I use a Melitta pour over cone, a Baratza grinder, a kettle with a temp control, and a spoon. Once in a while, I'll get out the French press. Good coffee doesn't really need to be complicated. You just need decent fresh beans and a little care.
Having been on the other side of that, there is a point. When an editor writes a rejection letter, aside from the fact that it already means what you wrote was better than 97% of what the editor saw that week, telling you why they turned it down isn't really quite the same level of feedback you get from an editor who has accepted a story and wants to get it over the proverbial finish line. A rejection letter is very broad strokes and first-impression. It's not actually editing. Editing needs a closer read, often a bit of back-and-forth with the author (I should say I learned a lot about editing in my younger days from both David Hartwell and Beth Meacham).
Many new trade hardcover books will not last that long. I work at a university press, and we still use acid-free paper, quarter-cloth bindings, sturdy boards, and other niceties that the big trade houses are increasingly giving up on. Guess what? Most of our books cost more than $30, or even $40.
I dislike the “brainwashed” comment from sibling, I believe it makes some assumptions. There aren’t any doubts that:
- AI is extremely resource intensive, consuming electricity, water, silicon, etc at levels possibly never seen before in humanity’s history; whether that’s a waste or not is subjective
- Massive datacenters are popping up like anthills, and coupled with R-flavored regulation rollback there is a definite risk for environmental impact - just like during our last industrialization push where we poisoned much of the country, leading to a massive rollout of environmental protections in the 1970s and 1980s
- Students are taking advantage of LLMs to shirk school responsibilities. Whether this is damaging or not is subjective until proven, and AI may not be causal here (students may not have been getting the expected value from their education without LLMs, again remains to be proven)
- Many companies have used AI as a justification for layoffs, who knows what’s actually true though. There is a very real fear across society that it will continue to impact jobs, and senior AI company leaders are fueling this with public predictions of massive labor shifts. Again, maybe they are lying, but can you blame anyone for worrying?
There are counterarguments to all of these, but dismissing the fear as uneducated or brainwashed reveals your own priors and ignores all of these facts. It’s healthy to ingest OP’s criticisms - especially on a form populated most by Smart People (tm).
I think you’re right. In a very narrow, short term scope. That’s the issue.
The problem with this argument is that assumes the world is static. When trains were invented, they polluted a LOT. Technology evolved. Looking backwards, the amount of value unlocked by them outweighed by order of magnitude the short term pollution they generated. Inefficient in the short term. Generation changing over the longer horizon. Extend the timeframe of your argument. Do you think it holds 20 years from now when we have more efficient algorithms and energy generation technologies? I don’t think so.
I still remember seeing Terry do a reading of this at Lunacon, I think, shortly after it was published. It was a good reading, he really knew how to land a joke.
reply