My current hunch is that it requires a Z axis. Google Earth, for example, manages to convey quite a lot of interesting variables simply (and has maybe been underutilised as a type of UI):

- Longitude

- Latitude

- Granularity / altitude ("the same, but different")

- Paths between destinations

- On Msoft Flight Sim, a slider can amend the time (to change weather, the sun, etc). This gives you another variable to work with.

I haven't tested implementing UIs from this hunch yet, but that's where I'm at currently. It feels like there's a lot of useful parallels.

More broadly, you might be interested in language models because they are new, and you don't want to discount the value of new, constantly-evolving tools for your art form until you have explored them and understood their strengths and limitations.

I personally have not found language models very useful at all for serious work thus far. I am curious, though, about why many people are openly dismissive of the potential artistic value of what is an extremely new tool, and - maybe more importantly - those who choose to use it.

How other writers write doesn't strike me as any of my business, beyond what I can learn from their methods.

The strength of feeling in those comments - such as this one - is really interesting:

>"you've missing [sic] the entire point of writing fiction."

Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job. Maybe you're not missing the point at all!

I'm interested to try it out, and perhaps build some features on top of what it's doing already. I've been using trees a lot for the novel I've been working on for the last couple of years, but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on. Trees can get really unwieldy really fast, with basically infinite combinations - especially if you're working at a very granular level.

I'm curious about anyone else here who has run into the same or a similar problem, and how they approached it. There are more plausible paths through this manuscript than I can personally hold in my head, which is quite different from approaches I've used in the past, where structures have been more formalised and deviation from them was thus quite limited.

Thanks for sharing this!

It’s a relatively big city geographically, and it’s really nice to be able to do 5 - 10 miles in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and not arrive at a social event in a sweat. The tube is really hot (high 30s!) in the summer and generally quite unpleasant (fleas in the upholstery!). So cruising around in the sun is a really big urban niche for rentals. Those that do lots of miles per day seem more likely to own e-bikes - delivery guys who probably average 50+ miles/day will absolutely feel the difference in their legs, and need to control their tiredness for their safety.

I think the tyres would limit the power output most. Probably quite annoying to have no rear mudguard in anything but the driest conditions. You’d be spraying a lot of crap up at the motor (and probably your back).

Attaching and detaching it looks relatively simple, though - removing it for downhills doesn’t look arduous. You could probably 3d print a clip for the frame.

Given the likely reduced power, and that the spec seems to be saying ‘500w peak, but 250w is sensible’ - probably up to the user’s needs whether the hassle is worth the extra watts per kilo. For those without mobility issues or longterm injuries, it’s usually best to optimise the rider rather than the bike for that.

I feel like off-road climbing would necessitate really wide, sensitive speed variance that this motor is likely not great at supporting. It strikes me that you’d want more direct pedal feedback.

Really fun bike design problem.

I don't think the alchemists suddenly became scientists, or died off to make way. It was a gradual transition.

They didn't quite work out how to transmute lead to gold, but the alchemists and their descendants did eventually discover - and create - substances that are worth more than gold by weight.

Now we have created sand that can teach itself how to talk. We covet and share the optimal incantations to speak into the sand. The best talking sand has ardent supporters, or cultists. Which it is depends on who you ask.

Most people do not understand how to make sand teach itself how to talk to us.

Those that do know the secret methods must feed the sand endless increasingly obscure and esoteric books because the sand has an insatiable appetite for our words. Those people might even break the law to obtain words to feed the sand.

Other people hate the sand. They say the sand eats too much water. That the sand might kill us all. Some sand is so powerful that some consider it a weapon.

Recently, the US government has tried to constrain the sand. They fear the sand in the East. It is getting more powerful by the day.

Camp dramatics aside, I think it's all arguably more than an approximation. Whether a thing is magic or just a magic trick depends mostly on whether or not you're the guy in the top hat, and if you're not, how many times you've seen the show.

Alchemy alone is, in some ways, a mostly solved - or irrelevant - problem. That alone is, I think, startling. LLMs are a weirdly neat continuation of it. Humans get used to magic real quick.

I wonder if you couldn’t distribute heavier parts across a swarm - perhaps separating the sender and receiver(s) - running the wave at an angle (or many angles simultaneously) to the surface.

The sources mention mostly aircraft, rather than drones, and human pilots aren’t as good as drones at flying in extremely tight formations, which might allow (if the tech allows in the first place!) parts to be distributed to work around pesky laws of flight.

1. The spread of disease (smallpox specifically) being fast enough that most European sources describe a relatively uninhabited Amazon strikes me as potentially interesting. This means that contact and trade was happening between locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but:

A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ?

B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards.

2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone?

It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.

Your "science made them men" point feels astute, compact, and one that feels familiar, as if I've come across it before in some form, relating to an older context, but I'm not sure where. If it's not an original take, I'd really like to read whoever you read it in. It's very sharp.

More broadly, "getting MKULTRA'd is an epic path toward maturity" is a deeply / darkly funny message.

It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.

Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.

"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.

I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.

That's very interesting, and not as dramatic a dilution as I'd expected over the period (2023 - 26), or even close to as dramatic an increase in overall number of titles (achieving a sale) as I expected.

This sample is limited to what the study's authors have defined as "self-published genre fiction", which isn't representative of the market as a whole, and has very different economics compared to, for example, fiction titles published by "Big 5" publishers.

Whether the sales of non-self-published books are potentially being diluted is an interesting question, because it will tell us slightly more about where those AI sales might be coming from. I'd like to know unit and revenue numbers for non-self-published titles for the same period, in the same Amazon categories - on the off-chance anyone here has BookScan access and that's something you can pull.

Overall, though, this seems like a relatively optimistic result. If the economics don't work in the longer-term - the dilution effect ends up not being worth the token cost & labour, unless you can "hit" relatively reliably - we'll end up with less slop, put out by slop-auteurs running book farms, which I think is a fine outcome.

This is not without precedent by any stretch - the only meaningfully new part of that would be the writing mechanism. It strikes me as a possible eventual equilibrium that's both realistic and makes logical sense.

Putting aside the AI-fiction panic, and "the novel is dead" hyperbolics (which is something that's been said about as long as novels have existed), it probably will settle around a % of low-budget genre fiction being slop - as it always has been.

It feels a little patronising to suggest readers looking for anything more "serious" will be seduced and have their sales diluted by mass-produced LLM outputs. Readers deserve more credit than that, I hope.

But it looks, to me, really hard to read anything directionally on that at all, especially without equivalent numbers on titles from actual publishers.

Yes - the former are high-risk actions motivated (at least partially) by a collectivist urge to help other people. The latter is significantly lower risk, and generally individualistically motivated, which is what I think you're pointing towards. I used those examples specifically to highlight that people, especially 'intellectuals', can hold intellectual beliefs very strongly, often at significant risk to themselves, and that those beliefs are often partially sparked by geopolitical events.

The author's implied argument is that the soft gaze of the MCU might either avert beliefs of that strength, or render them impotent. Or indeed prevent the geopolitical events which partially formed those beliefs from being of interest, and of cultural importance (or happening at all, I suppose, like when Superman fights Hitler in the WW2-era DC stuff). This attributes a hell of a lot of power to contemporary "nerd culture" which I simply do not think it has. It's a relatively safe argument to dismiss because it is deeply silly.

Not least because if this imagined intellectual's positions were so flimsy that they'd go weak at the knees after a wink from Wonder Woman or Wolverine, I'd be skeptical of the person's intellectual capacity in the first place. To frame it as something akin to a lost generation of intellectual capacity is laughable - it's nothing at all like, for example, the intellectual work we lost to the AIDs epidemic. We're talking about literal baby movies.

Do you mean that you think "studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization" was equivalent in that it was also guilt-motivated, at a time when you think these attributes were seen as of higher cultural virtue, and we have since culturally become more individualistic? I'm not sure I fully followed, but that would perhaps be a more tractable idea, I think.

If the author's argument had been: "Gabriel Smith specifically is wasting some of his finite life commenting on this post on HN - which is for nerds" then it would at least have been partially accurate, if a little circular.

I disagree - I don’t think the MCU and its ilk are satiating enough intellectually if you’re a person who has latent capability for a certain level of contribution.

You’d hope they’d intuit that they were missing something important, and discover - for example - Alan Moore, and continue from there toward slightly more nutritious content, as I suspect most people in this thread did.

But that opinion - though one I hold very strongly - is an opinion I hold because I find that it’s much more beneficial to believe that culture you do not aspire to cannot satiate you. Kind of Pascal’s Wager, but for baby movies. The placebo effect is very strong.

> lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise

What a heartbreaking image! You’d hope they would be thinking about - for example - their loved ones, or at least reflecting on how they had a lot of fun.

What a strange conclusion. Ignoring auteur theory (the idea that you might bring artistic or intellectual value to an otherwise bland commercial work) entirely, all the author’s hypothesised potential intellectuals are simply making too much money doing Marvel movies…? And finding this intellectually and artistically stimulating enough…?

I don’t think that really tracks at all. It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections.

I think, generally, people who want to make meaningful contributions to a field are more driven than that, and there are tonnes of excellent critics and theorists - ‘intellectuals’ - working, unmurdered, in the arts today. They are less visible culturally partially because, with the decline of print media, they are not as profitable for media orgs as they previously were.

I do think that our puritanical cultural view of productivity-as-maximally-virtuous has created a lot of guilt in the middle classes about whether they spend their leisure time ‘intellectually enough’, which - though seductive in a masochistic way - is a completely absurd frame once broken down.

I wonder if the author might not be projecting their own anxieties, in this sense, onto their imagined peers.

I find this (Nolan as conservative; Bane as Occupy) interpretation a bit tired, to be honest. It’s often repeated but I think it has aged badly.

Bane has ‘Occupy Wall Street’ elements for sure. But he’s also a strongman - visually, he’s a steroid populist. He doesn’t look like an Occupy guy at all. He looks like he should be on Rogan talking about MMA.

Isn’t the much more apt reading of the image in 2026 - ignoring Nolan’s intention, for a moment - that Bane is the face of what happens when the institutional mistrust of the Occupy movement (a trait that is not specifically left wing or right wing) goes ignored, festers, and musters behind basically whoever is loudest?

Bane is even pitted against an explicitly deep state-like surveillance apparatus run by Batman-as-Palantir.

It feels much more prescient to me of Trumpian chaos-populism (whose efficacy lies in its absorption of traditionally leftist sentiments and demographics) than it has been given credit for.

Neither Batman nor Bane (nor the failing state) is shown as good or ideal by Nolan, and Nolan doesn’t speak about his personal politics. Oppenheimer was about how observation and time changes interpretation - specifically the meaning of an individual’s politics when they are observed.

I guess you could argue that refusing to state a position renders you de-facto conservative, as it implies satisfaction with the status quo - but maybe Nolan is simply requesting more nuance from the observers of his work than interpreting it based on the author’s politics would allow.

I never played dark souls… bad attention span. What’s the link? I would just have global highlights as toggleable, personally, with some kind of relative upvote threshold, and ‘crit only’ mode, or something. A link feels hard to discover.

> is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?

Yeah - though not for subjective quality reasons. I think the lit fic short story ecosystem is most akin to the art world - the gallery and gallerist matter for understanding what you’re getting into with a short story. You’ll know their taste, tone, vibe, editing style, etc. It’s a small world with a low enough barrier to entry - ‘someone who knows how to make a website wants to put it on their website’ - that I think it’d be quite difficult to write an innovative short story and not find an editor in some form.

Subjectively, the lit fic I’m into when I read new work for pure pleasure is such a tiny slice of a tiny genre (‘Gordon Lish-influenced outsider artist maximalism’?) that I think the writer would end up emailing me or someone I knew, and I’d discover their work that way if they were unable to find an editor to work with. Maybe not everyone has that privilege, but I guess the websites people make to solve that problem are already called lit mags.

Feedback:

I couldn't work out how to begin audio - it didn't autoplay in Arc (which might block autoplay) but then maybe is also be hiding some sort of audio control. Scroll didn't seem to trigger it.

Actually, after mucking around hard refreshing trying to work out what I'm meant to click after the thing that was meant to carry stuff between devices, A play button did appear. Not sure if it was there and I was being dense (UI feedback), or if it wasn't there.

Actually, I had the old tab open still, and there's no play button there. Guess I had to interact with some element or something.

I can't work out how to sign up, unless it's the field that looks like it's to follow you specifically?

Stuff I've thought about around this:

1. Add global user highlighting of passages + commenting, upvoteable, a la (rap) genius. Work out how to get an LLM to scrape existing criticism to hyperlink that stuff.

2. Add a function that allows users to search and pull files from a remote location to their local device. Let users work out they can point it at Anna's Archive / libgen / wherever. Probably plausibly deniable (official legal advice). This feature would make me actually use this. ISBN is a pretty good uniqueifier.

The publishing world really needs disruption - I don't think it will stop using its weird legacy rights laws (which are extremely hostile to readers) without a shove.

3. I believe, legally, Amazon is able to get away with its TTS function being a shit audiobook without you having to separately purchase an audiobook by calling it an 'accessibility feature', and ensuring the file generated is a single use thing. Seems like an open goal with how low-power TTS models are becoming.

4. Integrate old longform criticism from LRB etc, and new criticism as it is published. It's insane those archives exist, and all books are online, but I can't currently move between stuff using hyperlinks. Criticism should probably be the same data category and treated the same as user comments / reviews / whatever of work, with a 'somebody cared enough to pub this' tag. Integrating new crit alongside comments from your friends gives you a 'feed' type view.

5. I don't care at all about reading user-written fiction. Wattpad etc exist for non-literary-fiction stuff, there's a whole ecosystem of tiny journals for lit fic. I do really care that books are the only commercial form (unlike movies, music) that didn't move from difficult piracy -> kind of piracy -> legit easy access to a reasonable amount of media.

I hope someone sorts that, ideally in a way that is non-destructive in the long term - but I personally believe "the Popcorn Time of Anna's Archive" existing is net-beneficial to humanity even with authors & editors never getting paid.