Today in signs of changing times, “we used to call that a botnet”: https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/

I see a bunch of people riffing on how The Art of War is obvious etc etc, but it seems few people keep in mind that this is advice for very powerful people of the time, the kind of guys who would be kicked in the head by a horse every day.

People who understand how power and lack of resources fucks with a person don’t usually get to tell armies to go fight a war, so those who do need to be told by a guy they’d let execute their favorite wife. (Also, probably the whole Seinfeld Is Unfunny trope…)

Here’s a pretty extensive rant/critique of how specifically GitHub is awful to use (and compares it to gitlab and also forgejo/codeberg).

Code forges render an empty repository using less than a million bytes challenge level impossible, etc etc

Yeah, I wish I had skipped it. Dropped the book at the 66% mark, where it was already too late for me ):

I still have to check out Rainbows End, sounds like it’s really great. That one other non-Fire short story/novella of his I read was … very mid (and pretty cringe in places)

When you wrote “he’s such a good writer”, I assumed you hadn’t read Children of the Sky… a book that urgently needed an editor with a spray bottle and the power to yell “No! Bad Vernor!” multiple times a minute.

Re-reading the preceding parts after Children has also fixed my impression of his writing ability, tbh.

Send more tech billionaires to space, more often, for longer: https://web.archive.org/web/20220117205028/https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/we-dont-know-why-but-being-in-space-causes-us-to-destroy-our-blood/

I’m sure he is regretting his part in bringing online a major player in this fashtech fashion scene. Bet there’s a bunch of tears-wiping with dollar bills going on.

It’s been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.

Hey, remember Pascal’s wager? What if we got the leader of the church to be part of our new “ai ethics” product launch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-18/anthropic-s-co-founder-to-launch-encyclical-on-ai-with-pope-leo?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3OTExMTY3NCwiZXhwIjoxNzc5NzE2NDc0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJURjhGMjNLSkg2VkcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4QjVENTdBQTJGNjY0RTdCOEQ4NkUxMzcwMDNDMkVDNCJ9.OEFYqROFrqezWHTRznaz9xKZCem4PIY99uXzZJ3bWQQ&leadSource=uverify+wall

Publish and perish!

oneshotted, a term that means, roughly, to be destroyed and subsequently remade by a single experience.

Strikes me as incorrectly translated. The remaking is extremely optional, in fact that definition feels like defining blackpilling as being healed by vile propaganda.

Those bacteria better be so supreme they can’t even be killed with regular antibiotics

Yup. If their backups (if they even had any) were this available to a rando with a single ssh key, it’s lucky they got wiped by an insider threat instead of ransomware.

Another day, another company that hooked up the random text generator to production and lost their entire prod db and backups: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue

Cue the long drag (https://x.com/amyngyn/status/1072576388518043656)

But also, damn, the random text generator did not “go rogue”, it generated text, randomly!

Is there a more generalized form of “weird hill to die on but at least you’re dead”? Because a new-to-me way for too-rich people to end their gullible lives has emerged https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/30/1134780/r3-bio-brainless-human-clones-full-body-replacement-john-schloendorn-aging-longevity/

As a pal remarks, finally they found a novel way to use the blockchain for drugs.

Good news for a change: https://pitchfork.com/news/bandcamp-announces-ban-on-ai-music/

A German writing Manifest Destiny fan fiction without any idea of the facts on the ground? We seem to have here a Karl May cosplayer.

It’s no comfort that an acquaintance who works at a slop company says they’d been doing that for years now. That surely makes it fine then.

I’ve never seen a more compelling reason to enforce strict and short retention rules for every corp communication medium, holy shit https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/