stackcats

You're a nerd, right? You're a nerd who likes Galaxy Quest (1999) starring Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, and Sigourney Weaver. Sure you are. You want to hear some nerds talk about it for an hour or so? Why not!

Two Old Farts Talk Sci-Fi ft. Rachel A. Rosen "Galaxy Quest (Sigourney Weaver Pt 2)," is ironically the first part of a two parter about nerd comedy, sci-fi conventions, and Acting.

sabotabby

Just finished: Killing Shakespeare by Koom Kankesan. This is a weird one, friends. After a fairly lighthearted concept you'd be expecting a time travel romp but our protagonists are quickly thrust into the sheer grimness of the era, with quite a bit more gore than one typically gets in YA. (That said, it's something I would have appreciated as a teenager.) Not to mention a sophisticated reckoning with the dark colonialist side of the period, where Suresh, who has grown to idolize John Dee, realizes the role he plays in the expansion of the British Empire and the eventual genocidal war on the Tamils.

Then it gets weirder? Because as the story progresses, the kids seem less concerned with getting back to their own time and the interior first-person narration of the kids gets progressively more sophisticated, something that feels like an inconsistency until ( spoilers )

Currently reading: Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God by Robert Charles Wilson. This has some interesting takes on belief and atheism, and in particular a defence of the idea of "intuitive atheist," which has more or less been my standpoint for the last few decades (the less said about my stint as an Internet Atheist, the better). There are a few things that I'm learning while reading it, like that the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Catholic priest.

That said it almost immediately does the thing that I hate in atheist writing, which is using Christianity as a stand-in for all religion. I have a pet theory that all self-proclaimed atheists are actually Christians who have decreased the number of gods they believe in by one. It's not that I'm not an atheist myself so much as I think most other atheists are being just as silly as most of the religious people who like to enforce their beliefs on others.

Look, when I was 13 I read the Satanic Bible and went, oh, that's just Christianity but goth, and I feel the same way when I read a lot of atheist writing. It's not racist like New Atheism (the author is quite a lovely guy!) but by advancing a religion=Christianity framework, it erases the diversity and complexity about what much of the human race believes. So it's a non-starter for me.

sabotabby

It's the last day of the semester. I'm taking a course that will last all summer so that I'm technically qualified for my job that I've now been doing for a school year. It's been awhile since I've done one of these courses—which we pay for ourselves and no, most newer-than-20-years teachers do not get our summers off—and I didn't realize the extent to which chatbot-assisted plagiarism is commonplace. Technically the prestigious Queen's University has an AI policy but that doesn't stop everyone from making uncanny valley infographics using ChatGPT. Shameful really.

I was discussing it with a colleague yesterday and he confessed that he also uses ChatGPT to make his comments sound smarter and more polished. I said that I preferred blunt honesty and authentic voices that didn't plagiarize from writers like me, who were not compensated for the theft of our work by AI corporations. But we both agreed that the workload is being rapidly increased, both in courses and on the job, with the expectation that chatbots are reading and writing for us.

All of which is to say that chatbot companies must be burned to the ground for the survival of the species. Or rather, NIMBYs and revolutionaries must unite to stop this fucking scourge. It Could Happen Here's short monologue, "The Necessary War On Data Centres" details how this is happening already and its potential to grow into a proper political movement. It's one of the most hopeful things I've listened to in a good long time.

Let's take our world back from the death cultists who want to burn it down and upload themselves into a machine consciousness.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Folks may have noticed that the site has been slow for logged-out users over the last while. This is partly because we separate traffic by logged-in, "logged out but have visited the site before", and "logged out, never visited the site before" and assign the fewest resources to the last category (because we're pretty confident the overwhelming majority of it is bot and scraper traffic, even if it's often impossible to say for sure). The flood of garbage traffic is a plague and a scourge the entire internet is dealing with, and it's hitting small sites the hardest as operators get better and better at cloaking their requests to look like real, authentic use. We long ago hit the point where adding more resources is a possible solution (because they just eat them up as soon as we do), and splitting traffic lets us keep the site usable for our actual users without wasting too much server power on garbage.

We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.

You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.

sabotabby

It's been a trickle due to working 12-14 hours days pretty much every day, but here we are.

Just finished: Starfish by Peter Watts. Sometimes you read a book published 27 years ago and it doesn't hold up, and sometimes you read a book published 27 years ago and it's actually much, much more brilliant than you remembered it being. Come for the disturbing underwater horrors, stay for the head cheese AI. Bleak and devastating.

Currently reading: Killing Shakespeare by Koom Kankesan. Time for a YA break. Nathan, a jerk jock who apparently has a heart of gold but I'm still waiting to see evidence of this, is suspended after writing an AI paper and locking his old-fashioned English teacher in a cupboard. Along with Isabel, a bookish prof's daughter, and Suresh, a nerdy comp sci kid, he's transported back to Elizabethan England with the goal of making sure that all of Shakespeare's plays go up in the Globe fire and thus he doesn't have to write essays on them. It's a pretty cute conceit. Of course things go wrong and the three end up earlier in time than intended, with Suresh apprenticing under Doctor Dee, Nathan joining one of Sir Francis Drake's privateering expeditions, and Isabel working as a serving girl for the Bard himself. It's fun and introduces quite a bit of complexity in its portrayal of the era (and also the current debates over studying the Western literary canon).

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