thank you very much!

also: ha! i’m doing the same thing! currently at book 2 ;)

you probably already know this, but for anyone else:

The Cosmere Series (of which the Mistborn Saga is a part of) does heavily feature Sci-Fi as well as post-apocalypse themes alongside (mostly) fantasy (Sci-Fi: the sunlit man, tress of the emerald sea; post-apocalypse: Stormlight Archives, Yumi And The Nightmare Painter), which made me think OP was talking about this series specifically.

In some of the other books it is mentioned that all of the powers originally came from a being called Adonalsium (basically God). what fuels all these manifestations of powers is called Investiture. Each Shard of Adonalsium manifests different Powers, Allomancy is just one of them.

so it’s a unique mix of classic fantasy, sci-fi, and post-apocalypse genres in a single gigantic saga, in which the sci-fi and post-apocalypse themes are intentionally kept vague and in the background.

highly recommend all of the other books!

they are great in their own right, and also give a LOT of extra bits and peaces of the overall lore!

what’s best about the series is, as you’ve already explained, the “hard-fantasy/sci-fi” approach to powers: all power requires some kind of source, everything comes from something.

best to do the Stormlight Archives after Mistborn (either order works), then the rest; order doesn’t really matter, although i recommend Tress of the emerald Sea and The Sunlit Man to be read last, because they contain a lot of sci-fi lore, which is best enjoyed last (imho)

also: Stormlight Archives Book 5 is coming relatively soon, i think it’s december?

all of the words you listed that use a soft g are loanwords from other languages (pretty sure they’re all french) soooo…yeah. no wonder those have different pronunciation.

when you look at anglo-saxon words the difference becomes clear:

• gift
• graveyard
• ground
• gay

all hard g’s.

mixing up languages is the common denominator here.

the G in GIF stands for graphical, neither english nor french in origin, hence the confusion about pronunciation.

alternatively; English is a terrible mess, and the only “correct” pronunciation is reached through general consensus. if the majority pronounces something a certain way, that’s how it should be pronounced.

Orconomics (Dark Profit Saga, Trilogy) for the exact same reason!

excellent fun to read, incredibly funny!

the information age is easy: the silicon age!

not sure about the space age…maybe titanium age? that’s about the time we figured out how to machine titanium on large scales, and for highly specialized, extreme applications (talking about the SR-71 here, mostly). could also call it the alloy age, since a number of important alloys were discovered around that time

pretty sure ATM9 recommended minimum RAM is 10GB…i have it at 12GB.

but i also run it at about 100fps and view distance set around 16 with shaders…

i looked it over and … holy mother of strawman.

that’s so NOT related to what I’ve been saying at all.

i never said anything about the advances in AI, or how it’s not really AI because it’s just a computer program, or anything of the sort.

my entire argument is that the definition you are using for intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is wrong.

my argument isn’t even related to algorithms, programs, or machines.

what these tools do is not intelligence: it’s mimicry.

that’s the correct word for what these systems are capable of. mimicry.

intelligence has properties that are simply not exhibited by these systems, THAT’S why it’s not AI.

call it what it is, not what it could become, might become, will become. because that’s what the wiki article you linked bases its arguments on: future development, instead of current achievement, which is an incredibly shitty argument.

the wiki talks about people using shifting goal posts in order to “dismiss the advances in AI development”, but that’s not what this is. i haven’t changed what intelligence means; you did! you moved the goal posts!

I’m not denying progress, I’m denying the claim that the goal has been reached!

that’s an entirely different argument!

all of the current systems, ML, LLM, DNN, etc., exhibit a massive advancement in computational statistics, and possibly, eventually, in AI.

calling what we have currently AI is wrong, by definition; it’s like saying a single neuron is a brain, or that a drop of water is an ocean!

just because two things share some characteristics, some traits, or because one is a subset of the other, doesn’t mean that they are the exact same thing! that’s ridiculous!

the definition of AI hasn’t changed, people like you have simply dismissed it because its meaning has been eroded by people trying to sell you their products. that’s not ME moving goal posts, it’s you.

you said a definition of 70 years ago is “old” and therefore irrelevant, but that’s a laughably weak argument for anything, but even weaker in a scientific context.

is the Pythagorean Theorem suddenly wrong because it’s ~2500 years old?

ridiculous.

just because the marketing idiots keep calling it AI, doesn’t mean it IS AI.

words have meaning; i hope we agree on that.

what’s around nowadays cannot be called AI, because it’s not intelligence by any definition.

imagine if you were looking to buy a wheel, and the salesperson sold you a square piece of wood and said:

“this is an artificial wheel! it works exactly like a real wheel! this is the future of wheels! if you spin it in the air it can go much faster!”

would you go:

“oh, wow, i guess i need to reconsider what a wheel is, because that’s what the salesperson said is the future!”

or would you go:

“that’s idiotic. this obviously isn’t a wheel and this guy’s a scammer.”

if you need to redefine what intelligence is in order to sell a fancy statistical model, then you haven’t invented intelligence, you’re just lying to people. that’s all it is.

the current mess of calling every fancy spreadsheet an “AI” is purely idiots in fancy suits buying shit they don’t understand from other fancy suits exploiting that ignorance.

there is no conspiracy here, because it doesn’t require a conspiracy; only idiocy.

p.s.: you’re not the only one here with university credentials…i don’t really want to bring those up, because it feels like devolving into a dick measuring contest. let’s just say I’ve done programming on industrial ML systems during my bachelor’s, and leave it at that.

perceptual learning, memory organization and critical reasoning

i mean…by that definition nothing currently in existence deserves to be called “AI”.

none of the current systems do anything remotely approaching “perceptual learning, memory organization, and critical reasoning”.

they all require pre-processed inputs and/or external inputs for training/learning (so the opposite of perceptual), none of them really do memory organization, and none are capable of critical reasoning.

so OPs original question remains:

why is it called “AI”, when it plainly is not?

(my bet is on the faceless suits deciding it makes them money to call everything “AI”, even though it’s a straight up lie)

here’s a thorough analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCuy1DaQzWI

TL;DW: they assume technology will magically “fix” the climate crisis and no big changes to society or the economy are necessary. thus perpetuating and worsening the climate crisis by pretty much telling people “it’s gonna be fiiiiine”…when it really won’t be “fine”.

edit: note, that most of their content is fine, just the climate “solutions” and stuff are…so optimistic as to be misleading. their physics and futurology stuff is fine. also way oversimplified in many cases, but fine.

ah, thanks!

that’s good to know!

you lose cross-device sync, don’t you?

that alone is kind of a big deal…

it absolutely was one of the stated goals for starlink.

it hinges on the laser mesh networking though, which isn’t online yet, iirc.

pretty sure most men (myself included) find beards just easier to deal with than daily shaves…daily shaving makes my skin unhappy