Well, that's a smart bit of advertising. And it's heartening and telling dat "no AI" is becoming a selling point.

Exactly. Either we are a post-singularity species several times over or the concept is bullshit to begin with. The concept is predicated on the idea that our rate of societal change is a one of a kind occurrence in history and it very clearly isn't.

Het gebruik van gereedschap bij zoogdieren en vogels is meestal cultureel, dat wil zeggen aangeleerd gedrag dat wordt overgedragen van generatie op generatie.

Het kan natuurlijk ook aangeboren gedrag zijn. Ik vermoed dat dit het geval is bij deze insecten... maar zo niet...

Thanks for doing this thread. I'm really enjoying it so I hope you keep going!

We decided to abbreviate it to HSF. A member of our organization suggested it could stand for "Horror, Science-Fiction and Fantasy" so that's currently the semi-official meaning for the acronym. Which also makes it a great name for a convention focused on Horror, Science-Fiction and Fantasy.

* HSFCon is named after the magazine published quarterly by the NCSF, the HSF. It used to stand for Holland SF, but because the current board of the NCSF is comprised mostly of members from outside Dutch provinces other than North or South Holland...

Obviously she breaks out and swears revenge. And in her pursuit of that vengeance she becomes, in the eyes of the world, the dark one.

The chosen-one "saves" the world, but to do so he has to do horrible stuff to the people he loves. One of those people being his sister in law, who is turned into a monster by his actions and locked away in a dungeon.

Tales of Berseria is part of the long-running "Tales of..." jRPG series. It combines a Count of Monte Cristo like revenge story with an inversion of the dark-one/chosen-one trope.

Unlike what LLMs proponents want us to believe, there's no guarantee that Large Language Models won't be thrown on the thrash heap of history like so many other technologies before. In fact, there's plenty of reasons to think LLMs are destined for that fate. But that's a topic for another thread.

I could go on and on (and seriously, get a beer in me and I will). But the point it that today's seemingly inevitable technological development might be tomorrow's "Zipdrives, what the hell are those?"

Or because it turns out the negatives outweigh the benefits. Like how asbestos is a great fire retardant material, but using it in construction turned out to be a big mistake.

Or because industrialization and automation made certain skills obsolete. There's furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries that we just can't reproduce today because we've lost a lot of woodworking knowledge during the industrial revolution.

Or because something better came along, like floppy disks being replaced by CDs, then DVDs, then Blu-rays, then online storage and streaming.

It's a messy process, with technologies being abandoned all the time for all sorts of reasons. It might be because the resources for it aren't available any more, like concrete when the fall of the (western) Roman Empire disturbed trade routes.

Could you post a link to the actual article for those who want to read the whole thing?

The novel I'm working on (and am posting about here) is Fantasy, secondary world and (hopefully) in the subgenre Adrian Tchaikovsky dubbed "Fantastical realism".

I'm also working on an urban fantasy adjacent short story.

My only published story to date is historical fantasy/alternate history.

Because I still (despite 45 years of mostly witnessing evidence to the contrary) believe that humanity is inherently decent, I think that after the LLM hype has blown over there will be more appreciation for human-made art in our society.