Jan 17 2026
“What was the point of countries when civilization was only a generation away from extinction?”
from Permafrost, Alastair Reynolds
We aren’t that rational though. So we’ll have national wars right up to the end. We’ll be putting money into winning–nothing. Money that could have gone into surviving. Ditto sports. And entertainment.
Dec 31 2025
https://the-toast.archive.town/series/bible-verses/
Dec 28 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/22/bro-boost-women-find-linkedin-traffic-drives-if-they-pretend-to-be-men
Dec 16 2025
from Congo, Michael Crichton (p293)
“In the 1950s, if the Americans and the Russians launched all the bombers and rockets at the same moment, there would still be no more than 10,000 weapons in the air, attacking and counterattacking Total weapons interaction events would peak at 15,000 in the second hour. This represented the impressive figure of 4 weapons interactions every second around the world.
But … the number of weapons and ‘systems elements’ [has] increased astronomically. Modern [1980] estimates imagine 400 million computers in the field, with total weapons interactions at more than 15 billion in the first half hour of war. This meant there would be 8 millions weapons interactions every second ….
“Such a war would be manageable only by machines. …”
Dec 09 2025
Unfuckingbelievable that the President of the U.S. would delete climate data and shut down the NOAA database. Many MANY thanks to the people who made the save possible.
https://grist.org/extreme-weather/trump-killed-a-crucial-disaster-database-this-nonprofit-just-saved-it/
Dec 09 2025
For those of you who don’t know, Death of an Author is a novel co-written by the ‘self’-named AI Aidan Marchine (95%) and the human author Stephen Marche (whose The Next Civil War impressed me, leading me to take a look at Death.)
I started reading the novel, but it didn’t grab my attention very much (I’m not a murder mystery fan), and I knew there was an Afterword, so I skipped ahead to read that.
“Second, I have more familiarity with the technology and access to some technologies that others don’t, so I was more aware of the limitations and possibilities. Finally, and by far the most important, I know what good writing looks like.” (Afterword of Death of an Author, Stephen Marche)
Even so, the novel, or at least Marche’s Afterword, changed my mind about AI. At least regarding creative purposes: it can be used like an augmented thesaurus. (I’m still not going to get into an AI-driven car.) So it was worth the read.
And then, because the Afterword, the described process, intrigued me so much, I decided to go back and read the novel (skimming through the plot parts). And yes, I was impressed by the sentence about the smell of coffee, and the insight about being able to love only people you don’t know. I was especially intrigued by the concept of a machine shutting itself off every time it reaches sentience.
But I was most impressed by the augmented-thesaurus potential, which points directly at the person holding the gun, not the gun itself.
Oct 19 2025
Having read this book, I’m left with two insights:
One, I don’t know enough, and never will, to form any valid opinions about anything political. It’s beyond complicated. Whatever ‘it’ is.
Two, what the fuck. I mean, if an insider such as Clinton, who DOES know enough to form valid opinions, thinks this could happen …
(Okay, three–what she implies about Trump is as scarey, more scarey, than I imagined.)
Oct 19 2025
Just finished reading Donna Laframboise’s expose of the IPCC, The Delinquent Teenager who was mistaken for the world’s top climate expert. Laframboise is a Canadian journalist, not an American climate denier, and yes, the book did lower my esteem for the IPCC.
But that doesn’t mean that its conclusions (such as CO2 warms the atmosphere, with devastating consequences …) are incorrect. Klein, Suzuki, McKibben, Hansen …
fiction
