Yes, Leckie writes SF. If you’re interested, I would start with Ancillary Justice, her first novel. It’s really good, and the first of a trilogy that’s all excellent.

I think you saw a post by me long ago where I posted my short notes about the books I’d read in that time frame. If you’d like me to pass along those notes for any of the books we talk about, like Leckie or the more recent Gibson novels, I’d be happy to.

And thanks for the offer. I’m good now, but who knows. An interesting time of change for me coming up: I retire in January after 39+ years at the same company, and sometime after we’re going to move from an area of southern California, where I’ve lived my whole life, to northern Washington State. Will be odd for sure.

Oh, good call, I did read those books and liked them quite a bit. Martine’s writing reminds me a bit of Ann Leckie, who I’ve read a lot of and like very much.

Hey, in know I’m just a guy on the internet who you talk about books with, but if you need to talk about more, I’m happy to listen. You might already have a good support network, which is great, but I know not everyone does.

I’m sorry to hear life is having challenges for you at the moment, I hope that resolves soon. A nice thing about a book is that you can put it down for days, weeks, months, whatever, and it’s still waiting for you when you feel like coming back to it.

I’ve been reading more Gibson lately. I read the first two books of the Jackpot trilogy (the third hasn’t come out yet) and the first in the Blue Ant trilogy. They’ve all been very good.

You take care and I hope things get better for you.

That seems high, though I guess if they’re doing it in a state with high renewable energy, that’s what they’re using. It uses a crazy high amount of energy though.

I wonder what fraction of Bitcoin mining energy comes from renewable sources. I bet it’s teeny tiny.

I’ve said it other places, but you don’t get a sense of just how bad they are until you see one in person. I don’t know if it’s that they’re a bit bigger than I thought, or that I’m used to seeing fake images of all sorts of things, but even though I’d seen pictures I was surprised at how bad they are in person. They’re cartoonishly awful.

That bit never got old.

Paul Rudd?

Ugh, I started in the middle of June last year and I have over 3K. Apparently I have no life.

Glad you enjoyed it, it’s one of my favorites.

I’m not sure if there’s a name for it, but there’s a style of story telling (not exclusive to SF) where the writer jumps right into the universe they’ve created without any explanation, and it’s impossible to fully understand everything at first. My wife is always a bit frustrated by those, even when she ultimately enjoys the book.

Your written English is great, especially if it’s not your first language. Did you start very young?

So what are you planning to read next?

Except unlike those others, this woman sued (for a bunch of things, not just the card thing), and the judge dismissed all of them saying she displayed a victim mentality over normal office interactions. I’m not faulting people for assuming she’s not very likable.

I’m a manager at a large aerospace and defense company. We had a hybrid arrangement where most people (who didn’t have to touch hardware) could work from home a couple days a week. Most people seemed to think it was pretty reasonable. There really are benefits to in person collaboration, so some on site days seemed to make sense.

We recently moved to fully RTO, and I find it frustrating. It’s not a big deal personally - I live close and I’m older - but it pisses off a lot of the employees, who see no good reason for it. I don’t see any notable productivity increase moving from three to five days on site, it just makes my management job harder.

In case anyone thinks it’s not real, or it’s an artifact of the candid photo, here’s a pic from the other day that he posed for. It was posted by the Republican that he’s standing with.

He must not have a mirror with the side panels. They must push his face through a hole in a bib and then blast it with a spray can. It’s ridiculous.

That being said, that’s not the reason to hate him, there are many other valid reasons for that

Right, that’s the thing.

I honestly believe part of the problem this country is in today started when the news media felt they had to give equal time to every issue. I remember lots of segments on climate change where they had one person on each side, and I could understand most people coming away believing we just don’t know. And it’s not just climate change, they did that with everything.

So here we are, polarized like never before, with so many believing that every opinion is legitimate. Sure, you can believe what you want, but if you believe the world was created 6000 years ago, you’re just wrong. You’re entitled to believe something wrong, but that doesn’t make it valid. A legitimate news site should reflect that. A climate denier or a creationist shouldn’t get equal time. Same with do many issues.

Lol, “one side of the climate debate.” There isn’t debate among scientists - there’s like less than one percent of climate scientists who don’t believe that humans are putting our climate in a terrible place. So just that part the tells you the bias. It’s just like when they talk about the debate between evolution and creationism: the only debate is with people who reject the data to further their own agenda.

See, this is an example of why he likes Putin. If you publish negative stories about Putin, regardless of truth, you’re going to fall out a window. Trump wants that.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.

Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.

LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.

Yeah, in in my 60s, so old. When I was in my mid 20s, I was in a bad marriage and needed some escapism. One of my coworkers was a reviewer for Locus Magazine, which is a major SF publication. I asked him for recommendations, so he went with me to the bookstore and said “Try that one, that one, to and that one.” One of those first was Neuromancer. I chewed through them, and it became a routine to go to the bookstore with him.

I eventually got divorced, and didn’t need the escapism anymore. My reading went way down, maybe a few books a year. Now I’m heading towards retirement and I’ve been reading more than ever.

More detail than you wanted.