This type of spam email is so insidious & cruel, because it preys on new writers desperate to break into publishing. I hate that it gets sent out to anyone - but in this particular case, it was kind of funny to receive it since the real @panmacmillan actually published this book! 😅
15km hike through the magnificent Carnarvon Gorge. Wow...
JK Rowling is Anti-Rights
https://quokk.au/c/comics/p/1076760/jk-rowling-is-anti-rights
There's a crow who I fed some left over chicken legs to. Crow ate them on the roof & oddly dropped the bones down my arsehole neighbours open chimney pot. I now feed him daily & crow repeats this every time. There must be about 20kg of chicken bones piled up in his chimney by now
🎯
@ai6yr @msbellows
"Does everything from Australia naturally want to kill you?"
--> Short answer: yes.
But not everything can 🤣
@angiebaby Believe it or not, this topic has come up https://www.usccb.org/news/2026/technomancers-and-ai-worship-catholic-experts-warn-spiritual-dangers-online
For at least twenty years, in every hotel I've stayed in, if there's a Bible I've signed it 'Cheers for believing, all the best, Jesus'. As a full-time touring musician it's well past the thousand mark by now.
I've arrived at the phase of the apocalypse where I think:
"Oooo this is a nice fruit, I should save the seeds in case we need to regrow the trees."
** As it's being discoursed:
I do not use any generative AI (ChatGPT, Claude et.al.) at any stage in my writing process.
I write because I enjoy writing.
I enjoy the challenge of expressing an idea, or character, or setting in such short form and tell a story with them.
It's all human made.
**
@davidtheeviloverlord Oh & the creepy pic is from a Russian startup named StartRocket owned by Vlad Sitnikov that's actually trying to build orbital advertising that would trash Earth based astronomy. Sometimes I wonder if I'm in the stupidest timeline & then somebody inevitably has a stupider idea.
https://theorbitaldisplay.com/
@davidtheeviloverlord
Found an article about Anthropic's theory that the stolen sci-fi rich tech bros are training their AI on is teaching them to be "evil". I've noticed quite a bit of AI sci-fi plagiarism in my own testing of frontier models. I doubt many of the tech bros have read enough to even notice their cognitive offloading to systems regurgitating dystopian fiction.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/anthropic-blames-dystopian-sci-fi-for-training-ai-models-to-act-evil/
@davidtheeviloverlord I don't think I've read that one yet, do you remember the title by chance?
IMO there're a number of reasons why rich tech bros are abusing dystopian sci-fi as a guide book instead of the warnings they obviously are. Ignorant stupidity & a complete lack of meritocracy are up there, but also the AI that's doing all their thinking was extensively trained on all that sci-fi. Anthropic recently released a report, I'll link if I can find it...
Feeling happy because I replace hand handle of my hand grinder with a hex nut, and so can now use by cordless drill to grind coffee.
This needs to be said in a loop until it sticks.
"What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”
- Stefan Rahmstorf, Climatologist.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/30/europe-wildfires-climate-crisis-heat-summer
@davidtheeviloverlord All that will do is reduce the number of AI entries. "Writers" will still submit AI slop.
I don't know what your piece is about, but there are many markets. Good luck with your efforts! Getting established as a published author is not easy, but is usually worth it.
@davidtheeviloverlord The sad thing is that those 300 submissions can probably be broken down into AI-generated slop, drivel by people who can't write, and a handful of pieces that are actually worth reading and considering for publication.
This 4,000-year-old city defied the rules of history
As Mohenjo-daro prospered, the gap between its richest and poorest households actually shrank. Its shared infrastructure, fair trade systems, and lack of powerful royal elites suggest that equality may have helped fuel the ancient city’s success.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260729010730.htm #science
I'm probably not breaking new ground here, but LLMs have made it very clear to me that there are broadly two ways that people approach performing a task - people who want the task done well, and people who want the status of having done the task.
LLMs are really appealing to that second group, because it lets you get the status of being a book-writer or app-publisher or whatever without all that tedious writing or programming.
Well, that was fun.
I've been waiting for a magazine to open their subs.
They opened 01 August.
Since I'm in Australia, and they aren't, that meant that about 10:30pm in Australia is about 8:30am where they are.
I go to submit.
They're closed to submissions.
Why? They only take 300 submissions each time. And they're already full.
Try again 01 October.
No, I don't think I will.