Loons

ed zitron, a tech beat reporter, wrote an article about a recent paper that came out from goldman-sachs calling AI, in nicer terms, a grift. it is a really interesting article; hearing criticism from people who are not ignorant of the tech and have no reason to mince words is refreshing. it also brings up points and asks the right questions:

if AI is going to be a trillion dollar investment, what trillion dollar problem is it solving?

what does it mean when people say that AI will "get better"? what does that look like and how would it even be achieved? the article makes a point to debunk talking points about how all tech is misunderstood at first by pointing out that the tech it gets compared to the most, the internet and smartphones, were both created over the course of decades with roadmaps and clear goals. AI does not have this.

the american power grid straight up cannot handle the load required to run AI because it has not been meaningfully developed in decades. how are they going to overcome this hurdle (they aren't)?

people who are losing their jobs to this tech aren't being "replaced". they're just getting a taste of how little their managers care about their craft and how little they think of their consumer base. ai is not capable of replacing humans and there's no indication they ever will because...

all of these models use the same training data so now they're all giving the same wrong answers in the same voice. without massive and i mean EXPONENTIALLY MASSIVE troves of data to work with, they are pretty much as a standstill for any innovation they're imagining in their heads

“Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?”

— Charles D’Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum: Stories

Love to see me reaching for re-reads for comfort and not being able to focus on reading a physical version... o.o On re-read, I want to rate both Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth as 5 star reads because I got so much out of this read. Plus Moira Quirk is FANTASTIC narrator. Her performance added so much depth to the books.

February hopefuls:

🦢 City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim

⛵ Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

🏺 Empire of Exiles by Erin M. Evans

☠️ Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (audiobook reread)

Continuing on from here my personal take on writing romance is there are three essential components: care/affection, profound mutual understanding and intense mutual admiration.

If you have all three you have the bones for something not just functional but aspirational. If you have the first and second but not the third, you have something that may be more of a deep, strong friendship but I can understand and appreciate the romantic overtones. If you have the second and third but not the first that's classic archenemy-shipping. If you have the first and third but are struggling on the second you have the bones of a painful tragedy. If you only have one, then what you have is probably not a romance, and my real quarrel is with people who think you only need the first.

touch-starvation needs to be written with emphasis on the starving part. you are hungry to be touched. so hungry that even the very taste of it makes you nauseous. it has been long since anything has ever touched you, ever fed you - that your body has grown more used to that gnawing emptiness more than anything else. it's better for you to be held, to eat but it makes you sick to try. you know

Listen. I get that he was in the wrong for “turning those cows inside out” and “eating the entire solar system” but John Gaius was so real for having apocalyptic levels of rage towards trillionaires. He’s really just like us. Rip John Gaius you would have loved killing the entire human race to make Elon Musk face consequences of his actions 💕