I saw a lot of recommendations for that series and ordered the first book, but I wasn't able to get through it. There's something about it that makes it very boring to read rather than enjoyable.
I am only on book three, but part of my issue is how much seemingly deus ex machina occurs. The world is alien, deep, and unknowable. At any moment, some previously unidentified entity can twist events on their head.
Big baddie about to destroy town? When all hope is lost, a powerful, benevolent force sprouts from the ground to end the threat.
Science fiction gets “one thing”. People are the same, but now you can backup your conscience onto a chip. How does humanity adapt?
Erickson gets 1000 things that will be revealed the moment you think you know where the plot is headed.
All that being said, it is interesting, layered, and a wild ride.
deus ex machina was a complaint of mine as well, but as you get further into the story you realize how it's actual gods/ascendants/people causing the things that happened. some of those things were put in place thousands of years in the past. he does have several magic systems in the series, but they all have rules and they're followed.
I totally get where you're coming from here. I adore Erikson, and I enjoy Williams but I sometimes need to force myself to keep reading his works (and then really enjoy them when I do).
However, Bobby Dollar (his shorter trilogy) is exceptionally fun. It's much tighter and funnier, well worth reading maybe especially if you've bounced off his other works.
If you are using an LLM to pull data out of a PDF and throw it in a database, absolutely go wild with whatever model you want.
If you are the United States and want a chatbot to help customers sign up on the Health Insurance Marketplace, you want guardrails and guarantees, even at the expense of response quality.
Part of what the enterprise is buying is someone to blame. Same can be said for consultancies, outsourcing etc. It is a very real part of the politics of decision making at large orgs.
Same here. The client/EndUser gives 2 entire shits about the source of the problem. What they care about is "Why isn't this working and what is this gibberish on my screen" and rightly so.
Don’t mind me, I’ll just sit over here making sad noises while you do whatever it is you want to do. It’s your life and who am I to tell you how to live it? I only gave birth to you (27 hours!) and raised you.
If you going to compare simple and easy, you've got to mention the Simple Made Easy talk by Rich Hickey. Though debatable if Rich would find Go simple in his sense of the word. An example might be not having an insertion-order map iterator.
