MikeBVaughn

7 ms·

1.
by MikeBVaughn 2y ago
> Sometimes the authors themselves invite and regale in this kind of festive chicanery. Sometimes not. But this sort of thing - far more than useful or warranted - does exist. Why does art and the attempts at interpretation thereof have
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
I feel a bit dense sussing out the relevance of this post to the content of the article. It seems apropos to the title, but the focus on novel-reading cuts orthogonally to the actual content. [Full disclosure: driveby quoteposting with no e
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
What does it feel like when (critically, not 'if') it accidentally shines into your eye?
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
I think there's a bit of overfitting in the output. If you put in a book in the middle of a series, it will sometimes recommend the predecessor.
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
It turns out you can, but it's not intuitive. You can create an account, rate some books, then request a rec with all of the fields blank. E1: Well, it worked the first time. Now the "AI Librarian" API call 403's out on
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
"We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and k
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
I'm genuinely curious about this. What about non-granular-carbon filters, like the sub-.5-micron extruded ceramic-and-carbon pump filters from someone like (the non-Microsoft) MSR? My understanding is those were significantly different
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
This conception of 'Great Books' is grim. It is literature denuded of all aesthetics, reading reduced to strip-mining for raw semantic content. For reading philosophical texts, sure it seems pretty fantastic, but the tacit value j
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
The replies don't load for me in this one.
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
I'm curious about the thought process of people who use services like this. If the datacenter operators are being truthful, then posting mycrimes dot txt on the internet seems like a bad idea. Fundamentally, they're saying "w
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
Anybody who disparages you for liking Butler is being a bit of a dingbat. But, "This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible." Butler is
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
Ah! Sorry. I misunderstood the scope of your initial 'I disagree.'
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
'I have found that modern translations inject a “modernness” into the language that isn’t present in translations from a century or two ago.' I'm completely baffled by this criticism in the context of a translation of a 7th C
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
I found Echopraxia a disappointing follow-up to Blindsight , because the thematic core was much harder to grok, and it felt diffuse and attenuated. It's very hard to write a novel that explores what it means for scientists to encoun
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
"I will say his metaphors can be quite beautiful hut they often make no sense grammatically." Question 1: Example, please? Question 1.5: In what way does the example not make sense grammatically? Question 2.0-2.(n): To what degree
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
If there's one thing I know from experience, it's that college students definitely won't turn to explicit piracy. Never happens, don't worry about it.
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
Does their US pricing model still couple streaming quality to the number of concurrent streams? It drives me batty that I can't get a "4k, but only one stream" plan. Between that and the "is the thing I really want to wa
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
"It's obviously a bit in the future, but I look forward to the day when you can just use AI to generate new music, movies, TV shows, etc that are unencumbered so you can watch them wherever and whenever you want, even in 4k on Lin
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
> If you have to be briefed on what an author is "really saying" outside of the story conveying it, what's the point? What armitron said was, "it's not explicit, you have to synthesize it." The verb 'sy
20.
by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
The only reading I can come up with, and it's really stretching generosity here, is that the works were written smack in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift. Some of the rhymes are lost/opaque for modern speakers. But that doesn&#
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
This is a remarkably facile discussion of an interesting relationship, and I was hoping for more substance than what's here. The conclusion feels like something I might have done in more than one 100-level American Lit midterm essay.
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by MikeBVaughn 3y ago
I have this exact chair and I've spent the past three months thinking the cheapo wired mouse I bought I was leaking voltage, or that I had a FUBAR HDMI cable. I cannot tell you how much of a balm this is for my sanity.
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by MikeBVaughn 4y ago
I don't mean this in a snarky way at all. I'm being completely genuine. I always thought of Pynchon as the Pynchon of sci-fi. If Cryptonomicon is sci-fi, then Gravity's Rainbow definitely is, if not more so.
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by MikeBVaughn 4y ago
Thanks for the recommendation! I actually have a copy of Gnomon sitting on my shelf that I've been meaning to dig into. I'll have to bump it up the queue!
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by MikeBVaughn 4y ago
> Are you looking to be delighted by words rather than ideas? Perhaps I'm extrapolating a bit here, Possibly! Prose style is pretty important to me. On the other hand, that's not something I generally complain about with Stephe
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by MikeBVaughn 4y ago
It's weird that I so fundamentally disagree; it really drives home how subjective fiction is. I strongly prefer Cryptonomicon to Snow Crash. I'm a big Stephenson fan, and I find his post-Cryptonomicon stuff more focused (or at lea
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by MikeBVaughn 4y ago
Based on what I've read from people vastly more informed than me, this absolutely 100% seems to be the case. Even beyond that, the general impression I get w.r.t stuff like supermaneuverability is that it's a much better use of mo
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by MikeBVaughn 4y ago
I tried constraining it to the United States, and on the first click got a road I'd driven in Watertown, WI before, which was pretty funny. After about twenty more clicks I got another one extremely close to where I grew up.
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by MikeBVaughn 4y ago
RIP those slick tires. How practical would it even be to replace those? Edit: Also, that livery is an "aftermarket" custom one, and it is... something. I guess the dude really likes Räikkönen?
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by MikeBVaughn 4y ago
Oh definitely! I do find that more than a hour or two of it, though, tends to give me an acute case of The Sadness.

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