Oklo, Gabon appears to have run a nuclear reactor about 1.7 billion years ago, though whether you can get a natural nuclear explosion on some chunk of rock somewhere might be difficult to tell.
25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.
LLM increase the range of things bikesheddable, so some folks will try to have a LLM design a nuclear reactor and manage the coffee budget in addition to the traditional bikeshed design complications. Whether this is an improvement or more engines of what passes for civilization catching on fire, well…
I don’t understand how LLMs make more stuff “bike sheddable”. What LLMs do is allow people to contribute low value garbage to all areas, but we have a word for that and it’s not “bike shedding”. It’s “slop”.
I hope this weird redefinition of bike shedding doesn’t take off. It’s a useful and meaningful term and repurposing it to mean AI slop is negative value.
Thankfully until this thread I’d never seen anyone use the term this way.
> Can only assume english might not be your first language.
This not-subtle insult does not add anything here.
AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.
The profit urge was already made fun of in a recent novel.
“And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote.
“What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the history which
he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once
give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him
from doing so than by any thought of praise.”
Whereat Sancho observed, “The author looks for money and profit, does he?
It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry,
with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are
never finished as perfectly as they ought to be.
Definitely a sterling example of the benefits of not paying people, given that he died in poverty and spent his life working odd jobs despite writing what was a best seller in debtor's prison.
But as you found quotes from someone arguing that writing to be paid is somehow bad
"I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money'"
-- Maya Angelou
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money"
-- Samuel Johnson.
But hey, I gotta admit, the first guy had one example of someone who wrote despite not having hopes of getting anything for their effort and now you come with one, so obviously my idea that not everyone has in the age of the world written without hope of compensation was wrong.
But let's go back to your quote, which for some reason you think is a good one against my assertion that there are people have written for money and to retain copyright.
Sancho makes the final point "It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry, with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are never finished as perfectly as they ought to be."
Which is a really good point for someone writing in a time when copyright did not exist and the only way to ever make money from your writing was to write quickly and to get the work into someone's hands after which they paid you, maybe, once.
I'm of course in agreement, somewhat, that works done too quickly are not done well enough, but some people can write at a speed that to others may seem in a hurry but to them are rather slow.
But I will give an example, Mark Twain, who I've already pointed out is the perfect example of someone who definitely wrote for money, except for a couple things he wrote towards the end of his life when he was old and bitter and also pretty darn rich by the standards of his time.
He took 7 years to write Huck Finn. If he wrote for money how did he afford this? Well he shelved it for a bit when he had writer's block and wrote other things for money, but also because he was in a much more financially secure situation than Cervantes expected the writer for money to be, due to his success, part of that success based on copyrighting Tom Sawyer before its publication.
But he also did do a bunch of crap, including the sequels to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and of course writing The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson too quickly to keep from bankruptcy from bad investments. I am not against the assertion that writing for money will produce things that are bad, but I do not believe that, quotes aside, it can be shown definitely that it will produce bad things.
At any rate if you read things written the last few hundred years and find them worthwhile, unless you are very particular in how you choose what you read, you probably have read lots of things that were written either partially or wholly for money.
Finally I notice neither you or other people who responded had anything to say to this part of what I wrote
"And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?
Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?
Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?"
I look forward to the quotes from great works of literature detailing how the non-writing parts of the publishing process are required for the writer to produce something great and how they should not consider money when laboring on that either.
