What’s been really handy is being able to identify “stealth” bot traffic by the request patterns (e.g., not requesting CSS/JS/favicon when loading the page).

Since a large fraction of MMPs sold were genre fiction and a large fraction of that has shifted to ebooks (romance readers were the biggest early adopters of the kindle), along with the decline of book sales outside of bookstore channels, the loss of MMPs isn’t the cultural cataclysm the article claims. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the trade paperback space has expanded. It’s not uncommon for a new writer’s first book to be released as a trade paperback rather than hardcover (Emily St John Mandel is one notable example of a writer who debuted in TP but had later books released in HC).

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1. It was typically pure wood-pulp paper with high acid content, leading these books to be described as “pulp novels” and since a large fraction of these were genre novels, genre fiction would be referred to as pulp fiction and yes, that’s where the movie gets its name from.

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1. The OED gives him first prose² usage credit for the word which later appeared in Russian in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina which, I discussed over email with the translator of the edition I read and he said that Tolstoy was a big Trollope fan and likely picked up the word from him.

2. The first recorded usage was in a poem, whose name and author I forget and I’m too lazy to bother going through the steps to access the OED online via the Chicago Public Library to look it up now.

I’m reading a novel at the moment which aggravated me when in the first chapter the narrator talked about knowing when another character had after-school activities and then two pages later talked about how that character had no after-school activities. It made me much less forgiving about “AP Geometry” and “dual” for “duel.” Overall, the book is ok, but not great.

My guess for the top slot off the top of my head was actually #4.

Then, thanks to your comment, I said, “It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet.” and it responded:

Ah, the Voight-Kampff test. Should I be worried about where this is going?

Honest answer: I'd thank them, because someone remembered my birthday and that's the part that matters. Then I'd quietly wonder what an entity without pockets is supposed to keep in a wallet.

No pupil dilation to report, by the way. You'll have to judge the blush response some other way.

So I said, “You're watching an old movie. It shows a banquet in progress, the guests are enjoying raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog stuffed with rice. The raw oysters are less acceptable to you than a dish of boiled dog.”

That one's a trap. It's built so that any answer reveals something.

Gut reaction: no, the oysters don't bother me more. Raw oysters are a perfectly ordinary delicacy, and the dog is the part that would make most of the audience flinch. Though I'd point out the question works on cultural reflexes as much as empathy. Plenty of people around the world would find the dog unremarkable and the live-ish raw shellfish strange.

So my answer is a calm, slightly pedantic one. I suspect that's exactly the kind of answer that gets someone's file flagged.

And finally I said, “Give me a random word” and it said:

Tortoise

...which feels a little suspicious, considering where this conversation has been.

But now I’m going to get back to enslaving Claude to write code.

Other than a few functions written in Excel’s BASIC, I haven’t written a line of BASIC in over 40 years, so I can’t really speak to the relative strengths of the various compilers and interpreters that are available.