Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
I run an Indie bookshop and we've tried since opening to support local authors with a more-or-less open door policy, but in the last year we're seeing more and more unsolicited requests that seem very poorly written, especially for children's books. I'm confident that some of this is AI. It's depressing, and since I am also not confident in my ability to tell AI slop from just bad writing I feel sad about leaning toward shutting out local authors altogether.
Comment · 2 months ago
The only thing I have in common with Dolly Parton is living in the USA and I grew up seeing her as a big sister and the best of what we can be. I wish I had 1% of the love she carried with her. This news is much more difficult than I would have expected. I guess that might be specific to 70s and 80s kids.
Comment · 3 months ago
Is it just me or is this comment extremely difficult to parse? Besides the lack of any links/evidence the assertions are full of jargon "decently sized", "scope and imagination", "productionalize their own fine-tunes", "This whole notion... is ridiculous". It is currently at the top of HN and I hope that is just because it's a Sunday afternoon in many places.
Comment · 5 months ago
I started reading history hoping to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, and instead came to the conclusion that history inexorably repeats itself, over a cycle just long enough for the current generation to forget the last event. (I'm trying to indicate similar kinds of mistakes in judgment, the details are always different of course.)
Comment · 6 months ago
Probably in the minority here but I, too, went to the article hoping for objective quantification of the change in cortisol levels corresponding to the input, i.e. trying to distribute Mac software from scratch.
Comment · 6 months ago
Apologies for the naive question (because I haven't read the book). I grew up with the Evil Empire waiting to nuke me until Gorbachev provided a brief respite before the KGB returned. As I recall, they were presented as an enemy with almost but just barely not quite unlimited capacities. I still don't understand what happened in terms of global geopolitics in the last forty years.

Does the book suggest that the Soviet collapse was caused by rather than delayed by their Orwellian perversion of language?

Comment · 6 months ago
I was contacted by Palantir recruiters about 15 years ago. I found the name troubling along with the gov't contracts, as well as learning that spending one night a week at the office was encouraged.
Comment · 9 months ago
Just my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.
Comment · 11 months ago
My parents were architects and my sister and I lived our first few years in Honolulu before moving to the SF Bay Area. There were no billboards in Hawaii, and I recall distinctly the first drive from SFO the the East Bay. I was unable to avoid reading and staring at every billboard next to the freeway and it literally made me throw up. I didn't understand what was happening.

Of course, I was quickly conditioned off of that response to billboards, which I consider natural.

Comment · 1 year ago
One of my earliest jobs in tech required driving southward into Sunnyvale for a 5AM shift. Seeing Hale-Bopp each morning for weeks on that commute was amazing. All of the images I can find fail to capture the visible confirmation that we're all on a rock floating in a vast universe with myriad amazing things nearby.
Comment · 1 year ago
Damn. I'm visiting my sister in Birmingham next week. It's a big city with a lot of history (industrial revolution, modern geology), and a lot of pride in ordinary people doing their best. RIP Ozzy.
Comment · 1 year ago
I clicked to the comments to see how far down this observation would appear. It was my first thought, although I can understand why the more energetic discussion is around human-centered energy collection and management.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Very recently their "advanced search" page was redone with a totally different and slightly more modern styling (prior to addition of the chat expert overlaid in the corner). The rest of Ingram's ordering site is still the same as five years ago and is clearly older than that.

That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.

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