Tai Lopez became so famous he was immortalized in the cute rogue-like "Going Under" where he is spoofed as the "Hauntrepreneur"[0]

https://going-under.fandom.com/wiki/Hauntrepreneur

Strongly disagree with most of the consensus here to start with Player of Games and that Consider Phlebas is boring. I found Player of Games to be the much weaker book, with lots of heavy handed social critique and a generally quite stock plot.

It's true that Consider Phlebas is set outside The Culture. I think that's for the best as The Culture is pretty alien and the Phlebas protagonist is more relatable. Banks does a great job of building the world such that when you get to the end of the book, you're like "I get it" in terms of understanding the Culture. Plus, Phlebas has a number of wonderfully evocative set pieces that are super cool. You can see how influential the series was on later sci-fi, especially stuff like Halo.

Car dealers are a scourge on Americans and a hidden tax imposed via poor legislation. They employ thousands and are generally very wealthy so regrettably they have become an embedded political entity.

I don't know what the answer to them is other than to remove the anti-DTC laws but that seems unlikely.

In a small town I used to live in, the car dealerships essentially financed the entire town. Their sales taxes paid roughly 80% of the town budget. The dealers could have murdered people in broad daylight and the sheriff would have handcuffed the corpse.

They're not going to build a 4 mile siding, which is the length that many freight operate at. At that point it's like building a second set of tracks.

Then don't build 4 mile trains. It needs to be possible for trains to pass each other.

Can you provide a reference translation or at least call out the issues you see with this passage? I see "far far away in the [time period]" which I should imagine should be "a long time ago" What are the other issues?

- "they were more small than large" (what?)

- "even in the thirties little had been done to them" (done to them?)

- "Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg" (Untranslated!)

- "his father had first called it Eleutheria" (his father'd rather called it)

- "just as extraordinary does not refer to the ordinary nature of the outside" (complete non-sequitur)

Waar heb je het over? "Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg" is volkomen cromulent Engels.

For what it's worth, I do use AI for language learning, though I'm not sure it's the best idea. Primarily for helping translate German news articles into English and making vocabulary flashcards; it's usually clear when the AI has lost the plot and I can correct the translation by hand. Of course, if issues were more subtle then I probably wouldn't catch them ...

Thanks yeah, you’re right these are bad.

Not the original poster, but you can read these paragraphs translated by a human on amazon's sneak peek: https://lesen.amazon.de/sample/B0D74T75KH?f=1&l=de_DE&r=2801...

The difference is gigantic.

Fair criticism, but also this arguably would be preferable. For many use cases it would be strictly better, as you've built some sort of automated drone that can do lots of work but without preferences and personality.

Honestly very impressive, even with LLM augmentation.

I am a "savvy shopper" and have no desire to buy components on Amazon anymore. Their stock co-mingling doesn't work for speciality computer components. I've received items marked as new that were clearly open box returns. I've received completely nonfunctional components. I've received the wrong item a few times. The component I've had the most success with are SSDs, but for anything beyond that I prefer to buy from brick and mortar because of their "curation." To be honest, it's a shame because the Amazon shopping experience is vastly superior but they send you crap, so it's unusable for this vertical. I still buy other junk from Amazon, but nothing that's particularly performance sensitive.

foiled by the old em-dasheroo!

I am annoyed that correct use of punctuation is now considered a red flag.

Like all punctuation: it's a choice.

One that has made it's way into LLMs because they've injested a lot of actual books that were professionally type-set.

Humans typing online don't tend to use em-dash; LLMs often make the choice to do so.

That makes it a very strong signal.

I use the em-dash and en-dash pretty often—as many academically-styled human authors do—and sometimes I worry my writing style makes my content seem like LLM output. I tend to use it more when I've been using a lot of parenthesis for lists or elaboration (eg. & ie.).

I've found the most telling sign isn't just the presence of the em-dash, but the fact that the em-dash is used for everything, regardless of wether a parentheses, comma, or semi-colon was more appropriate.

Often the em-dash is used "incorrectly" such as the example above where there is a single space on either side of the em-dash and sometimes it is used in place of the en-dash for number ranges too. I regularly have to fight things like ChatGPT to use other "advanced" punctuation in place of the em-dash.

Also line breaks, LLMs love markdown line breaks for some ungodly reason.

That's my pointless pontification for the day. :)

You're only considering braking, and for that case you're right. You're not considering acceleration, where EVs supply near maximum torque instantly when you press the accelerator pedal. This causes increased wear in tires, I've seen estimates of 20%.

Which can easily be sorted with a more gentle throttle curve.

My EV has three modes - Eco, Normal and Sport. In Sport you get shoved back in your seat from the instant torque, and the fast 0-60 times. In Eco you take off like in a normal car.

You also need to remember that traction control is inherrently easier and faster in an EV as the ECU has fine grained control of how much power to send to the tyres and can effect it near instantly.

> EVs supply near maximum torque instantly when you press the accelerator pedal.

You do realize you can drive without just slamming the accelerator pedal straight to the floor every time you start going right?