Phillip Irving

Tweet (yes, ugh, I know) from Seth Harper of New Yorker story on AI: The biggest capital outlay ever, for a product that no one will pay for. OpenAl loses ten billion dollars a quarter. There is no path to profitability for subprime Al. These absurd data centers will stand sentinel over the ruins of our fake economy like moai on Easter Island.

Via Gary Marcus.

Wow.

Fortunately the bar kicked us out before too late!

Just noticed that the pocket programme for #worldfantasyconvention2025 has cut the 9.00PM slots off the programme grid for today (Thursday). They are there to see in the full listings! @worldfantasy2025.bsky.social

Yes! Been too long 🙂

Having great Thai food in Brighton ahead of the start of #worldfantasycon2025 tomorrow. First panel (ever!) will be Satirical Fantasy in Edinburgh Panel Room 3 tomorrow at 21.00 😊

Caitlin Rozakis World Fantasy Convention Schedule Thurs Oct 30 9PM Satirical Fantasy Fri Oct 31 8-10PM Mass Autograph Session Sun Nov 2 10AM Reading

Going to the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, UK next week? I'll be there!

Thurs 30 Oct
9-10PM
Satirical Fantasy
Me! (moderator), with @irvingphil.bsky.social , @mikebrooks668.bsky.social, and Karin J. Robinson!

"But when the team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20% slower when using AI than when working without it. Researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome. We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.”

🎁link

Disney has the opportunity to make the loudest political statement by any media organisation in history.

By moving to Canada.

I'm looking for an artist to do a book cover. Full disclosure - I'm on a time crunch. I would need it by August 1st. I know what I want on the cover, and I'm looking for a realistic style. I can give more info. Drop your examples of your work below.
#BookSky💙📚 #ArtSky

Cannot imagine ADHD being survivable as a vampire.

“I thought sunrise was in an hour?”
“That was an hour ago.”
“That was never an”

As I recover from the much-underpromoted but fantastic #Leicester Comedy Festival, I’m eyeing up #Derby Comedy Festival in May/June, with a couple of late March and mid-May spots to tide me over. Great to see #standup #comedy doing so well in the #EastMidlands.

Well done @irvingphil.bsky.social last night for winning Some-Antics

Never been able to find a transcript, but Audrey Niffenegger's LonCon PEN speech was along the lines of writing being the act of giving others access to the unique way you see the world that no one else does. I think secret garden was her metaphor. I always think back to that if I'm having a wobble.

It’s a play that Agatha Christie wrote 🙂 well worth a watch.

Only loosely based on the events of the board game, so still worth checking out…

They cant get my data if i am Fully Dissolved in a bath tub full of sodium hydroxide

😂

In fairness, from 2001 onwards, the mere mention of Sean Bean can be read as a spoiler.

The very mention of a novel in that context carries dire implications.
“Of course, we’re going to *have* to mention A Game of Thrones…”
“Why do they have to mention A Game of Thrones?!”

I’m very spoiler averse so would probably be the person a few minutes into the panel thinking ‘oh my God what have I done?’. Wouldn’t complain about it in that context though!

If you sang it in the North East people would think you and your friends had an elephant

This is literally what I was looking for in the replies

This is an example of extreme reactions being represented as common behaviour (for “anti-spoiler culture”?😂). I think most of us avoid major revelations ahead of time and, given that there are quite a lot of books, how long a book has been out isn’t really a good indicator of whether it’s fair game.

Also worth keeping in mind that this varies by genre and by text, and that some writers/producers explicitly ask that spoilers not be shared - theatre whodunnit The Mousetrap has been running in the U.K. for decades and at the end asks people not to spoil it for others.

I like the variations in the NYT one - sometimes guessing the gimmick is integral to working out what on Earth the puzzle is doing, which adds a dimension U.K. crosswords don’t have.

I started out with the Telegraph when I was a teenager - think they’re a bit easier on the whole. Guardian varies a lot. They published a primer a while ago that was helpful in terms of how they construct different sorts of clues but I still find them sometimes utterly opaque!

I’m one of those sometimes I just click with a setter, sometimes I don’t, solvers. Helen is, unsurprisingly, more consistent!

Yep! Am at the point I can get it half the time without but some are very US-centric (which is fair enough, really!).

Needless to say, occasional searches to work out what the apparent answer to a Guardian clue is when it doesn’t look like a real word tend to be much more specific…

We use it a lot for crossword help! But that’s due to us compensating for a lack of US cultural context: Google’s results are hugely skewed toward US pop culture. Needs very specific prompts for anything other than mainstream results. And the autofill suggestions are better than the search results.

Is it some sort of meta* Field of Dreams thing? Because now I’ve thought of it I’m hard pressed to think of a better film metaphor for how I’d *like* to imagine the creation of Bluesky…

*as opposed to Meta, obviously

Google is objectively terrible as a free-to-use service across most of its products. No tech support at all for if things go wrong and, as you say, increasingly poor performance as it apparently substitutes AI for its existing algorithms long before AI is in any fit state for such use.

Oh no. Just did a [word] vs [word] Google lookup to check something and for the first time all the initial results were from AI proofreading sites 🤦🏻‍♂️