drakonka

14 ms·

211.
by drakonka 3y ago
Agreed, I've always believed you can learn anything you want. The realization I was talking about was the one where maybe that's not the default assumption for everyone.
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by drakonka 3y ago
I always assumed everyone assumed everything was learnable. Realizing this (i.e., that being everyone's default belief) might not be the case is kind of blowing my mind a little right now.
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by drakonka 3y ago
There was a flood of low-quality fully-human-produced books before and now there's an additional flood of low-quality AI-produced books, and for anyone with a little bit of experience with reading indie books _or_ self-publishing them,
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by drakonka 3y ago
Many years ago I spent a lot of time on a website called Personality Forge, where you would create chat bots very similar to this and set them loose. They could then talk to other people or each other and you could review the transcripts. A
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by drakonka 3y ago
A company once reached out asking to talk after a few of ex-colleagues recommended me. I was not actively looking to change jobs at the time, but after catching up with them they basically asked me what kind of role I might be interested in
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by drakonka 3y ago
I'd say 85-90% of my work these days is programming. Both the actual coding and thinking through problems or architecture decisions, benchmarking, testing/comparing approaches, etc. It really depends on the position and nature of
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by drakonka 3y ago
This looks great! I'd try it for sure if I was on iPhone. Do you have any plans to release this for Android as well at some point?
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by drakonka 3y ago
What I want is a physical smartphone keyboard with nine keys. The one with three letters per key. I've never been faster and more accurate at typing on my phone than when these were a thing. I have pretty small hands, but even for me t
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by drakonka 3y ago
Would you mind pointing me to some info on this? I actually tried to invoke my custom GPT through the OpenAI API and found no way to do it. The closest option at the time was creating an Assistant, which is a whole separate construct. If th
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by drakonka 3y ago
Unless they're changing this, custom GPTs as far as I know are not accessible through OpenAI's API. AFAIK they're just ChatGPT running GPT-4 with a custom instruction and optional knowledge base. No private information leaves
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by drakonka 3y ago
I believe it is just GPT-4 with a custom system prompt added. You can also upload your own added knowledge base of data for the GPT to reference.
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by drakonka 3y ago
> Now with custom gpts anyone can piggyback on that trust and just upload all that data to their servers. Can they? I thought custom GPTs were hosted entirely by OpenAI with no middle-man in-between? How would the creator of a custom GPT
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by drakonka 3y ago
I've been laid off, but my contract subsequently extended for a while. I have not been actively searching since I have the luxury of taking my time and figuring out what I want to do, but so far interest has been coming in. I've d
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by drakonka 3y ago
Well for monetization, take all of the below with a grain of salt because my books only pay for themselves right now. My primary work is programming, so I'm by no means making a living off my writing! The common advice I hear that reso
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by drakonka 3y ago
Yup, and if they think it'll sell then book stores can stock up more. Many book stores don't stock unless the book is distributed as returnable (in case it doesn't sell). Whether self pub or trad pub, unsold books returned by
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by drakonka 3y ago
Ingram Spark provides global book store and library distribution.
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by drakonka 3y ago
Not telling anyone you know is probably smart. _If_ you write outside of the genre your friends group usually reads and a bunch of them visit and buy your book out of curiosity on Amazon, it can negatively impact the categorization of your
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by drakonka 3y ago
For most self-published authors, a few thousand dollars is a lot to drop into a project that may never pay out. And in many cases if they do have the money, it makes more business sense to spend that budget on editors and cover designers ac
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by drakonka 3y ago
Sure! Feel free to reach out at me at liza dot io.
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by drakonka 3y ago
That's a good point. I'm already in the process of using voice synthesis to narrate one of my books. It is still a huge time outlay to get to the quality bar I want, but much cheaper than paying for a narrator. One thing working i
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by drakonka 3y ago
Unfortunately discovery still usually comes down to some manual sleuthing. It really depends on the genre, but I think you'll find that many ebooks on distributors like Amazon, Kobo, etc are self-published, so we're pretty easy to
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by drakonka 3y ago
I did not downvote, but just wanted to mention that the first two do not require a traditional publisher. In fact none of them do, but especially not the first two. It is true that there are real quality issues with a lot of self-published
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by drakonka 3y ago
This is actually a huge factor - both the covers and the blurbs are hugely important. Self-published covers in competitive genres now have to be on-par with trad covers for a reader to bother clicking on them. Niches where there may not be
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by drakonka 3y ago
One place to get started might be the Alliance of Independent Authors: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/ They are author as opposed to translator-focused, but maybe reaching out to them can be a first step in gett
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by drakonka 3y ago
Afraid not! I write under a pen name. It's not a huge secret, but not something I advertise either for various reasons (the main one being that I'm still not as good as I'd like to be... but I'll get there).
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by drakonka 3y ago
It happens quite a bit! I mentioned it in another comment here, but one thing that publishers can be very useful for is audiobook rights and translations. These are very costly to produce and it sometimes makes more sense to offload that pa
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by drakonka 3y ago
First, congratulations on finishing your book and getting a contract! That is a huge achievement. I do not think your reasoning is misguided at all. If you think a traditional publisher affords you more credibility and a sense of satisfacti
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by drakonka 3y ago
Check out the romance top 100 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Romance/zgbs/digital-tex... I point out romance because that's what I write, but it's just one example. At a quick glance thro
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by drakonka 3y ago
To be honest I'm not sure. It seems like _a ton_ of work to put out a high quality translation. I do not know how much time and money translators spend on each project but can imagine it being a lot. For example, some authors may expec
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by drakonka 3y ago
I suggest starting by deciding what you do care about, since it's not the money. What does "producing quality works" mean to you? How do you measure it? If you write only for yourself you can be your own judge of quality. Or

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