This is just an off-the-cuff response.

The title of the book makes me think satire, an impression reinforced by the product description. The sample also seems to lean in that direction.

On the other hand, the categories (military thriller, war fiction, war and military action fiction) don't fit that impression at all. (Though I have to say, it's doing well in the existing cats on the free list, even if the downloads weren't particularly numerous.)

All of those fiction types could conceivably include a more introspective element, but that wouldn't typically be the focus for thriller or action genres.

The book has gotten good reviews, so some of the intended audience clearly found it, but I imagine a lot of people looking for thrills and action would have landed there and had a WTF moment.

Death toll now at 133.   

Pack mules being employed in areas that are inaccessible by other means:

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/01/hurricane-helene-north-carolina-mules-aid

Numerous volunteer organizations from many states getting involved.

States along the Ohio River have experienced flooding and power outages.

Vultures in human guise are out in force, so if anyone reading this lives in an affected area, keep your wits about you:





In unrelated news, the danger from the chemical fire in Conyers seems to be over.  The shelter-in-place order has been lifted:

https://apnews.com/article/biolab-chemical-plant-fire-chlorine-evacuation-9552ac17f3674ecbd1a52be13b08413f

Death toll stands at 91 at last count.

https://apnews.com/article/hurricane-helene-tropical-weather-destruction-16b41006d3cb6fedad78d19ca3f389a9

I expect that number to continue to rise as more of the missing are found.   

It's amazing just how hard the mountains were hit.  They've had flooding up there before, of course, but nothing even remotely like this.  Entire towns are gone.  Roads are washed out, power is out, and communication is down, so much of the region is now isolated to the point that it might as well be on Mars.

According to google:

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

So, yeah, technically AI is intelligent. It 'learns', just not like humans do.

Not what I'm seeing.

The bots do what they are coded to do. Nothing more, nothing less.

Intelligence in bots requires going beyond the code. There is no sign of that yet. Just marketing tricks to fool people. It's just code.

And by that definition, the majority of humans are NOT intelligent.

Because there is no intelligence behind AI.

[...]

But there is no intelligence there.  Machine "learning" may be a form of training, but the machine never actually learns anything.  It may be trained to perform a function, but it did not learn.  It does not understand.  It may mimic learning and it may mimic understanding but that does not mean it has accomplished either.

They butchered the name for a buzzword. Any true learning is probably now lumped into Artificial General Intelligence, which is still science fiction, but has the same meaning we all originally assigned to AI.

Machine learning as a term may be coopted by AI soon, but it has a distinct meaning now as well. It was mostly about designing algorithms using statistics. A simplified version is that a Reinforcement Learning model (a category of ML) is given a series of actions it can perform, and is given a score based on the results the actions. You run hundreds, thousands, etc. of these. For example, you may give it a Mario game and ask it to maximize points or time to complete a level. So it can self-improve. But it's still dumb, so it's not really "learning" why a certain combination of buttons results in a certain score. In the way that the new "AI" operates, it's hard to fit it into these kinds of definitions.