#BruceSterling

*It's 25 years from now and you're like: "I'm flying to Belgrade, Serbia for my A)-Biotech medical upgrade, because it's legal and cheap over there"

*What's worse: a make-believe civil war with fake invasions, or politicians pulling a walkaway where the last one out of the bureaucracy turns off the lights forever

*If "workslop" is generated product that ticks the checkboxes of labor without advancing the mission, then what does "playslop" look like? "Leisure activity" with no real amusement, like automating the grind in a videogame, maybe

*I guess I'm sub-skeeting him here, but this highly distinguished computer scientist was on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society and on the US President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, and yet he still can't manage with Apple's dreadful bullshit

*Pretty sure that these harmless Rotterdam art-hippie urbanites would qualify as "globalization terrorists" over at the U.S. War Dept

www.engagerotterdam.nl/en-us/manifest

*It was a deliberated career choice really: "Why is this 70-year-old sci-fi guy rewriting the same trilogy for the fourth time"

Or else: "He was '80s Cyberpunk Underground, and nowadays he's so freakin' underground that even four different intelligence services never know where he lives" 👍🤖🚀🖋️

*I always knew this day would come if I lived long enough: "Didn't he used to be Bruce Sterling, whatever happened to him"

*It's kind of exciting

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work," as Gustave Flaubert used to say

*When he wasn't catching syphilis in Beirut, and all that

*To quote a guy on Mastodon:

We went from "we will deport the worst of the worst" to "we will deport anyone here illegally" to "we will round up anyone who looks wrong" to "people who live in cities are the enemy" essentially overnight.

*it's surprisingly common for political activists to grow by the size of their enemies. It's like some kind of Robert Boyle Gas Law. The political pressure bloats the least likely balloons

*Anybody who has studied the extensive saga of French history knows that France is never too big to fail. Even a Napoleonic Imperial France half as big as all Europe is not too big for an abject collapse: swords, ostrich feathers, leopard-skins and all

*Maybe they should rename themselves "Antiglobalist Security," to fit with the "War Department" thing

I'm inclined to agree, but there are some micro-ethnic groups scattered here and there whose weirdness goes underappreciated. Mom, dad, the kids are weird... and Grandpa, 3 times as weird

*Especially if he's into math

*Here, in another SF story which isn't "Il Versificatore," Primo Levi has it figured out that a cybernetic machine that writes poetry would also offer spiritual counsel to the users, ChatGPT psychoanalysis-style.

*How did Levi do that #prophecy

*You can "correct" slop, but it's rather like oil-painting, where you have to brush-on an additional layer of more finely-diluted slopness.

*The left one is the earlier one. And it's "better." More of the AI frisson

*I wonder how much money these phishing guys make and how do they make it

*Maybe they're hapless slaves in a camp in Myanmar

*You look at "weird" science fiction people and, like, how many of them do any time in prisons and madhouses

*Not all that many, really. Surprisingly few.

*They might have a *day-job* as some orderly in one of those places

*Science fiction writers are not the weirdest people that I've ever hung out with, but there are some SF creatives who really are pretty darn weird

*Well, there's Tanith Lee (1947-2015). Upstaging Chelsea Quinn Yarbro twice in Chelsea's own obituary

*Our Tanith, man, that was a real-deal weird fantasy writer

*What if "War Stars" is written with otherworldly ChatGPT multidisciplinary erudition and is much more interesting than some L.A. studio product from the young George Lucas

*Every Jawa from Tattooine has a unique generated backstory ten million pages long

"Creative writer"? Trump hates you and wants you replaced with slop

Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar to Support a New Business Model for the AI-Driven Internet | Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced plans to introduce NET Dollar, a new U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin that will enable instant, secure transactions f...

*Isn't this just "Facebook Libra" six years later with some "AI" painted on?

www.cloudflare.com/en-au/press/...

Universal basic income won't save us from AI. Here's why Universal basic income, or UBI, has been floated as a potential solution for the coming AI revolution. But experts warn it's far from a perfect fix

*A nonhuman AI "economics" where there's no such thing as a "job." Would there be no "consumers" and no "advertising," either

qz.com/universal-ba...

"Creating an ignorance-base: Exploring known unknowns in the scientific literature"

"Unlock your AI access" so as to "read strategically"🤖

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

*Writing "science fiction" about sciences that don't exist or can't exist, that's very Borges, it's very Stanislaw Lem

*Kinda "caviar for the multitude," but that's not gonna stop me. The multitude have their own favorite issues and I have mine, okay 🤖🖋️🚀

*Being a science fiction writer, I tend to look for the "oxymorons" instead of the "empty holes," but I'm extremely keen on approaches like this

*I'm not sure it matters much if AIs explore the "previously unthinkable" in the "holes," but at least that's not "baked-in," so it's easy to notice

*Heck yeah. "Permissionless artificial intelligence." Nobody ever asked your permission to install it. It's just "baked in" there, world-wide, and you use it the way you'd "use" nanoplastics or extra carbon-dioxide.

*On the plus side, I can't be scolded for it. Who even knew it was there

*Even neologism fans can "use Artificial Intelligence" #ChatGPT

*Okay. So what I'm looking for here is, doing some "text-mining," and somebody unearths a jewel in that mine, and it's a durable crystal that has a size and properties that no human being ever saw or expected

*That would clearly be the opposite of "slop," like, some valuable ultra-rare diamond

*It's legendary in the AI field that as soon as people start practically "using Artificial Intelligence," then people immediately stop calling it "Artificial Intelligence"

*Like some "instant archaeologism" phenomenon, like stick-on labels evaporating off a red-hot surface