Ah. Shame I left it already wanting my time back for the first book

Just to mention it, this is literally named the Seinfeld is Unfunny effect on TVTropes

Huh, that's a new one to me. Given its age I could definitely see it being full of tools used later by other authors. Yeah, the Seinfeld is Unfunny effect is no joke.

Finding holes in software has employed "fuzzing", where you send completely random payloads, as a research tactic for quite a while (and it has found exploits). LLMs just seem like "educated" fuzzing, I don't see why anyone would complain about updating your suite with them.

the Strunk & White sobriety test

got me good

is there an AP style variant?

To be clear, I only read the first book because I was not interested in reading more (read: actively annoyed that nothing interesting happened).

As for YA, that's easy. It falls over the tropes (which, to be fair, it could have been early/first in). This post had been a favorite of mine for years, the "Protagonist" section is 2 for 3. Where it does somewhat lean out of the genre is its world, which is not just thinly-veiled school or the like.

As for what we actually see in the first book, though, we get an often-told YA story that happens to occur in an exceptionally well-thought out world.

Oh, I have no doubt there's some Seinfeld is Unfunny effect going on.

But unfortunately I read it in ~2020 after three decades of reading books, so every plot beat was played out for me beforehand by decades of imitators who iterated on it. Unfortunately, being first doesn't make me care about your plot.

Dune.

It's Y/A trash that had the benefit of coming out a long time ago and so being ensconced in scifi culture.

I'll give that it is interesting for its world, its one unique aspect, but the actual plot - chosen-one special boy's dad dies and so he immediately becomes the married leader of a group of locals and stages an insurrection against the antagonist in revenge - is so worn out you can barely turn the pages.

But I'm sure back when it came out, all the adolescents were drooling over the piles of teenage wish fulfillment.

No war but clast war

They should end it by having another drunk driver come out of left field and crash into you instead

For sure. It's the classic:

...on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

• Douglas Adams

Pomme d'terror

Buddy had the nightmarish idea a while back with all the new generative ai stuff for video chat services injecting ads using the faces/voices of the participants in lieu of payment. Just, regularly-schedule ad breaks in your call where "your friend" suddenly starts talking about how excited they are about Raid: Shadow Legends

Ich spriche keine Deutsch, aber Fick die AFD

No. This is a result of thinking of natural selection as working towards an "absolute" better and away from an "absolute" weaker, as opposed to pushing in directions that are entirely defined by the situation.

Natural selection is this: in populations that make copies of themselves, and have mistakes in their copies, those mistakes that better fit the situation the copies find themselves in are more likely to be represented in that population later down the line.

Note that I didn't say, at any point, the phrase "SuRvIVaL oF ThE FiTtEsT." Those four words have done great harm in creating a perception that there's some absolute understanding of what's permanently, definitely, forever better, and natural selection was pushing us towards that. But no such thing is going on: a human may have been born smarter than everyone alive and with genes allowing them to live forever, but who died as a baby when Pompeii went off - too bad they didn't have lava protection. Evolution is only an observation that, statistically, mutations in reproduction that better fit the scenario a given population is in tend to stick around more than those that don't - and guess what? That's still happening, even to humans - it's just that with medical science, we're gaining more control of the scenario our population exists in.

Now, can we do things with medical science - or science in general - that hurts people? Sure, there's plenty of class action lawsuits where people sued because someone claimed their medicine was good and it turned out to be bad. But if you're asking "are we losing out on some 'absolute better' because we gained more control of the world we reproduce in," no, there is no "absolute" better. There's only "what's helpful in the current situation," and medicine lets us change the situation instead being forced to deal with a given situation, dying, and hoping one of our sibling mutated copies can cope.

Columbus' contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.

"1491" is a good read.

My favorite was a guy in college who came in, used the urinal, used the hand dryer, and left.

My friends were very excitedly talking about setting up a corp in this when it was first announced.

They wanted my buy-in, and I asked if I could be head of HR, to which they said "yes".

So I bought it, created our corp, and performed my ideal goal: set up a corp recruitment posting called "entry-level Star Citizen player" which required 10+ years in Star Citizen.

We're now at the point where I have to find my log-in and change that to 20+ for the joke to make sense again.

I heard if you trade a pokemon early that can use surf and strength and then push the car off the island when you get to the S. S. Anne a Mew appears