Yeah, maybe not, and what do you make of it? Now that the secret sauce has been revealed and it's nothing but the right proportions of the same old ingredients?
Hey that LLM is trained on everything we've ever produced, so I wouldn't say we've been "reduced", more like copied. I'll save my self-loathing for when a very low-parameter model can do this.
I just don't know if everything we've ever (in the digital age) produced and how it is being weighted by current cultural values will help us or hurt us more. I don't fully know how LLMs work with the weighting, I just imagine that there are controls and priorities put on certain values more than others and I just wonder how future generations will look back at our current priorities.
This is interesting...considering the high IQ profession aren't seemingly littered with attractive people. I'm sure there are stronger correlations for that case though.
Our opening up of trade to China was contingent on eventual political reforms to the CCP's form of government. This has not happened. We've tried using the carrot on China for over 50 years. It's time to take out the stick.
It’s antithetical to the books and it’s just painful, to me, to watch. I kind of like what they did with Empire in the first season, but only made it through two episodes of this latest season before giving up. I hate-read summaries of the rest of the season on Wikipedia and nothing I saw made me reconsider my choice. I’ll grant that Lee Pace is great but they stranded Jared Harris.
I think the number of people who read the books is quite small so they kind of had to pander to an audience that hadn't. I kind of enjoyed it but it is a bit...strange.
I read the books. But not many years ago like most people who claim to be Asimov fans or something. I went ahead and re-read the entire series before Season 1 was released.
Asimov is a horrible writer. The books are just bad (with the exception of the first one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555390). And if you take the series as whole, what they did in the show is really good. Imagine springing the Mule or R.Daneel Olivaw out of nowhere like the books do?
Not the PP, however it seems Foundation is one of those series both the audience and the actors themselves must sort of adapt to. I didn't read the Asimov original books (well I started like 40 years ago but gave up after finding them boring in contrast to short and non SF stories by him) so I didn't have any expectations, and was mostly satisfied with the series that appears getting better and better with time. Definitely not a masterpiece, but quite good.
The only somewhat valid criticism I've read is that it's not exactly like the book. I went in fresh to the show and loved it so much that I decided to start the books. I'm enjoying both and mostly agree with the adaption changes to keep some semblance of familiar characters over a story taking place over hundreds of years. But I can see how it can be jarring if you went in expecting huge cast changes constantly.
Some parts of the internet however dislike the adaptation because the main cast is no longer almost entirely male and really hate the skin color of some of the actors.
It's very, _very_ far from the books. There's no point calling it "The Foundation". It's not even the same genre - how much action is in Asimov?
It's fine to judge it on its own and say it's good or bad, but then why the name? Basically for the tv show equivalent of clickbait. Which is why I hate it.
>It's not even the same genre - how much action is in Asimov?
An entire season of characters just talking about what happened instead of actually showing what happened would be painfully boring to watch.
I've only completed the first book, but thought the show did a decent enough job of having action while condensing the characters down so they could be available over multiple arcs for consistency for the contents of the first book.
People make a similar defense of Paramount's Halo.
>An emotionless supersoldier mary sue? It would never work as a TV series, we need to explore the spartans' emotions!
And so we get some garbage that misses what was beloved by fans and features Master Chief with his helmet off, being sad on the subway. Feels like it's written by people totally unconcerned with the source material, just like Apple-Foundation.
Unlike Apple-foundation, glimpses of what a proper Halo adaptation could have been exist:
> An entire season of characters just talking about what happened instead of actually showing what happened would be painfully boring to watch.
Is this an argument that the series is the same as the books? "Any changes that are necessary are not really changes" or such? I didn't argue that the changes are unnnecessary, or even bad. Just that they exist, and they are many. Sure sounds like you agree with me.
> The only somewhat valid criticism I've read is that it's not exactly like the book
The Foundation TV show did not even have the same ethos, the same world-view, the same philosophical view of history as the books.
Apple wanted a big dumb heroic VFX-driven sci-fi saga TV show; and we can understand why. However, the source material that they chose is about history, and is actively hostile to the "heroic" view of history. It actually seems to be a critique of the heroic derring-do sci-fi of the day and the "great man" theory of history. (1)
It's like the showrunners did actually understand what the books were _about_, but decided to deliberately do the opposite. Maybe they actively hated the books.
I could not care less if they change skin colour or gender; or spice up the action scenes, updates like that are good, but IMHO this is by far the least of the problems with the _Foundation_ TV series.
A lot of Season 1 and Season 2 have been showing Hari and Gaal making huge mistakes. The Second Foundation is way behind schedule and probably going to be founded "in the wrong place" versus the books and almost seems like it won't be strong enough when it is needed to face The Mule. The "real" Hari ("Knife Hari") is shown to be a fallible slimeball just as much as the religion around the "fake" "Prophet Hari" gels around his seeming "infallibility".
I think to some extent the TV show is showing a variation of the timeline with respect to the rules of psychohistory: it doesn't account for individual actions (including/especially mistakes). I personally don't think it is trying to be a "Great man theory" version of Foundation, because so many of the "changes" are mistakes from the seemingly more "pristine" timeline of the books (or at least how we perceive them from how the Encyclopedia Galactica documented them).
I can definitely appreciate where that criticism comes from though, I appreciate that it is a valid point of view of the show. I just find it worthwhile to point out that I don't feel like the showrunners are as oblivious as that and I don't think they are intending a "great man" take on the show and at least in my reading of the show so far I do think there are other ways to read what they are trying to do, plus or minus the format constraints of trying to do it as a TV show with the contractual and budget/production reality of needing to keep some cast member stability from episode to episode and season to season.
I hate this sort of "woke" argument. It's a way of shutting down valid criticism by portraying anyone who didn't like the show as a racist. I thought Foundation was a badly written show and poorly cast, but it had nothing to do with the gender or race of anyone, I just thought the cast mostly didn't give a shit, had never read the books, combined with a poor script.
But there were also people who criticized black female actors playing white male roles from the book, and that's not a valid critique if the gender and skin color isn't a necessary part of the role.
Besides, Asimov's book tend to have neither female characters nor people of color.
I think Foundation admits people of other races exist by book 5, in passing. And there are like two (maybe?) notable female characters in the entire book series.
So why are getting offended about call outs of actual racism if you aren't upset about the races of the characters?
The second part of your comment could have been anywhere in this thread, especially if you actually had specific complaints.
But you had to use the word woke and get angry, so you could pretend there haven't been racist comments about the show on the internet from the sci-fi community?
Pretending nobody is racist helps no one but actual racists from getting called out.
Oh I wasn't calling you a racist I was just saying that a lot of racists agree with you.
How is someone supposed to take that? Refuting an argument not made is either a great way to make a point or a great way to make someone really unhappy.
Dog whistling is like sealioning. I'm not saying it doesn't happen but it's the least worrisome and bothering thing on the Internet.
If someone is dog whistling they are effectively conceding the argument because they're too ashamed to make the case plainly. Just take the W. The alternative is to explain to someone (and some hypothetical audience) that you you know what's going on inside someone's mind better then they do.
And again - there are people who will literally say they are Nazi's. There are people who will make not dog whistle or beat around the bush argument but straight up I am not ashamed to say arguments for awful things.
If you like Foundation and disagree with the arguments that it's not good then engage the argument made - just saying that you think there's an unstated argument and you'd like to engage with that particular one doesn't really get you anywhere.
No, Jeff Bezos has it right. There is some nuance to his data analysis approach and I recommend listening to his interview on the Lex Fridman podcast to understand what he was getting at.
Even in the face of all the data look at the early comments in this thread. For some reason these individuals want you to believe there's this high level of crime. Blatantly ignoring the good trends and focusing on the outliers, in worse cases calling anecdotes better than facts. So strange and quite frankly weird as hell.
I know for a fact that since pandemic I've been threatened a bunch by bums and once minorly assaulted. None of that made it into the statistics as there's no point to reporting; the city council, the state legislature, and the DA are cool with me getting threatened and assaulted.
Foolish use of metrics is everywhere these days. Carefully consider what the facts you have mean.
There are also crime victimization surveys which, instead of counting reported crime, sample the population and ask which crimes the respondent have been victims of - the DOJ nationwide one doesn't seem to be out for 2023 yet.
The problem is that if one party is arguing that the other has fallen into McNamara's fallacy, they won't have the numbers to back it up and can always be written off as just anecdotal data and outliers.
The US does not make a cultural claim to any part of Canada, except possibly jokingly Alberta, which might actually be "Alberta jokingly makes a threat to secede to the US" (the US does not really want alberta and its disgustingly sulfurous oil).
China is constantly threatening to invade the Russian far east and retake haishenwai
