Speaking of ChatGPT, I like Cory Doctorow’s explanation of it and its cousins from his latest piece:

AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs.

Dave Winer (I think he’s still @dave on Micro.blog) talks about using ChatGPT to

make calls about a user’s WordPress account. I want to know what sites the user is following in their reader app.

ChatGPT notwithstanding, I’m mildly horrified that a) WordPress makes that info publicly available, and b) Dave wants to use it.

Well, it’s obvious that no one reads this, or they’d have drawn my attention to the ridiculous typo in the title of the last but one post. And of the book it was naming. My apologies to Becky Chambers.

I’m not sure who the New York Times folks are trolling with today’s Connections, but it’s a good one.

I think I’ve seen more rain this summer than in all the years I’ve lived in London.

Oh no, we’ve lost touch with Voyager 2. I feel weirdly sad about this. It’s the furthest-away thing humans have ever made.

This Scottish MP who’s been ousted by the people for breaking Covid rules: I think this is the first time we’ve had a recall in the UK.

Now, what we need is to have the policy extended to the whole of parliament. Could we get 10% of the electorate to vote to recall the current parliament? Yes. Yes, we could.

Started reading The City & the City by China Miéville 📚

This is one of only very few of China’s books that I haven’t read, and I’ve joined a kind of online book club at work, so I have to finish it by the 10th of August. Which should be doable.

How do people cope with being full-time sport fans? Watching Murray/Tsitsipas last night was so stressful. It felt like a final. I can’t imagine going through that every week.

The Guardian is reporting that people who didn’t get the alert are mostly on the Three network. As I am.

Hey, what happened to my government warning? It’s twenty past three and I haven’t received it yet!

Conventions conventionally drink the real-ale bar dry too early.

Here at Eastercon, apparently we’ve drunk the bar dry…

… of low-alcohol beers.

On my way to Birmingham for Eastercon. Been a few years since I’ve been to a con. It’ll be good to see folk.

Just after midnight last night I finished my novel, Casino Soul. The first draft, anyway, or maybe only the zeroth draft. There’s a lot to do to make it anywhere close to good.

But that can wait for later. For now I’m feeling a combination of elation and deflation.

92,000 words and two years elapsed. Writing takes time.

Extremely rare software update this morning: Scrivener for Mac updated to version 3.3. A huge number of changes from 3.2.3, and I can’t help but wonder if they’d be better off doing more frequent, smaller updates, just so we know they’re still there.

The best writing app.

The first band I ever saw live, back in (fuck!) 1980, was Stiff Little Fingers.

I’ve seen them a few times over the years. Tonight I’m at The Roundhouse to see them once again.

Look at the new Interzone: it’s a paperback book! I like it.

I’ve written here before about Nick Cave’s newsletter, The Red Hand files, and lately I’ve taken — slightly hyperbolically, perhaps — to saying that I think it might be his greatest creation. Today’s issue knocks it right out of the park.

He writes about worrying about singing flat, because he’s going to duet with Johnny Cash. Even Nick Cave worries about not coming up to the mark. And then — well, just read it.

And in the last paragraph, after the signoff, he introduces another hero of mine, just in passing.

Wonderful.

I just crossed the 80,000 word mark on Casino Soul, the novel that I started as part of my creative writing masters in January 2021. Nearly finished (I keep thinking).

When you end the week with a massive merge to master, and then go downstairs to drink wine and listen to Ziggy Stardust. Hello.