Chaos

Tau is so much better. It'd make learning the unit circle far easier. Half the circle would be tau/2. Way better! In basically every physics formula, it's always 2pi. That really should indicate that 2pi is the correct one. I mean, when the hell do we even is C = pi * d? Use the radius! The radius is the important one. You might say, "But Eric what about A = pi*r^2?" To which I'd say, A = 1/2 tau*r^2 is very symmetric with the kinetic energy formula. That 1/2 should be there anyway, due to integration. In fact, I thought that one argument against tau was that the standard normal distribution had a single sqrt(pi) rather than sqrt(2pi), but nope! It does have a 2pi. I guess the integral from -infinity to infinity of e^(-x^2) has the sqrt(pi)... So anyway, I'm a math professor who loves tau. I'm not at all a fan of pi day, and I won't stand for this pi propaganda merely because "well then we can have pie on pi day". Lame. I spend pi day in my math tutoring center explaining why tau is superior.

Ya'll need to chill. EDIT: That is certainly odd, so I understand the reaction.

I don't know what to tell you. I have no idea when you changed it. If it happened to be very close to when you changed it, that is certainly strange. It is a coincidence. Indeed, I absolutely don't come on every day. Spooky? Sure, I can see that, but I would appreciate if you believe the words I say? I have literally no reason to lie... there was no report or anything... That would be completely insufferable if I got pinged for every name change.

Is that common? Maybe this is why we get so many people who literally never read the forum descriptions. But yeah, I loaded the forums and saw it pretty much first thing. This is not a mystery

...I saw it on the forum home, just like any most recent poster would appear?

Hi

Yes: That's five lines. You have space for that first paragraph, everything after is too long. I'd leave it for your About Me page or compactify.

Hi, the 17S Discussion board is for site related discussion, not book discussion. You're looking for the Cosmere Discussion board, which I've moved this to.

Hi and welcome. AI generated content is not permitted in the site, including profile pics: Apologies and thank you.

This does vary depending on viewport, but feel free to report people and I'll investigate. I would say this is too long; choose between image or the text. Both makes it too long.

You want Entertainment Discussion for non-Brandon books, and says books in its description: https://www.17thshard.com/forums/forum/29-entertainment-discussion/ Lots of people had issues with Wind and Truth and so that wouldn't be unusual. Our Code of Conduct discusses the conduct we expect from people, and yeah, people are allowed to like or dislike what they wish. Of course, you can imagine discussion on Brandon books to involve lots of fans here, which can bias who is talking. I guess what I'd say is you're absolutely allowed and encouraged to post unpopular opinions, and everyone does need to be respectful. But, others are also allowed to not agree with your opinion either. That doesn't mean anyone is talking in bad faith for disagreeing. For example if someone came onto the forums and said Way of Kings (a book very well received in general) sucked, that person should expect people to not necessarily agree, and that's okay. I have seen this where people with the unpopular opinion feel they are being dogpiled, when in reality it's just... Yeah, sometimes a lot of people like a thing that you don't.

No worries. In general I do recommend thinking, as a general policy.

This is not a joke. Do NOT ping me for stupid BS. If you are not pinging me for urgent matters then don't. (Though realistically you should just use the Report feature.) Yes, har har, you're very funny. Cool, let us not do it again. If people insist on not following my very reasonable instructions, then I will ensure you not be able to be a problem in this regard, and you will not be laughing. This is incredibly immature.

Don't ping me for dumb forum games. Thanks.

It's not that the AI content is "trolling", it's that it's trivial to generate. Yes, this is a niche community, but as you can see from some forums, some people can make a lot of posts. Imagine how much can be generated with basically no effort. Sure, I feel like a post like the one you suggest, it's kind of whatever. Maybe a worth a laugh. If even 2-3 people are doing stuff like that often, will people to care to read? I'm not sure. That's the spamminess I'm talking about. The easier it is to do, the more it's like, "Do I want to read or watch something AI generated among all of this AI stuff when I could do something else?" It's a forum that if it exists I think quickly devolves into something not useful. But, of course, I'm sure there's different opinions on that, and fair enough. I think we as staff are more concerned with the fact that these LLMs are effectively stealing copyrighted information to generate this stuff, which feels... less great. Among other reasons. So, that is a motivation of the AI policy. We don't feel the benefit outweighs that. Again, I think we might have different definitions of "spam". I think there's a pretty colossal difference between someone creating hundreds of images in moments and posting them all vs. an artist who is creating things themselves. There's a pretty important bottleneck there, in that creating art takes time, that inherently makes it far less spammy. I can't comment on the video you're talking about, as I do not know the video or the specific art piece therein. We do feel it is very important that 17th Shard is a place that is a pleasant and positive place to be for artists. This is why we have a No Unsolicited Critique policy. We want to be encouraging to artists. Some are doing things for funsies. Some want to improve, some aspire to be professionals. Canonicity is not required nor would be a thing we wish to judge or adjudicate. Not all are looking for feedback like, "Cover the safehand." That might not be the focus of the art piece or the artistic intent. That's not our domain to judge, and if people are not requesting critique, then that is not permitted to judge here, either. I think your concern is quite overblown. There's, what, 2000 images under Stormlight Archive Art across nearly ten years? I'm... not really concerned with that pace, I have to be honest. I am also not concerned with some... nefarious artist who is drawing noncanonical Stormlight art in an effort to get their name out, and is using this site to do that. Let's be perfectly real: there is vastly more cosmere art on Instagram. They'd use that. If it wasn't reasonably good, then it wouldn't get traction anyway. And, is there some more nefarious intent? I feel like that's literally never happened on this site. Again, I can't speak to the video you saw, but I would need more information to make such judgments. Lastly, artists posting their art here without discussing much here is fine. I like seeing cool art here. We are also fine with cosmere content creators posting their videos here. This doesn't happen too often--again, the time required to create such content is an important limiter--and certainly that could be spammy, if a creator was posting their video in a ton of forums. But one topic every once and a while? Sure. If we disallowed that and required all posters of such content to be active on the forums, we would be even less of a Brandon Sanderson hub than we already are. The difference with AI is, again, the scale that this can be done compared to the effort. That's my spam concern. It is not my personal main reason the AI policy exists, but it is a reason why I think an AI-only forum would quickly become a ghost town with lots of stuff that probably no one looks at. Your mileage will vary, of course, and that is fine, but I just don't think it's an extremely compelling use case to warrant an exception to the broad policy. This is already highly restricted and moderated here. It sometimes comes up, but has not been a major issue.

For what purpose or goal? Seems like that would just lead to a ton of spam, which also undesirable.

It gets easier once you have calculus. Way less formulas to remember. I don't find classical mechanics fun, but it gets more interesting when you can use the Lagragian and such. You wouldn't get that until you're a third year physics major, though. I really enjoyed it.

That's funny! I love it. Sure. Well, you're not going to get much into quantum physics in AP physics. Some introductions on some results of it, potentially, but what you're going to do is much more the standard physics 1 stuff, which will be Newtonian mechanics, forces, etc. To truly dig into quantum mechanics, you need four semesters of calculus, and that's just the start. Quantum mechanics is the study of really small things, like atoms and electrons, and how they behave. Electrons don't behave like a really tiny ball orbiting an atom's nucleus. Instead, they act both as a wave and a particle at the same time (look up the extremely famous double-slit experiment). If that doesn't make sense to you, that is okay! The world is under no obligation to make sense to our own intuitions. We make math to create a model to describe observations, and make predictions with our model. This is why if someone asked, "Explain to me quantum mechanics without math" like... you just really can't. The intuition is in doing the math. Regardless of how weird it is, it is incredibly empirical and extremely well substantiated. Quantum electrodynamics, which covers the electromagnetic force, is basically the best measured and tested scientific theory, where we computed a number to like... seven decimal places, and we have experimentally corroborated that. It's insane. Anyway, you wouldn't get to that sort of stuff for a long time, even as a physics major in college. It is very interesting, but requires a lot of math.

Thanks for the kind words. It will be a very long time, if at all, as trad publishing is very competitive and a huge book like this will not be looked to kindly. It's entirely possible I'll need a shorter book to break in before anyone takes any interest in this one. Self publishing, particularly with AI rampaging about, seems just like a too difficult business model for me to make a living at. You really have to publish a book a year, and that's impossible for me. So, I have roll the trad publishing dice.

As I said before, how people research is their own business. If the text is written by you, cool. Expanding off what Ene said: this can apply to essentially any rule. We are happy to answer any questions, but hypotheticals like this can be very challenging to answer. Context heavily matters. Most situations, as Ene said, I think it'd be a minor thing where once a person is told, they go, "Okay cool no worries I won't continue." But I could imagine scenarios where people are being especially egregious which could lead to harsher punishments, for example, imagining someone who is posting a bunch of art, they say they made it, they repeatedly affirm they created it, and it comes out it was AI generated. Like... there's a level of deception there that violates the spirit of our Code of Conduct as well as this rule that in my opinion would warrant further action. But, ultimately, it's very hard to say. There has been nothing beyond "Someone shared a meme that looked AI, and we removed it in accordance with the policy". We are going to be discovering edge cases and making determinations. Maybe there will be a major issue or event that leads to something, but it is highly dependent on context of the situation, so I can't possibly know how we would rule. However, I would say that we always make decisions as a group. No one person is making any determination. So we hope said decisions will generally be reasonable.

I split this up into a few different sections for ease of response. 1. I've always dreamt up stories. I remember as a kid just having a tennis racket and bouncing a tennis ball up and down and thinking of fantasy / scifi stories. This was very, very common for me. Video game stories really captured my attention. Here's a fun little anecdote. I remember a standardized test in school where they had you write a creative essay, and the prompt was something akin to, "You come across a chair in a mall and you're transported somewhere else" and you had to write something. I don't remember what I actually wrote, but I was transported to some fantasy world, and I think I was on flying on the chair, and there was some evil wizard on a similar chair. We duked it out with different colored laser beams, and the different colors had different effects... Anywho, apparently the graders did not like this and I heard they actually wanted to hold me back a grade. BUT LOOK WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?? Anyway so you can see why I gravitated to writing fantasy and harder magic systems with defined abilities, hah. I wrote some stuff in high school--including a Yugioh forum RP which was very foundational for my creative writing, to be honest--and in college I wrote half a book (about 90,000 words) with a reincarnation based magic system, which went pretty well though had some important flaws. In college I started getting the key defining ideas for The Prophet King, but it seemed very ambitious, so I wanted to finish the reincarnation book first. But I just got burned out, and I lost my momentum. I think I got feedback too early. Years went by, and then... I just was never getting back to that. I met my wife on here, and I distinctly remember when she visited, I would tell her about Prophet King and lots of details about it. This has been stewing in my brain for a very long time, so I had lots to tell her about, as well as lots of secrets. Then, in 2021, it was just... why not go for it and actually write the thing? Jess was right, it was the thing I was passionate about. Though this trilogy has been the subject of much thought and attention of mine, there are plenty more stories that I will write, too. Jess can tell you, my mood is strongly correlated with me getting writing done 2. Hmmm. How do I talk about this in a succinct way? I could (and will) talk for a long time on this. I started with a few core ideas, which led to a few characters, and the worldbuilding and story stemmed from them. Like Brandon, I am very excited and motivated by endings, so I start with the cool ending first, and work my way backwards. I'm a huge outliner. In fact, when I am writing a new scene, I often need to outline the beat-by-beat layout of each scene, up to the ending of that scene, so I can figure out the essence and soul of the scene. I don't write in order, either. I will skip around between scenes, and in a scene itself, I am skipping around in it, too. Words are words, so I will write the interesting part and stitch them together. If you saw a chapter that I was halfway done writing it would be completely unintelligible. 3. Not really? I remember being very overwhelmed when I first listened to Writing Excuses when I was writing the reincarnation book. This was back when Brandon did that podcast. Go write anything. It will suck. But just do some stuff and figure out what works for you. There is no one way to write, no one way to outline. The creative process is different for everyone. 4. I actually think this is pretty solid. I had great reception on the alpha draft from a good set of alpha readers, and that draft was way worse than this revised draft. It's honestly extremely cool. We'll see what the beta readers think. Though I do think it's publishable, I don't think any publisher will take a 260,000 word book from a first time author, but we will see. I think it is likely I will need to write something shorter first, and then whenever that's picked up by a publisher, maybe they will take a look at this. I am very happy to say that the ending for Prophet King that I have thought of for probably fifteen years absolutely slapped. Every alpha is ravenous for the sequel, as am I. The second book is the one I am even more excited for than book one, but now that outlining is coming soon for it, I'm a bit nervous. Book two is a complicated beast, with four POV characters instead of two, with a risky structural aspect... There are several reasons that I want to complete the trilogy before selling the first one, so hopefully I can make this all work. The end of book two is one that I actually made a dramatic change in 2022 (which is very recent for core changes) compared to the original ideas. That will at least completely slap. I've already written snippets of it (as I am wont to do) and damn. It's going to be so delicious. It's been very fun to write lines into book one's revision that have meaning in that book, but will have way more meaning if you reread it after book two. Sometime, I hope everyone can read it all! But I can be very patient with my secrets.

For example. We disallow AI fanworks in this, yes? We don't want to allow discussion of "This is how you can get the best Jasnah Kholin generated". So it's things like that. I don't think those conversations happen often, but that's covering our bases. Yes, it will indeed require judgment. We don't have much interest on doing extensive research or investigation in particular posts to discern what is AI generated. I imagine we will give plenty of grace and benefit of the doubt, and I imagine most people will just be, "Okay, cool, don't post stuff from ChatGPT here." If you are worried about using em dashes, worry not. We love our em dashes here. So, yeah, particularly as the tech advances, this will be harder and harder to discern. I would rather be in a place with strong policies than just say, "Eh, anything goes." I don't particularly want to be on a forum where no one is writing their own text and it's all just AI generated topics with AI generated posts. We want people to communicate with each other. No plans currently for any special appeal process. We don't have a formal appeal process anyway. Let a mod know if there's a false positive. I don't think we have removed anything on the forums as of yet, so I'm not super concerned right now. We are open to adjustments as things progress. If anyone has had their paper they worked hard on be accidentally flagged as AI, I would not worry. I would not consider that generative AI. That's been around for a long time. Now... If someone's not writing anything and are just having an LLM generate them a whole topic, that would be different matter.

Don't stress about past posts with AI images; that would be silly for someone to search through their posts to find, and impractical to police even if we wanted to.

Oh, no worries. I just thought you were meaning, "There hasn't been a problem, so why do it?" hence my response. AI generated profile pics / cover photos would indeed not be allowed. For your second thing, the text is human made; how you research is your own business. (But, pasting an AI generated summary for someone else would be not allowed, for example.)

We would like our policies to be relatively consistent with Discord, and there have been some AI related content posted. This simply clarifies that people can't just put out AI generated stuff; it will be removed. It's come up some and will only become more prevalent. We do not need to wait for it to become problematic to act.