You're not the only one to be taken aback by that. Yes, the Hugos do fantasy, but I'm not sure I would have even thought to categorize Sinners as fantasy.
I mean, yes, it has vampires. Was From Dusk till Dawn fantasy?
But as a sister comment suggests, categorization is never easy, and probably just reinforced personal biases. (See Old Town Road being reminded from Billboard's country music list.)
There's more to Fantasy than a single boolean "does it contain something that is not real?"
Fantasy gets applied to the work as a whole, to its dominant tone and structure, not to one element. A work of fantasy usually has other elements that show it to be such. Is there world-building? Is it a quest or a hero story? Is there some kind of lore that grounds the whole universe? Not all of those are necessary, but usually you can clearly define the whole work holistically as Fantasy.
From Dusk till Dawn in particular is a straight crime thriller that turns into a horror movie.
Ok, I got nerd-sniped into trying to define Fantasy after saying I wouldn't.
I don't think crime thriller or horror have anything to do with if a story is fantasy. Alien is a sci fi movie and a horror movie. Psycho is a horror movie with no fantasy elements. Sinners is a fantasy horror movie. It sounds like you are talking about epic or high fantasy, but there is fantasy romance, fantasy detective, fantasy crime thriller etc. You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars.
I can envision a reasonable case that Star Trek is space fantasy, sure. But I think it's significantly overstating things to say that Trek is just as much space fantasy as Star Wars. There's nothing in Star Trek remotely as fantastical as the Force and the users thereof.
>There's nothing in Star Trek remotely as fantastical as the Force and the users thereof.
A lot of things in Trek are a lot more fantastic than the Force. The second episode of the original series has someone whose powers far exceed any Jedi not named Skywalker or Palpatine. Plenty of aliens are telepaths. And then the Q came along. The Douwd are apparently an alien race made of eldritch music that can erase entire species with their mind.
Honestly the Force is far more grounded in comparison. At least it has a structure and some rules. In Star Trek you could find an alien species that literally plays billiards with planets and it's never explained or referenced again. That just a thing that sometimes happens. Oh yeah and Wesley Crusher ascended to a higher plane of existence.
But let's move on to cosmology. A weird barrier at the center of the galaxy where a space god is imprisoned like some JRPG final boss. Anomalies in space that create time loops or fulfill your deepest desires. Whatever subspace is supposed to be - both a "layer under normal space" that's used for communication and also arbitrarily fixes the plot and also sometimes monsters come out of it that steal your organs.
Or technology. Set "Threshold" aside. The transporter can create evil clones of you or turn you into a child. The holodeck can create sentient life on command. The Enterprise got knocked up and had a baby one time. How does the universal translator work? Look up the only canonical explanation in TOS, it's basically magic.
I agree the line between fantasy and sci Fi is very thin. In general I would say if the author intends for it to be a natural explanation like wormholes or something it's sci fi, if it's a magic teleportation spell it is fantasy. There is a series I read once Starships Mage which plays with this, it's hard sci fi for most things but magic exists and FTL is solved through teleportation. Everything non magic has to obey relativity and such.
I'd say that line can be blurred somewhat by "Blindsight". "Not real" isn't where I'd put the line, it's "not plausibly and consistently explained (or at least explained away) within the laws of nature.
Never heard that this is stopping anyone from reading recent books.
Maybe someone whose only method of selecting books is to scroll through Kindle and look at the titles, maybe they need to pay attention to publication dates. But the rest of the world picks books because they get a recommendation, they look at reviews, they know the author, etc.
NYTimes said that the new Marlon James book might be the book of the century so far. Hyperbole, I'm sure, but it's now on my reading list and I'm pretty sure it wasn't written by AI.
It is not so unusual to read books that have stood the test of time at least somewhat.
Newness is not really a valuable quality when it comes to books, barring some exceptions like books on subjects that change frequently and meaningfully.
Diminished quality however is a meaningful signal, and would give most serious readers pause.
Preferring books that have stood the test of time is totally different from just avoiding everything published in the last few years because you're worried it might be AI slop.
Besides the data center itself, many people in the US are against what the data center is bringing: more AI.
Most regular people have not been sold on the idea that more AI will be good for them or their families or communities personally. Instead all they hear is AI taking away jobs, and AI preventing high schoolers and college kids from learning how to read a book and write an essay. Most people think a world with more AI seems bleaker.
So people wonder why communities don't want this hulking, loud, energy-expensive data center whose main benefit is to hasten the arrival of this world they don't want?
There’s no need to mince words, they’ve been aggressively told that AI will eliminate nearly every job.
If you need your job to feed your family then what Sam or Dario is saying is quite literally a threat to kill your children.
Of course they’re full of shit, it’s more like a very useful business automation project but if you say stuff like that you can’t be surprised when people hear it and form highly rational opinions about it.
How is this any different to the invention of the cotton mill?
You don't get to pick and choose what productive technologies to adopt. You either adopt them, or you'll be paying the countries that do and you'll still lose your domestic industry to competition.
It's not about whether it makes rational economic sense, it's whether people are happy about it.
It could make economic sense to be the world leaders in the next drug that turns everyone into mindless worker drones ("if we're not making the factories that make the drugs the Chinese will!") but people still won't be happy about what it means for their futures.
A country who drugged their citizens into mindless robots would be shunned, sanctioned and perhaps attacked. Their economy would be isolated and not pose a threat from competition. It's an obvious attack on our collective humanity and is treated as such.
Until AI proves a systemic risk to humanity there would be no similar consensus on shunning its use, and the economic spoils go to the countries that adopt it.
I don't understand why it's being fought by left-leaning, many self-proclaimed communists that have been fighting for a world where we just hang out and make shitty art all day.
Isn't AI the only way we get to that? Who is gonna do actual important work otherwise?
Because (a) that vision of utopia is not party of any "self-proclaimed communist" philosophy that I've ever heard of, and (b) no one believes that's what's going to happen.
Instead the evidence of our own eyes tells us that AI seems to be worsening the K-shaped economy: a handful of Elon Musks will become trillionaires, a slightly larger number of engineers will become billionaires, and the rest of us will have fewer jobs and fewer prospects of upward mobility in a world where AI can do most entry-level work.
Even in Massachusetts most people I know tend to know the seasons of many fruits and vegetables, and I definitely mostly eat apples in the fall when they're much better.
When I lived in Europe people were even more aware of the seasons of fruits and vegetables.
There isn't great evidence to suggest that electric toothbrushes are much better at removing plaque than manual. E.g. this metaanalysis [1] found basically no difference.
There are also studies that show that electric is better, like this meta-analysis that found a small effect [2] and this Cochrane review. [3]
What I generally read in articles is that the single biggest thing that makes a difference is brushing for the full 2 minutes, and electric toothbrushes can help with that by having a built-in timer.
No, I would think all trials are random with people assigned brushes
> 5068 participants were randomised to receive either a powered toothbrush or a manual toothbrush. Majority of the studies included adults, and over 50% of the studies used a type of powered toothbrush
I heard (via Steve Novella of the Skeptic's Guide) that there was similarly light evidence to support flossing, but mostly because nobody's bothered doing the studies.
The reason for that? It's obvious that flossing is going to help. Obviously brushing away cruft is better than not. So why waste the money on a boring study?
I can see the same for the electric toothbrush argument. Of course it's going to be at least as good if not incrementally better than me see-sawing my way around my mouth.
> the single biggest thing that makes a difference is brushing for the full 2 minutes, and electric toothbrushes can help with that by having a built-in timer
As someone who had toothbrushes for the longest time with a single 2 minute timer, and now has one with 4× 30s timers, I can say that the difference is radical.
I don't understand how I got bored in 2 minutes but I don't get bored in 4×30s, but I do not. Every quadrant gets the full time, and twice a day I do it for the full 2 minutes, no exceptions. That wasn't the case before.
I'm curious whether individual-word highlighting is best for people with reading disabilities, or a broad, whole-sentence highlighting might actually be preferable.
When I'm reading my eye is jumping back and forth across the sentence. The demo made this abundantly clear -- it was actually very hard to just track the highlighted word.
Just using the fact that I consider myself a very good reader as an example, I wonder whether there are advantages to the eye being free to skip back and forth across a sentence.
I assume it might be as simple as a user-preference toggle, since you're already highlighting the sentence.
You could also try UIs where the highlighting was more "spread out," focused on the word being said but bleeding into the other words on either side (maybe up until the hard stop of the sentence boundary) to lead the eye toward it. I'm imagining something like the red-blue text color of the BeeLine editor.
My guess is, like many accessibility tools, it will vary by person! The Storyteller apps don't actually support this multi-level granularity demostrated in the demo here — until this iteration of the alignment algorithm, the timing wasn't good enough for word-level highlighting. So currently we only do sentence-level highlighting.
When we do roll out multi-level granularity, it will indeed be something that you can configure yourself, including how each level is indicated (e.g., you might want to set a background color on the sentence and underling the word) and whether a each level is indicated at all!
The "spread out" highlighting is a really neat idea, I don't think I've heard that suggestion before!
If you're in New York and you look due East across the Atlantic, what country are you looking at?
Most people would assume Portugal.
Nope, you're looking (over the curve of the earth, of course), at Morocco. Look just a tiny bit to the south and you're looking at the rest of West Africa. Look Southwest and you're looking at Australia, or even Brazil.
I feel like that's the benefit to the creator having made this a dog (even if a demon-possessed dog). As intelligent as a dog can be, can we ever truly understand why they do the things they do?
The Uncanny Valley effect would be too big if a human companion randomly started talking to you while you were sneaking up on an enemy. But a dog? You'd be pissed off at it for a bit, and then forgive it because it's a dog.
Except it is not a dog. It is an AI. It’s a character in the game.
People often love to fus ro dah Skyrim companions off of cliffs because they can be incompetent annoying little dumb things that won’t shut up.
The character taking on canine form won’t suddenly make gamers more likely to put up with it messing about their gameplay. Thats just not how things work.
> The character taking on canine form won’t suddenly make gamers more likely to put up with it messing about their gameplay. Thats just not how things work.
I mean, yes, it has vampires. Was From Dusk till Dawn fantasy?
But as a sister comment suggests, categorization is never easy, and probably just reinforced personal biases. (See Old Town Road being reminded from Billboard's country music list.)
reply