Bruce Sterling is active on social media but he’s pretty forward-looking. I tried complimenting his Heavy Weather from the early 90s and get a self-deprecating dismissal.
Early Gibson short stories are tinged with late 70s SF, not surprisingly.
Incidentally superhero movies are current western SF/fantasy hybrids.
I wonder how much of “the cyberpunk movement” in SF was authors getting sick and tired of “woo” psi powers etc. For me personally it really felt like a breath of fresh air.
I don’t know anything about Abe apart from him being a right-winger. Was he also very very worried about Japan’s birthrate (just like Hackernews is)?
“Gross thrice-married orange man wants you to bonk more” is gonna be a hard sell but rest assured, his pals in tech will make sure their ad selection supports it.
25+ years… i.e. Bush II instituted a new Golden Age but it was betrayed by (checks notes) radical Marxists??
At least set the start of “Western society solidity” at 1989…
I keep forgetting so many people online are very, very young.
An morewronger discusses the “points system” implemented by the Ukrainian armed forces where soldiers can spend points earned by destroying Russian targets on new drone hardware
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sJpwvYsC5tJis8onw/the-ukraine-war-and-the-kill-market
Lots of wittering about markets and Gotthards law, but what struck me was
Now, this is clearly a repugnant market. Repugnant market is a market where some people would like to engage in it and other people think they shouldn’t. (Think market in human kidneys. Or prostitution. Or the market in abortions. […])
(my emphasis)
What “market in abortion”, motherfucker???
A dimly flickering light in the darkness: lobste.rs has added a new tag, “vibecoding”, for submissions related to use “AI” in software development. The existing tag “ai” is reserved for “real” AI research and machine learning.
An hackernews responds to the call for “more optimistic science fiction” with a plan to deport the homeless to outer space
Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
sinks like a pellet of uranium on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43825285
edit flagged and dead
“The millenials were so well paid in tech jobs during the boom that they nevered bothered to invest in homes” is … a take
Just a standard story about a lawyer using GenAI and fucking up, but included for the nice list of services available
https://www.loweringthebar.net/2025/04/counsel-would-you-be-surprised.html
This is not by any means the first time ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Bard, or Copilot, or Claude, or Jasper, or Perplexity, or Steve, or Frodo, or El Braino Grande, or whatever stupid thing it is people are using, has embarrassed a lawyer by just completely making things up.
El Braino Grande is the name of my next band GenAI startup
We have that already, it’s called ads.
when people do stuff like dismissing x-risk because their top Google search result pointed them at RationalWiki, what exactly was the proper non-free-speech-limiting solution to this problem?
How can we leverage the monopoly of violence of the state to promote our religious views?
Inside baseball, and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but LW is crowing over a legal loss for RationalWiki
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW5tjMmTqsoRa6zrd/pablo-s-shortform?commentId=wB9jcCPrXzNCLCQXL
They link to a TracingWoodgrain(!) tweet which is basically just a screenshot of a talk page
https://xcancel.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1913717061626347642
I don’t know the significance of this, if any. I don’t recognize the names of any of the plaintiffs(?) in the screenshot, so I find it a bit amusing that probably the only google juice they had were RW.
YIL there was a right-wing antisemitic US general called Moseley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Van_Horn_Moseley
Nominative determinism?
You still can’t be an outright Nazi without people getting mad at you. Obviously unacceptable.
TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW
The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]
Yeah I’m sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a “draconian censorship regime”
[1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania
JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don’t wanna bypass their paywall
Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers […]
They’re Internet Native/Terminally Online, so they can SEO their own appearances, plus now they are fully plugged-in to the right-wing hype machine so they’re probably turning down appearances instead of chasing them.