Read: Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius 📚Drips realism and apparently the CIA uses it as an exemplar of Middle Eastern espionage. The detail draws you in and the conflicts between ethnicities and sects is tragically still relevant. #booksky #books #readingcommunity
I mean, that’s a slightly different thing than writers not using LLMs and there are reasons like the environmental impact and putting people out of jobs for not using LLMs, but the biggest one is that it will only ever produce derivative retreads.
Some books have always been derivative slop of course - they were called ‘pulp’ for a reason - and really the only reason for not using LLMs to create more is that even hacks deserve bread on the table (speaking as a hack).
LLMs are only ever going to come up with the most likely version of the next word given its instructions, and that probability is based on what’s out there already. So, always derivative shit. That’s why not to use AI.
Read: Golden Hill by Francis Spufford 📚Dark smart pastiche of Fielding, Sterne, etc, in late 18th century New York, but there’s more to it than just quality fanfiction. The characters are ludicrously alive and you can smell the horse shit and ambition. #booksky #books #readingcommunity
Read: The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd 📚 Juicy atmospheric procedural set in Paris just after the Germans marched in during June 1940. Not spies, but feels like Furst, Gerlis, Robert Harris. #booksky #books #readingcommunity
I’ve stumbled into being a sportsfan for the first time in my life, as a 57 year old Brit. Mostly, I’m in it for the incomprehensible commentary.
Recently moved to Canada, just in time to latch onto the Toronto Blue Jays getting narrowly beaten in the final of the World Series, and then my wife announced she’d got a Sportsnet subscription. And now I know what stacking your bases and platooning is.
But 90% of the commentary still sounds like
And here comes Bravetti to the plate, sets his flonkers, gives the wrist-crank, and delivers — oh, that’s a high floopster, drifting toward the schnozz zone, and Palumwick gets under it, tracks it back to the warnle, makes the snab! Beautiful snab by Palumwick, who’s been snabbing everything in the deep dubris tonight. Two gromps, one blurtle, and the count sits at three-and-wumble.
It’s like Debussy writing sports coverage, or Monet in his late ‘lost my glasses’ phase. The details swoosh past in an infinite scroll of pleasurable enough to keep going.
It’s setting the audience (fans? crowd? My arts background still pokes through here and there) up for a massive dopamine spike. Depending on a largely random contact between ball and bat, my alloted champions might go four ahead, or they might lose the series.
I’m pretty sure the rules were written by BF Skinner. A pitch becoming a ball or a strike is the definition of intermittent reinforcement - sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, based on no consistent criteria I can divine. Trying to figure out the rules is enough to keep me pulling the lever for more cheese.
And in the meantime, I’m going to figure out whether a floopster in the schnozz zone is a good thing or a bad thing.
Read: The Pariah by Dan Fesperman 📚Happily facetious palate freshener involving the a murderous Eastern European dictator, metoo’d American comedian, chimney cakes (whatever they are), delicate egos and many violent deaths. #booksky #books
Read: All the Sinners Bleed A Novel by S. A. Cosby 📚Nails the atmosphere of Deep(ish) South small town revenge, tangled up in barely hidden racism, fully developed characters. Solid genre procedural but stands in its own right too. #booksky #books
My latest ’excursion’ into podcasting is up - an interview with spy writer Michael Dylan about his latest book The New Spy, for @spybrary. Find it where-ever you get your etc. etc. spybrary.com/the-new-s… #booksky #authorsky
Trump: I want Iran’s oil
ATTACKS IRAN
Media: Let us ponder why Trump is attacking Iran.
I mean. Come on.
Read: There There by Tommy Orange 📚Most of the book is perceptively drawn scenes of disparate cast in the runup to a powwow in Oakland. When tragic violence explodes there, it’s both the point and beside the point that they’re all native American. #booksky #books
Read: The Fraud by Zadie Smith 📚Meaty and slightly meandering like the 19th century English novels it pastiches, with a nuanced human take on slavery’s effects rather than performative shouty self righteousness. #booksky #books
Saw #onebattleafteranother. Self indulgent self righteous simplistic mess congealed by four over privileged stars riffing cringey stoner ‘humour’ on Pynchon pretension for spurious intellectual validation and only winning #Oscars because everything else is even worse.
I use AI a lot in writing, to get over blank screen paralysis. I get it to generate a bunch of words which I know will be so infuriatingly bad I’ll be forced to rewrite them entirely till none of its version remains and I have created my first draft #writingcommunity #amwriting #writersky
Read: Everything We Do Is Music How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop by @elizabethalker.bsky.social 📚Wonderfully nerdy cross referencing of pop music with ‘serious’ avant garde, which took my listening down many weird and, it transpired, joyously unlistenable rabbitholes. #booksky
Read: Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie 📚Fergie/Andrew bio- readable etc. but most of it’s been in the media already. Brings together the astonishing extent of their ligging and fosters a sense of righteous outrage. #booksky
Down a snow-drifted alley a tipped up wheelie bin wide open like a pm’d corpse and a cheap suitcase ripped apart with cheap clothes scattered in the slush. Like a proxy for a murder victim. #writingcommunity
Read: Villager by Tom Cox 📚Portrait of a village, seen partly through the eyes of the village, circling through time, space and points of view. Rich and enrichening and humane. #booksky #books
Went for a walk on the frozen lake…
Can someone suggest a ‘comedy’ podcast that is at least 1/10th as funny as the smug friends interviewing their smug mates and/or straining to crack weak predictable topical jokes think it is? I’ve just been trying a bunch and they all, without exception, ear-meltingly awful and homicide inducing.
Read: The New Spy by Michael Dylan 📚The opposite of the Slow Horses (Galloping Thoroughbreds?) fight a bunch of terrorist threats in London. Fast read, and more action than atmosphere. Feels like a lost novelisation of BBC’s Spooks. #booksky #thrillers
Read: Reykjavik - A Crime Story by Ragnar Jónasson KatrÃn Jakobsdóttir 📚By the numbers, emotionally flat Icelandic noir heavy with the usual deserted islands, crusading journalist and middle aged professionals hiding a sin from their youth. #booksky #thrillers
Read: Vienna At Nightfall by Richard Wake 📚Richly atmospheric Alan Furst-ish world of pre-WW2 Austria, as completely believable ‘ordinary bloke’ is pulled into spying, with all the agonies and internal conflicts it brings, and a credibly snarky authorial voice. #booksky #thrillers
Productive happy days make for dull journalling.
Productive, happy days make for dull journalling.