#BruceSterling

*Also the super-potent. super-cheap slopware has these subtler issues that Andrej Karpathy describes here

*So, what does next year's "software" look and feel like, when it's very sophisticated and capable, it has nice slop graphics, ten million lines of it are too cheap to meter, it's cheap or free to use (at your own risk), and it's really, really insecure

"Oh heck no, ICE isn't a fascist death squad!" said no American in Italy, even at the gloating and sinister US State Dept

*They have big house-parties. #SteampunkInc #ICE

youtu.be/vOUUM7dRTBM?...

*You're not "all in" unless you're willing to storm the Senate and go to jail for The Donald

*If there was some new regime in DC, I'm pretty sure that ol' Jeff would promptly pivot toward the New Whateverness and maybe even angle for wife #3

*Jeff doesn't get it that Everything Trump Touches Dies

*I would agree with this, and say furthermore that it's healthy to immerse yourself in activities where you CAN'T POSSIBLY get any good

*Like "being Turinese," for instance. Everyone knows I'll never do that, and yet I learn something new every day

*Well, you're gonna love this peppy essay, then

medium.com/@elvirabary/...

*These guys seem fun. Since they comb the social web for people dissing ICE, they must be working overtime this week.

wiki.icelist.is/index.php/Gi...

*Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" but streamlined by Big Tech.

*A list of the biggest American corporate fans of ICE here. It's everybody you might plausibly expect and then some.

wiki.icelist.is/index.php?ti...

Steampunk

"Steampunk Inc," who got $174 million for providing ICE cybersecurity. #steampunk

wiki.icelist.is/index.php/St...

*Hmm. Well, that's the movie biz, except that it isn't. It just RESEMBLES a "movie." #bribery #BigTech #Amazon #oligarchy

filmstories.co.uk/news/melania...

"Melania herself is pocketing $28 million from the licensing sale," so it's a hit from the First Lady's perspective, at least

*And once you do notice that about Trump, you can understand that "sanewashing" applies to every aspect of human affairs; that "news" exists not to reveal existential truths, but to provide a comforting lacquer over the raw chaos

*Who is supposed to be reading superhuman physics papers? Other AI instances, I guess, but why would they bother?

*Also, why do AIs ever "write" any "papers"? Shouldn't they just swap weights and upload to code-bases?

*Like weeping Russians used to say about Stalin, "Sure, he ran everything with an iron hand, but when he died he didn't have a penny in his pocket"

*He's gonna invent something else to hop over the Minnesota contretemps

*Divorcing Melania for being an Epstein hooker, for instance. Then, marrying somebody fantastically implausible

The Zero-Human Company, which is to say, the ideal cybercriminal accomplice

"Hey, who paid to burn that Reichstag?" oh, you know, no malefactor in particular

*Go ahead, indict him for it! He lives in a cloud

*What a terrific cut-out for electronic crimes of every possible description

*Do the disembodied open-source Asimov legs obey the "three laws of robotics," well, no, but that would be a lot to ask from 3DPrinted legs

*Be careful not to AI-ketamine the world on its ear until you have the trademark issues settled #singulariity(TM) #shoggoth(TM)

How Bad Are A.I. Delusions? We Asked People Treating Them.

*Ai, Ketamine, or getting nudged into flat-out psychosis

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/u...

*Subterranean postal system there. "We Await Silent Trystero's Empire"

*Sci-fi books did not write this because of the HG Wells principle that "if anything is possible than nothing is interesting"

*The Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence made up that term in 1956 because they didn't like the mushy term "cybernetics"

*It's interesting to see these spontaneous science-fiction dystopias in tweet form

wholewhale.com/tips/the-hid...

*Speaking of respect for Robert Crumb, did you ever seen this remarkably insightful sci-fi dystopia Crumb created (and which I blame him for):

*Probably not as disrespectful as auditing Crumb's taxes so he had to permanently flee the USA

*I could hand-draw that cartoon as a normal "parody" instead of just slopping-it-out as a parody, but that might be even MORE disrespectful to Crumb

*They'll all mellow out when Claude-for-Living persuades them to be less abrasive

*This is also a very second-quarter-of-21st-century remark