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!
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