It's clear the original trilogy was lightning in a bottle for many reasons, and it's clear that Marcia Lucas and other skilled editors had an absolutely huge impact. But can you really say the editor is the "more talented" Lucas? Seems to me that for a time, whatever partnership George and Marcia had personally and working together, worked really well.

After the split, neither one of them ever created something as on target as the originals.

Then again, Star Wars is almost unique for the cultural impact it's had. Hard to do a repeat.

Just shows how sometimes connotations and visceral impacts of words change over time.

I learned about that movie from The Wall..

My kids call me a boomer when that happens to me. And yeah, it happens.

Though to be fair, I actually really like the side button -- the one on the lower right that is touch sensitive. I use it for activating and using the camera. I just ALSO sometimes activate it when reading in landscape mode. Oops.

But now you're in a position where a work can only be recognized as "quality literature" decades or even centuries after it was created and publicized. I guess that's a plausible definition, but I don't see much value in it.

I would also add that many governments deliberately preserve and publicize certain works not for their inherent literary value, but due to some message that the government wants to promote for many possible reasons.

IMHO, everything you just said boils down to "it's a matter of taste" or "I know it when I see it."

On one level, I don't disagree. Taking two fantasy authors I enjoy, Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss, I would say that Patrick Rothfuss is the better literary writer, but at the same time, I enjoy Sanderon's books more and I enjoy Sanderson as an author far more. Both authors are highly literate and knowledgeable, and their works are clearly highly influenced and referential to many other works, tropes, and so forth. I would say Rothfuss's writing is more artful, but I don't know how to quantify that.

"Lasting value" is, just like, your opinion man, and (IMHO) boils down to spectrum of enjoyment.

I have done the same thing (both with actual LLM text and with my own writing). The detectors seem wildly inaccurate on all samples, and wildly inconsistent between different detectors.

I think of the Star Trek holodeck. There are many episodes that portray how human characters “write” holonovels. They design the characters, the personalities, the plots, etc., but the holodeck generates the dialog, responds to stimuli, and so forth.

I think it’s a pretty interesting possibility for table top especially. GMs could create a character plan that then operates as a Non-Player Non-GM Character. A wildcard in the game. I could see that introducing some interesting elements to play.

You lost me here. What happens in a human mind is not covered by copyright law? Are you talking solely internal thought processes that are never externalized in any way?

Because I can image a cartoon mouse all day long. Yellow gloves. Red shirt. Etc. But if I put that imaginary mouse to paper (no computer involved), Disney might have something say about it.

I wonder if something like this is where we may end up. Computer learning vs human learning may be one of the great legal (and moral and ethical) battles of our time.

As I said, I don't know what quality literature is. The Nazir piece reads like Joyce to me. Ulysses is certainly a classic, but I'm not sure I've ever met anyone whose read him outside of highschool or a college literature class! I can't stand it, personally, but props to the people who do love it. I went deep into the serialist music hole once upon a time, and I found a level of appreciation for something that had been unlistenable to me before. More power to people who find that in Joyce. Zahn is very well know and popular amongst certain nerd groups, but largely unknown outside of them. Eco's books have sold well, but do people actually read them? How many men read hockey romances or 50 shades?

I take umbrage at the term "quality literature!"

I believe literature should be evaluated primarily on an "do not enjoy...enjoy" spectrum.

Looping back to the topic at hand, I've said before that I'm afraid that one thing that LLMs may show is just how derivative and formulaic a great deal of human production is. (That's not necessarily a bad thing, either, IMHO.)

My wife grew up in Minnesota. I know, unfortunately, more about hockey romance novels than I ever wanted to.

"Amish porn" is a new one to me!

As I understand it, women are by far the biggest users of public municipal libraries today. I'm not sure if the current selections are a "chicken" or the "egg" in why that is.

Wtf is quality literature?

50 Shades of Grey sold 150 million copies. Quality literature?

Topseller on Amazon right now is a hockey romance novel. Quality literature?

How do they compare to The Name of the Rose (one of my favorite books) in terms of being quality literature?

Zahn's Star Wars novels sold millions of copies? Quality literature?

Hemingway (I've run into critics who HATE Hemingway)?

Ulysses (Joyce)?

I don't know what quality literature is, and I don't really care. For fiction, if I enjoy it, I'll read it. I've just skimmed a bit of the Nazir story, and it does absolutely nothing for me, but it sure does have the veneer and impenetrability of James Joycian writing.

Maybe the moral of the story should be, don't listen to the C suite OR the tech media!

That's amazing. I used Delphi in the 1990s at about the same time as, IIRC, Visual Basic 4.0. I enjoyed it at the time, and Object Pascal was a pretty reasonable language, but outside of maintaining legacy apps, I don't really get it. I'm surprised to see both it and Visual Basic so high on the list.

I guess I'm also surprised to see C at #2. Maybe because of Linux?

Mozilla has discussed what kind of bugs they found. Here's their blog entry: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behind-the-scenes-hardening-firefox/

You should read it. It's a very level-headed article that avoids the for and against LLM-hype that so many low quality news sources report.

Around close to the same time, Greg Kroah-Hartman also commented on improving reports: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/26/linux-kernel-czar-says-ai-bug-reports-arent-slop-anymore/5226256

Finding bugs is good. Integrating these kind of tools into a testing and build pipeline is a good idea.

You might want to check your sources.

Here's Anthropic's writeup (March). They say:

Here's Mozilla's writeup: