It's possible that it's location specific. We have a Whole Foods nearby so Amazon invariably shows me Amazon Fresh products. I remember once I even added a lime to the cart because my total was $24.99 and it wanted me to make it $25.
I thoroughly enjoyed Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and White Nights, but I'm finding myself slogging through Karamazov. I'm about 600 pages in and its picking up at least. Banking on it all being worth it in the end. Normally I subscribe to the quote "life's too short to read a bad book", but making an exception for Dostoyevsky.
I started with Karamazov, then C&P, then the Idiot.
I loved excerpts of Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor, Dimitry's troika ride, any passage with Grushenka) but I also found it rough to get through. I really don't think I was ultimately able to appreciate it as a whole.
C&P felt much smoother and finally I devoured The Idiot. Those novels felt like night and day compared to Karamazov.
With Karamazov, I feel like there is some subtext or context I'm missing and would have loved to have had a companion text or course to help me.
When I first Master and Margarita, it came with incredible footnotes, and rereading it again I found I sometimes recalled the footnotes more than the text. I recommended the book to a friend, but their edition didn't have the footnotes so they bounced right off it.
Anyway if anyone knows of an edition better than the Penguin Classic of BK I'm all ears.
Ha. I love Karamazov. To me, it boils down to a love affair/triangle and case of mistaken identity and ultimate justice. But in true Russian lit fashion, you must pass through the absurd with a detour through morality and human nature.
edit: I read the Barnes and Noble translation. And I would encourage reading some passages aloud.
I had the same experience, lol. I started with Crime and Punishment expecting thinly veiled philosophy where each character is a mouthpiece for one of the author's thought processes. Granted there's some of that, but I wasn't expecting such an exciting murder drama. Went into Karamazov expecting an exciting murder drama, and got the type of Russian literature I initially expected Crime and Punishment to be! Really it's a question of expectations.
To give you one idea of the approach - the accurately translated title is The Karamazov Brothers. Every other translator chooses the usual way because it sounds grander or eccentric or just because that’s how others did it before them, even though it’s simply incorrect as a translation.
P&V - one of them edits without even knowing Russian, a polar opposite
Karamazov is basically YA fiction though. Find other works if you’re not into it as an older adult, it’s fine
I've taken several stabs at it over the years but I always give up in exhaustion. It feels badly in need of an editor, not that anyone would dare. Maybe this is a consequence of the format: it was released serially in chapters to a literary periodical over the span of a couple years. It certainly would've been nice to trim away some of the side characters and ecclesiastical debates for a more focused read, but we got what we got.
Yeah I've picked it up and put it down multiple times over the past year, might have had some context loss. Theres been a few very lucid monologues I've enjoyed, but I haven't felt the same level of internal revelation as the previous novels.
His criticism of characters being laid bare at the beginning of the novel is fair, especially in Karamazov. Unlike Nabokov I don't think it detracts from the work.
Why is there so much interest in local AI systems, am I missing something? Cloud providers have scale and expertise that would allow for much bigger throughput at lower costs. The small latency gains will be nice, but ChatGPT and Claude already come through blazingly fast via their API.
LLMs are powerful systems that eventually may be a requirement for being able to economically participate in a large portion of the economy. For this and other reasons it's important that people are able to control their own LLM.
Look at how much Google has changed over the years in the pursuit of profit. What will ChatGPT and Claude look like when they are pushed further down the profit maximization path?
1. Local models become more capable
2. you can easily fine-tune them
3. availability of certain cloud models and your access to them is something you can't control
4. privacy of your data
The product being evaluated is a home security camera agent, its user base is HomeAssistant-adjacent. Value here is privacy over latency (23tok/sec isn’t amazing for a vision model)
I find it so incredibly freaking cool that the machine sitting next to me can generate code, images, and prose based on natural language prompts. It's cool that any computer can do that, of course, but it hits different when it's the one right here in my apartment versus a server off in the ether somewhere. It's the sort of thing I think about it in utter amazement as I fall asleep at night.
I don't know if that's why other people are interested. I'm probably weird. But that's what drives my interest.
Most western jobs are higher up the value chain, although it might not feel like it a software engineer or finance bro generates more value than a manufacturer or farmer.
More specifically, they generate value for people who are already relatively rich (often vastly so), and a consequence of declining marginal utility—which applies to money the same as any good— is that the it takes less actual utility value when you do that to produce any given amount of monetary value.
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