Ozzy Osbourne, RIP
Jul. 22nd, 2025 06:27 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
scalziwhatever_feedPassing on just after a triumphant farewell concert is Bowie-level leave-taking. Well played, and what a wild life.
— JS
scalziwhatever_feed
The Big Idea: Kate Heartfield
Jul. 22nd, 2025 11:31 amscalziwhatever_feed
For her novel The Tapestry of Time, author Kate Heartfield took a real moment in time, involving a real object, and gave it just a little twist, threading a needle between fantasy and reality. What time? What object? Read on!
KATE HEARTFIELD:
On July 14, 1944, the New Yorker ran a brilliant cover to celebrate the Allied invasion of Normandy almost six weeks before. The design, by Rea S. Irvin, was an homage to the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, which chronicled Duke William of Normandy’s conquest of England.
It seemed fitting. Bayeux was the first town liberated, and where the exiled leader of the Free French Forces, Charles de Gaulle, chose to make his first speech after the invasion, on June 14.
But when he made that speech in Bayeux, the tapestry wasn’t there. In fact, even a month later when the New Yorker ran that cover, very few people on Earth knew where the tapestry was.
The tapestry (actually a kind of embroidery, but everyone calls it a tapestry) is massive: about 70 metres long. It was made sometime around 1070 C.E. and is basically a long comic strip, missing its final panels. When the Second World War began, it was put into a storage cellar in Bayeux.
Like many fascists, the Nazis were obsessed with trying to fit historical facts into their twisted narrative. Heinrich Himmler and many of his gang of archaeologists, historians and occultists saw the Bayeux Tapestry as a Germanic artifact showing the glorious past and future of their master race (because Duke William had Norse ancestry). Groups of Nazi officers and scholars started “inspecting” the tapestry (and at least one cut a piece off). Himmler was renovating a castle in Germany (using the forced labour of prisoners from two concentration camps) and stuffing it with looted medieval artifacts, to serve as the centre of the SS cult. In another timeline, that could have been the fate of the Bayeux Tapestry.
We often talk these days about the importance of putting grit in the gears of fascism, about the weaponization of paperwork. That’s what kept the Bayeux Tapestry in France, although some of the people putting grit in the gears were from other branches of the fascist project who just didn’t share Himmler’s particular brand of weird. In 1941, one of those branches managed to get the tapestry moved (in a truck running on an engine converted to charcoal because of the lack of gasoline) to a more remote storage facility, the Château de Sourches, where it stayed until 1944.
There, it would be safer against bombing – and also, not coincidentally, less subject to gangs of Nazi historians, amateur and otherwise, wielding scissors.
With the tide turning against Germany in 1944, Himmler decided he’d been stymied by bureaucracy long enough. He hatched a secret operation to take the tapestry first to Paris, and then to Berlin. They did manage to move the tapestry (in extremely hazardous conditions) to the Louvre, a few weeks after D-Day. But by the time Himmler managed to send two SS men to retrieve it in August, the people of Paris had risen up and liberated the city before the Allies got there. The Nazi commander of the city had to tell Himmler’s goons that the Resistance had just taken the Louvre, where the tapestry was being stored; they were welcome to try to get it.
(My main source for this part of the story is The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece by Carola Hicks, which is great.)
The story of the tapestry’s movements in the summer of 1944 is the inspiration and framework for my novel The Tapestry of Time, which is about four clairvoyant sisters racing against the Nazis to prevent them from using it for their nefarious ends. Think Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, except the tapestry instead of the ark, and instead of an American professor, the protagonist is an English lesbian who works at the Louvre.
I wove clairvoyance into the story because I was interested in exploring how we learn things about our past and dream about our future – and how fascism would like us to believe that we know things about our past, and can dream about our future. I often use fantastical elements to literalize metaphors and help us see the past in new ways, and this one helped me raise questions about how we can trust information, and the manipulation of gut feelings. Also, it was fun.
It was fascinating doing the research into the training given to the saboteurs and spies who helped the Resistance (which informed the Nazi-punching, and Nazi-shooting and Nazi-stabbing, in this novel). I will admit that when it came to learning what I needed to know about Nazi institutions and individuals, I sometimes found it draining to do the research about an evil that is still so fresh, and unfortunately so familiar. But these are stories we have to keep telling, because fascism will never stop trying to abuse history for its own ends.
This summer, I’m travelling to Dunkirk, to stand on the beach where my grandfather survived the strafing and bombing from German planes overhead. I’ll go to the beaches where the Allied forces landed four years later. I’ll go to Bayeux, where the tapestry survives, and is about to go out of public view for a couple of years of renovations (and a loan to the British Museum). If there’s a lesson I take from the many near-misses in the long history of the Bayeux Tapestry, it’s that small acts of courage or even just stubbornness, with a little luck, can change the future. My novel is my small offering of thanks to those who went before us and one way, I hope, to keep their stories alive.
The Tapestry of Time: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s|Bookshop
Kate Heartfield: Website|Bluesky|Instagram
Read an excerpt here.
Omg, John.
Jul. 21st, 2025 08:00 pmsidequested_feed
The post Omg, John. appeared first on Side Quested Webcomic.
The Friend Who Isn’t
Jul. 21st, 2025 02:13 pmscalziwhatever_feedFirst, watch this video, for the song “Brutus” by Em Beihold, which is a clever and enjoyable song about envy:
The thing I want to talk about here is not the song or its lyrics, both of which I like (and boy, who among us has not that had that same feeling at one point or another), but the final few seconds of the video, in which Beihold, at lunch with the girls, including the one who is the focus of her envy (and not coincidentally, all the attention). After watching everyone else lavish their attention on this woman, Beihold, or more accurately the character she’s playing in the video, finally gets up, goes to the woman (played by Katya Abayss), whispers to her about her envy, and leaves. And during these couple of seconds and directly afterward, we get to see the play of emotions across the enviable woman’s face.
And what are the emotions? As I see it: First, distracted as her friend comes over to say something private, pulling her away from her conversation already in progress, then confusion at the message, and then, right at the end, being upset and sad. Because the woman knows that, in this moment, she’s just lost a friend. She has no idea how, even if the now-immediately-former friend has given her the reason why. The reasons are all internal to Beihold’s character and how she feels about the other woman’s successes, personally and (apparently) professionally. This other woman is the cause of Beihold’s envy, but it’s possible and even likely that the woman had no idea that Beihold had all that going on in her head. Envy is often quiet, until it’s not.
(The other thing about envy (in the real world, at least) is that it’s often predicated on a fantasy version of someone else’s life, the part with where the fruits of their talent and/or money are evident but not the part where the human in the life still has to be a human and still has human concerns. In a world where some of the richest people in the world are very clearly desperately unhappy because (among other things) they simply don’t know how to people — and that’s in public! Imagine what it’s like in private! — there is indeed the constant reminder that money/fame/talent may solve some problems, but not all of them, and opens up a whole new set of problems that one has to deal with. High class problems! Which maybe other people think they would rather have than their own! But still problems.)
In the song and in the video, which she co-directed, Beihold the actual creative person does a fun and lively job of getting into the head of someone who has let envy finally get the best of them and stops seeing a friend as a friend and now sees them simply as a (possibly unworthy) possessor of a life they covet. But I think it’s important — and smart! — that after watching an entire video of humorous scenarios of the envying smoldering unhappiness at the envied, there are those few seconds at the end where we get to see that envy isn’t actually funny, and that it actually can hurt, not just the subject of the envy, but the object of it. Two people lose a friend in the video. Only one of them saw it coming.
— JS
SRE Weekly Issue #486
Jul. 21st, 2025 01:15 amsre_weekly_feedFor his hundredth(!) episode of Slight Reliability, Stephen Townsend has an awesome chat with John Allspaw. I especially loved the part where John pointed out that different people will get different “Aha Moments” from the same incident.
Stephen Townshend
This article delves deep into the nuances of Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective and how to manage both without spending too much. There’s a strong theme of using feature flags as you might expect from this company, but this article goes beyond being just a one-dimensional product pitch.
Jesse Sumrak — LaunchDarkly
A discussion of the qualities of a good alert and how to audit and improve your alerting.
Hannah Roy — Tines
This one contrasts two views on latent defects in our systems, from Root Cause Analysis and Resilience Engineering perspectives. The RE perspective looks scary, but it’s much more nuanced than that.
Lorin Hochstein
Grab has seen multiple scenarios in which concurrent cache writes result in inconsistent fares. This article explains their strategies for detecting and dealing with them.
Ravi Teja Thutari — DZone
Adding a node to a CouchDB cluster went poorly, resulting in lost data in this incident from 2024.
The mistake we made in our automated process for adding nodes was to add the new node to our load balancer before it had fully synchronised.
Sam Rose — Budibase
The parallels between this incident and the Budibase one above are striking! I swear it’s a coincidence that I came across both of these old incident reports in the same week.
Chris Evans and Suhail Patel — Monzo
Another tricky failure mode for Cloudflare’s massive DNS resolver service. They share all the details in this post with their usual flare (sorry, I couldn’t resist).
Ash Pallarito and Joe Abley — Cloudflare
Jim Boggia at the Old Church
Jul. 20th, 2025 02:49 pmscalziwhatever_feed
After we purchased the Methodist Church building here in town, one of the things we said that we wanted was to keep it part of the community, and not just our own office building. One way we were thinking of doing that was to occasionally have events there that would be open to the folks here in town. Last night, we started doing that: Our good friend and almost incomprehensibly talented musician Jim Boggia came the Old Church (as we are calling the building now) to give a concert, and we gave an open invite to Bradford to come out and see him. The event — like all the events we’d be planning — was free to attend, sponsored by the Scalzi Family Foundation. Because, honestly, what’s the even the point of having a foundation if you can’t occasionally give a concert for your fellow townsfolk?
And how was the concert? Honestly, terrific. Jim is an immensely engaging performer and played a mix of his own (really great) tunes and rock standards from the 70s, which was perfectly in tune with this audience, who gave Jim a standing ovation at the end of his set. An excellent time was had by all, and for us — for whom this first event was a test case to see if there was local interest in such events and what we need to do to make them viable — it was proof that this sort of thing was something that would be enjoyed and appreciated in our home town. We’ll be doing more of this. Hopefully soon!
(PS: Get some of Jim’s music, it’s fab)
— JS
Aw, he’s family!
Jul. 18th, 2025 08:00 pmsidequested_feed
The post Aw, he’s family! appeared first on Side Quested Webcomic.
Publishers Weekly on The Shattering Peace: “A Treat”
Jul. 18th, 2025 05:41 pmscalziwhatever_feed
And, well, yes! It is! The full review (here, warning, mild spoilers) also says that it is “tightly plotted” and otherwise praises the writing for catching up reader on the events of the series while still keeping things moving in the book’s here and now. And, again: Yes! I will take all that. Also, and I say this with just about every novel, it’s nice when the first trade review is a positive one. It means I can relax a little.
More news on The Shattering Peace soon. We are two months out from the release! Things are beginning to pick up momentum.
— JS
The Big Idea: Caspar Geon
Jul. 18th, 2025 02:56 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Human characters have never been essential to tell a good story. Author Caspar Geon breaks the mold of featuring boring ol’ humans in his newest novel The Immeasurable Heaven. Come along as he takes you through worlds, nay, universes, of his imagination.
CASPAR GEON:
I’ve read that if you go outside and cover a portion of the sky with your outstretched thumb, you’ll be obscuring approximately fifteen million galaxies. There was a clear sky the other night so I went out and did just that, and it’s mind-boggling. That’s fifteen million distant islands, each home to hundreds of billions of stars. And all of that just a drop in a colossal ocean.
This was the starting point for The Immeasurable Heaven: the conviction that there’s so much going on out there independent of everything we know or understand, so much that we’ll never have a hope of glimpsing, and my preoccupation with leaving all earthly issues behind to experience a tiny portion of it in some way. Pure escapism. Escapism with a capital, er, E. Fairly standard behaviour for someone who was put back a year in Primary school for ignoring his work and staring out of the window all the time.
When I finished the final book in my space opera trilogy the Amaranthine Spectrum in 2018 (which had neither earned out, nor, as far as I can tell, earned much at all) the onus was on writing something less ambitious and more commercial. Simple, right? In the Amaranthine books I’d already compiled three biggish novels about the far future of humanity and the strange plethora of mammalian forms that it would eventually become; now I had to get serious.
Elderly relatives who’d made the mistake of trying my books would counsel me earnestly to write something with more human characters and relatable storylines, and I would nod my head, go home and do precisely the opposite, feeling that wicked thrill as I struck out on an adventure with zero human characters at all, set three billion years ago in a distant ring of connected galaxies. I was still writing it five years later.
I wanted to find out what a settled galaxy would look and feel like after hundreds of millions of years of unbroken civilisation, what its inhabitants would have become, and how they would lead their lives. In that process I came up with the Throlken, omniscient machine intelligences that have set up home in the hearts of every star and ruled for a third of an aeon, forbidding violence of any kind. I met Whirazomar, a linguist forced to journey in the cramped, filthy confines of a sentient passenger spore with a hundred rowdy passengers, and Draebol, a hapless explorer of the lower dimensions. And I found the voice at the centre of it all, a prisoner sent far away for a very long time, its mind now utterly rotten.
What I’d somehow assumed would be an equivalent amount of worldbuilding to the last three novels had ballooned into a stack of notebooks heavy enough to knock me unconscious if they toppled over. Spending time in the galaxy of Yokkun’s Depth and its seven linked neighbours had become an obsession as I wrote about reality-hopping sorcerers, walking parasite cities, coral and pollen spaceships, interdimensional multiplayer games and ice moon ocean battles. The book also delved deeper into the concept of mortality than anything I’d ever written, since death is presumably a constant that most sentient beings will at some point in their existence have to contemplate, and to this eternal question there might – somewhere – lie answers.
This went hand in hand with the nature of reality itself, which, when experienced elsewhen and elsewhere, is at its core a malleable notion quantified in countless different ways, especially once you throw a variety of sensory organs and methods of perception into the mix. Who can say which is the correct reality, the one true way of seeing? And what then is death, if reality itself cannot be firmly defined? ‘The Immeasurable Heaven’ (actually the English translation of the lovely Hawaiian name for our own galaxy cluster, Laniakea) was a title I couldn’t resist.
Anyway, despite the constant risk of disappearing into my own belly button and popping out of existence entirely, my number one priority was to have as much fun as I could writing, especially since it seemed to me that this wasn’t going to be a book any traditional publisher would want to take a risk on. The fact that one eventually did still surprises me, even a week from publication.
And so, to reference the book’s afterword, I hope you’ll join me on my leisurely trip across this immeasurable heaven, for there are many more tales to tell.
The Immeasurable Heaven: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Waterstones
Thursday Recs
Jul. 17th, 2025 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppet posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
queerly_belovedWhat's this I spy? Why, it's Thursday Recs coming in over the horizon!
Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!
Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!
Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!
Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!
No, I Didn’t Write It, No, They Didn’t Ask, No, They Didn’t Have To
Jul. 17th, 2025 06:35 pmscalziwhatever_feed
The comic book company IDW, in conjunction with Paramount, which owns Star Trek, has come out with a limited edition comic book series called Red Shirts, which is about the security teams in the United Federation of Planets, the first issue of which came out yesterday. Clearly from the cover and the panels you can see here, the comic series will not be shying away from the essential nature of the red shirt in the Star Trek universe, which is, to die for dramatic story purposes.
As most of you know, I wrote a book 13 years ago called Redshirts, which essayed this same concept, albeit not in the Star Trek universe specifically, and it did pretty well, becoming a New York Times best seller and winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel, among others. So how do I feel about IDW/Paramount now coming in and releasing some comic books with almost exactly the same name?
I feel fine about it. One, I don’t own the trademark on “red shirt” or any variation thereof (nor did Paramount when I wrote my novel, I checked), and I wrote a novel, not a comic book series, and anyway I borrowed the concept from Star Trek’s fandom, from whence the phrase came. I can’t exactly get worked up if Paramount and IDW reappropriate a concept I appropriated in the first place. Second, the phrase and concept have been used by others in other media before – there was a card game with just about the same title a while back, as just one example. We’re all working in a same pool. Overlaps will happen.
The only real issue — one I’ve already seen online — is that some folks appear to think I have some participation in this IDW limited series. I don’t. I’m not the writer (a fellow named Christopher Cantwell is), nor did anyone involved in this comic get in touch with me. Not that they should have; from what I can tell about the story it has only the vaguest common elements with my own novel. It’s its own thing, and should be appreciated as such. I mean, I hope it’s good. I wouldn’t want something even mildly adjacent to my own work to be junk. The early reviews I’ve seen of the first installment seem to be pretty positive. So there’s that.
Anyway: Nope, not based on my thing, nope, they didn’t check in with me, nope, I’m not upset at that, and nope, I shouldn’t be upset even if I were. Give it a shot and see if you like it.
— JS
New Zealand slang needed please 🙏
Jul. 17th, 2025 05:50 pmkitarella_imagines posting in little_detailsI write RPF and due to sheer stupidity thought a guy (L) was Australian but he's from New Zealand 🤦♀️ Is there anyone who could translate these Australianisms (which I really love and got from Home & Away and Neighbours) into New Zealandisms? I don't watch any NZ soaps.#
JUST TO ADD: this is a fun, fluffy story, nothing gritty, angsty or serious. It is only just in the T rating, mainly because of a few dodgy comments. It could pass as G probably but better safe than sorry. It is not about football of any type, L isn't a footballer, he is just bouncing a ball in one short scene, which he was doing on Instagram.
Also, do New Zealanders play keepy uppy? When you bounce a football on your knee and see how many times you can do that without dropping it. A well known British game but maybe it's called something different in New Zealand?
~~~
“G’day mate,” said the Australian. “Sorry, we're playing keepy uppy and the ball got away from us.” He was smirking as he picked up the football.
“Don't be such a flaming galah.” L threw the ball at N.
“Strewth mate, that’s 50 already.”
“Here we are,” said L. “Enjoy, you pair of hoons.”
JUST TO ADD: this is a fun, fluffy story, nothing gritty, angsty or serious. It is only just in the T rating, mainly because of a few dodgy comments. It could pass as G probably but better safe than sorry. It is not about football of any type, L isn't a footballer, he is just bouncing a ball in one short scene, which he was doing on Instagram.
Also, do New Zealanders play keepy uppy? When you bounce a football on your knee and see how many times you can do that without dropping it. A well known British game but maybe it's called something different in New Zealand?
~~~
“G’day mate,” said the Australian. “Sorry, we're playing keepy uppy and the ball got away from us.” He was smirking as he picked up the football.
“Don't be such a flaming galah.” L threw the ball at N.
“Strewth mate, that’s 50 already.”
“Here we are,” said L. “Enjoy, you pair of hoons.”
sometimes, I think of ponies
Jul. 17th, 2025 08:43 amsolarbirdHave you ever noticed that every projection about “AGI” and “superintelligence” has an “and then a miracle occurs” step?
I have.
I shouldn’t say every projection – there are many out there, and I haven’t seen them all. But every one I’ve personally seen has this step. Somewhere, sometime, fairly soon, generative AI will create something that triggers a quantum leap in capability. What will it be? NOTHING MERE HUMANS CAN UNDERSTAND! Oh, sometimes they’ll make up something – a new kind of transistor, a new encoding language (like sure, that’ll do it), whatever. Sometimes they just don’t say. Whatever it is, it happens, and then we’re off to the hyperintelligent AGI post-singularity tiems.
But the thing is … the thing is … for Generative AI to create a Magic Something that Changes Everything – to have this miracle – you have to already have hyperintelligent AGI. Since you don’t… well…
…that’s why it’s a miracle. Whether they realise it or not.
I’m not sure which is worse – that they do realise it, and know they’re bullshitting billions of dollars away from productive society to build up impossible wealth before the climate change they’re helping make worse fucks everything so they can live like feudal kings from their bunkers, or whether they don’t, and are spirit dancing, wanking off technofappic dreams of creating a God who will save the world with its AI magic, a short-term longtermism, burning away the rest of the carbon budget in a Hail Mary that absolutely will not connect.
Both possibilities are equally batshit insane, I know that much. To paraphrase a friend who knows far more about the maths of this than I, all the generative AI “compute” in the universe isn’t going to find fast solutions to PSPACE-HARD problems. It’s just not.
And so, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, I think of…
…I think of putting a short reading/watching list out there, a list that I hesitate to put together in public, because the “what the actual fuck” energies are so strong – so strong – that I can’t see how anyone could take it seriously. And yet…
…so much of the AI fantasia happening right now is summed by three entirely accessible works.
Every AI-fantasia idea, particularly the ideas most on the batshit side…
…they’re all right here. And it’s all fiction. All of it. Some of it is science-shaped; none of it is science.
But Alice, you know, we’re all mad here. So… why not.
Let’s go.
1: Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
This is the “bad end” you see so much in “projections” about AI progression. A new one of these timelines just dropped, they have a whole website you can play with. I’m not linking to it because why would I, holy shit, I don’t need to spread their crazy. But there’s a point in the timeline/story that they have you read – I think it’s in 2027 – when you can make a critical choice. It’s literally a one-selection choose-your-own-path adventure!
The “good” choice takes you to galactic civilisation managed by friendly hyperintelligent AGI.
The “bad” choice is literally the plot of The Forbin Project with an even grimmer ending. No, really. The beats are very much the same. It’s just The Forbin Project with more death.
Well. And a bioweapon. Nukes are so messy, and affect so much more than mere flesh.
2: Blindsight, by Peter Watts (2006)
This rather interesting – if bleak – novel presents a model of cognition which lays out an intriguing thought experiment, even if it … did not sit well with what I freely admit is my severely limited understanding of cognition.
(It is not helped that it directly contradicts known facts about the cognition of self-awareness in various animals, and did so even when it was published. That doesn’t make it a worse thought experiment, however. Or a worse novel.)
It got shortlisted – deservedly – for a bunch of awards. But that’s not why it’s here. It’s here because its model of cognition is functionally the one used by those who think generative AI and LLMs can be hyperintelligent – or even functionally intelligent at all.
And it’s wrong. As a model, it’s just wrong.
Finally, we get to the “what.” entry:
3: Friendship is Optimal, by Iceman (2012)
Friendship is Optimal is obviously the most obscure of these works, but also, I think maybe the most important. It made a big splash in MLP fandom, before landing like an absolute hand grenade in the nascent generative AI community when it broke containment. Maybe not in all of that latter community – but certainly in the parts of which I was aware. So much so, in fact, that it made waves even beyond that – which is when I heard of it, and how I read it.
And yes… it’s My Little Pony fanfic.
Sorta.
It’s that, but really it’s more an explicit AI takeoff story, one which is absolutely about creating a benevolent hyperintelligent Goddess AI construct who can, will, and does remake the world, destroying the old one behind her.
Sound familiar?
These three works include every idea behind every crazy line of thought I’ve seen out of the Silicon Valley AI crowd. These three works right here. A novel or a movie (take your choice, the movie’s quite good, I understand the novel is as well), a second novel, and a frankly remarkable piece of fanfic.
For Musk’s crowd in particular? It’s all about the model presented in Friendship is Optimal, except, you know, totally white supremacist. They’re even kinda following the Hofvarpnir Studios playbook from the story, but with less “licensed property game” and a lot more more “Billionaire corporate fascism means you don’t have to pay employees anymore, you can just take all the money yourself.”
…which is not the kind of sentence I ever thought I’d write, but here we are.
You can see why I’m hesitant to publish this reading list, but I also hope you can see why I want to.
If you read Friendship is Optimal, and then go look at Longtermerism… I think you definitely will.
So what’re we left with, then?
Some parts of this technology are actually useful. Some of it. Much less than supports the valuations, but there’s real use here. If you have 100,000 untagged, undescribed images and AI analysis gives 90% of them reasonable descriptions, that’s a substantial value add. Some of the production tools are good – some of them are very good, or will be, once it stops being obvious that “oh look, you’ve used AI tools on this.” Some of the medical imaging and diagnostic tools show real promise – though it’s always important to keep in mind that antique technologies like “Expert Systems” seemed just as promising, in the lab.
Regardless, there’s real value to be found in those sorts of applications. These tasks are where it can do good. There are many more than I’ve listed, of course.
But AGI? Hyperintelligence? The underlying core of this boom, the one that says you won’t have to employ anyone anymore, just rake in the money and live like kings?
That entire project is either:
A knowing mass fraud inflating a bubble nobody’s seen in a century that instead of breaking a monetary system might well finish off any hopes for a stable climate in an Enron-like insertion of AI-generated noise followed by AI-generated summarisation of that noise that no one reads and serves no purpose and adds no value but costs oh, oh so very much electricity and oh, oh, oh so very much money;
A power play unlike anything since the fall of the western Roman empire, where the Church functionally substituted itself in parallel to and substitute of of the Roman government to the point that the latter finally collapsed, all in service of setting up a God’s Kingdom on Earth to bring back Jesus, only in this case, it’s setting up the techbro billionaires as a new nobility, manipulating the hoi polloi from above with propaganda and disinformation sifted through their “AI” interlocutors;
Or an absolute psychotic break by said billionaires and fellow travellers so utterly unwilling and utterly unable to deal with the realities of climate change that they’ll do anything – anything – to pretend they don’t have to, including burning down the world in the service of somehow provoking a miracle that transcends maths and physics in the hope that some day, some way, before it’s too late, their God AI will emerge and make sure everything ends up better… in the long term.
Maybe, even, it’s a mix of all three.
And here I thought my reading list was the scary part.
Silly me.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
The Big Idea: Allee Mead
Jul. 17th, 2025 01:23 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Sometimes, we all need a friend. And sometimes, that friend is a robot that accompanies you to social events so you don’t have to go alone. Follow along in author Allee Mead’s Big Idea as they tell you about how real life feelings of disconnection led to their newest novella, Isaac.
ALLEE MEAD:
I began writing Isaac at a time in my life when I felt disconnected. I had friends at work but didn’t see them much outside of it. I didn’t chat with my grad school classmates. My most cherished loved ones lived a 5-hour drive away. One day, my town was putting on a free concert of a 90s band whose music I enjoyed. I texted only one person to see if she wanted to go, but she didn’t see the message until the next day.
I began imagining a woman who owned a humanoid robot (“android” is the correct term, but “robot” was the word bouncing around my head) purely for social events. She kept him in the closet and only powered him on when she wanted to go to a movie or restaurant. In this vision, the robot finally gained enough sentience to ask if she’d leave him on for the night; eventually he left the house to see the world.
I wondered what kind of character this nameless woman was: where she’d gotten the robot, whether she had enough initiative to purchase him or if she somehow stumbled upon him. The story snowballed until the woman had a name and an estranged family and the robot had a clearer purpose.
Now, despite writing a futuristic story about androids, I’m not a fan of new technologies. I got my first smartphone in 2015 at the age of 24, but I still power on my laptop anytime I want to make an online purchase. I don’t have social media and I once asked a friend if I could drive to her house and drop off cash instead of setting up Venmo. I’m at best ambivalent about technology’s ability to help people connect. I’m also someone who tends to sit on the fence instead of developing a clear opinion about something.
So as I wrote Isaac, I asked myself, “What ways will Isaac help Eleanor reconnect with the world, and what ways will he limit her?” I wrote scenes where Isaac’s presence encouraged Eleanor to go out more than she normally would: to see movies, plays, and concerts; to try new restaurants; and even to go to a bar on a crowded weekend night. I also wrote a scene in which Eleanor is all dressed up and ready to go out, only to find Isaac in the middle of a software update. She misses the play she wanted to attend, stewing in anger until Isaac enters the room. In another scene, her workplace is planning its annual picnic; Eleanor’s excited to go until she can’t think of a story to tell her coworkers about why Isaac isn’t eating.
Ultimately, I cut these last two scenes. What I potentially lost in deleting these scenes of technological limitations I gained in the juxtaposing moments of Eleanor’s fathers John and Javi. While we don’t see John wrestling with new technology, we watch him connect with Javi. Javi, who easily makes friends wherever he goes, encourages John to reach out to his therapist and join a parent support group. John learns that he doesn’t have to do everything on his own, and Javi learns to put down roots. In these moments, it’s less about the limits of technology and more about the benefits of genuine human connection in its many forms: platonic, romantic, and community.
Isaac: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Space Wizard Science Fantasy
Author socials: Website
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