There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons. The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.

Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises.

(Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.)

Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.

Here are a few ideas trends that are affecting this: -Publishing is getting less profitable so there are less books being published by the big companies. -Publishing companies are grow 70-80% woman and are choosing female preferred books -Most published fiction readers are female (I'm not sure what came first women reading more books or publishes publishing less male friendly books) -Romance is the biggest genre fiction and that has heaps of dragons, werewolves and vampires (hence why those terms haven't dropped off) -Self published books aren't included in isfdb, lots of male authors self publish -Amazon best selling sci/fi, cyberpunk lists now have heaps of self-published books (maybe most) -Most of this stuff is pretty pulpy, but it is really common to have starships and space travel in these books.

ISFDB has tens of thousands of self-published books listed. Since it's a volunteer project, and since specific self-published books are not necessarily easy to find if you don't know the title or the author name, they only get added when an editor there runs across them somewhere. And if something isn't listed there, you can always create an account and add publications yourself.

I'm looking forward to having LLMs used for character interactions. It will be like that thrilling point in half life where the soldiers start talking about freeman and for the first time you realize that characters are responding to you in normal game play.

Emulating real life isn't going to be as exciting as you think it is. That awesome moment in Half Life is scripted to make it immersive like that, but most of the game isn't and that's what makes it special. If all the enemies behaved realistically all the time, the game wouldn't be fun, I can guarantee you that.

I tested a Sherlock Holmes game where AI was used for character interactions.

The actual dialogues were of course awesome, and relevant.

I gave them feedback about the controls for moving the character, which were a bit awkward.

Your link shows that South Africa ranks below the US. It is ranked 43rd in the world, vs the USA which is at 28 (in 2024 the latest year).

good point: I'd fix the post but it's too old. Well hopefully it gets downvoted into oblivion soon.

Man, I suck at rhythm games. I've played about 50 times and the best I've gotten in 84%.

If you restart after a certain number of turns you get a pawn replaced by an extra queen. I won with four queens.

I wonder if the same thing is happening in genres like sci-fi. These trends sound familiar: Publishing books to appeal to critics, more prestige fiction published, less published white male authors, less published books on best seller lists (by published I mean published by a professional publishing firm). I am not sure that big authors of the 80's and 90's such as Iain Banks, Neil Stevenson, Peter F Hamilton would get published now days. I've noticed the big sci-fi awards seems to have a lot more books with social justice themes than I remember. I find I don't like a lot of the newly published sci-fi. I'm reading a lot more self published books amd, at least judging by best seller lists on amazon, so are a lot of other people. It is a pity, I think professionally published books are generally better written, perhaps it is the pipeline of authors writing about themes I like being broken?

Pretty much all the best stuff is self-published first weekly basis on sites like Royal Road, and then some mainstream publisher will pick it up when it gains momentum.

I assume you're joking, but hopefully everyone will be aware that Ian (M) Banks was woke as fuck, and Neil Stevenson and Peter F Hamilton continue the noble struggle of publishing through such minor imprints as HarperCollins and Random House.

This is a bad faith response. Of course publishers aren’t going to drop established best-selling authors; alexitorg’s point is that these authors would not get the same chance if they were starting out today.

Also, I think Banks was more of an old fashioned utopian socialist, which is very different from “woke as fuck”.

I guess it's at least some comfort that Banks didn't have to live to see a world where a white man couldn't publish a series about gender-bending space communists.

Cool, I like the other three, I'll give battleship chronicles a go.

The key point in the article is that the polling shows that respect for universities has fallen, and fallen quickly since 2016. It obviously isn't just about Israel, as it happened well before 2023.

I put it down to a number of factors: -The replication crisis -Divergence of "Social Justice Leftism" (for want of better words) over main stream liberal and conservative ideals at universities. -over production of degree holders, creating a shortage of trades people and graduates who can't get jobs. You have many graduates who prefer to work in unskilled jobs rather than retraining into trades. -Increased expense of university. On average most attending university are better off. But there are a lot of people worse off. -Disappointing returns on research at universities. Commercial and Industry specific labs have a much greater return on investment, but the narrative has been about needing to invest in universities.

I'd like to see less places funded at universities. Less research funded at universities. More funding for research elsewhere. Pre registration of studies become the norm or mandatory (i.e. say before you do the work what you are looking to test in the data you collect). More prestige and funding for trade schools.

I've built pilots of these kind of models for my government department (Victoria, Austalia). The prototypes in R using Random Forest models. Pilot version in Python using gradient boosting. We could have used deep learning models, but the increase in accuracy of the predictions is pretty minimal.

We haven't used these models outside of a pilot. There is a long lag to get other departments/services data and de-identify it and link it (we have a team that does this, it has a lot of safeguards to ensure privacy). Although old data is still quite predictive. A simple predictive score didn't help our workers do their job as they needed to justify their decisions with evidence. Giving the workers access to underlying information (they would need to have legal authority to view the data, so that excludes Homelessness support staff) often is missing what they need for their processes.