> 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 to be useful or warranted? Festive chicanery sounds delightful to me. I would like more of that in my life, please.
> In other words some works of writing often fiction but not necessarily are just elaborate exercises in getting away with balderdash.
> In other words far too many mediocre works of the past still get top billing, than they rightly deserve largely because no one called out their bullshit.
> HN should buck this trend and not join in adulation.
Do you have some concrete examples of works that fit these claims?
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 extra content or contextualization is one of my most deeply felt pet peeves]
Hmmm, from the home page URL, I enter a book. I then click on the book, confirming that it's the one the app knows about.
It then shows me the same book, and a summary of it, and asks me if I want to read it.
Below that, it shows me a set of books in the "No Labels" category.
For all the books I've tried so far, it's given me this same set of books. House of Leaves is very different from A Time of Gifts, so it's unlikely that they're recommendations based on the book.
"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 keep deeply investing in our game engine."
It is hard to think of a diplomatic response to this specific framing. Of course the first substantive paragraph was this. It's inevitable, and I'm convinced it's encoded into some fundamental physical constant.
If a company actually, once, for-real avoided this specific sort of mealy-mouthed, boilerplate-indirect-corporatese semi-apology, I would seriously consider using their product solely on that merit alone. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who feels that way, and it's sort of amazing that nobody appears to have figured that out.
Surely someone in some sort of corporate PR position at some company is reading this. Think about it. Seriously think about it.
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Edit: this isn't a personal criticism of the author either, I'm pretty darn sure that this the post was vetted and revised by at least one layer of PR and legal. The issue is an intractably systemic one that is not rectifiable by any individual. Outside of maybe the C-suite, I'm skeptical the that it makes any sort of sense to attribute blame to any individual for this type of corporate apology.
Not GP, but for a while I have thought that PR shitstorms should be treated like security breaches and outages.
So you do a blameless post-mortem where you outline what went wrong, your five whys, and what steps you are taking to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The Rust leadership did it right during the RustConf scandal. Key figures resigned (from leadership, not from their respective teams), changes in procedure were announced, process transitions were accelerated, etc.
Here Unity is just saying "here's somsome decisions we're lightly amending, sorry you got upset".
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 from Britta-likes, and were generally a solid choice for deep backcountry backpacking stuff. At least that was what I used doing 40 miles on Isle Royale's interior trails, where nearly 100% of the readily accessible water is wicked-nasty non-moving water, with giardia and cyanobacteria blooms.
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 judgement on the all other forms of literature? Unspeakably depressing.
Though, that context does explain why the article contains the current front-runner for my least favorite sentence in the English language:
> They deserve to be greeted with a tailed-tux and clean palette, chewed with the utmost mindfulness, spat out onto the table to rest for five minutes, licked off the table to savor the flavor of oxidization, digested over a four-hand stomach massage to increase circulation, vomited out Roman-style, spread over the genitalia so that the most sensitive part of the body can gain a tactile appreciation, ingested for a second and penultimate time, passed out quickly with laxatives to preserve the fibrous quality, and cooked in a slow-roast paste to capstone the feast.
Maybe OP will eventually find the leisure to tear himself from his diet of great books long enough to avail himself of a lesser tome that may teach him the distinction between “palette” and “palate”.
There are very few books I’ve bought two copies of. When I was a poor student it would be because a friend borrowed it and lost or damaged it (and damaged our friendship in the process. That was MY book, fucker.)
Once in a while the stars don’t align and I end up with different editions of one of the sequels. If I’m keeping them it’s nicer if I have a matched set. So I think there’s a copy of one of the Murderbot books and one of The Expanse in my giveaway bag. And I bought Three Body Problem because I had borrowed someone else’s and had only 2 and 3.
And then there was Braiding Sweetgrass. This book was almost ahead of its time. Released in 2014, it hit The NY Times Bestseller list in the middle of Quarantine, which is when I found it. By then it was on audiobook, I bought and was blown away by. The whole time I’m listening to it I just wished I could take a highlighter to the audio.
Some books, especially Great ones, have layers, or too much to absorb in one reading. So I bought a paper copy, and I can just open a random page and read it. Still haven’t bought a highlighter though.
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 "we operate in a comparatively lawless area, and we're doing <x>, <y>, and <z>." But, all things being equal, I'd expect things like regional militias and organized crime to fill the vacuum of state power, and explicitly saying what you do seems like it opens you up to getting shaken down or worse.
On the other hand, they also have no real obligation to be honest about the service they're providing. If they're already publicly claiming to be doing crimes, then being dishonest about the security and safety of the services provided is a drop in the already-quite-full bucket. My guess is that unless they're extremely principled about their specific view of free speech, the risks inherent in the venture mean they don't believe this necessarily has, say, decades-long sustainability as a business model. If so, then maximizing near-term profit by cutting corners or abusing access to customer data is probably a very tempting option.
Looking at the angles, I have a hard time seeing who'd want to use a service like this.
I've used a similar site for DNS and some hosting.
The main reason was having to deal with CSAM and copyright reports, the more common registrars/providers would threaten to pull me if I didn't reply in 24 or 48 hours and eventually I would get kicked off.
I was hosting copyrighted content, I wasn't hosting CSAM but there was legal content involving minors but average provider doesn't care and will argue with you or say it violates their TOS. These shady hosts/registrars just don't care, sure they might vanish one day but if you have backup it's fine.
I used a shady domain registrar (.com) for fun. They had their legal contact in Ethiopia, didn't ask for anything other than an email address and would even accept cash money sent to them. All kinds of crypto currencies, too. I used Paypal and their annual invoices were shady looking too, always ending up in spam.
Yes, they just didn't care. Then one day they said I had to send them a copy of my passport to continue. Also if I wanted to cancel or transfer the main. I let the domain expire instead (got domain squatted but I managed to get it back a couple of years later).
I’d like to distribute training data. (I’m one of the authors of The Pile, which was recently knocked offline when The Eye stopped hosting it due to threats.)
I also have the entire books3 dataset — the original epub files, not text extractions — sitting around on a hard drive. Many people have wanted metadata or to reprocess the set for their own purposes. I’d like to release those, but distributing 190,000 epubs is a little… hard.
Sadly 50TB of traffic per month is almost nothing when it comes to disturbing 800GB datasets. I’d spend 150 euros a month for a solution, but it’d need to be heftier.
That is kinda India's domain though. Aided by their even lower wages and seniors being susceptible to phone calls, not digital comms. "Hello this is Microsoft calling, we need to fix a problem with your computer". There seems to be an upsurge in this crime lately.
Similar to Serbia India's government seems highly acceptant of these scammer callcenters. They seem to operate without any legal intervention. IMO the country should be hit with sanctions for it, that'll end it in no time.
While Serbian government is also very corrupt, Kosovo has its own government now, made up entirely (to my knowledge) of Albanian people who conquered it.
Why does art and the attempts at interpretation thereof have to be useful or warranted? Festive chicanery sounds delightful to me. I would like more of that in my life, please.
> In other words some works of writing often fiction but not necessarily are just elaborate exercises in getting away with balderdash.
> In other words far too many mediocre works of the past still get top billing, than they rightly deserve largely because no one called out their bullshit.
> HN should buck this trend and not join in adulation.
Do you have some concrete examples of works that fit these claims?