In 1975, Martin met Dune author Frank Herbert at a book convention and they shared a drink. The meeting was “near the end of Herbert’s life,” Martin says. Herbert had written many acclaimed novels, but all fans seemed to want was more Dune. Herbert’s publisher had just offered him a modest advance for a story he wanted to write, or six times that number for another Dune novel.

“He didn’t like Dune anymore and he didn’t want to write any more Dune books,” Martin says. “But he felt locked in by the success of Dune, so he kept writing them.”

Martin finishes … and waits.

I ask: Do you relate to how Herbert felt?

“I’m not necessarily tired of the world [of Ice and Fire],” he says. “I love the world and the world-building. But, yes, I do.”

And I mean for real, not the hex code.

Bulgarian lawmakers formally approved on Friday the resignation of the country's minority government, a day after it bowed to mass street protests and said it would quit, paving the way for talks on forming a new coalition or most likely a snap election.

This article from last week provides some context for the protests: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjezwzw088jo

Critics of the abandoned budget plan said they were protesting against increases to social security contributions and taxes on dividends to finance higher spending, as well as state corruption.

"We are here to protest for our future. We want to be a European country, not one ruled by corruption and the mafia," Ventsislava Vasileva, a 21-year-old student, told the AFP news agency.

Without paywall: http://archive.today/2025.12.09-224441/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/arts/music/jubilant-sykes-stabbing-death.html

Jubilant Sykes, a celebrated baritone opera singer, was fatally stabbed on Monday night in his home in Santa Monica, Calif., and his son was arrested in the attack, police officials said.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/40687915

"Who's to know? [Technology firms] are spending trillions and trillions on AI and maybe it's going to produce the next War and Peace.

"And if people want to read that book, AI-generated or not, we will be selling it - as long as it doesn't pretend to [be] something that it isn't.

"We as booksellers would certainly naturally and instinctively disdain it," Daunt said.

Readers value a connection with the author "that does require a real person", he added. Any AI-generated book would always be clearly labelled as such.

AI (LLMs and image generators, really) is trained on human-made material scraped from the entire internet. As more and more communities and sites online are filled with AI-generated content, AI training is in danger of getting stuck in a loop, trained on its own output again and again.

Communities that are harshly purist in their anti-AI rules are thus an excellent source of curated training data for AI while the rest of the internet becomes unusable for the task.

Perhaps AI companies and their products are even deliberately so annoying, shitty and repulsive, because they want to spark some resistance, have a part of the population reject AI and enforce anti-AI rules and communities.

The Project Gutenberg community mourns the passing of our CEO, Dr. Greg Newby (@gbnewby).

Without his years of leadership, Project Gutenberg wouldn't be what it is today. Learn more about him and his contributions at

https://www.gutenberg.org/about/newby.html

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“I never liked film music very much,” Williams said to The Guardian’s Dalya Alberge, “Film music, however good it can be — and it usually isn’t, other than maybe an eight-minute stretch here and there … I just think the music isn’t there. What we think of as this precious great film music … we’re remembering it in some kind of nostalgic way. Just the idea that film music has the same place in the concert hall as the best music in the canon is a mistaken notion, I think.”