Adam rambles
Cory Doctorow has a recent post laying out the terrain of power for LLMs and AI, including the venal ordinariness of our generation of platform barons. The post is actually pretty good, pulling people away from the hysterical online consensus that LLM based AI is a radical break from all other technological change, either for Continue reading No, Charles Babbage Was Not Optimising Slavery
In Beyond A Boundary, the blend of memoir, politics, history and criticism sometimes called the greatest book written on sport, CLR James takes some time to argue cricket is an art form. He does so not just by noting that cricket is often beautiful, but that across batting, bowling and fielding, it showcases an extraordinary Continue reading Cricket and Civic Time
Manchukuo 1987, yoshimi red I picked up Manchukuo 1987 as a low stakes pulp alt-history wheeze by an amusing internet rando. A few days later I was depriving myself of sleep to find out what a fascist middle-aged Japanese secret policeman with a gammy leg was going to do next. The setting is Manchuria, what Continue reading Manchu Days
I have a new piece out at Diffractions Collective, Delirious Microservices. In it, I look at an architecture meta-pattern that uses improvisational, fashion-sensitive, swappable units of executable culture: Manhattan. And also microservices.
Peter Hamilton Pandora s Star Commonwealth Saga, Book One, -Ish Pandora s Star has very solid speculative premise, namely, what if trains, but in space, and the promise of a hard SF mechanic underlying it had me quickly mashing the buy button. The space trains emerge as a side effect of wormhole technology. A wormhole is Continue reading All The Live-Long Day
Catherynne M. Valente The Past is Red EVERY MORNING I wake up to find words painted on my door like toadstools popping up in the night. Today it says NIHILIST in big black letters. That’s not so bad! It’s almost sweet! Big Bargains flumps toward me on her fat seal-belly while I light the Continue reading Grief Is Red
I always find it interesting to dig into the problems pioneers in a field thought they were solving. So too with the origins of NoSQL and non-relational databases. This excerpt is a taster. I know that, for many, our age is attempting to flee SQL [ ] But truly to escape SQL involves an exact appreciation Continue reading Persistence and the Owl Framework
A River With A City Problem Margaret Cook (2019) Termination Shock Neal Stephenson (2021) Last year I fled my house due to rising floodwaters, and soon after, my daughter’s cricket team finished up for the season. The water stopped short of our backyard, though not by much, and my daughter took some nice Continue reading Stochastic Land
Joan Didion The White Album Everyone that writes about Didion seems to pick her up because of her role as a cultural critic, and a bagful of other MFA student values. It’s true: her prose style is exquisite, and she is one of the few writers who can make reading about the sixties bearable. Continue reading Hydrological Romance
There are no good philosophers of software. There is some good philosophy inspired by software, or on the society created by software, or on how software changes the way we think. There is no good philosopher of software construction. That is the provocation I threw out on Twitter in response to Hillel Wayne s excellent prompt, Continue reading There Are No Good Philosophers of Software