Daniel Abraham

Nominating “qliphotic” as the adjective of the age.

This is a great demonstration of the difference between actively malicious (not on display) and just absolutely morally bankrupt (which hoo boy)

NEW AD: Have you seen these anti-Talarico attack ads? Elon Musk paid for nearly all of them. The world's first trillionaire knows if he drags the most corrupt politician in Texas across the finish line, Ken Paxton will owe him everything. Elon Musk: Texas is not for sale.

Remember when the Democrats sidelined an incumbent president because his age was giving people concerns about his fitness to serve? Such a weird thing.

I remain kind of amazed that the horse in the hospital party is so thoroughly dedicated to keeping a horse in the hospital. I genuinely would have thought that at some point it would have seemed better to put the horse elsewhere.

Honestly assumed this was satire, but people are treating it like it’s real? Like a real ad for Copilot and how it can make sure one’s bloated, water-logged ego can devour enough praise to distract from the essential waste of life.

James SA Corey wrote the last book in the Star Wars expanded universe before Disney bought it and consigned the whole thing to Star Wars Legends. It was a giggle.

Just had a push poll trying convince me that New Mexico shouldn’t fine Facebook so much. I was mostly able to keep from yelling at the pollster. I would 100% be ok with a state-run platform for small businesses to take up slack when Meta fucks all the way off of my state.

There’s a generation of priest and pastors out there that haven’t been doing their jobs. Satan is in the pulpit. Let the innocent beware.

There was a time I actually admired this guy. I feel dumb about that now.

I am in no way an expert on immigration issues, but I am surprised that the folks I think of as being most staunchly anti-union so often also want to get rid of the kind of vulnerable, easily exploited workers that one would usually use to bust unions.

Talking about LLMs and stoic with a friend brought up two interesting points: — What would “transcendental shallowness” be? — Pattern matching and plagiarism are really quite closely related concept.

Being John Malkovich for Tax Purposes

This is why I am a long term supporter of the News Literacy Project, which educates students on how to tell reliable information from bad. newslit.org

THIS IS TRUE. As I just said in a recent appearance: fake news, propaganda, rage bait, bias-affirming slop, etc is a demand problem, not a supply one.

Voted early and in person

Angry neighbors stress me out.

Huh. Well that’s interesting.

It enshittified its product but was still burning tons of cash, its bankruptcy documents say.

pop pop

Dem comms staff: Please check your Meta security. RIGHT NOW. There's some kind of bug, and I was somehow given access back to a page for an elected official for a job I left in 2021. (I created the page originally, so I'm assuming that's how that happened?) But this official has -

Wait. The David Brooks from the Epstein files, or is there a different one?

I've been toying around a lot with the idea of libidinal rationality, which is when people act not according to strict rationality of maximising profit or returns or sustainability, but toward what provides them with libidinal satisfaction, which trumps everything else

I do wonder about the overlap between the kind of readers who decry “plot armor” and sadists. There are writers who I fell out of love with because I got tired of sucker punches disguised as realism. I can *absolutely* be trained not to emotionally invest in your characters.

I love Slow Horses, but the characters could stand a little more plot armo.

A book is only as good as its reader.

This is common. This exact story happened to multiple IRL friends not just internet folks.

So Muse is a software that asks for all your personal data, and then does *stuff* with an unknown, non-zero error rate? If my assistant accidentally pulled forms for a gym that I 1) didn’t belong to and 2) didn’t live in the same state, I’d assume they were ill. www.wsj.com/podcasts/the...

I remain impressed with how much of the conversation around AI glosses over how often it gets things wrong in a “of course everyone knows this” way. It is the central and unfixable structural flaw of LLMs.

through no particular intention, I have read Pollan’s A World Appears, Moore’s Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, Dehane’s Reading and the Brain, and now Zeman’s The Shape of Things Unseen. Strange year.

Going to be honest this might be my favourite headline of the AI bubble

For values of mind-boggling approaching very, very predictable

A thing I learned not too long ago is that when an LLM selects a token that leads it down an incorrect path (factually), it has no way to back up, or even know that it should back up, it's just on to the next likely bit. Literally every LLM is just posting their way through it. What an image.

AI as Procrustean lifestyle tool. I am so not interested in playing that gam.

For my ABQ peeps, Launch event tonight at Books on the Bosque! B&N Santa Fe on Saturday! New York City Comicon, where I’ll be appearing with the one and only Neil Newbon! (Did I mention what an incredible job he did narrating? HE SINGS A SEA SHANTY AS AN ENCHANTED HARP)

Giving AI its due: it has been useful for tracking down things with only random bits of information. (That one mystery novel about the artist and the fire where the audiobook reader’s name started with X) Not convinced that’s worth staking the whole economy on, but…. 🤷

Surprising how many of these discoveries appear because some human already put them in the dataset. Wait, no. Not surprising. The other thing.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe turns out to be the most important artistic insight for the 2020s. I maybe can't tell what images are on a screen are representations of real events, but that dog on my couch is a dog.

I have been reminded of an old line: Authors don’t get paid to write. We get paid to suffer the casual judgment of others.