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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2399 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there a specific name for the culture war dictate/guideline of "my rules, applied unfairly > my rules, applied fairly > the opponent's rules, applied fairly > the opponent's rules, applied unfairly"?

I always thought of it as a corollary of motte-and-bailey (arranged something like that old "their barbarous wastes" two-castle picture) - [I get to keep] my bailey > my motte > the opponent[ gets to keep hi]s motte > the opponent's bailey.

Why would someone who is being sued and appears to have some tangible assets choose a default judgment and not defend his or her self in court? This pertains to the Wes Watson situation. There is a thread about it: https://old.reddit.com/r/WesWatson/comments/1l39uoa/default_judgement_against_wes_watson_from_the_7/

It would seem completely irrational to not show up, especially as in the case of Mr. Watson , as he does appear to have attests that can be seized to fill the judgment. He can also be taken to court to testify under oath as to his financial situation and location of assets. I did some research on this , and typically there are exceptions (e.g. living expenses or homestead ) or the judge can set aside the judgment, but I don't think this would easily apply here. I also read a no-show would lessen the plaintiff's legal expenses, so this could lead to a smaller settlement if one does not expect to win.

Is it possible that he protected in his assets in such a way as to be judgment proof using a cool legal trick, or maybe he's actually as dumb IRL as he appears on youtube?

There are no legal tricks to protect your assets, unless you put everything in a trust that you have absolutely no control over several years ahead of the conduct that led to the lawsuit. And there better not be any evidence that you actually control the money. Aside from that, there is no reason to default on a lawsuit. Even in credit card collection cases where you'd think there would be zero case I tell people to file the necessary paperwork and show up for the court date to avoid a default. Why? Because there's a 50/50 chance the creditor's attorney doesn't show up. When I was doing bankruptcy a few years ago I'd get calls from people who were getting sued but had no other debts, and I'd represent them for fun. One credit card company was using a small law firm in Harrisburg to essentially collect default judgments. I knew they weren't going to pay for someone to come to Pittsburgh for a $4,000 debt. Even if the firm is local, the attorney is often unprepared. I've gotten out of a few cases because the Plaintiff couldn't produce the original signed credit agreement. This can be a serious problem when the plaintiff is a collection agency that doesn't actually have the original agreement and would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it. And then there's the fact that a bank representative needs to appear as a witness, again a serious problem if the plaintiff is a collection agency who can't testify to any relevant facts about the agreement or about the bank's recordkeeping procedures. And then there was the case where the lady from the credit union had everything and showed up without a lawyer, not realizing that companies can't appear pro se. The point is that even in hopeless cases, there are defenses that can be made and can be successful.

In this case, he filed an answer shortly after the default judgment was entered, and courts will usually give you a little leeway.

Is there any research on how a nation's (its people) body language, thinking styles, communication styles, attitudes towards self, etc, etc, is affected by a past where the country was subordinate to another country/empire? Slave mentality or the like.

Russian history, perhaps? The Mongol domination was, if memory serves, fairly traumatic for their self-identity. Might be worth doing the legwork and going through a history of the Mongol period and immediately following.

Japan has an interesting postwar phenomenon where the masculine was severely repressed (i.e. pushed down from open representation) in favor of cute feminine and childlike appearances. But I’m not sure this was the American occupation so much as it was the fact that the previous ruling ideology was so overtly masculine and that it totally failed the country to the point of destroying their holdings and getting them occupied.

Thanks for the reply.

The Japanese post war development might be interesting.

I don't think I'll find what I'm looking for in old texts on the Mongols.

Let me explain a little more about what I'm looking for:

The dignity or lack thereof with which they hold their bodies and minds. How lofty their goals of self actualization, "classiness" and ambitions to increase that class and their sophistication etc. How they walk. Do they start their own businesses and strive for perfection or do they settle for modern subsistence "farming".

It's my tentative impression that the average person of the middle class in the previous "lordly" country will have a subtle but important increase in these things as compared to the descendants of the suppressed.

You can find this within a single country too. Just look at the north vs south of England. Their lower vs upper class, which is somewhat divided by north vs south too. The lower class "know their place". This might have roots all the way back to the very severe and thorough "harrowing of the north" that the Norman ruling class orchestrated.

But I’m not sure this was the American occupation

They did rewrite the constitution to give women equal rights to men...

What are your experiences with the latest google search auto summary AI. I find it hilariously bad - usually the summary is opposite of what i am looking for/the truth.

Earlier today I was looking for a particular high resolution image. I don't know when Google removed resolution information from the results it returned, but I had to use DuckDuckGo and then TinEye to actually find what I was looking for--and even then, the level of linkrot I encountered was astonishing. A few weeks ago, I was looking for the source of a specific text string, but Google kept ignoring the way I put the string into quotation marks.

The enshittification of Google has been underway for a while now, but I feel like over the past few years it has accelerated precipitously, and AI is just the tip of that iceberg. Google search no longer exists to return useful results (even if that was not its main purpose to begin with, I at least got results as an acceptable tradeoff for having my privacy sold). Google search now exists exclusively to sell me things, or to sell my attention, so increasingly it gets to do neither.

Try Yandex, I use it more and more lately. It has a different set of problems than Google et al, Russian language results and worse at removing scam/fraud links, but it great at image/video search. Their political censors are entirely uninterested in the sorts of US culture war and IP issues that Google heavily restricts, and they don't have the main focus of the results on selling things.

Ahh yes. I haven't been able to find direct quotes for eternity. And we are talking for punchlines of popular jokes here for example.

My favorite instance was yesterday when I searched google for a term, there were no normal results, and the AI suggested I try searching google.

(Partly this is because it insisted on autocorrecting the term no matter how I tried to specify it, quotes, etc., and it kept giving me the "showing results for $corrected_term" even when I kept clicking on "show results for $original_term" instead.)

I've been trying to find a reliable way to hide it completely. It's both useless and visually extremely distracting.

Search has continued to deteriorate steadily over the past 15 years and this is just more of the same.

Google wants to retain people who asking AI instead of search, which makes sense from their point of view.

But it’s misaligned with the users incentives. If I open google instead of ChatGPT it’s because I want a search not an AI response, nor an ad.

It’s just a terrible experience all around.

It’s hard to do any worse than the results themselves these days, but they pull it off somehow.

Anyone have particularly strong feelings about best (or worst) UI libraries? I spent a good part of the weekend trying to take a more serious attempt at familiarizing myself with Avalonia, but I'll admit user interface work is always something I've dabbled with rather than gotten a great understanding of, and at the dabbler's level a lot of great or terrible code gets completely buried by the strength (Visual Studio) or weakness (oh boy, QT!) of IDE-focused tooling, or the difficulty of entry (ia ia OpenGL fhtagn).

I wonder if anyone has tried gpui?

https://www.gpui.rs/

It powers https://zed.dev/ which I likewise have never used, but seems interesting and more performant than electronslop.

I have strong feelings that GUI toolkits have never been done well. All existing solutions are bad, and they’re mostly all bad in the exact same ways.

The root of the problem is smart people want to work on things where they can deliver formal results—and in many areas of software engineering, you can! Databases, type systems, even graphics to a large extent are all backed by substantial formal theory (even if the users of these technologies are largely unaware).

UI, on the other hand, has no backing in formal theory whatsoever. It’s like knot theory in mathematics, or the Collatz conjecture—nobody even knows where to start to make progress in a direction anyone would care about.

The OG Macintosh GUI toolkit was absolutely excellent -- a real revelation to a young programmer, and an intro to O-O done right in my case.

A port/replication of the application side of that would be an interesting OS project -- I doubt the codebase is available, but the IP issues (which led Windows down its monstrous path) should be gone by now, and it was extremely well documented.

UI, on the other hand, has no backing in formal theory whatsoever. It’s like knot theory in mathematics, or the Collatz conjecture—nobody even knows where to start to make progress in a direction anyone would care about.

This isn't remotely true. If you care to look at the literature, particularly slightly older, you'll find there are plenty of commonalities backed by usability research. The fact that (particularly modern) UIs so often ignore them doesn't mean the data and "theory" doesn't exist.

"Usability research" is not formal theory. It’s psychology, applied to human-computer interaction. And psychology has one of the worst track records of any field ever.

By formal theory, I mean math you can put into a theorem prover like Coq/Agda/Lean.

At work I use C++ Builder / RAD Studio which makes for ridiculously quick & easy creation of native Windows apps for most any level of UI sophistication, using the VCL windows-wrapper library. Or they have a different library which supports cross-platform native from one codebase. And other than c++, their other language for the same product is Delphi, which I think may be more popular particularly among hobbyists. I'm not a fan of software getting more bloated and laggy in general, so I definitely appreciate the native snappiness.

Most people don't even know these still exist from back in the 90s, when they were Borland turbo pascal & c++ builder, after microsoft poached all those borland engineers to go on to make c# and .net. So it's not exactly the best career choice, if that's your angle. But they are still keeping up with the times, and made a free community version of the otherwise expensive IDE.

In practice, if I just want to get something of simple-moderate complexity done, the best UI library is react. It works, the functional style is nice, there are whatever libraries you need. Web browser APIs have problems, but I'd much rather interact with them than deal with native stuff. UI latency is fine if you don't do anything complicated, a lot of optimization work's gone into the browser, and you get cross platform + mobile easily. Javascript kinda sucks but it's fine. And you probably don't need electron, just make a website.

I love SwiftUI. There are a few other languages that do this as well, but SwiftUI is the one I know best.

I have a lot of trouble with XML-based layout strategies- there are way too many options to actually get right (WPF/UWP/Avalonia), layouts are fiddly and require specific boxes to be checked so your elements don't launch themselves across the screen as soon as you resize the window, and you have to move out of the layout editor to actually code anything.

With these new frameworks, you can just write and call functions directly from UI code, and the code that generates the UI (and calls the other functions you've attached to buttons, etc.) is itself just a function. Spacing/stacking is automatic (compared to XAML where you have to be explicit about literally everything).

It's an absolute joy to use, or it would be if Apple's implementations of certain things weren't so buggy. There's an Ada 2.0 a Rust implementation of this idea, but the downside to that is then you'd have to use Rust.

I’ll just note that anything Electron based is a crime against humanity and should be grounds for immediate execution without a trial.

VSCode is just the spiritual successor to emacs: it's an operating system in search of a good text editor.

I'd rather cut my arm off than touch VSCode.

I dunno, am I the only person who hasn’t noticed performance issues with VSCode? I keep myself to a pretty tidy set of plugins, and the thing lets me edit files just fine. I’m not running an overpowered rig or anything.

This is an open request for horror stories if anyone has them; they’re always good fun.

Most of the common complaints are about minimum memory and CPU footprint; VSCode takes comparable resources to run as far more fully-featured IDEs. But if you've got the specs these are unlikely to actually feel bad, it's just kinda goofy.

The biggest problems are pretty hardware-specific, but they've been pretty bad when they pop up. I've had VSCode pull 16+GB memory (especially bad on an 8GB-RAM system) or peg multiple threads at 100% core utilization just idling, all with the default configuration, no extensions. A lot of it seems very dependent on renderer, especially since it started defaulting to a hardware renderer even on Intel integrated GPUs, but sometimes 'normal' developer workstations with multimonitor configurations have gone really wonky. While a less common use case, I've seen bigger problems with massive files in VSCode than in VisualStudio, Intellij, Android Studio (which isn't great itself!), or NotePad++, sometimes to the point where I had to shutdown the computer because VSCode was capping out CPU utilization so high that I couldn't use the mouse or keyboard.

((I've also had problems with deployments of VSCode, rather than VSCode itself. Which, tbf, usually aren't even the Electron developers faults, but since it includes things like a 40+ GB electron update, it's still worth keeping in mind before committing to VSCode as a day-to-day dev environment.))

VSCode defends itself in many cases by pointing to issues with extensions, and to some extent that's fair: just as it's not the Electron devs fault that a distro screwed up once, it's not VSCoders fault that a random html/css extension can peg a cpu. You can't build a framework that can contain every sufficiently dedicated forkbomb without making it useless. But you're almost certainly going to need some extensions just handle basic compiling and debug functionality. And some of them are pretty bad! My worst experience have been with the Java variants, with high idle CPU utilization across the board, but that's mostly because VSCode is the 'officially supported' tool for FIRST FRC so I see it on a lot of different non-optimized hardware. I don't do much webdev, but the few times I've run into ESLint, even with a minimal ruleset and properly configured (why is apply-rules-on-typing even an option?!) it's been pretty painful.

I actually use it and am pretty happy with it, but it is really heavy. That said, I'm not really trying to run other heavy applications at the same time other than compile jobs, so it's not really inconveniencing on any reasonably-modern hardware ("I have 1-2GB of RAM available for this").

Install Sublime Text, and open the same set of files you have open in VS Code. Note the vast difference in memory usage between the two. When I tried this it was something like 300 MB for Sublime and over 1 GB for VS Code, with like two files open. Just absolutely ridiculous to use that much memory. You can't get away from this no matter what plugins you use either, because Electron is just a resource hog.

That's pretty fair, if not a little lenient.

Well, I just didn't want to be the first to mention eternal torture here...

If I didn't see it for myself, I wouldn't imagine that men are capable of such evil.

Do you think that Israel bit more than they chew with the Iran situation? I doubt they have the logistics for sustained campaign and it is far from sure that they will be able to destabilize the regime or plunge it in a civil war enough for the time that they have.

Possibly. Patriot, Arrow and THAAD all have limited interceptor capacity and once those run out lots of targets become sitting ducks. I’ve also seen video footage that show signs that Iran isn’t just yeeting missiles at apartment blocks, there is definitely counter-battery fire in an attempt to take out the missile defense systems. This is the same thing that happened in Ukraine, but it could happen a lot faster here because Iran has spent 20 years stockpiling missiles for this one job.

What I don’t know is how badly Iran is getting diced up right now. They are definitely getting hit but I don’t know what the state of their missile launch capability is. If it’s still in good shape then Israel could end up in a pretty bad situation pretty fast. @coffee_enjoyer might be right about imminent US intervention but it remains to be seen. And of course there’s always nukes.

No, they have America and European powers protecting them from many of the projectiles while also feeding intel on Iran

This isn't a war between Israel and Iran. It's Netanyahu vs Khamenei. 2 unpopular leaders living on borrowed time. (1 literally, 1 figuratively).

Netanyahu wants to leave behind a legacy. 'Securing Israel's safety from nukes for a generation' seems to be it. Khamenei cares less about regime change per se, and more continued existence of Iran as a clergy driven autocracy. Khamenei has consolidated power for 35 years. His succession struggle was bound to be full of conflict. This is before 2025, when his civilian and IGRC right hand men both passed away. His priority is for that successor to be one of the clergy and not the armed forces. (Armed forces != IRGC) (I don't believe an arab-spring-like color revolution is on the cards).

Iran and Israel will survive with limited damage to civilian infrastructure. Regime change is likely to be a good outcome for both nations. Over their long reigns, neither leaders have acted in their nation's best interest. What's at stake is which leader's legacy will be remembered as a positive one.

At this moment, Netanyahu looks to be succeeding. Sure, his actions have fanned the flames of antisemitism, but he won't be blamed for it. On the other hand, if Khamenei gets a non-clergy successor, then this new govt won't remember him fondly. Today, non-clergy succession is the top choice for prediction markets.

To your point, if Khamenei was in good health, then Israel would not have been able to get much done. Instead, they're adding a straws to a weary camel's back. Khamenei is old. His chosen successor Raisi is dead. Khamenei's son is weak and beholden to IRGC, who've endured the biggest losses over the last few days. (intentional by Israel). The youth only knows this regime, and doesn't share the previous generation's fervent hatred towards Shah or the US. Lower religiousness means lower allegiance to the clergy. That's a lot of dry straw. The spark is all that's missing. (I like my malaphors)

Trump looks to be in a good mood to make 'deals' and doesn't have the same obsession with democracy that the liberals have. If Iran agrees to audits of its nuclear sites, then I can see Trump backing a less hostile (ie. non clergy) regime. Israel would agree to any non-IRGC leader as long as Iran is under nuclear surveillance. In contrast to liberals, Trump doesn't need this regime to look like a liberal democracy. This gives Iran a lot of leeway for what the successor regime can look like. IMO, the obsession with democracy was the downfall of liberal/neo-lib orchestrated revolutions of the last 30 years.

The goal is not to overthrow the regime (though it'd be nice) but to set back the nuclear program (and ballistic missile capabilities while we're at it) significantly. Israel is well on its way to achieve that. Whether or not that would eventually lead to the regime collapse it's up to Iranians.

What damage did Israel exactly inflict on Iranian nuclear capabilities so far? All I have seen is a couple dead scientists and some bombed non-critical infrastructure near the nuclear facilities. I have a hard time believing Israel’s opening attack wasn’t the best they can do with tons of smuggled bombs/drones and local collaborators as well as unprepared Iranians.

I have a hard time believing Israel’s opening attack wasn’t the best they can do

"Best" is a meaningless term here, it's not a competition. It's a military campaign, which is not finished yet. And the supply chain to make a working nuclear weapons is long and requires multiple high-tech processes - the ingredients of which are being destroyed now. Full reports on it aren't available yet (Iranians would certainly claim almost nothing is destroyed, and Israelis may also not give you true picture in the middle of military campaign, they have other priorities). But with almost complete aerial domination Israel enjoys currently, I think a lot of things getting knocked out. Some things - like Fordow - are too deep to be easily knocked out, but I'm sure Israel thought about it for many years and they have some ideas.

Yes they obviously thought about it quite hard and the solution is to bribe and blackmail enough American politicians (with child rape) to get the American military to complete the job.

“Best” is a meaningful term because Israelis don’t have the means to actually destroy the facilities themselves. If they would, this would change the strategic picture massively.

"Israel is bribing American politicians with child rape" is a sufficiently inflammatory claim to require considerable evidence, proactively supplied.

blackmail enough American politicians (with child rape)

Are you serious?

“Best” is a meaningful term because Israelis don’t have the means to actually destroy the facilities themselves

IMO it's not inconceivable they can figure out a way. WWII had the Grand Slam and Tallboy bombs built specially on fairly short notice for attacking hardened German targets. Desert Storm was a short war, but special bunker busters were developed and dropped in combat within a month.

Israel has had quite a bit of time to consider the problem, and given that they have total control of the air, dropping something very heavy with a modern guidance kit from a cargo plane doesn't seem that inconceivable.

Possible, but not the only way. As recent events showed, dropping large bombs from high altitude is not the only way to deal with things, and Israelis are pretty good in employing different modes of warfare. We'll soon see if they have any ideas about underground targets like Fordow plant.

Desert Storm was a short war, but special bunker busters were developed and dropped in combat within a month.

I have it on Very Good Authority that the primary reason that this is so is because the DoD cut out all of the typical red tape involved in developing said munitions.

Israel is well on its way to achieve that

Without snark - is it? As in - is it easier for Iran to rebuild, than Israel to replenish it's offensive capabilities? So far in the face of Iran Israel has been faced with the greatest gift of them all - stupid adversary. But you can't expect this gift to keep on giving forever.

My humble armchair prediction is that we will be unpleasantly surprised at how fast Iran will get it's footing back if the regime survives.

As in - is it easier for Iran to rebuild, than Israel to replenish it's offensive capabilities?

No, it's not. Making a bomb is easier than making an uranium enrichment factory. Most expensive stuff on Israel's side is capital investment (like planes) which is not consumable, and consumables are relatively cheap. Certainly not free and at some point you could only make so many bombs, but you can build new bombs faster than you can build high-tech factories.

But you can't expect this gift to keep on giving forever.

If they stop being stupid, by virtue of that they'd also stop trying to invest so much money in destroying a tiny country which would gladly forget they exist if only they'd let them. Iran literally gains absolutely nothing from messing with Israel except stupidity points. It's literally the stupidest fight ever for them - they have no territorial dispute, they can gain no resources, they can not make more money or destroy a competitor - nothing. If they were smart, they'd do what Qatar or Saudis do - say "fuck them nukes", make peace with the Jews, buy American fighter planes and use the oil money to bribe half of the world into submission. They may throw a bone to the islamic terrorists to go fight Jews from time to time, just for the old times sake, but they wouldn't get into an open fight that gains them nothing. Israelis are not too proud, they know how diplomacy works in the Middle East - you can yell "death to the Jews" all day long, but if you don't do much to back it up, it'd be fine. But Iran government are stupid and blinded by their ideology, so they are.

If they stop being stupid, by virtue of that they'd also stop trying to invest so much money in destroying a tiny country which would gladly forget they exist if only they'd let them

Smart and rational are different beasts.

To armchair off your armchair: I think the Israeli campaign is going to have a pruning effect on Iranian infrastructure and personnel. I bet the Iranians are drawing up blueprints for deep bunkers for leadership and whatever else will make their country more resistant to the current/next air offensive. Like any long term conflict, the smart survive and get promoted, exposed SAM's get blown up and new ones are put in hardened installations.

Short answer: No. Neither Iran nor its allies can do fatal damage to Israel, Israel can sustain air operations against Iran for a period of time, then things will cool off for a while. Iran's regime is not going to fall, at least not in a way salutary to Israel, but neither is Israel's going to fall, at least not in a way that achieves Iran's goals.

Long answer: it depends on the timescale and how you define "Israel."

The dreams of "modern" "western" "tech hub" Israel have suffered, and may in the short term become impossible, as a result of this conflict. I don't know that a modern tech economy can survive in a place that suffers missile attacks with regularity. And it's not clear where the off-ramp from here that leads to normalization of Israel's situation sits anymore. It's highly likely that Israel will face significant difficulties de-escalating on a permanent basis.

The goals of Netanyahu and his allies have been advanced, in that Bibi has another simmering conflict to stoke to remain in power.

The long term future of Israel probably ticks downward, but hey maybe AGI or whatever.

Possibly, but if they see a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat, then their actions are borne of a desperate need that obviates any consideration of other consequences. A fight that needs to be fought, no matter the odds or outcome, because the alternative is certain destruction.

Whether that is actually the case and the way Israeli leadership sees things, I don't know. Maybe deescalation would have been possible but was seen as too risky, or undesirable for reasons that elude me, or perhaps it is as many tinfoils claim and war is the best distraction from internal problems.

As far as Iran itself goes, I don't see the regime as particularly unstable. Compared to Israel, both have their internal tensions and and external pressures, and I'd argue Iran actually comes out slightly ahead in a direct comparison of stability. But that's from my very limited understanding. Take it with handfuls of salt.

Maybe deescalation would have been possible but was seen as too risky, or undesirable for reasons that elude me

The reason is simple - all indicators point to Iran being committed to reaching nuclear strike capability, and considers all the talks and agreements as a sideshow, while remaining strategically committed to this goal no matter what. Iranian government also confirmed multiple times that their strategic aim is to destroy the state of Israel. For Israel, with it's tiny territory and high population density, even a single nuclear strike - even via a smuggled small-scale device, for example, let alone a ballistic missile hitting practically anywhere - would be absolutely devastating, extinction-level threat. Israel does not see any situation in which Iran could be convinced to genuinely desist from reaching this capability, so the choice is simple - either strike, or place the very existence of the country into the hands of Iranian regime and hope the ayatollas are kind and gentle. I don't see how any de-escalation is possible until one of these factors change - either Iran changes its thinking or it becomes incapable of achieving its goal of nuking Israel, at least in the near term.

Well, yeah - that's what my first paragraph above was about. This seems like a parsimonious explanation.

How do you best verify Large language model output?

I hear lots of people say they use LLM's to search through documents or to get ideas for how something works, but my question is how do people verify the output? Is it as simple as copy-pasting keywords onto google to get the actual science textbooks? Or is there some better set of steps to take that I miss. I also wonder how you do that for looking through a document, is there some sort of method for getting the LLM to output page citations so you check those (maybe it's in settings or something)

they use LLM's to search through documents

I ask it to include page #s or text snippets so I can CTRL-F and confirm they exist (sometimes they don't!)

get ideas for how something works

This is more situational. A lot of the time I am trying to re-remember something I already knew, so I know if the answer is wrong or right once I read it and my buried memory of the thing resurfaces. Where I can't fact check internally, usually the LLM has given you enough info you can quickly hop onto google/youtube and corroborate the thing with a non LLM source.

Take the output from one LLM and feed it to a different LLM from a different company for verification. Not perfect but works more often than it should do.

Verifying the output depends on the use. Code gives you a pretty easy time verifying. Searching docs depends: if you’re trying to find some info in the docs, this can be sufficient to get keywords and navigate to the section you want.

Lots of current LLMs are pretty good at copying text out of prompts when told to, e.g. page numbers. That can help a lot, since verifying is very quick.

Hallucinations and other errors are still very common and you must account for them.

I just post LLM findings to social media and then delete the post if anyone fact checks it /s

An easy trick is to get another model to review/critique it. If both models disagree, get them to debate each other till a consensus is reached.

These days, outright hallucinations are quite rare, but it's still worth doing due diligence for anything mission-critical.

As George suggested, you can also ask for verbatim quotes or citations, though you'll need to manually check them.

These days, outright hallucinations are quite rare, but it's still worth doing due diligence for anything mission-critical.

I asked chatgpt what the 4 core exercises of the LIFTMOR routine were and it didn't get a single one correct. It's a simple question to google so I am not sure how it got it so wrong. When I changed the question to specify the LIFTMOR routine to help counteract osteoporosis, it got it right. Google doesn't require the additional context.

Oh man, if you think that's bad, AI studio will drive you mad. I was asking it what it could do (using 2.5 pro always of course since it's free) and we got onto its TTS abilities. I checked the list of dozens of star names like achernar and fenrir and asked it why none of them mention which ones are male or female and it rattled off a wall of text about how Google wanted to promote inclusivity, avoid gender stereotyping and focus on function over form.

After it refused to reply to my 'lol fuck you' I developed my argument into "actually people have been able to readily distinguish male voices from female for thousands of years, so it doesn't matter what lofty goals Google has, what they have done is reduce function due entirely to form." after some more sparring it admitted that the function of a Google TTS bot is to optimise its immediate task, not shape future behaviour and it agreed to tell me which names were which gender.

Victory? No, not even close. All of its voices were named after their accent followed by a person's name - not star names. It apologised and explained how to find the voices named the way it said they were. Incorrectly. Those names did not exist, nor did the pulldown menu it told me to use. I explained that, and it apologised again and explained google had rolled out the new chirp3 system and so the actual names were Vega, Sirius, maia and so on. Incorrect again. None of those names were available to me. By now it was beating itself up pretty hard, and the conclusion it came to was that Google were a/b testing and it asked if I could tell it some of the names I saw in the list so it could piece together our disconnect. I mentioned achernar and fenrir and gacrux and acherd and it finally managed to give me a list of voices that sounded male and voices that sounded female. One of them was clearly an effiminate man, but the rest were spot on.

It was a lot of effort for very little reward, but I was just fucking around with AI studio anyway, and I found the entire thing much more interesting than frustrating. This was the best version of Google's ai looking at another part of itself and whiffing so completely I was beginning to feel sorry for it. And yet the tech is still so much better than it was a year ago that I can't help but be optimistic about it. I use ai instead of search now pretty much every day and I have only been blindsided by a hallucination once so far. Search is still better for... things you already know the answer to, I agree. No, just kidding, search is better for simple stuff like that for sure, the big benefit of ai imo is it collates all the information you would usually have to browse multiple sources for into one place - then you check the sources and one might be nonsense but the others are usually good.

I asked it right now, and it got everything right. How long ago was this?

I even used the basic bitch 4o model. There are better ones that I have access to as a paid user.

https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard

The current SOTA LLMs hallucinate as little as 0.8% of the time for well grounded tasks, text summarization in this particular case. Of course, the rate can vary for other tasks, and the results worsen when getting into obscure topics.

I asked it last week. My husband has a highly tuned llm (granted, he buys access) and we have an ongoing friendly argument about how useful (him) or useless (me) they are. So whenever it comes up I ask chatgpt some dead simple question to see if it gets in the right ballpark. In this case (and often) it didn't - it gave me bodyweight stuff like deadbug. Don't get me wrong, deadbug is useful! But the whole point of LIFTMOR is that us oldsters need to be lifting heavy (safely) to increase bone strength. Stretching and bodyweight is helpful but not enough.

I would imagine it depends on the kind of thing you want to verify. In the old days (meaning last year) I would often simply ask, after an answer had been produced: "Really?" and the LLM would double check itself and at times respond with really annoying phrases like "You caught me!" and proceed to explain why what it had just reported to me as accurate was, in fact, inaccurate. Again, it depends on what it's doing for you, and how it's been calibrated by you to do that (though calibration is not perfect. I've long inserted that it should not fabricate or embroider, and at times it still does.)

The easiest thing to do is just ask it. "Can you produce the pages and precise quotes of xyz?" Depending on the response, continue questioning it until you're where you want to be.

Others will very likely be able to suggest a more efficient strategy.

I have similar experiences, but the LLMs will correct their correct answer to be incorrect. I now just view the whole project as useful for creative idea generation, but any claims on the real world need to be fact checked. No lab seems to be able to get these things to stop confabulating, and I'm astonished people trust them as much as they seem to.

Just to round out the space of anecdotes a little more: when I've called out LLMs in the past I've sometimes had them "correct" their incorrect answer to still be incorrect but in a different way.

(has anyone seen an LLM correct their correct answer to be correct but in a different way? that would fill the last cell of the 2x2 possibility space)

They're still very useful in cases where checking an answer for correctness is much easier than coming up with a possible answer to begin with. I love having a search engine where my queries can be vague descriptions and yet still come up with a high rate of reasonable results. You just can't skip the "checking an answer for correctness" step.

Yes this used to be commonplace in my experience. One should always at the very least triangulate results with other sources if the stakes are high.

Somebody on here was reading Sublight Drive, which I have now finished and loved. The author reported he had to stop writing secondary to mandatory service, anybody know what country he is from?

Possibly was my rec, glad you liked it! Wasn’t able to figure it out but he did respond to a few comments particularly in the last few normal chapters IIRC, so it might be deducible. He said 2 years? So I assume Israel or South Korea

If it's Israel and 2 years, then it's a "she". Males used to serve 32 months, now extended to full 3 years. Females serve two years (don't think it was extended).

I hope so! I was worried about Ukraine but I don't know the specific situation right now.

I'm pretty sure I saw someone talking about this and the author is from Singapore.

Ofc, you may think "just how bad could military service be in a city state" well the answer is they do military exercises in Northern Australia in those swamps full of salt-water crocodiles and other Northern Australia goodness.

Yeah, checked it out. https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/completed-sublight-drive-star-wars.1095425/all/reader/

'City of Lions' - that's Singapore.

Thank you!

Although I am not pleased with Australia slander.

So what are you reading?

Working on my annual re-read of Battle Cry of Freedom and staring the Stormlight Archive.

Just finished Stormlight and really enjoyed it. Yes, people will point out stylistic/prose issues, and they'll be absolutely right. But Wind and Truth succeeded as the plate-spinning, world-expanding, every-new-detail-an-entire-sequel-hook kind of book I was looking for.

For something completely different, I'm alternating back to Annals of the Former World, a set of geology essays. I mentioned the first one last year, but apparently never commented on the next two, so here we go:

In Suspect Terrain was a hit piece on plate tectonics. Great premise, slightly confusing execution, because it was really more like a series of reasonable objections to people in the "new theory" hype cycle. I can't tell if that means the main character was stating the obvious, or if she really was a visionary who was vindicated in the next 40 years of textbooks. The coolest part was that, yes, plate tectonics was new in the 50s and 60s. I always kind of assumed it was settled in the 1800s like so much fossil and timeline stuff.

Rising from the Plains, though, was amazing. It's a history of one family stretching back to the westward expansion into Wyoming. At the same time, it's a narrative of how the Laramie and Medicine Bow mountains got where they are today. Outrageous cowboy anecdotes share pages with the solemn march of Deep Time. Part of the charm was having to keep a map open to cross-reference. I highly recommend this one.

Anyway, the next essay up is Assembling California. So far he seems to be coming at the region from both the western fault lines and the eastern Sierra Nevada. As always, the prose has been delightful. Here's hoping it keeps up.

Schopenhauer "Essays and Aphorisms"

Making my way through "Suicide of the West" ,a 1962 book by James Burnham. It's a book about liberalism, or more specifically 'liberal syndrome' - Burnham doesn't think liberalism is coherent enough to be called an ideology.

The book aged very well, perhaps the only exception is that back then liberals were typically for freedom of speech for communists -Burnham was basically cancelled for supporting McCarthy, presumably because as a CIA connected guy he knew more than the average left-winger.

Now it's generally true that they're usually soft on islamists.

The Ionian Mission.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin return to Mediterranean for the first time in something like 6 books in a Temu Ship of the Line.

Will Stephen finally get ganked by French Intelligence? Will Aubrey get any on the side? Will they run out of Plum Duff? Let's find out!

Man I'm still on book 3 but eager to catch up.

You're in for a treat.

A third of the way through the Divine Cities Trilogy. It's pretty good so far, the worldbuilding is interesting at first, not a ton of depth but hey, the writing is good and the plots are fun.

Finished my reading sample of Ninti's Gate, and ended up not buying the book. Pierce seems to have attempted a show-don't-tell approach to worldbuilding and characterization, but ended up moving the plot along too fast. The characters' motivations were completely opaque and the action made no sense.

So I'm still re-reading The Worm Ourobouros. I dunno why. Maybe the pretentious language gets me. Maybe I'm just a sucker of chivalric romance. I don't regret it.

Also picked up the Cyropaedia, but taking it slow.

Started on Dresden Files. I watched the one-season series and liked it, so decided to try out the books. So far Storm Front wasn't bad, and Fool Moon is fine too. I wonder why they couldn't make a decent longer-running TV show out of it - the story and the setup is very cinematographic. Since there's a lot of book in the series I will probably return to it from time to time for a while.

I'd say that the TV series was limited by what was possible at the time, more than anything else. More specifically, I don't know how much better the source material could have been treated for a modestly budgeted SyFy series. I think that Netflix or Prime could potentially do a much better job with it these days but, of course, they'd be just as likely to screw it all up for Reasons if they tried, alas.

I'll be interested to hear what you think of the series if/when you return to it. FWIW, while I know that Butcher himself has said something to the effect that the first four books are completely skippable, it was the third book that set the hook for me as a reader. Where the first two felt to me like they were more mid-level urban fantasy fare that weren't necessarily too serious, shit got real in Grave Peril, and IMO it hasn't stopped since. While there are plenty of folks that have been upset by this twist or that turn in the overall series, I'm not one of them. There have been many deeply touching moments in the series for me, more than any other that I've yet read, and some of them are made that much better by being brought to fruition over the span of several or even many books. Even the seemingly-slightest rhetorical flourishes can be pregnant with foreshadowing, and I personally think that Butcher has just gotten better and better as a writer as he's cranked them out, with Ghost Story being my personal favorite.

Where the first two felt to me like they were more mid-level urban fantasy fare

Yes, I agree more or less. "Mid-level" sometimes taken as damning with faint praise, but here I think it's appropriate and not negative - I mean he's not spectacular so far, but decent and enjoyable fare. Based on what you say, I'll probably get to Grave Peril sooner than I otherwise planned, thanks.

Based on what you say, I'll probably get to Grave Peril sooner than I otherwise planned, thanks.

I agree with @Muninn that the first two books are just OK. Book 3, for me, is where the series really grabbed me as something special. And from there on out he keeps that high level of quality pretty consistently.

HPMOR. I'm just past the troll fight.

I have never planned to do this (since I haven't read the original books), but somehow, I ended up on its webpage and decided to give it a try.

It's... not what I expected. I kinda expected a "Harry Potter pokes holes in or abuses the laws of magic while being an insufferable little shit about it" and there were chapters like that, but that's not what the book is about. It's not "sequences for the fans of HP", even though there are chapters like that. The quality is kinda uneven, too. The whole SPHEW arc felt like filler, for example, especially after the Azkaban arc that preceded it.

What's surprising is how much of a capital P progressive EY is, up there with Paine, Marx, Pinker, etc in his conviction. It's not this surprising when you think about it, it's the Motte that has been warped by its interest in the culture war too much.

What's funny is that back when the chapters were being released live, people used to complain when it got far afield of "Harry Potter pokes holes in or abuses the laws of magic", as many seemed to genuinely expect that the series would end with Harry discovering the source of all magic and using that to become God or somesuch.

Also, the reveal of Quirrell's true identity caught a lot of people off guard.

There's maybe a fair critique there, the series starts to get REALLY BIG in the scope of its ideas when you're past the midpoint, and brings in a lot of characters and implies a LOT going on... then as it comes in for a landing the plot has a laser focus on the few main characters. And then the somewhat unfortunate message, which is all but outright stated in the last couple chapters is: "Only about a dozen people in the WHOLE WORLD are capable of making any real difference in the grand scheme of things."

So people who came in hoping for Harry to break everything were let down... and yet there's literally no doubt at the end of the book that Harry is the most important person in history™. Which isn't a knock against the plot, but looking back its pretty on-the-nose as to how EY and perhaps other rationalists view themselves.

Also, the reveal of Quirrell's true identity caught a lot of people off guard.

Seriously? I haven't even read the original books, but wasn't that, like, the plot twist of the first volume?

It was! Which may have been why people expected him to subvert it.

Yudkowsky said he thought it was blatantly obvious as soon as we found out that, e.g. Quirrell and Voldemort (by Quirrel's own admission!) were trained in the same martial arts dojo by the same teacher.

But I think many people (myself included, I guess) were expecting some kind of clever double-twist to be revealed later.

I think using power word: kill on the jailer and explaining it away as expecting him to dodge it was the stage when it became obvious who the BBEG was, especially given EY's strong views on harm.

Didn't he explain that in parseltongue, which is the language that allegedly prevents the speaker from lying.

Of course, the reflexive reliance on the killing curse is indicative enough on its own.

Oh, I also remember that my other theory was that Harry himself had been specifically confunded to be unable to make any direct observations about Quirrel's true nature, which is why he was seemingly unable to make basic reasoning/connections about the guy even as evidence mounted.

And then there's a moment in Chapter 104, right before the finale pops off for real:

"Wait!" Harry blurted.

The Potions Master's hand hovered about his robes. "Why?" said the Potions Master.

"I... I just think you probably shouldn't call them..."

In a blur, the Potions Master's wand was in his hand. "Nullus confundio!" A black jet darted out and hit Harry, striking in the direction Harry had already started to evade. There followed four other spells, containing words like Polyfluis and Metamorphus; and for those Harry politely stood still.

Snape literally hit him with a spell for dispelling confusion caused by another spell, and then SHORTLY THEREAFTER (mere minutes later) Harry puts together the entire puzzle of Quirrel's role in everything.

Just really interesting timing, that.

I think EY intended Harry's issue seeing Quirrel for evil as an example of a massive failure mode for rationalists (I really don't want this thing to be true so I will purposefully avoid accepting information that would make me update that way). But it also makes sense that Quirrelmort might take the extra precaution of screwing up Harry's thought processes just enough to avoid catching on too quickly.

But Quirrell can't cast spells on Harry. That's the whole narrative reason why the resonance mechanic exists; if Quirrell can just confound Harry or erase his memories, the plot becomes unsolvable.

Not quiiiiite true.

The actual solution to the final exam involved Harry casting a spell directly on Quirrell, for example. If the spell effect were small enough I'd guess its something that he could actually do without triggering a major problem, OR he could have someone else do it for him, which is his MO for almost all the other stuff he pulls outside of the Azkaban rescue.

And Quirrell's initial motivation was to create a worthy opponent to play with so he wouldn't be bored in eternal immortality. And that only changed once he learned of a Prophesy that would DIRECTLY threaten that immortality, with Harry being the trigger.

Adjusting Harry's thinking so that he wouldn't discover Quirrell's secret before Quirrell had won him over is well within bounds of that motivation.

Yudkowsky wrote a whole author's note about how obvious he thought it was and how he didn't know how to make it any clearer:

Since many reviewers are still asking if Quirrell is Voldemort, I tried putting in a final sentence from "Professor Quirrell's" point-of-view and got such reader outrage at the unsubtlety that I gave up and removed it. I am now seriously asking for help and suggestions on what I can do to make it clear to all readers that Professor Quirrell is Voldemort. So far we have the following facts:

  1. canon!Tom Riddle applied to teach Defense at Hogwarts and put a curse on the position when he didn't get it.
  2. canon!Quirrell is possessed by Voldemort.
  3. It has been repeated within the fic that the Dark Lord has lost his last body but is somehow still alive.
  4. The author has summarized the First Law of Fanfiction as "Frodo gets lightsaber, Sauron gets Death Star".
  5. The Defense Professor at Hogwarts is
    5a) A drooling zombie
    5b) Who occasionally undergoes a drastic shift of personality and
    5c) Becomes a genius who
    5d) Loves the spell Avada Kedavra and
    5e) Is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Battle Magic and
    5f) Talks about how he always wanted to teach Defense at Hogwarts and
    5g) Wanted to be a Dark Lord when he was a young Slytherin and made a list of all the mistakes he would never make and
    5h) Talks about "pretending to lose", which he learned through a horribly humiliating experience in a martial arts monastery which was wiped out by Lord Voldemort shortly thereafter, except for one student who was a friend of his and
    5i) Doesn't seem to understand why Harry wouldn't want to become a Dark Lord and
    5j) Talks about how much he hates this flawed world and
    5k) Has manipulated Harry into disliking Dumbledore and
    5l) Thinks that when Harry knows him a little better, Harry will deduce that he would want to cast a spell on the Pioneer 11 plaque which will "make it last a lot longer"

The reader is supposed to know at this point that PQ is LV. How can I make it clearer without it being disruptive? If you have ideas, please share them.

I think the only way to make it 'clearer' was to not make the whole fanfic explicitly about disrupting the canon set up by Rowling in every way possible.

That is, its still pretty possible that there was an incompetent Lord Voldemort who got destroyed by the combined might of the good wizards...

AND there's a vastly more competent dark wizard who isn't blatantly evil but is definitely running machinations in the background that are far and beyond what Voldemort could achieve, whilst having nothing to do with voldemort.

I guess the one factor I didn't see right away is the why, as to why a supergenius wizard with demigod-level powers would want to adopt that persona for long periods of time. That came out later.

But yeah, he practically bashed people over the head with clues.

The entire HPMoR is Harry's first year, which is the first volume of the original septalogy.

Just finished reading the first Volume of The chemical Formulary, a book which is best described as "What if the Necronomicon were real"

It's got all sorts of recipes from adhesives to cosmetics to explosives to (insanely sketchy) medicine. It also presents everything in a mater of fact way without telling you of all the demons you are possibly creating.

Here's the recipie for cleaning coins for example

Sodium Cyanide 8 ounces

Water 1 Gallon

Apply the above solution with a tampico brush and when tarnish is removed wash with cold clean water then hot water and dry.

Note: this material is Poisonous and care must be taken in handling.

When this book says something is dangerous what they mean is this has a level 4 safety risk in the data sheet cleaning coins just requires enough cyanide to kill 2000 people

In volume 6 they have a Defense against war gasses section on page 535.

The describe Titanium Tetracloride smoke as "harmless", and Zinc Chloride smoke gets the same treatment

Yeah that's right this book is that unhinged.

It's also got great recipes for making Hydrogen Sulfide gas, a chemical that if it reaches 1000 parts per million and you take 1 breathful you die instantly.

This book is both a gold mine and a walking disaster. The funny thing is most of the chemicals used in the recipes are super easy to purchase at your local hardware store or wal-mart. Then you can light your house on fire, give your neighborhood cancer, die of Cyanide poisoning (ok that one is harder), die of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Some of the stuff is harder to make thankfully but the danger levels of this book rival removing a microwave transformer.

Adding Political Ponerology to my list.

Finished Cryptonomicon. 5/5. Neil Stephenson has an interesting approach to relationships and sex. It stands out a bit because many books that feel like this (and Anathem) just skip them entirely. I think Cryptonomicon did a better job overall.

As I read it I thought "this is great but it was clearly written just a couple of years ago" given it's references to crypto currency. No - 1999. Amazing.

I lust, I yearn, I ACHE for late 90s hackerdom like you wouldn't believe. Two pieces of art have sparked my imagination in a way to have made me wish I was born 10 years earlier or smarter: this and the movie Primer. Halt and Catch Fire not bad either.

I also have some simple, base pleasures that I know are bad for me. The Japanese being wrecked in WWII is one of those things, and so that was an unexpected and happy bit of catharsis.

Now digging into Circe which has also been excellent so far!

I can thank Neal for the blessing and the curse of knowing about Van Eck phreaking.

If Cryptonomicon tickled your fancy, check out Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a trilogy which utilizes the same sort of parallel story lines.

I feel the yearn for 90s hackerdom also. Assuming you’ve also read Snowcrash, what about Neuromancer? Gibson really builds that dystopian cyberpunk world so well.

Like No_One, I really enjoyed both Snowcrash and Neuromancer but did find they were a bit heavily stylized for my taste.

Claude suggests both Altered Carbon and The Windup Girl - both of which I've read and think are less 90s style but share some elements of the sub-genre. Both very good!

I read Gibson-Neuromancer and a related book but didn't like it. All style, no substance.

About a hundred pages into my second read of Unsong. I previously read a print-on-demand edition of the web serial version, but when Scott announced an official print edition with some significant edits, I bought a copy. So far, the edits seem fairly mild: everything I liked and disliked about the version I previously read seems to have survived intact. The Kabbalah stuff is great, the alternate history stuff is great, the intensely literal-minded apophenia-laden interpretations of passages from the Torah and Talmud are great - but the glurgey interactions between the protagonist and his MPDG "t3h penguin of doooom!!" love interest positively make my skin crawl.

Just finished my first read.

I enjoyed it a lot, and a lot more than I was expecting. I went in pretty much blind other than having read Scott's blog, so I wasn't expecting so much humour, and the rationalist/utilitarian references that I assumed would be present were thankfully reasonably scarce and understated. I think my favourite part was Dylan Alvarez's entrance and the idea of placebomancy.

I'm not much of a fantasy reader but this one pulled in a lot of the parts I can enjoy (a bit of Ted Chiang, a bit of Douglas Adams, a bit of Terry Pratchett) and left out almost all the parts that totally put me off fantasy writing (excessive and self-indulgent world building and lore). The last fantasy book I read was the Northern Lights trilogy which was trope heavy YA shite.

My only grumble was that after such a good book the ending was only "good enough", but good enough is good enough.

Yeah, the ending feels a lot like Alan Moore's Promethea (or, tbf, a lot of Douglas Adam's works, like the Dirk Gently books). There's an absolute ton of pins that were lined up, and then the bowling ball never really came, so they fell over anyway. Which is praising with faint damns when it all still comes together! But feels like something that could have been improved in the editing pass since initial release.

I wish Anna was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl fucks you. Anna is just a bitch.

But the biggest problem with Unsong is that Aaron is a pussy. He is not brave or manly. He has very little agency; things happen to him. By the end of the story, he has become an observer to the Cometspawn, who are the ones actually moving the plot forward. He's got yandere Buffy throwing herself at him and he still holds out for Ms. Lets-just-be-friends. This is someone else's story; Aaron is just along for the ride.

The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.

Other problems: Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations, Kabbalism is a lackluster magic system.

Still, I think Unsong has a lot of really cool ideas (the Comet King is fucking awesome). There is the core of a good story there, even if the execution is badly flawed. I think if you gave it to a more talented rational fiction author to rewrite, like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Alexander Wales, you would get something truly wonderful.

The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.

Yes, thank you, you put it into words. No accident that the protagonist names his laptop after the Buffy the Vampire Slayer desktop that adorns it, so much of the dialogue has that "quippy" Whedon quality I find so grating. "Wouldn't it be funny if Christian archangels communicated like annoying teenagers on Tumblr?" Not especially, Scott, no.

Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations

I actually don't mind this too much, I think it contributes to the sense of the fictional universe being huge and epic in scope. Although perhaps it might have been a bit less disorienting if there had been two chapters in the present-day A-story, then jumping back in time to provide backstory, then jumping back to the A-story for two more chapters etc.

Fortune's Envoy (Cyber Dreams book 3) by Plum Parrot. I started the first one after finishing Daring and I'm still way into it!

I’m also working through the first book in Stormlight Archive! I’m alternating between that, Hegel And The Hermetic Tradition, and a book about the basics of Freemasonry.

Stop at the third. It goes downhill from there.

I think this is bad advice. First, because that is not generally agreed upon (the fourth book is excellent in my view), but second because if you read three doorstopper fantasy novels you're not going to stop there. Pretty much anyone who enjoys them enough to get that far is going to keep going to see how they like the books they were advised against. Third, it would be extremely frustrating to get only 30% of a story. Better to not read the books at all if they really do go downhill to such an extent.

That is not quite true. if I tell you to read the wheel of time up to book six (if we are generous) and then jump directly to the gathering storm will I be giving bad advice? If I say to stop reading dune after the messiah/children/god emperor - is it bad advice? Or witcher after the second.

Brandon Sanderson has enough time to get back on track and fix things. Series do have ups and downs. Fourth was total slog to read - you could remove 3/4ths of the book and improve it. And the fifth was both weird and the big secrets revealed and payoffs of mysteries were ... meh at best. And let's not start at the ending. The fifth was cringe in everything but the adolin parts. And even there was substantially weaker than similarly themed Coltaine's chain of dogs.

That is not quite true. if I tell you to read the wheel of time up to book six (if we are generous) and then jump directly to the gathering storm will I be giving bad advice?

Yes, because the entire series is great. Books nine and ten are some of the best material in the series in fact.

Fourth was total slog to read - you could remove 3/4ths of the book and improve it.

No way man. The fourth book was one of the best in the series. The Navani scenes alone made that book riveting and well worth reading, let alone the other good stuff on top of that.

And the fifth was both weird and the big secrets revealed and payoffs of mysteries were ... meh at best. And let's not start at the ending. The fifth was cringe in everything but the adolin parts. And even there was substantially weaker than similarly themed Coltaine's chain of dogs.

The fifth book has issues (I've touched on them before), but it still was decent. If Sanderson keeps putting out books that have the same issues as the fifth has, then I'll be more concerned. But for right now it's one single aberration in a series which has otherwise been uniformly excellent.

Yes, because the entire series is great. Books nine and ten are some of the best material in the series in fact.

You really think Crossroads of Twilight is one of the best books in the series?

Yes! I will grant you that the Perrin chapters are a slog (as they are through that whole region of the series), but the Mat/Tuon chapters are peak Wheel of Time. Honestly one of my favorite parts of the series because of that.

Better to not read the books at all if they really do go downhill to such an extent.

I agree with this. Read the Mistborn trilogy instead, @Lizzardspawn. You get a full story, still set in the Sanderson world, in a tight package.

The first two are solid adventure fantasy. Starting in 3 and really picking up in 4, it delves into this horrible amateur philosophy that just guts the life out of the entire world and concept.

Books 1 and 2 are really two parts of what should have been one, big, book. Books 3, 4, and 5 are the remnants of what should have been a good trilogy, with some fantastic moments that just don't hold together well enough.

The one-backstory-character-per-book would have actually worked if it were a trilogy. It really let me down in books 4 and 5.

I disagree. Like I said, I thought book 4 was excellent (I would say it's my second favorite behind Words of Radiance). Which is why I'm saying there isn't really agreement on this point, so it would be more accurate to advise new readers "I don't really care for the books after this point, but many people still like them, so you may or may not find it enjoyable".

Interested to hear your thoughts on Stormlight. I don't think I'm going to like it, but I promised my friend group I would read at least the first book.

So far I think it’s… okay. I still don’t feel like I have a strong grasp of the setting, and I especially don’t really understand how the “spren” are supposed to work. Seems like they would make it extremely difficult for anybody to ever conceal their emotions, and so far I haven’t seen any suggestion of how social relations in the setting are different from those in our world as a result. The action scenes thus far have been sufficiently exciting, and I’m intrigued enough by certain plot threads to make it worth continuing with the book.

The spren are shinto spirits, or sentient ideas and thoughts. They're part faerie, part ghost, part imagination made manifest.

Right, I understand that much, I just don’t understand what their existence is supposed to imply about social relations on this continent. Are people able to suppress the appearance of spren related to an emotion they’re currently feeling but would like to conceal? Can actors cause spren to appear which outwardly indicate the appearance of a particular emotion, even when the actor is not authentically experiencing that emotion internally? Maybe some of these things get explored later in the series, but for right now they just seem like a weird decoration or curiosity.

Are people able to suppress the appearance of spren related to an emotion they’re currently feeling but would like to conceal?

To some extent. This does get explored in the series (for example, a character going undercover who has to try to not draw fearspren). It seems to be that the main thing is how strongly you feel the emotion, so not drawing spren is a matter of trying to keep your emotions calm. I would say the books don't get as deep as you might like, but they do give some consideration to how the existence of emotionspren affect the world.

The emotion related spren (as opposed to wind etc.) are mostly gloryspren, creationspren, fearspren etc. and I think they are generally attracted to emotion when it's expressed strongly enough that it's hard to hide. In practice the questions you raise don't seem to come up. There are spren related to lying and things you might want to hide but a) they're not around much for reasons and b) they're good at hiding! The nature of spren is explored more later but not really their effects on society - they're bottom feeders reacting to currents, not integrated into those currents per se.

Can actors cause spren to appear which outwardly indicate the appearance of a particular emotion, even when the actor is not authentically experiencing that emotion internally?

No, I don't think so.

Mild spoilers (I believe it is mentioned in the first or second book, and confirmed in 3): There are locations where the spren won’t show up, even if people are feeling the emotions.

For help with the setting, Sanderson was inspired by rock pools at a beach he visited, which is why almost everywhere is rocky or sandy, most creatures have crustacean features, and 'grass' and other plants act weird.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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