@ploum @Remittancegirl Naah, for Hollywood, Hero's Journey is old; these days it's all Save The Dog (or whatever cult formula came in after that, there's a new one every generation).

@Remittancegirl Correct. (There's also the distinct and somewhat less familiar Heroine's Journey structure, but reusing it runs into the same problem eventually.)

#writersCoffeeClub 9/8: The Hero's Journey is garbage. Discuss.

I avoid writing Hero's Journey narratives because they're deterministic. If the reader recognizes it, it drains the novelity out of a story and turns it into a Plot Coupon Quest—in which the protagonist has to ramble all over fantasyland, collecting magic Plot Coupons, until they have enough to send off to the Author for an Ending.

NB: it's OK to run something that initially looks like a Hero's Journey then takes a surprise twist.

@landley You just hammered my knee-jerk reflex: THE TURING TEST AS WIDELY UNDERSTOOD DOES NOT EXIST. (Ahem.)

Turing's original paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" set up the thought experiment really badly: it's really a test of whether a chatbot can emulate performative feminity—gender-coded language. It says more about Turing (gay Englishman from a quasi-monastic single-sex background) than about AI.

(You're not wrong about the "first cut" thing, but …)

https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf

"the rot set in when Paul Otellini replaced Craig Barrett as CEO way back in 2005. Barrett had a PhD in materials science from Stanford. Otellini was an economics grad with an MBA. Put simply, sales replaced engineering at the top of Intel."

TLDR: Intel is suffering from Boeing disease.
https://hachyderm.io/@stevel/112903283602509052

@KimSJ But the point is, they *can't* count everything. There are things that they *don't know* should be counted, and things that can't be counted at all because they're not amenable to enumeration, or require multidimensional quantification that's not cost-effective to collect, or because quantifying something is politically embarrassing (eg. dissatisfaction with the bureaucracy). And when things go uncounted, bureaucrats ignore them.

HP have finally admitted that the printer ink subscription model has failed, so now Logitech are queueing up to give it the old school try with an inkless subscription printer analogue.
https://appdot.net/@joshuafoust/112876742414155342

@rakslice @KevinMarks I'd be a lot happier if they were throwing this kind of money at aneutronic fusion reactors or orbital solar power stations. Similar startup costs but more likely to turn out useful (AND profitable in the long run).

Sequoia Capital's analysis of the AI arms race in game-theoretic terms is chilling by implication.

Not the AI startup grifters, or the GPU manufacturers selling shovels during the gold rush, but the existential terror that's got Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook and hangers-on all panicking and shovelling billions into the sector?

Our biggest corporations are locked in a prisoner's dilemma game. And when this bubble bursts it'll swallow about a trillion dollars.

https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ai-optimism-vs-ai-arms-race/

@rakslice Did you see Sequoia Capital's analysis of what's going on in game-theoretic terms? Not the AI startup grifters, or the GPU manufacturers selling shovels during the gold rush, but the existential terror that's got Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook and hangers-on all panicking and shovelling billions into the sector?

This made sense of it to me—the missing piece of the picture. The implications are terrifying.

https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ai-optimism-vs-ai-arms-race/#

That $1Tn figure may be low-balling it.

If cloud services have a combined market cap of $250Bn, what's the future valuation of the entire AI sector? Bear in mind that AI has a limitless appetite for data centre capacity, burps, and asks for more. Which is what the big vendors—AMZN, AAPL, META, MSFT—are making a play for. All with market caps north of $1Tn each, so essentially bottomless asset pits to borrow against.

@KevinMarks In a word: badly.

(There *is* value, e.g. in protein folding research, drug design and delivery, physics, image recognition, and a bundle of other fields. But spicy autocomplete is what gets the headlines and the biggest bucks.)

Resisting the urge to say "hands up if you know what linguistic styles these represent"

(because yes I do, and I don't need a chorus-line of reply guys in my mentions for the next six months)
https://botsin.space/@computerfact/112863751661179798

@ZachWeinersmith More than that many sales would be needed, but in a slow off-season week it's possible to debut on the NYTimes hardcover fiction list with a few thousand sales when the title launches. Also, there are other bestseller lists. (I've never made the NYTimes one, but apparently I hit the USA Today bestseller list with some launches.)

@keyboards On the "what the 1982 market demanded, only in 1984" note, Amstrad was a consumer electronics firm and Alan Sugar was not a computer guy—he hired the design talent in and bought the components obsolescent hence cheap (eg. his giant bulk buy of Sony's also-ran 3" floppy disks and drives—he bought their entire manufacturing run when it failed to out-compete the rival 3.5" standard). I think he lacked a feel for the pace of change in computing, which was much faster than in TV/audio.

I remember when I first saw a CPC464 in a shop I was working in, in 1984.

It was a very neat answer to what the market needed in 1982. But by 1984, cassette storage and Z80s were clearly long in the tooth—it came out the same year as the Macintosh, and 12 months late Atari STs and Amigas were showing up.
https://mastodon.social/@keyboards/112351091848131466

@electropict @sdarlington @keyboards I bought an original 8256 the month it came out. By the time I sold it and switched to a PC it had 512Kb of RAM,a second (720K) 3" floppy drive, an external 10Mb hard disk, and was spending all its time running CP/M.

@electropict @sdarlington @keyboards Yup, the PCW left me in ZERO doubt that Van Eck phreaking was possible! (Get a B&W TV set with a portable antenna and point it at the PCW at short range and you could—very fuzzily—pick up the screen!)

@katzenberger @juglugs Please bear in mind that the "drama queen" behaviour is the Conservative Party and the extreme right: ascribing their idiocy to the UK as a whole is like looking at the AfD as if they represent Germany.

@mcnees Have you tried BBEdit? It's only been around since 1990 or thereabouts, so predates textmate by a *long* time, but has been actively ported to macOS and upgraded regularly …