Josh Melican

39 that a moon has to shine! that a moon has to battle fascist street lights! that a moon has to get mixed up in that sordid business of car lights! that a moon has to constantly watch for ingénue skyscrapers! Enough to make a moon undignified. -Dionne Brand

"Enough to make a moon undignified."

Authoritarians love "Gen AI" because it
- Sounds confident even when factually wrong
- Broadly conforms to & reproduces their biases, off the shelf
- Lets them create bespoke realities (text, audio, moving & still image) which agree w/ their biases
- Degrades trust in knowledge/evidence/expertise…

How the web became unreadable, an article obscured by medium's pop up asking you to sign up to read the words that have already loaded.

Lmao

I had, in my own head, misremembered this as ‘kibble’ and leapt to an assumption that the pet food concept of kibble had grown from this PDK passage, and only just now realised my error thanks to you.

Man speaks to killer from beyond the grave in Arizona courtroom through Al video

I’m seeing a lot of outrage about this story but honestly it’s preferable to the old way of doing this which was both disrespectful of the deceased and traumatising for the puppeteer

[Velma]: Okay gang: Let's see who this technoscientific technosocial paradigm REALLY is!

[All]: Old Man Eugenics??!

[Old Man Eugenics]: And I would've gotten away with it too, if only it… Wait. I *Did* get away with it. I'm *Still* getting away with it! Huh. Welp… …See ya!

[All]: ☹️​

All of this is valuable perspective for writers in times when you need some motivation to push through

I finished five novels before BLACKBIRDS was ever published — none good and all necessary to write. That doesn’t include the many more novels I began and never finished. I still think of myself as a failed novelist — my failures outweigh my successes and I am glad for that. Failure teaches.

In a world of Matts, be a Derek.

A scruffy-looking-nerfherder of Millenia Falcon

Millenia Falcon?

Had a moment of realisation in the shower the other day which has led me to return to a novel I finished in 2019 and change the ending, so I’ve rewritten the pivot-point chapter this morning, scrapped about 16,000 words of the original Act 3, and back to the drafting phase.
Weird how writing works.

People disturbed by the way that Chinese AI systems seem to ignore information that’s inconvenient to Chinese authorities - the Tiananmen Square massacre for example - might want to think about what that implies for American AI systems.

Great work

Coal use to reach new peak – and remain at near-record levels for years Spike in fossil fuel use a result of global gas crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Apologies to Tooze, "polycrisis" is too technical. @greatdismal.bsky.social 's "Jackpot" is better (all our humor is gallows humor), but we need a new term for "self-inflicted sociopath-flamed soulcrushingly-stupid systemic clusterfuck we can't fix or ignore."

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

If you want to send it through I can have a read over Jan.
Heads-up I have only a passing broad-strokes knowledge of French Revolution, and haven’t played Bloodborne.

A hamster in a cardboard tube with the opening facing the camera. The hamster is crawling forward with one front paw raised.

"Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs..."

Either the subject /object distinction for who/whom or the subjunctive “if I were” rather than “if I was”

I found it! "Talk to Your Children About Two-Tongued Jeremy" by Theodore McCombs in Lightspeed. www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/talk...

Great news!

Hello folks,
I have reactivated this account and am migrating across from the bad place.

select all images with the ship of theseus

man what am i even supposed to do here

Currently, too many comparisons between “AI” and Magic serve to either hype up what “AI” can do, or wave away the things “AI” companies and designers want hidden from the public— indicating a fundamental misunderstand of both magic and “AI.” Both kinds of systems are internally consistent, even when built on rules which may seem—or are intended to be—opaque to outsiders. “AI’s” logics are put into relation arrayed around older, hidden systems of emotional resonance and symbolic association—and in the West, “power,” “supremacy,” “perfection” “individuality,” “liberty,” and “property” are among the most potent symbols of social attainment.

They’re built by people who hide their true goals and elide their responsibility by attributing both “objectivity” to the data and nearly ineffable powers to the “AI” itself. And these systems are built and deployed from logics which would see them work the wills of their creators and operators into the world. They’re built on logics of magic. But the present magic of “AI” is performed on us without our input, without our knowledge, and without our consent. There’s another word for that kind of magic; binding, subjugating magic performed on you against your will is called a curse.

My article "Any Sufficiently Transparent Magic…" is part of the journal American Religion's Fall 2023 roundtable "On Religion and Algorithms." I explore both religious & magical concepts w/in "AI," & the obfuscatory work done by hype-laden "AI" discourse. Hope you enjoy!
muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/articl...

UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges For the largest health insurer in the US, AI's error rate is like a feature, not a bug.

When we warn the real threat of AI is how it’s used against people in the present, not the fantasies that some day computers might think for themselves, this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about: health insurers using AI to deny care.

arstechnica.com/health/2023/...

#Novellavember day 5

The amazing Voidwitch saga by @cjwhite.bsky.social
Just a psychic revenge seeking space witch and her feline companion out for an adventure or three.
If you love the snarky Murderbot voice, space opera, or Stranger Things, this one is for you.
Bonus awesome Australian author

This feels like an endless cycle for me. The approaching dystopia outpaces my capacity to update the novel.

Once again we unfortunately discover that a coalition of the fearful, the ignorant, and the hateful is a powerful political force.
I so much want to insist that Australia is better than we repeatedly reveal ourselves to be, and yet here we are.