Readit Newshttps://www.languagereactor.com/m/t_en_-
We're ranking them using the download count, and also this prompt to chatGPT (it's primarily for language learners):
"Is this text engaging and interesting for a modern reader, someone not into fine literature? Rate the text excellent, good, ok or poor. I don't want crusty, flowery, contorted language, talking about buttons and mannerisms and the hue of the sky etc."
Then, we're rewriting the ~1000 most popular books using chatGPT to modernise/simplify the text.
Using some markdown as an internal format, drawing from the gutenberg plain text and html formats, this will go to a github repo shortly.
There's translations, and then, need to look at current best TTS voices.
To others questioning the need for rewriting: language changes over the course of a century! It's no problem for me, as a native English speaker, to read English from around the turn of the 20th Century. However, it increases the degree of difficulty for me to try to read French or Spanish from the same time period. Also, to get through an old book I have to learn a bunch of useless words that have fallen into disuse; it's much more effective for me to learn the version of the language that is relevant in today's world.
It looks like the French TTS isn't working properly yet? At least on the couple of titles I tried. The selection of titles you have listed looks great.
I read a lot, and used to use goodreads for this, and now I don't use anything for this. I have a messy little notebook where I write down books I want to read so I don't forget they exist.
I inconsistently cross them off as I read them, and all together it's enough to usually remember what I read and often remember how I felt about it. It turns out my reading life isn't improved by any more than this.
I like keeping a journal as I read and find that valuable. But goodreads isn't well suited for that and I never look back through it anyway. Writing it is useful, indexing it isn't.
IDK my reading isn't your reading but you might be surprised how little of the goodreads feature set is actually valuable if you stop using it.
1. Keeping track of where I am in a series. Goodreads has a handy feature where you can see the list of books in a given series. I maintain a reading list with (way too many) different series and it has my next book in each one.
2. Remembering which books I've read. (Kind of related to #1.) More than once I've gotten more than a few pages into a book and realized, "hey I'm pretty sure I read this before".
Either of these would work in a notebook or spreadsheet but that would require changing my workflow (and "importing" a long list of books).
It started as a few sed commands to merge TeX+code -> TeX for a book project. I ran these sed commands from a makefile. Life was easy.
But then there were complications, and I needed to make slightly more sophisticated substitutions. So the sed commands moved into an awk script, run by the makefile. This was better than maintaining a handful of little commands that were growing on a weekly basis. Life was good.
The transformations I needed kept growing a bunch of little variations, and the awk script became hard to maintain, so I rewrote it in go, with proper parsing and output. (And even unit tests, after the 2nd time I broke some output.) Designing it as almost-a-proper-compiler was 10x better than maintaining an ad hoc script. Life was great, even with the overhead of maintaining a separate processing tool.
It may be the case that a small amount of trees is beneficial overall for pollinators but if you’re managing an area as described then it takes a bit more work to plan for trees and mow around them.
A dozen or so years ago I worked at a startup using svn and all reviews were like this: generate a diff, post a link to the diff on jabber, someone will comment/question. There’s room for immediate back and forth as needed. Revise, approve, done. Very lightweight, yet effective. However we were all colocated and all of the team members were high functioning so I’m not sure if it generalizes. (Also, being colocated meant that occasionally the jabber conversation could move to f2f with whiteboards if things got complicated.)
(Everybody else in my life uses go's on default "your direction is up" and it's worthless. You follow directions and have no idea which way you're going or how far :-()
Unfortunately the fg part of the equation was lost on about 2/3 of our class... after editing they would start another scheme instance! I recall being in the terminal lab the night one of our first assignments was due, and the machine slowed to an absolute crawl. Can't remember exactly how it was resolved but I do recall being taught how to look for classmates running two or more instances of scheme to remind them about fg. (Also not helpful to machine load: "solutions" to the 8 queens problem with infinite recursion. The real lesson here was, in later years, to not be logged in on nights when CS 401 had assignments due.)
Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book should have a 2.5. If you don't rate like this then you just end up with garbage.
Just allowing a boolean rating (ala Rotten Tomatoes when aggregated) is much better, assuming you can get enough reviews for that system to actually work (probably > 30 is required for most applications).
I think "aggregated personal Elo" would be a fun way to rank things: I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me which is better. Do this loads of times and eventually you have a solid ranking of every book you've ever read. Aggregate everyone's rankings and you have a much more robust system then "please rate this book out of 5 stars".
IMO the real problem with something as subjective as books or movies is that even completely honest, well-reasoned reviews are going to be all over the map. My review of a Pride and Prejudice movie is going to be maybe 3/10, but my wife would give it 7/10, while we have the opposite reactions to something like The Hunt for Red October.
I don't care about reviews from experts or the unwashed masses. I don't even really care about reviews that much -- I'm more interesting in ratings from people who like the same kind of stuff I do.
Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid?
The only exception was learning banjo (as an adult) because I basically learned it all from youtube and forced myself to memorize songs. But when I could play piano I only ever remembered a few bars from a couple of songs, everything else had to be written down. Even just playing chords on a uke!