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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 a…

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 …

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 fir…

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 w…

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…

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 …

"The CIO integrated data from seven different county departments, de-identified for privacy, including emergency room visits, behavioral health care and large public benefits progr…

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, sa…

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 …

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 muc…

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…

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…

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 a…

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 pas…

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 a…

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…

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…

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 bein…

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.…

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 arbitratio…

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. h…