I think he meant he was Hobart the one that submitted the story. CmdrTaco is Rob Malda who use to run Slashdot and who created the post.
24 karma · joined June 13, 2025
Interestingly, the novel with no "e" was actually translated into English multiple times (most famous one is called 'A Void'), proof that constrained writing is something quite a few people seem to enjoy.
I think you just made J.S. Bach roll over in his grave.
And don't forget: Brahms, Handel, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, Wagner.
The competition is not so one-sided.
The funny thing is that "slop" was defined by the writing habits of AI model, which we have learned to pick upon and recognize.
The "It's not X, it's Y", the rhetorical questions and other patterns would have been the tools of a skilled writer, and those people writing "like AI" before AI most likely would have been recognized as such.
3h of fun for a mere $140.
I've seen more expensive hobbies.
I actually have an interesting setup to play Civ 4 with the family (best civ game, change my mind): the games are running on virtual machines on a headless servers and we play on iPads using the native touch controls. It's really nice user experience and I was surprised it worked so well on such an old game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...
I hope I won't be in one of those cars when the in-memory encryption key gets bit-flipped by the unfortunate cosmic ray.
Also, you should note that Yamaha Corporation, the musical instrument maker and Yamaha Motor are now 2 distinct independent companies, even if were originally part of the same group.
A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given their financials, they have to go the cheap dedicated server route (they host on OVH). They publish an Excel sheet somewhere with every resources they use to run the services and last year, I had fun calculating how much it would cost them if they were using an hyperscaler cloud offering instead. I don't remember exactly but it was 5 or 6x the price they currently pay OVH.
The downside, is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated, when cloud provider on the opposite can easily move around your workload. In the case of Lichess outage, it was some network device they had no control of that went bad, and lichess was down until OVH could fix it, that is many hours.
So, yes you get a great deal, but for a lot of businesses, uptime is more important than cost optimization and the physicality of dedicated servers is actually a serious liability.
[1]: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longes...