Pet Sematary

What Hacker News says

1. Allocator2008Jan 2009
   Interesting question. I am not a biologist, but I believe I read that cells have a sort of "internal clock", modulated by certain enzymes. Normally cells reproduce in a certain way, but these enzymes deplete over time, such that at a certain point the cellular structures don't reproduce in the same manner as before. Hence, "aging". So, sure I am all for finding treatments for Alzheimer's and so on, but aging itself, as outlined above, is just really an evolutionary necessity. Stephen King treats this sensitive topic well in his novel, 'Pet Sematary', dealing with both the human resistance to, and the biological necessity of, death, including the aging process leading into that. Personally I find great comfort in the idea that even if however many millions of years from now, all or most mammals, including humans, will be extinct, some of our genes won't be, just as for example birds have some of the genes the dinosaurs had. The individual may be here for only a short time, but the genes she carries are far more transcendent.
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2. bastawhizJan 2026
   That's empirically false. If it was true, there wouldn't be any ongoing litigation about whether it's allowed or not. It's a legal gray area because there specifically isn't a law that says whether you're allowed or not allowed to legally purchase a text and sell information about the text or facts from the text as a service.

   In fact, there's exactly nothing illegal about me replacing what Anthropic is doing with books by me personally reading the books and doing the job of the AI with my meat body (unless I'm quoting the text in a way that's not fair use).

   But that's not even what's at issue here. Anthropic is essentially banning the equivalent of people buying all the Stephen King books and using them to start a service that specifically makes books designed to replicate Stephen King writing. Claude being about to talk about Pet Sematary doesn't compete with the sale of Pet Sematary. An LLM trained on Stephen King books with the purpose of creating rip-off Stephen King books arguably does.

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3. Sam6lateJan 2025
   There are many ways of reading, the selection and the diversity (old and contemporary writers) of what you read helps you see how you could appreciate a more critical view of what you are reading. Reading a novel before watching someone's rendering of the same novel into, say Netflix, may expand your imagination and possibly show you how limited the director's version of the same story. I felt that with Stephen King's thrillers, Pet Sematary and Thinner, then watching them as movies.
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4. BeefWellingtonOct 2022
   Uhh, I'm gonna have to disagree hard on this take:

   > So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to license.

   Copilot is Github's product, and Microsoft owns Github. They are responsible for how that product functions. In this case, they should be held responsible for the training data they used for the ML model. Giving them the benefit of the doubt here, at minimum they chose which random third parties to believe were honest and correct. Without giving them the benefit of the doubt, they lied about what data sets they used to train it.

   To try and put it simpler, let's say a company comes along and tells the world "we're selling this cool book-writing robot, don't worry it won't ever spit out anyone else's books" and then the robot regurgitates an entire chapter from Stephen King's Pet Sematary, is that the fault of Stephen King or the person selling the robot?

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5. tomeFeb 2019
   FTI: "Pet Sematary"[sic] is the name of a book by Stephen King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sematary
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6. msgNov 2008
   I read all the time, no matter what my schedule is. It is an anchor in my life. Mostly sf and time-tested classics.

   I'm starting to read Aubrey-Maturin by Patrick O'Brian. I finished Master and Commander and I'm on the next one, Post Captain.

   I'm reading Bad Money by Kevin Phillips, which basically called the market failures early this year.

   I've got A Canticle for Leibowitz and Anathem, which I'm doing as a pair.

   I started reading Stephen King in chronological order a while back, and I'm up to Pet Sematary (early 80s).

   Also, Crockford's JavaScript book.

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