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I've only read the first three but I definitely thought of Murderbot as female. I'm not sure I could point to anything on the page to justify that.

I’ve read the first four, and yes I also thought Murderbot was female in appearance.

There’s a lot of coyness about their appearance that made me think so, as well as perhaps more of the author’s perspective coming through than intended.

I've forgotten the ending to Anathem. The Reamde was a solid ending, but the ending was basically a set piece of "libertarian country gun nuts vs. terrorists" and was bad.

Arrivng tomorrow - Koumei and the Five Fates

https://youtu.be/D6iblGunMnQ

By "Stephenson ending" you mean no ending at all, right?   

I remember when I read the Baroque Cycle I was impressed by the fact that it actually felt like it had an ending (a very longwinded one, mind you), as compared to Cryptonomicon and Snowcrash where I remember them just kind of trailing off.  I can't remember now where Anathem and Reamde fell on that scale.

Just started on the fourth Murderbot book.  They're extremely in demand at the library right now so I'm being forced to pace myself, but it's kind of nice to have each trip to the library (to pick up the next volume as soon as it shows up on my hold shelf) feel like Christmas morning.

I went to the library last week and ended up picking up Neal Stephenson's new(est) book, Temination Shock.

His previous book to this (Fall or Dodge in Hell) was so horrible that I barely made it halfway through so I wasn't expecting much, but this one was actually more like his older books. Does have a "Stephenson ending," but at least it wasn't the abomination the previous book was.

My second time I was stunned at how much I'd missed the first time because I wasn't looking at game sites, etc.

The third time that I just started, not so much, and yeah, slower.

We are all really soon going to be like cockroaches skittering in the walls of vast swells of AI text where AIs are talking to AIs.

Which the AI-chasing parts of Big Tech companies don't really want but are powerless to stop because they're all dumb cunts. I was talking with someone at an academic publisher who suddenly reached out to me about a conversation I had in person with his predecessor about a manuscript I'm working on. That was four years ago. This guy was like "wow we want this book stat, send up a prospectus! Send us the almost completed manuscript!" and I was like "this is kind of weird". It turns out he was going through his predecessor's notes for the last decade of those kinds of conversations and he was hot to get everything in the door because the big corporation that bought this press a few years back signed a deal with several big AI players to sell them all the draft manuscripts they are working with for LLM training because they all have run out of text despite scraping the entire Internet, the entire corpus of Google Books, every digitized manuscript, every digitized archive. They don't care what's in the drafts, just that it's not by AIs. But they're not going to be able to get ahead of the AI Centipede wave where the AIs are shitting into social media and consuming their own shit and training themselves into a deadly recursive space where the shortcomings of their present training models get amplified. There's nothing human left to eat, and they're going to crowd us out of the textual spaces we've used to communicate with each other.

BG3 and Cyberpunk have both been really replayable for me. I appreciate that.

Same. BG3 slightly less than Cyberpunk I think because the gameplay is slower paced and so on replays I sometimes get impatient at the same story beats happening over and over.

Welcome to Internet 3.0.  Comments recycled into AI-generated images to generate more comments ad infinitum:



I expect within the year we'll see variations of this that add in product placement and/or political slogans.

BG3 and Cyberpunk have both been really replayable for me. I appreciate that.