For the Hainish Cycle books the order doesn’t matter too much, they’re not direct sequels.

I started with (and would recommend starting with) The Left Hand of Darkness. The first 3 Hainish novels are also her first novels and she was still developing her style, in my opinion. I think The Dispossessed is her finest work, although I still haven’t read all of her novels.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Institution

“PED” (Program for Evolutionary Dynamics)

You can’t make this shit up.

Of course, the “AI Control” in Firefox for Android conveniently doesn’t include the “make a wanking motion-to-llm-summarize a-page” “feature” Mozilla has added.

The first I heard of a project doing this was iocaine, an anti-scraper tool (that I think awful.systems uses??) which has module names like “sex_dungeon” and “GargleBargle” intended to make the codebase unmanageable to navigate for llm tooling. It’s pretty funny that this has become an established technique.

Claude v6.0, “Tall Tale”

Claude v6.1 “Big Fish Story”

Molly White continuing to slam it out of the park with a pivot to AI. As always, worth a read in full, but this intro bit stuck out to me after reading lots of inane blather on how crypto and AI are different:

Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network. Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one, is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network. The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.

Eschatoken

If it’s this easy to coerce the Magic Eight Ball, what chance do the rest of us have against DOOM?!?

https://theintercept.com/2026/04/23/chatgpt-ai-false-confession-interrogation-crime/

“If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?”

I don’t have words for how stupid this is.

Topic adjacent, jazz musician/music theory youtuber Adam Neely has an 1hr30 video eviscerating Suno/AI music. Very high quality sneering with some wonderful Ben Levin animations.

why, the unlucky stiff

Yeah, I haven’t been feeling great about having to nod vigorously and feign enthusiasm for slop on every damn cover letter and interview I’ve had recently. The best I’ve managed is saying I only use it in professional capacity and try to emphasize the personal learning angle as a defense.

It’s brutal out there and I’m losing hope. I wish I had another industry I could pivot to await the passing of the bubble that gives me the flexibility to be a musician like remote work programming does.

I really wish this was my average experience trying to land another software gig in the past year…

I regret reading that in full. Really, read the opener summary, stop at “What if pee pee was poo poo” and you will be wiser and happier.

Insane that people got paid large sums to write this.

Commented [97]: if we simply imagine something that didn’t happen,

“Intelligence Displacement” indeed.

I need a shower.

I grow increasingly frustrated every time one of these ponderous essays fails to mention the gutter racist and eugenicist beliefs of these people. This dilution of what ‘far right’ means only serves their interests, and it’s malpractice to not mention that the racism is foundational to their origin and organization as a movement.

I expect better of the New Yorker; it’s disappointing to see their writers following the path of the New York Times.

2020s as the decade where tech stopped progressing in the way we know it

I mean, sure, but I think the underlying cause here is the end of Moore’s law and exponential growth of potential userbases as the world becomes fully connected. The Enshittocene can be viewed as a consequence of capital’s attempts to continue exponential growth while the fundamentals are no longer capable of sustaining it.

Processing and its descendants, p5.js, p5.py. Nannou for Rust.

vpype is a really powerful python library/toolkit for generating art for plotters (drawing robots).

Blender with python scripting is also widely used.

Some relevant keywords: “procedural art”, “generative art” (generative AI is kinda killing this one), “creative coding”, “algorithmic art”, “plotter art”, “pen plotter”, “live coding” (for music with code)

The fediverse (mostly mastodon) has a decent presence of artists, usually tagging works with some of the above keywords.

you can count on microslop to always be behind the curve