@micefearboggis A darker implication: The carbon emissions of the human writer will still be there even if he or she is not writing, but doing something else. So the only way to *save* emissions by replacing writers and illustrators with AI is if they stop existing altogether.

@fraying I hope you're right!

@ahfrom μ is, uniquely among Greek letters, part of the Latin-1 Supplement Unicode block (as well as ISO-8859-1).

@abucci I feel this so, so much.

And I feel helpless against it.

@amy When I re-read it earlier this year, I strongly felt that Weizenbaum had inadvertently invented the genre of horror non-fiction.

@SnoopJ @glyph I used to teach community college CS, and when one of my courses got to "the horrors of concurrency" (and the limitations of testing) I would always tell the story of THERAC-25.

@aud @xgranade @tkinias I can't speak for any Greeks, and only for precisely one Scandinavian, but I don't care about people getting Norse imagery or symbolism on tattoos, clothing or whatnot.

Though I *will* judge you if you put horned helmets on vikings or blond hair on Thor.

@marleenstikker Problem is: The entire value proposition of generative AI *is* that it threatens the livelihoods of those people.

@GoblinQuester @futurebird I read Russian at about the level of a six-year-old, I think. I read Cyrillic fine, but my actual reading comprehension is terrible. I can read children's stories, but no adult literature.

I've read Danish and English translations of Dostoevsky, and felt the tone was *VERY* different ... but I can't attest to which one is more faithful than the other.

@aaron @futurebird That is also where I'm at with Spanish. I've read all Borges' short stories in Spanish, but *a lot* of it (and certainly all the linguistic cleverness) went over my head in a way it didn't in Danish or English. My German is in a similar state: I can read it, but I can't be a reader in it.

(I've read a few books in Swedish and Norwegian over the summer, but those are very closely related to Danish.)

@futurebird (Notably: The Danish version feels a lot more depersonalized, distant and alienated. Part of this is that Danish has an impersonal pronoun that doesn't exist in English, and the least clunky translation is often "we" ... but that connotes a togetherness and community.

(roughly) "One does not fly out here, one merely drifts" vs. "We do not fly out here, we merely drift".)

@futurebird One of the sf I did read this year was Olga Ravn's "The Employees" ... though I read it in Danish, as "De Ansatte". It's set on a starship in the future, but structured as a collection of employee interviews (with both human and android employees).

The tone is *COMPLETELY* different in the translated bits of the English version I've read. (Ravn wrote both; she is a professional translator as well as a writer).

@futurebird It feels so weird to realize that despite being a very avid reader, I'd basically turned my back on the entire literature scene of my own country and my own language for something like a couple of decades. (Largely because I used to mostly read sf/f, and there is very little of that in Danish - and the Danish writers who often do write that sort of thing often do so in English - a language with 5 million native speakers, of which only a subset reads sf/f, is a small market).

@futurebird So, I decided I'd start reading more Danish literature this year. The highest point was a Bronze Age epic (that is, a modern author trying to write something that believably *could* be an epic set in among the Sun-worshipping tribes who lived here at that point, right around the time where all the imports from the Mediterranean area started freezing up). But Danish literature tends towards harsh social realism, so there's been a lot of that.

@futurebird Second is that earlier this year, I realized that - without ever having made a conscious decision about this - at some point I had started reading exclusively in English. While I was recovering from surgery and spent a morphine-addled week on my couch, I'd gotten a boxed set of an old Danish comic book series from my childhood (figuring that would probably be about what my brain was able to take in), and realized that this was the most I'd read in my native language in over 5 years.

@futurebird There are two ways my reading habits have changed in the last couple years.

First is that I've tended much more towards historical fiction than sf and fantasy. I've grown much more fascinated with how people used to live, work and relate to each other than with space travel, orcs and magic. *When* I read speculative fiction, I now tend to gravitate towards the more mundane than towards the epic and spectacular.

...

@futurebird I have almost stopped reading science fiction the last two years, for reasons much like this.

@inthehands @faassen I did that with software-only mutexes! We'd go through a range of actual, historical flawed attempts and find the mistakes, and eventually get to Dekker's Algorithm.

@abucci That was on purpose. The human condition is an animal condition. I have more in common with my pet lizard than I do with a "virtual employee".

Of course, I also admire art and experience literature. But that is not relevant to survival if the owning class destroys my livelihood - and those are also things the AI industry means to destroy.

@abucci And by then our humanity will be very evident: We need food to eat, warm clothes for the winter, and somewhere to sleep.

"Virtual employees" don't.