Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1h

*The Torment Nexus was way too optimistic. People line up for that Torment, they'll run the Nexus on their own cellphones

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 2h

In retrospect 1984 was optimistic to expect the party would need to censor written newspapers and Fahrenheit 451 was optimistic to expect the TV slop people watch instead of reading will be like a soap opera.

4 13

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1h

What happens when you meet an LLM "shadow model" and he's been 'distilled" eight times until he's some kind of crazed and hideous underworld pigmy

medium.com/enrique-dans...

AI’s dark mirror: the unregulated world of shadow models

While the debate about AI largely focuses on players like Chat GPT, Claude and Gemini, a largely unseen battle is being fought over shadow…

medium.com

2 10

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2h

"Hey Vaclav 'Living in Truth'! The truth is, those cheap cigarette are wrecking the one lung you've got left after all that jail time"

*Yeah, okay, I admit that's true, but so what, you can't make me care

3

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2h

*This Havel biopic is quite good, it's got a lot of the feet-of-clay thing going on

*In terms of hero-worship, I actually PREFER the clay to the marble. The clay is the much-better human substance, actually, it's more creative, it's got more potential for change

youtu.be/RSoVtGh_OKE?...

7

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 3h

*Those little AI robots aren't workers, they're *worksloppers.* They *pretend* to work so that you can slack off and hoodwink the divine authorities.

*This seems like an important distinction.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushabti

Ushabti - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

8

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 3h

*These "ushabti" sacred figurines, your little AI robots who work for you in the ancient Egyptian afterlife -- they're not your servants. Instead, they show up if the Gods demand that you yourself should work for a living in heaven.

Ushabti - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

1 6

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 6h

"I'm a mathematician because of my stark intellectual devotion to absolute and self-consistent provable truth"

*Kurt Goedel: "No system can ever actually work like that"

"Uhm... I just really love math, ok, monstrous fractals, irrational numbers, lemme at 'em"

1 10

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 6h

*I'm very impressed that he was able to STOP being President and was able to get out of town and just rusticate a few years while amusing himself

*He was "doing what history required" and then he just knocked it off

Bill Stewart @billstewart.bsky.social · 6h

I walked by Havel's office one day in 1992. You could just do that; it's in the castle with other bureaucratic offices and tourist stuff.
We didn't try to go in, and I don't think he was there that day,
but it was no big deal, just a waiting room and secretary desk behind glass doors to the walkway.

1 1 11

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 6h

*Even if you're Vaclav Havel "Living in Truth," your idea of a good time is to have your longhaired pals declaiming Ginsberg Beat poetry in Czech while they play-act dress-up Absurdist theater skits in the back garden

*It's true, ok? Sue me

10

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 6h

*People don't actually like truth all that much, even scientists and philosophers find truth kind of annoying

*When your pet beautiful theory is slain by some ugly fact, you don't jump up and down exulting, "yay, triumph of Truth"

8 24

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 6h

*Call me a Vaclav Havel fan (and a career fiction-writer), but I don't think "truth" is as tender as people let on

*Everybody who is anybody has got obligatory "Workers of The World" posters, that doesn't mean there's truthfully gonna be some world-uniting

medium.com/@bruces/the-...

“The Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel

It’s a famous work of viral samizdat, and I thought it might be handy to have in my Medium feed. Got this version direct from the Havel…

medium.com

1 1 8

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 7h

*I take his point here, sorta, but what if you're an ardent Catholic person-of-faith and you're very keen on Midjourney AI slop pics of the Archangel Michael

*How much "truth" is this activity totally-destroying

www.flickr.com/photos/bruce...

2 14

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 7h

*It's strange, but "Popular With Friends" on Bluesky is absolutely the most intense and morbid bad-news stream I've got anywhere

*You could *actively search" for trouble and find less trouble than that

20

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 13h

*Speculative DARPA notions of the capacities of "artificial intelligence" back in 1982. It's pretty clear that modern LLMs have somehow blundered into doing all of that stuff, which was impossible back in the day

1 9

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 17h

*So entirely secure that they had the security word in their name twice

John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 1d

I don't know if there's such a thing as a "world cyberwar" but I think we are in one? and the US is determined to lose it. 🧵

Today the admin is mass-firing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the nation's cybersecurity protection across all levels of government.

1 5 14

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 18h

*What if it's AI slop and it's also this big metal chair

youtu.be/lULd8fmxJC0?...

7

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 18h

*Does "cardboard" become"stale"? After you soak it in slop, maybe

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 20h

The palpable relief of reading a syntactically awkward student paper nevertheless brimming with ideas they’re trying on after having to consume the stale cardboard generalities of a Chat GPT essay.

2

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 18h

*Will they drop acid and levitate the Pentagon?

CNN @cnn.com · 1d

Top Republicans in Congress will take a massive gamble on shutdown politics in the coming days: GOP leaders will not step in to prevent missed paychecks to the military.

GOP leaders steadfast in shutdown stance despite rising pressure inside party | CNN Politics

Top Republicans in Congress will take a massive gamble on shutdown politics in the coming days: GOP leaders will not step in to prevent missed paychecks to the military.

www.cnn.com

1 5 24

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 18h

*Ever seen that giant flying saucer full of "Next Nature" people in Eindhoven? There's a cult picture of me on the wall in there

Guido Eekhaut @eekhaut.bsky.social · 2d

O, so Bruce Sterling is around here as well. Hi, Bruce. Interviewed you somewhere in (I think) Eindhoven, two decades ago.

1 10

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 18h

*I wonder how MUCH old media these new LLM systems are gonna kill

3 4 18

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 18h

*I wonder what would happen if novelists had to answer those questions

6

Reposted by #BruceSterling

Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 2d

White House staff should just make and show him an AI-generated video where he wins, fly him to Duluth and tell him it’s Oslo, and dare the New York Times to say anything more than “Experts disagree about whether Mr Trump was awarded the Nobel Prize”.

54 630 3.1K

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

*I think that newer image is a minor improvement, because it's got more of the "LLM-WTF cognitive dissonance" thing going on, but for some reason I hate to nag them to do-any-better

*It always feels like retouching a spontaneous photo with white-out

3 8

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

"The background is too vague and out of focus. Put all the urban people in Victorian costumes, and sharpen up every detail in the obsessive William Holman Hunt style of PreRaphaelite realism. Also, put some brush-stroke texture in it so that it looks more like an oil painting."

5

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

"Remake this image so that it is hand-painted by William Holman Hunt in a very meticulous PreRaphaelite style. Make the model into a Victorian PreRaphaelite "stunner" model, with huge flowing hair in the PreRaphaelite style. Make sure that the T-shirt logo is visible."

2 7