Don't grok

It's only taken me two decades but I've worked out why I've never liked people using the term "grok", despite being a big nerd who's the right age to have read that Heinlein novel.

Using it is a way of reinforcing your sense of being part of a special group …

more ...

Terra Ignota

Too Like The Lightning
Seven Surrenders
The Will to Battle
Perhaps the Stars

New York City: Tor, 2016-2021

Ada Palmer

I wrote a review of the first part of Ada Palmer's novel (it's very much one book in four volumes) back when I read it in 2018. I caught up …

more ...

ChatGPT

Stories about AI have an impoverished visual grammar: bots that look like something from a 90s music video, all porcelain surfaces and dark hydraulic sinews, against corporate vaporwave neon swirls, or junk from DALL-E. I suppose there's a need to embody the disembodied, the same impulse that puts a CGI-rendered …

more ...


Emitting references

I put filters on "ChatGPT" and "LLM" on Mastodon because the constant flow of discourse, to which I was also contributing, was starting to wear me out, so I'm writing this post with a slightly guilty conscience.

Here's something about nerd culture which it has taken me longer than it …

more ...

Bots minus Twitter

I turned off the Twitter versions of my fleet of bots last week, and today I went through their various home pages and took out the Twitter timelines - which seem to have stopped working anyway - and replaced them with embedded timelines from their Mastodon incarnations, using Emfed, which was really …

more ...




Happy New Year

Last year was a really big one for me - I changed jobs and institutions just before the end of 2022, and was lucky enough to become a group lead in the new team in May. It's been challenging but really exciting, I feel like I'm getting a lot more out …

more ...