-novel. Thank you Dan, for your amazing writing; may you rest in peace.

I read Sam Kriss' substack and he's a wildly unique and talented writer.

IIRC, Ricky Gervais advised the showrunners of the US adaptation to make Michael Scott more optimistic than his UK counterpart. Quite savvy on his part.