In all honesty, it had been years since I regularly read anything of note. An occasional audiobook (of while I have an intimidating collection of unread volumes. I've been collecting epub and pdf books from bundles and sales, etc.
2024 was the year of my dropping Twitter and (mostly) Facebook. It was also the year of stopping dropping most things Google and Reddit and other sites that encourage division. I deleted my podcast app, as nothing I was listening to was truly compelling or really even that interesting.
It's been a year now, in July 2025 and I've completed over 40 novels and novellas. Short story collections, poetry, etc. I have about six books on the go at any time, just like I used to do when I was a teenager. Instead of a stack of open books stacked up beside my bed, it's all on my phone and tablet.
As of this writing I have read 30 books of the 12 I thought I might finish in all of 2025. I think I might need to up my estimate a bit.
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8% complete! Richard M has read 4 of 50 books.
It Can't Happen Here is a semi-satirical American political novel published in 1935. It's Plot centers around newspaperman Doremus Jessup's …
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution is an overview of the history …
@technicat regarding the aside about Anil Dash, Dash and Doctorow are two people that I have complicated relationships with as well. There are others, but many have gone silent in my bubbles. These two, though keep popping up in otherwise excellent discussions. I do read Doctorow's books, though I prefer his fiction. I don't roll my eyes as much.
To the content of the rest of your review, I can see that there are a handful of other books there that I should read before this one. Thanks.
@technicat regarding the aside about Anil Dash, Dash and Doctorow are two people that I have complicated relationships with as well. There are others, but many have gone silent in my bubbles. These two, though keep popping up in otherwise excellent discussions. I do read Doctorow's books, though I prefer his fiction. I don't roll my eyes as much.
To the content of the rest of your review, I can see that there are a handful of other books there that I should read before this one. Thanks.
In this alternately chilling and hilarious sequel to The Atrocity Archives (2004) from Hugo-winner Stross, Bob Howard is a computer …
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of …
Richard M
boosted
A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …
This is a great summary of everything that's wrong with the current hype around AI and especially LLMs. It doesn't expect any prior knowledge to the field and is a very good introduction to a lay audience. The authors (@emilymbender@dair-community.social and @alex@dair-community.social) also have a great podcast that I'd recommend: "Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000".
The book has so many quotable passages that I can't possibly list them all here but to give you an idea: * In the vast majority of cases, AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier. * As with AI "art" discussed above, AI boosters think that science is only about ideas, rather than communities of practice. * The point of talk therapy is not to exchange text strings, but rather human connection, which furthermore is guided by the expertise of the therapist. …
This is a great summary of everything that's wrong with the current hype around AI and especially LLMs. It doesn't expect any prior knowledge to the field and is a very good introduction to a lay audience. The authors (@emilymbender@dair-community.social and @alex@dair-community.social) also have a great podcast that I'd recommend: "Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000".
The book has so many quotable passages that I can't possibly list them all here but to give you an idea: * In the vast majority of cases, AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier. * As with AI "art" discussed above, AI boosters think that science is only about ideas, rather than communities of practice. * The point of talk therapy is not to exchange text strings, but rather human connection, which furthermore is guided by the expertise of the therapist. And so many more!
The book does a great job of showing how ridiculous the claims of AI boosters are when taken at face-value but also what impoverished views of the world and notions of truth and expertise AI carries with it. I particularly liked what they say about information retrieval, which is supposed to remove "friction":
friction in information access is actually not only beneficial, but critically important.
This is crucial, and something I've noticed time and time again. People using LLMs for search are ready to trust the output simply because it appears to be the one answer to their query; they don't have to go through a list of links, evaluate them and make a final judgement call about their relative merits. But this exercise is essential! A document is not just a collection of text strings, it has an author, an origin and a context, and it's only when all those things are taken together that one can really gauge how much trust they should assign to it.
(To French readers: this also ties nicely with "Éloge du bug" by Marcello Vitali-Rosati @monterosato@mamot.fr, where friction is a central element.)
A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies …
A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …
It matters what words we use when we talk about these technologies.
For instance in our writing, we don't use the term hallucination to discuss the errors of LLMs for two reasons. First, if it's used tongue in cheek, it is making light of what could be symptoms of serious mental illness.
Second, hallucination refers to the experience of perceiving things that aren't there, but LLMs actually don't have perceptions and suggesting that they do is yet more unhelpful anthropomorphization.
That means we also avoid assigning thought processes to these systems or saying that they can think. Metaphors have power, they structure the frames of discourse and they can subtly and insidiously encourage certain ways of understanding technology and the social systems it is embedded in.
Resist.
A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies …
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of …
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim’s point …
