About 1/3 of the discussion spanned by that vacuous Subject that you were the first to propagate. However from your comment it isn't clear to me what Subject might have accurately represented your intention. Also unthanks for nudging me to look at AC in search of a contextual hint as to your intention. (No, I could not care less about AC's intention or existence.)

My concern is with the potential for abuse by the police. The usual edge case involves a bad apple in blue, but the law as described in the summary here seems badly considered. But perhaps it's the best we can expect from such a Congress and legal system as those which America's have devolved down to?

(There should be a funnier way to end with that proposition.)

Mod parent funny though the joke I was looking for was about hot leads for wannabe bridge salesmen.

Oh, wait. I forgot. Nobody buys slightly used bridges in these Internet-dog years, even if the bridges were only used by little old ladies to go to church on Sundays. These days the best-selling snake oil is crypto currency, and I'm quite sure the crypto-scammers already had all those names and the their PII. It's not that the crypto-scammer-in-chief wouldn't prefer to keep the secret, but just that "all the best people" he hired can't be bothered. Or something like that.

So would like you to buy a barely used NFT? I'm sure they'll come back into fashion RSN! Or you can print a copy on a sticker to cover up the 11-stripe flag on the cheap phone. (You'd think the YOB could have splurged on a phone case printer with high enough resolution for the lucky 13 stripes.)

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.

So what's the solution? How about if the google revealed the business model of each app to give us the information to recognize the shovelware? (I'm interpreting that term based on memories of a couple of days actually shoveling horse manure back when I was in the service... So long ago that I can't remember the details, but I think the first day we were piling it in one place and the second day we had to get it back in the truck because they decided it was the wrong place...)

I know solutions are unfashionable around Slashdot these years. Much easier to just criticize the messes we've gotten ourselves into, but I sometimes can't help myself. I imagine a "Financial model" tab/section for each app. Basically two parts. In Part One the developer would explain what's going on. Most of the time that would involve picking from the most popular models, though there should be room for "Other" to allow for innovation. In Part Two the google would say a bit what they know. At first that should be based on the google's due diligence that checks the legitimacy of the app and the app's developer. (Cue the laugh track.) Later on the google might be able to say more about whether or not the app is performing financially in accord with what the developer claimed in Part One.

To be distinguished from the criminal apps with criminal ads that the google supports so eagerly. At least I haven't been able to find any way to report the fake "urgent update" notifications trying to fool me into installing malware. Most frequent are probably the ones that claim the PDF reader needs to be updated. "Now, now, NOW!" While blocking out as much of the screen as possible except for the install malware button.

Having said that, I'm kind of tempted to take a look at this Android app thing. I've been working on a little webpage front end app using Claude and already I seem to be reaching its limits. Makes a pretty webpage, but the guts are not smart.

Both the theme of the story and the AI brain fart. And I suppose the suckers who voted for the YOB, too, while I'm at it?

*sigh*

s/This is/These are/

"These is not the wild coincidences you were searching for."

Not finding any funny, so forced to look for the low-hanging fruit? "Today's Slashdot: These are not the jokes you were looking for."

That's it? All the funny that Slashdot could handle these days? This story had great potential for laughs, but...