He was all over TV the other day, joining the crowds to attend the ridiculous Nakba day propaganda ceremony. I have no doubts he's been in just fine health lately, and if anything he's been playing up how unwell he is to get out of court dates over and over again for months. The other big reason for his recent disappearance from public view is the likelihood of his beach house getting another knock on the door from a Shahed, maybe luckier this time.

Yeah, it's upsetting how much I've ended up thinking back to the crap arms race for how casual a plot detail it is, and how much more apt that descriptor is for LLMs than most other sci-fi conceptualizations of AI.

At this point, especially with Fall, I think he just has a tendency to pick up and run with whatever cool idea techbros are into at the moment without any real regard for how seriously people take it as a belief, resulting in a bunch of conveniently packaged, reader-gratifying ideological vignettes for said techbros to latch onto as a coherent vision and complete the cycle. I don't think he ever meant to genuinely promote the metaverse or digital money laundering or acausal brain hell or space eugenics, but he seems chronically incapable of mounting a systemic critique of any of his subjects in a style that demands a good guy crypto billionaire, likably clueless cultist, or badass geneticist to outsmart the Islamic terrorists, alien special forces, and conniving cosmonauts and save the day.

I do still find it somewhat concerning how many of his plots come down to "80% of everyone are mindless sheeple enthralled by a higher power," though.

I continue to be endlessly fascinated by Anathem, by virtue of enjoying it as a kid for the wacky speculative metaphysics, enjoying it as an adult for the case study it presents in how Neal Stephenson can get you nodding along to a set of faux-lectures strung together by road tripping until he gets you to an obviously false conclusion, and now the fact that The Wick is apparently what rationalists actually believe in, just substituting simulations and reality-hacking for quantum woo and nukes? The ~~Incanter~~ Basilisk can entrap your consciousness by manipulating which ~~timelines your brain is quantum-entangled with~~ coexisting copies of your psyche exist in the multimetaverse and selecting among them to ~~give you quantum immortality~~ 51% attack you into the Matrix, I guess.

It's the difference between "shooting and crying" and "shooting and laughing." there's no shame anymore, 0 back pressure against the worst possible depravity, no reason to waste money on PR anymore that could be spent on more bombs, because what's anyone going to do about it?

Easy honestly, you just have to put some effort into your appearance and be ok with that attention coming from weird 60 year old men, just like anyone else.

Well, for CNC you'd likely want some way to program and upload looping movement patterns to an off-the-shelf controller, for CNC you'd want devices to negotiate and establish a safeword when they connect to the network, and for C&C you could patch OpenRA to call the API at appropriate (?) times. That's why I think a 15th competing standard is needed here.

CNC is (ideally, without roofie roulette and a ton of social pressure to perform involved) consensual, just simulating non-consent, and there are already some interesting API standards out there for relevant haptic devices...

Is there an open-source standard for that yet?

The maize isn't high-fructose; corn syrup is entirely an industrial product, made by chemically digesting corn starch. If the yield numbers worked out differently, we could all be eating high fructose wheat syrup or potato syrup, but maize happened to fit into our extractive systems the best, a sad fate for a beautiful grain.

So, snake oil but for text.