deathmtn

Effective March 6, 2024, I will begin the process of winding down Bards and Sages Publishing.
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I am spending four to five hours a week trudging through submissions just to weed out AI-generated trash. I have editorial assistants who actually read and review the submissions, but I still look at every submission myself first to make sure I am weeding out the obvious junk before wasting their time, otherwise the submission response rate would take 20 months. Just over the weekend, I rejected twenty obviously AI generated submissions. My inbox is flooded with it.
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Two to three times a month, I need to fight with Amazon over negative reviews that get spammed on multiple books because an author got upset about a story being rejected. Or I get some snark response back about how my reviewers need better training, or that I am not a "real" editor, or something outright vulgar. Or I get a prank call to my phone. These sort of people have always lurked around the industry, so I am not unaccustomed to dealing with them. But it seems like they have grown more emboldened, and there seems to be this weird social currency tied to the bad behavior now.

As the body starves, its immune system begins to fail. The malnourished fall prey to waterborne infections and suffer diarrhoea, which causes devastating dehydration. Other communicable diseases – which today could include Covid – also ravage communities. The most common cause of death in a famine is disease, not starvation as such.

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In most famines, there’s a margin of uncertainty in predictions, because people may be able to find unexpected sources of food or money. In parts of rural Africa, grandmothers may know about edible wild roots and berries or migrant workers may find creative ways of sending cash to their families. In Gaza, Israel knows every calorie that’s available. In 2008, the coordinator of government activities in the territories calculated every aspect of Gaza’s food production and consumption, in minute detail, and extracted the “red lines” needed to keep Palestinians on what it called a “diet”, just short of starvation.

Ask Maciej Pocwierz, who just happened to pick an S3 name that "one of the popular open-source tools" used for its default backup configuration. After setting up the bucket for a client project, he checked his billing page and found nearly 100 million unauthorized attempts to create new files on his bucket (PUT requests) within one day. The bill was over $1,300 and counting.

“Africa is not prepared to reach its full AI potential because we do not have enough talent,” Olayiwola told Rest of World. The few startups available may not have what it takes to train enough professionals, he said. “The best way is for African governments to invest in university AI programs. This, coupled with private startups, will help build an adequate number of AI professionals.”