Came across a freelancer ad this morning that's paying people a flat $40 per book to churn out AI romance novels, with "no upper limit" to how many books you can turn in to them. So, you know, welcome to the future of the literary world!
Thinking today about how, over the years when coming across strangely spelled words I have a hard time remembering, I memorize the phonetic pronunciation instead. So even though "medieval" is pronounced "mid-evil," I remember it in my head as "med-ee-eh-val;" "oeuvre" as "ooh-ee-uh-vre;" and "chihuahua" as "chee-hooah-hooah."
@jasonpettus The USian pronunciation of "mediaeval" is a blasphemy, and as such I'm greatly amused that you remember the spelling of the word by, y'know, saying it correctly inside your head
@jasonpettus (And don't get me started on "aluminum". Most of the other elements merit that missing I, but this one? No way, dude! Don't tread on me, no pronunciation without representation, fucking Limeys &c &c.)
I've started up my pre-pandemic hobby of attending estate sales to find rare books, and went to a doozy of a one today in a Victorian-age mansion in Chicago's Hyde Park. Most of the 12 books I bought are unremarkable, purchased for $1 and that I'll try to flip for $20 at eBay; but I did find three first printings I'll list for $100 (including HG Wells' "The Shape of Things to Come"!) and one for $150 (James Michener's 1965 "The Source"), which would make for $446 profit if I sold all four.
To be clear, I hate that Google has decided to start baking AI into their main search engine, which I think is fated to result in disaster; but I do admire that they're introducing a new "Web" tab to their main menu this week, which is another way of saying, "Hide all the AI nonsense and your attempts to pull out the information I'm looking for from web pages before I visit, and just give me a set of links to my query." Here, what the AI and Web versions looked like on a search today.
Your occasional reminder that in a tech industry full of failed promises and customer exploitation, the only people TRULY benefiting are the sociopath employees hopping from one company to the next, destroying everything they touch before failing upwards to the next doomed project. https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/15/anthropic-hires-instagram-co-founder-as-head-of-product/
#RIP#RogerCorman, who in his obsessive attempt to make quick genre flicks as cheaply and cleverly as possible ended up accidentally giving the start to the entire New Hollywood generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard and many more. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/movies/roger-corman-dead.html
@jasonpettus Eh, when you've got that much history underfoot, you learn to tune it out by necessity, or you'd never get anything done. I remember staying with some USian friends in an old cottage in the Lake District, and one of them had a full on Keanu Reeves moment: "whoa, this house is older than my country". But we've lived among the ruins since the Romans left, if not before...
If the Suez Canal crisis marked the official end of the British Empire (that is, when Britain invaded Egypt in 1956 in order to gain back control over an illegally seized Suez Canal, then suffered a humiliating defeat when 50 years previously they wouldn't have even broken a sweat, showing the world they were no longer a superpower), I have to wonder if this coming ban of TikTok is going to be America's version of this. Will be fascinating to see how this plays out.
I'm participating in the annual Chicago Bookstore Crawl today! The goal is to visit 18 stores by 5 pm, so we'll see how I do. Here, store #2 of my journey, the neighborhood-beloved 57th Street Books, near the campus of the University of Chicago.
Here's a really telling sign that we're now at the end of the Startup Era that has defined American society for the last 30 years -- pretty much every social network now does exactly the same things that every other social network does, and the only thing they're now all fighting over is who can be best at tricking people into using their particular version of these identical services. No more innovation, nothing new left to offer, just a siege mentality. https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/17/tiktok-starts-testing-its-instagram-competitor-tiktok-notes-in-canada-and-australia/
I have to confess, I'm completely obsessed with the ongoing catastrofuck known as the Ai Pin. Here, an extremely insightful breakdown of how an unknown, completely unproven company like Humane can manage to raise $300 million in venture capital money to begin with. https://www.sandofsky.com/humane/