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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 3h

"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"

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 3h

*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 · 3h

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.

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 3h

*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

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 3h

*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"

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 3h

*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

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 3h

*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...

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 4h

*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

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 9h

*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

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 14h

*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.

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 14h

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

youtu.be/lULd8fmxJC0?...

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 15h

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

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 17h

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.

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 15h

*Will they drop acid and levitate the Pentagon?

CNN @cnn.com · 22h

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

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 15h

*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.

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 15h

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

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 15h

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

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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”.

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#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

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#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."

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#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."

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

*"That's very nice. Now please show the same photograph, with the same identical T-shirt, but taken in the black and white Pictorialist style of Alfred Stieglitz in 1916. Also, transform the woman into the young Georgia O'Keeffe, who is modelling for Stieglitz."

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

"Please show this stencil image as a popular image printed on a black decorative T-shirt, as T-shirt band merchandise being worn by a female techno-music fan in the city of Cologne, Germany."

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

*But Mr Sterling! Is that even an 'artwork'?! That's more like a far-fetched cyberpunk hack, isn't it? What the heck is even going on with an off-the-wall scheme like that

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

*What can you actually DO with a "useless" AI-generated pseudo-stencil that can't possibly ever work as a stencil

*Well, maybe you cut it out of sticky-tape (so that the broken parts hold together) and then you screen-print a T-shirt using wood-glue as substitute vinyl

youtu.be/-KMe4nW40Os?...

The Absolute Easiest Way to Screenprint (no chemicals, no burning needed)

YouTube video by Laura Kampf

youtu.be

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

*What can you actually DO with a "useless" AI-generated pseudo-stencil that can't possibly ever work as a stencil

*Well, maybe you cut it out of sticky-tape (so that the broken parts hold together) and then you screen-print a T-shirt using wood-glue as substitute vinyl

youtu.be/-KMe4nW40Os?...

The Absolute Easiest Way to Screenprint (no chemicals, no burning needed)

YouTube video by Laura Kampf

youtu.be

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

*But if you already ARE a Processing guy and you're looking at the advent of LLMs, you're just as startled and horrified as everybody else, and maybe more so

*In your world, "being generative" was FUN, it wasn't like Apple violently crushing everybody's easels and pianos into a wafer-thin iPhone

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2d

*Do you need, maybe, a pet open-source LLM like "Processing" code, like a quasi-academic user-group goldfish-bowl built and intended for the expressive purposes of code-artists

"Since 2001!" etc etc

processing.org

Welcome to Processing!

Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology...

processing.org

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