Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,135
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
-
PS I think Projekt Pluto is in fact a translation of the same book but that may not be especially helpful. That aside, I can quickly swap in The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, a 1903 spy novel which is widely regarded as having influenced…
-
Ah. Shall I choose a different book?
-
Looks like it's available second hand through bookfinder.com, at least in the UK
-
I'm ready when you are
-
Plutoshine discussion area now set up!
-
All, for July I'm pretty much settled on Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick. It is a fairly near-future SF work which was shortlisted for the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award. It's set (rather obviously) out on Pluto and has a number of plot elements revolving a…
-
(Quote) My own feeling is that when many people talk about intelligence or sentience, what they actually mean is humanness. Both in the AI sphere and the other-species sphere (cetacea, corvids, colony insects and so on) there is a tendency to draw a…
-
PS that was Windows CoPilot's response, and no I'm not planning to take either story into any more detail :)
-
Prompt 2: "write a 250-word plan for a thriller set in London where an angry man with nothing to lose breaks up a people-trafficking gang Response 2 Title: Shadow of Vengeance Summary: Haunted by his past and desperate for justice, former detec…
-
Prompt 1: "write a 250-word plan for a children's story about some woodland animals having a picnic" Response 1 Title: The Woodland Picnic Adventure Summary: A group of woodland animals—Benny the Badger, Rosie the Rabbit, Felix the Fox, an…
-
(Quote) With the proviso that the original seed request, modified by subsequent clarifications, adjusts the prior probabilities of what word follows. So if I say "write a children's story about some woodland animals having a picnic" or ins…
-
(Quote) Thanks for this - I suspected it had developed this way but have been away from active involvement for too long to be sure. Pity really - the little firm I worked for made a nice living out of 6-week pilot projects to try to identify what ki…
-
(Quote) This sparked a memory of some computer games that my son used to play quite a few years ago. One was the whole Star Wars franchise, where your actions while navigating through the early scenarios got summarised behind the scenes into which s…
-
I guess the rainbow is like the tree in the forest... on any given day when there's both sun and showers you could in principle identify the exact locations someone would have to be in to see it, but you don't know for sure unless you get yourself t…
-
Yes, I also restarted thinking about how to get this moving. I think with school holidays and hence a busy season approaching here, I won't do anything concrete before the autumn... but it's definitely something I'd like to do provided the other clu…
-
One of the interesting things to me is the shift in AAI from lots of separate algorithms, all easily surfaced for individual use, to more generic models where the actual mechanism is submerged from the user. So back in the day (and we're talking som…
-
All this suddenly reminded me of a trilogy I read years ago - Omnivore, Orn, and 0X, from the late 60's - early 70s, by Piers Anthony and sometimes collected into a single volume Of Man and Manta. Like a lot of Piers Anthony, hiss male-female relati…
-
(Quote) In that case he does a pretty good job of writing decently about religious persuasion!
-
(Quote) I don't really have the practical experience to comment much, but this section intrigued me. I think you are saying here that as characters improve (however measured) a good chunk of that improvement should focus on who knows them and by imp…
-
(Quote) :o
-
All, looks like the extensive discussion about The Terminal Experiment is dying down so it's a good time to remind everyone that June's read is The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, selected by @NeilNjae . I haven't yet picked a July ch…
-
I read that as just extremely dated - I don't know how many authors were writing about therapists at all in 1994/5, so it probably needed to be quite simplistic in outline
-
I think it was a kind of stand-in for "the humans concerned only thought of a few things but the virtual ones had plenty of time to work out their own agenda".
-
For everyone who's been wanting a flying car... https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/flying-car-that-can-reach-over-155mph-in-the-air-could-come-to-market-in-2026/ar-AA1EYdhq One minor drawback "However, AirCar 2 is not affordable with estimates…
-
There's an interesting and vaguely parallel technique used in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell where a lot of this material is provided in footnotes. These range in size from a sentence to over a page, and are typically written from an encyclopaedic …
-
Oh that's excellent, thanks for filling in detail :) nothing like local references to round out a book
-
(Quote) Yes, it's a way of getting additional voices into the narrative without trying to head-hop too much in the main narrative.
-
Interested to hear what others think
-
I hadn't spotted that! Thanks for highlighting it. I guess Sally was in that position?
-
Oh yes, totally! Not wishing to advertise and all that, but one of the subplots in The Liminal Zone was exactly this idea, where Scribe class personas feel superior to the older Sapling class, and both are rather disdainful of the original Stele cla…