The explanation for the German words (widow = Schusterjunge, which means cobbler‘s boy, orphan = hurenkind, as mentioned in another comment) is also applicable for the English ones:
An orphan doesn’t know where it comes from, a widow doesn’t know where she will go.
It feels to me as if the author got it backwards - in turning the AC back on, they didn’t „say no“ - the person who put up the note has „said no“ in the first place (to the practice of turning the ACs off) and the author was ignoring this clearly visible outlined boundary that other person has drawn.
Don’t get me wrong, the note itself wasn’t great either, but ignoring it wasn’t some great sign of „saying no“ - it was needlessly escalating a conflict instead of trying to resolve it.
100%, the author believes they learned the lesson, but failed to recognize what it looks like when a person on the other side initiates this process. It's amazing the dissonance here:
> They should expect a possible answer to be 'No' and be prepared to negotiate the difference. I didn't throw these wise words back at him, but that's what was going through my head. And it emboldened me further. I simply told him the room is unusable for yoga with the AC on and we've paid rent for the room.
They were emboldened to discard even mentioning negotiation and stood their ground instead. That might be fine if the lesson you're trying to illustrate is one about firm boundaries but the advice they're holding up here was very much the opposite.
Probably because LLM output only gives the appearance of cohesive writing, but the more you try to understand the author's intent and meaning, the more confusing and annoying it gets, as there is no author, no intent and no meaning there to understand.
That’s not it in this case, because the book is mostly a recounting of what happened.
I narrowed it down to two things:
One is that every aspect of the story is treated equally - unimportant facets get an equally profound sounding prose like the really important bits.
And the other one is the repetition of phrases. Everything is worth slowing down on.everything is load bearing. That’s so annoying.
As you read it, you would naturally try to understand why the author used such profound-sounding prose in that particular part of the text. You would expect that the author's intent was to emphasize the important bits. When the author talks about slowing down or something being load-bearing, you would expect that they're going somewhere with this, that this particular bit is especially important in some way.
But with an LLM-generated text, these attempts at understanding will get you nowhere and only produce frustration. The reader is left trying to interpret a signal that isn't really there.
I find it very hard to find books worth reading. It’s so difficult to separate Signal from noise - there are just too many books and too few reliable curators. Amazon ratings, goodreads, some book awards, best seller lists - they all are sometimes hit, mostly miss for me.
Depends on what you want to read. For fantasy and sci-fi fiction I really like the Youtube community. I did not expect this at all but there are a lot of great "Booktubers" in the 3-5k subscriptions range. Tiktok and Instagram have a lot more "vanity" people and it feels like more of a "look how much I read har-har" kinde of vibe and I avoid them completely.
It is indeed an odd challenge to find good books because I hate to be spoiled and that limits the search options quite a bit.
I used to be in that boat of not knowing what to read. Even using r/books didn't always give me good books.
Until, I realized Hacker News users sometimes recommend books in their comments, and the books are related to the topic being discussed. Also, sometimes there are submissions asking people to list their favorite books ever, favorite books read in a particular year, etc. It was a game changer.
Reminds me of m favorite late 90s messenger, Odigo[0]. It had some sort of radar which showed you people who were visiting the same site. It sure had this town hall feel, but admittedly most sites were simply empty.
Yeah me too. It felt like it was designed exclusively for me, it ticks all the boxes in what a dumb phone should and shouldn't have in terms of functionality.
> If it had an option to install a messenger of choice (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp etc)
It has that capability. From TFA:
> A flip phone with the apps you need: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. Music, podcasts, maps, rideshare, a great camera for the moments worth keeping.
As a parent, what I find effective are content rating systems, be it for movies, games or apps, along with the ability to control and fine-tune them.
For example, with Apple's parental controls, I can blanket-decline access to Social Media apps, or to apps recommended for a specific age or older, and I can also allow exceptions as I see it fit (for example, my kids have no access to WhatsApp but they are allowed to use Signal, both have the same age recommendations)
This moves the responsibility for age verification to me, the parent, and provides me with suitable tools to monitor this. With this, there is no need for my kid or me to upload sensitive data or go through some bad age verification implementation.
Websites are more difficult to control, but not impossible.
Long story short - improve tooling for parents that allow more centralized control instead of mandating social media to do the age verification on their end.
It is similar to what Frank Zappa proposed when they were looking at age restrictions on records. He said, they should have the lyrics printed up so parents could decide if their kids should assess it. A decent moderate response.
Alas, the age restrictions came in and the big warning on the front covers was added. It did kind of backfire because that warning started to become a badge of quality to younger people. A similar thing could happen here. If you restrict it then it becomes the forbidden fruit.
You confuse ease of using a tool with quality of output.
A skilled carpenter can work both with high and with medium quality tools and prefer one over the other with no difference visible in the craft they produce.
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