> Douglas Adams had invented the concept of the ebook
Adams wasn't even going for that. The fact the Guide is electronic and you can read it is not all that important (though it does avoid needing "several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in").
Its nearest modern analogue is wikis, especially Wikipedia, not ebooks.
(and to me, ebooks are regular books, fiction and non-fiction, formatted so they can be reflowed on an ebook reader. Typically only one author, flow linearly and are rarely updated)
The Guide...
* is updated regularly and automatically (over the Sub-Etha net)
* can be used by field researchers to directly send updates back to their editors
* is focused on what the average traveller wants to know, rather than being academic, e.g. its entry on alcohol tells you the best drink in existence, where to get it, etc.
* it's edited by "any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing"
It's not entirely predicting Wikipedia, as it's still rooted in Adams' understanding of 1970s publishing corporations, where contributors must go through editors, but it's close to Wikipedia's spirit
> God, if you're listening, I will never drink this much again, and so if you'll find your way to help me get from the kitchen floor to the couch, I promise, in future, to keep my remarks about the Catholic Church to an absolute minimum daily requirement...
Huh? We've had pretty good translation in some languages in many general purpose contexts for a while. The LLM stuff if you're referring to that to my knowledge only has some gains in some languages in some contexts. Which is exciting no doubt.
Compared to google translate of yore, it’s gotten way more fluent thanks to transformers. Good translation relies heavily on context of course. Voice recognition and text to speech quality have increased dramatically. And near real-time (or as real-time as is possible given a pair of languages) is becoming feasible.
> Douglas Adams had invented the concept of the ebook
Adams wasn't even going for that. The fact the Guide is electronic and you can read it is not all that important (though it does avoid needing "several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in").
Its nearest modern analogue is wikis, especially Wikipedia, not ebooks.
(and to me, ebooks are regular books, fiction and non-fiction, formatted so they can be reflowed on an ebook reader. Typically only one author, flow linearly and are rarely updated)
The Guide...
* is updated regularly and automatically (over the Sub-Etha net)
* can be used by field researchers to directly send updates back to their editors
* is focused on what the average traveller wants to know, rather than being academic, e.g. its entry on alcohol tells you the best drink in existence, where to get it, etc.
* it's edited by "any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing"
It's not entirely predicting Wikipedia, as it's still rooted in Adams' understanding of 1970s publishing corporations, where contributors must go through editors, but it's close to Wikipedia's spirit
> God, if you're listening, I will never drink this much again, and so if you'll find your way to help me get from the kitchen floor to the couch, I promise, in future, to keep my remarks about the Catholic Church to an absolute minimum daily requirement...
That's.... oddly specific
What’s wild to me is that we have basically manifested the Babel Fish in the last few years.
Huh? We've had pretty good translation in some languages in many general purpose contexts for a while. The LLM stuff if you're referring to that to my knowledge only has some gains in some languages in some contexts. Which is exciting no doubt.
Compared to google translate of yore, it’s gotten way more fluent thanks to transformers. Good translation relies heavily on context of course. Voice recognition and text to speech quality have increased dramatically. And near real-time (or as real-time as is possible given a pair of languages) is becoming feasible.
I enjoyed reading this.
Was this author's voice supposed to come off like Douglas Adams? Is that the meta joke here? Because it’s kind of impressive.
I think so, and it's very close in tone to the pedantic pedagogy that Adams created and Snicket adopted.
Does the author's voice come off like Douglas Adams? It's been quite some time since I read H2G2, but I don't remember Adams being insufferable.
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I'm sorry, but you just sound like an idiot.
I am.