Mind giving some examples of works you've experienced as 'bad'? I've been looking into hobby writing myself and I know my beginning work is going to be atrocious but it would be helpful to have some examples of what not to do too to hasten the improvement process.
Bad writing examples here in separate comment, lots of recency bias with them, they’re almost all litrpgs, but they’re cheap! And bad is a strong word. It’s probably more fair to say they have notable faults to me.
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Bad prose with good ideas and flow:
-defiance of the fall 1
-the primal hunter 1
Bad structural flow and immersion breaking:
-bibliomancer 1
Polarizing characterization with strong Voice:
-he who fights with monsters 1
Most improved book to book:
-The cradle series. First book is intentionally stilted, but just difficult to read. Author quickly adjusts away from this.
This was my process. The outline is very long but fairly simple and hopefully it will at least give you some ideas. It also presumes you will not have an editor or friend that will give real critical feedback for at least 6 months.
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Write your first complete story, ideally one that is under 2000 words. Something basic, short, and familiar without being a ripoff of anything in particular.
Then keep writing stories that way until you’ve forgotten most of the details of the first story. read it now from an outsider perspective and note the things that don’t work.
The most common offenders early on will almost certainly be phrases or modifiers that are repeated too often(“to be quite honest”, “suddenly, x happened”) as well as sentence structures that do not flow well or require re-reading to parse. This is all easy to fix; simplify the complex sentences and substitute common phrases to expand your prose.
After quick and dirty adjustments, keep writing new short stories. Then reread again and adjust, again. Eventually you’ll have a “library” of like 10-20 stories that you’ll either know way too well to acquire the easy outsider perspective, or have hammered into an acceptable quality.
At this point writing ~specific~ short stories is a good idea. For me, I focused on methods. So it looked like this:
-Start with a strong visual and go
-Start with an ending and go
-Start with a strong emotional event and go
-Start with one well defined character and go
-Start with a writing style/intention, mimic a real author
-Start with an intended audience reaction
generally the later attempts should be more difficult and more specific. For example, write the same story twice from radically different perspectives. Force out a story in iambic pentameter. Things like that.
Batch 2 does 2 things fairly organically. One, it implicitly teaches you what KIND of writing you enjoy while helping you hone your own voice. Secondly, it forces you to examine the actual structure and components of a story and how configurable they are without diving into anything formal or educational. That last part was important to me because it’s VERY easy to absorb too much of an authors style by listening to them talk about writing, and formal education takes all the fun out of writing.
Worth noting; this second batch of stories will probably suck. hard. Worse than the first. They are handicapped and probably very difficult to complete well. That’s okay. Examine them the same way you did with the first batch.
Offenders you might start to notice now: -pacing. It’s one of the more complex problems because it’s really hard to examine and there’s no real rules. But you’ll see it with that outsiders perspective; sometimes you just spend way too long on some things and way too little on others.
-description. This is super personal, some authors rarely describe more than the literal events of the story, and occasionally mannerism. Some authors go super super hard on describing environments, what characters look like, how things make characters feel. What’s more important here is feeling out a ceiling and floor. Fall below the floor and you can’t imagine the scene or setting at all. Rise over the ceiling and the pacing and flow will tank, the audience will be bored to death.
-consistency and flow. Inconsistencies between sections of the story and sudden jumps that don’t feel precipitated will immediately yank the audience out of the story, and they can be tricky to avoid because ~you~ know where the story is going but the audience won’t.
At this stage, the trick you’ll probably want to learn is to summon the outsider perspective on demand. regularly. At different stages of writing. Honestly this worked out best for me by literally inventing a character in my head named Joe Averageguy. He has a dopey voice. And I “ask” him what he thinks frequently while I’m writing. This has many downsides that you can probably guess but it does solve the problem I had with summoning that audience perspective.
After this? Well, you’ve probably been writing for like a year, hopefully with some consistency. Push yourself out of the nest however you see fit. Pursue a significantly longer story, have someone you know read some of your stuff, shut you could realistically publish something with how open that process is now.
Also: consider having an LLM critically examine a story or two (if you can get it in the context window) KNOWING FIRST that your story now belongs to OpenAI or whoever. This approach still has real value; it’s one of the only things those LLMs are consistently good at and it is nearly immediate reasonable feedback. And that is going to be HARD to find. Don’t just say “critically examine this”, process, and bail. Probe it with many questions like similar authors or target audience information. When possible, modify the LLM to not be a sycophantic worm. Just never let it feed you direct phrases or sentences. All LLMs have a firstly distinct voice, and that voice sucks. Don’t let it inject your writing or your brain with its bland corporate filth.
Im self taught of many things and this sounds like real proper way of a good start for writing. Saving this golden advice for right time. Did you consider sharing this to more people?
How is it the same? Apple runs a closed ecosystem and has shown it doesn’t care for gaming for a long time so its user should know that by now. Linux is an open platform and the results show. SteamDeck is running on Linux and can run most Steam games. Macs still can’t. Apple users should take responsibility on this one.
I am now having a brief fantasy of a world where Apple pulls Proton into the OS as a Windows emulation layer for games and starts pushing their changes upstream just like Valve does.
I can think of many reasons why it would never happen but it sure would be nice. Not that I haven't been voting against Mac games with my wallet for years, I've had a Mac to get shit done with and a rotating set of consoles to play games on since about 2000, and very occasionally bought a point-and-click adventure for the Mac.
Wow, that many guarantees should persuade me to base my tech stack on Bun and Zig.
Seriously, I think this question is worth asking. Why was Zig chosen as the language when it’s not even stable, and what implications does this have for the long term viability of the project (besides the fact that its _fast_)? Zig’s head guy isn’t even sure when Zig will hit v.1.0, and Bun’s head guy hasn’t really responded either AFAIK.
Zig is fast, promising, compatible with existing C libraries, and relatively barebones. The language itself may not be ready for production, but the binaries built in the language work just fine.
If Zig dies tomorrow, bun could probably continue using it as-is, perhaps after fixing the bugs they encounter. It's "the API and language spec isn't complete yet" unstable, not "we haven't implemented floating point operations yet" unstable. So far, only the allocalypse has caused major grief in terms of language changes, as far as I know.
Because an update to the compiler could come out next week that completely alters the language. If you're developing a product in this language, you'll need to put significant effort into keeping it up to date, and any dependencies you've downloaded in source form may not work on the most recent compiler.
In one such change, all *Allocator parameters were turned into Allocator parameters (not the missing *). That meant rewriting tons of function bodies and signatures, because passing specific allocators around is one of Zig's strengths. The compiled binaries came out just fine, but every major Zig component needed refactoring from one compiler version to the next.
they probably figure the developer velocity gained from using it over c++/rust is worth possibly having to make large refactors if a feature in the language is removed.
> Demonstrably by this 1.0 bun release it seems safe to say it ended up being a fine decision, no?
That’s just a decision they’ve made themselves. I honestly think it’s an interesting question: can software built on a <1.0 base legitimately call itself 1.0? What if there are big underlying issues discovered within Zig?
Well sure, it can legitimately call itself anything. You are wondering if Bun’s standards for 1.0 match up with the standards for 1.0 that you have in your head, but of course only you can answer that.
> Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?
Low barrier to entry. Convenience. Ease of use. Sign-up and now you can talk to your friends from across the world!
Now, you have to be force-fed shit ads along the way.
I don’t think anyone who values their social life would like it if you put it like that, but inertia and the gravity of network effects are a bitch.
The real problem is these private platforms have the power of public utilities, and we treat them like public utilities until they pull the rug from under us, and siphon our data to profit psychopathic overlords.
Furthermore, these companies don’t just throw ads at you, they also aid the surveillance state which can compromise your basic rights to privacy and fair elections. Malicious foreign governments use it to influence elections with false information and propaganda. Malicious domestic government can use it as a easy spying tool by buying or scraping data.
No one will be safe on these things until we get proper government regulation. The EU’s GDPR is a step in the right direction but more work needs to be done.
The MacGyver military-industrial complex is something you just have to see to believe. Cheap Macguyver warfare makes a lot of sense economically for an economy like Ukraine’s.
Meanwhile in the US:
On top of the $22.4 billion it cost in research and development, the USS Zumwalt, one of three Zumwalt destroyer class ships, cost over $4 billion to create….Military Watch Magazine reported issues back in 2018, saying that the USS Zumwalt “suffered from poorly functioning weapons, stalling engines and an underperformance in their stealth capabilities, among other shortcomings.”
There's a classic 1951 science-fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke, "Superiority" about a country that's developing an ultimate weapon, except that specifications and costs keep expanding to the point that only one can be afforded, and that of course comes too late.
The post-WWII period and beginning of the Cold War (starting dates are somewhat ambiguous, though George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" was posted in February 1946, and the Truman Doctrine declared on 12 March 1947) also saw an arms race, particularly of increasingly-powerful nuclear weapons (the hydrogen bomb was first tested in 1951 & '52), jet-powered bombers, and work was proceeding on what would be the first intercontinental ballistic missiles (the Soviet R-7 Semyorka, first launched in 1957), as well as the still-in-operation B-52 Stratofortress long-range strategic bomber (first prototype flight in 1952).
I've seen variants of Clarke's observation such as extrapolations of combat aircraft costs which lead to a single plane being shared amongst the US Air Force, Navy, and Army, with the Marines having dibs every few weeks, something similar.
The criticism isn't entirely fair, as there is an element to which a superior weapon or capability can utterly overwhelm numerically-superior forces, given an equivalent initiative to fight, and military leadership capability. The defence-offence advantage (that is, a defender virtually always has the advantage) means that yes, a technologically inferior force can wear down a superior invader over time, though shear weight of numbers (though often at immense cost), as with China over Japan in WWII (Japan occupied portions of the country but simply lacked the personnel to control all but a small fraction of it), the Vietnam against the French and Americans in Indochina, and Afghanistan against the British, Soviets, and Americans from the 19th through the 21st centuries. But at the same time in an initial assault phase technological supremacy can offer overwhelming advantage, as with the US in both Iraq wars and initially in the Afghan conflict, Nazi Germany against France in WWII (most notably radio-equipped tanks overwhelming the noncommunicative French forces), and presently in Ukraine where more advanced Nato munitions seem to be giving a critical edge over Russian massed forces and dumb munitions, though that's been a relatively closer contest, given that Russian leadership seems to have little concern for its own forces' losses.
Most notoriously, Zumwalt is built around the Advanced Gun System, since Congress is obsessed with naval shore bombardment. (See also how they kept Iowa in service decades after it was obsolete)
But...
>A total of six of the systems were installed, two on each of the three Zumwalt-class ships. The Navy has no plans for additional Zumwalt-class ships, and no plans to deploy AGS on any other ship. AGS can only use ammunition designed specifically for the system. Only one ammunition type was designed, and the Navy halted its procurement in November 2016 due to cost ($800,000 to $1,000,000 per round), so the AGS has no ammunition and cannot be used. The Navy will remove the AGS from the ships in 2023.
I have absolutely no information on the viability of the Chinese military. However, I will observe that the US military a) has people with combat experience at pretty much every level b) publishes documents detailing its fuck-ups. We’re not comparing apples and oranges here.
Well, low hanging fruit is sometimes hanging very low, but if you want to move past that and reach higher, it gets exponentially harder and thus more expensive.
Also things like reliability, durability under various extreme conditions, safety for humans involved and so on can escalate times and prices dramatically, but are not massive concerns in existential situation Ukraine currently is in due to russia's war.
US is basically never aiming so low with new tech they want for its military, it wants brilliant solutions above everybody else, and has money to burn on it. And from time to time, when looking back those investments were well worth even with flops included. US global hegemony is not something that US wants to lose due to few hundreds billions not allocated as effectively as possible.
The Ukrainians have one very big advantage: they know exactly where they want to wage war and against who. This allows them to do all kinds of optimizations.
1) US military programs are a domestic jobs program / political pork barrelling exercise more than anything. Because of course support for the military is one of the only things left everyone can actually agree on.
2) US needs to build weapons for the future not the present. And as such the amount of cutting-edge R&D as a percentage of the total program spend will always be significantly higher than for most other countries.
It would to me. Any employer who wouldn’t negotiate on something like this for a job that does not require being in-office is potentially toxic.
Commuting can be expensive and even potentially dangerous. Car, insurance, gas, dangerous traffic, time wasted driving at least 2x a day.
There’s also the potentially unproductive office environments: loud, annoying co-workers, constant interruptions, etc.
RTO has costs, WFH has benefits and employers who don’t recognize that should be shunned. If the reason they require you to come back is because they wisely rented office space and didn’t even consult the employees on whether the workers would return, that should tell you how much you can trust management and how much they value you as an employee.
The safety issues are what kills me. In a large enough office you will regularly have employees getting maimed and killed on their commutes. This is literally justified on the grounds of employee productivity as if employers just get to wash their hands of any culpability for safety so long as their employees die on their way to or from work instead of at work.
Employers literally demand blood sacrifice from their employees and wonder why their employees are either leaving or becoming non-complaint when they do this without accordingly raising wages.
I was getting sick of Window’s bloat and telemetry so I replaced Windows on every single one of my computers with PopOS! and have never looked back. The transition was rough ( I basically gave up gaming to learn programming) but I have no regrets, and this post just validates that decision. Micro$ cannot and should not ever be trusted.
I've been using DDG for a few months for almost all my searches now. It gets me the results I want almost all the time. When I do switch to google when DDG isn't enough, google gives me SEO crap and I go back to DDG, rephrase and focus my search and get the results I want.
Why does google serve up so much irrelevant crap nowadays?
Yeah lol he's not going to be 100% perfect. There are definitely improvements that could be made in the request parameters being sent to the OpenAI API but I think the actual training data being uploaded and referenced as part of the response could be improve I'm just not sure how. Open to ideas!
