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.

I’m not going to say I’m okay with that privacy policy, so not reading the article, but the original complaint is quite a read.

At my company, is have to tell that guy he can’t wear that hat because we don’t allow people to wear political stuff. I’m not a fan of dress codes, but I’m a fan of that one.

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?

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.

It’s such a beautiful area. We used to rent a houseboat on Shasta lake as a regular summer vacation. But the political signs you see there are just insane.

If you read the article, it gets from the one to the other. It’s actually worth reading.

The flip side is that people who live in states with a big land area but relatively small population have a way oversized vote compared to people who live in high population states. Why should a small number of people in the Midwest be able to outvote the majority?

As other people have said, it would be way worse to have him him assassinated. If it’s looking like he’s going to lose, I could see the people who want the US unstable to prefer assassinating him instead.

Loathsome, misogynistic convicted felon? Yeah, about right, though at 72 he’s a bit young.

So if a group of guys came to your neighbors house and told the family that they’re going to move into it with them, you wouldn’t be for removing them, even if that meant a fight? It would be better to just let them move in because that way no one gets hurt?

And if they successfully move into your neighbor’s house, they might have eyes on your house next.

Russia is trying to take over Ukraine, a sovereign country, by force, and other countries are trying to help Ukraine fight Russia. Yes, people on both sides are dying. Ukrainians apparently overwhelmingly believe it’s worth the fight.

It’s really infuriating. Every time he’s asked a question, and she gets a rebuttal, he just starts rebutting her rebuttal and they just let him. And half the time what he’s says has nothing to do with the question that was asked. They cut Kamala off pretty much every time.

“Watch for the voter fraud because we win without voter fraud,” Trump said. “We win so easily. Hopefully, we’re going to win anyway. But we want to keep it down."

Yeah, this is just him doing more to set up January 6 Part 2.

It’s kind of amazing how upfront they are about it

The Republican response is literally that they’re going to defund the IRS. If there weren’t 100 other things demonstrating that the Republican party serves the ultra rich, and not the people, it would be astonishing.

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.