It has been ages since I’ve read them but anathem is definitely his best work. I did really enjoy zodiac, snowcrash, and the cryptonomicon when I read them ~15 years ago though.

His books are always a bit libertarian (usa meaning, derogatory) although snowcrash is a very funny send up of what that might actually look like if adopted wholeheartedly so idk how much they can be said to endorse it wholeheartedly.

Some of it reminds me of the incoherence of Pratchett’s politics. A sort of “Just let smart people with good values do what they want and things will be ok” without establishing how you determine who that applies to or really sitting with how fragile that is.

Damn, imagine living in this world and being like “You know, those people who’d keep women chained to the house, kill the gays, force a state religion on people, and segregated society have some good points”

So I love Neal’s books, I think he’s a fun story-teller and anathems orbital mechanics scene has loads more tension than any slop in something like interstellar.

But whenever he gets involved in social-technological commentary I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.

Anyway, scour the submissions for little Lytton contest entrants

The defensiveness that people have learned to write online with is truly a tragic marker of our times. It didn’t even cross my mind you would be pro-malaria.

I was pretty disgusted by that. It seems like the guy’s crimes were some poor citation (he did cite the academic he alledgedly plagiarised so obviously it’s not plagiarism lol) and maybe exaggerating some of his life?

Seeing the media go from uncritically regurgitating a racist’s allegation, to reporting about the allegation controversy, to uncritically reporting what people claim to have or have not remembered about his life from 30 years ago, to digging through his entire life. For, I’ll reiterate, maybe citing something badly and doing some sloppy scholarship.

You know, the thing that gets someone a disciplinary chat and maybe a bump down if anything.

In my brief foray into it, actually I met singer once lol at a lunch about it, no. Really just that it’s a cheap way to save people that were otherwise ignored because of racism.

You still encounter disgusting narratives about overpopulation and people living in Africa, despite most of these people’s resource consumption and thus strain on the world being completely negligible compared to the sort of people that love making those arguments.

Malaria is suuuuper upsetting and preventable.

There were always racists in the movement and its ideological foundations are shakey but they didn’t have hegemony at the start.

Class consciousness in software is in the abyss, I have worked with people who didn’t know that sick leave was won through the labour movement and not something that “just made sense” to do.

That doesn’t change their class interests, it just means they behave ignorantly (in a way that hurts other workers but that’s why they need education, not isolation).

Misusing a defined term (petty bourgeois) to make your argument look more tied to historical ones is kinda fucking fail for a historian

Most managers are still primarily reliant on selling their own wage labour and do not own the means of production. Their power is highly constrained (literally just where they work, limited ability to control the circumstances of their work) and they are subject to the whims of those who own the means of production.

Getting more favourable terms to keep other workers in line does not fundamentally change your class interests but it does give you peverse incentives to harm your own class (which in the long run fucks you, e.g. you need sick leave too).

Deceiving workers about their class interests to divide us is a tactic of the capitalists and we don’t need to help them with that.

Emacs is so wonderfully capable I’m pretty sure we’re all just running in an emacs buffer somewhere. Nothing built by humans could be so nice.

piiiiisssssssss

My fucking eyes can’t they see how ugly their shit always is?

Sloppers hold up the ugliest, most artistically meritless shit while going “Oh yeah? what about this!?”

Yeah actually, the sign border is weird, building in backround makes no sense, building on the right has a couple of weird features, trees are very indistinct, pavement on left abruptly changes paving pattern just before the sign, pavement-road on right of sign.

The kids are alright!

Automated company or attempt at viral marketing?

OpenAI is slowing development because of uh safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/open-ai-pause-hack

Definitely not because improvement is stagnating and they’re running out of money

I haven’t been listening to your podcast (no shade, it’s just not my thing) but I’ll have to listen to this because my God that man frustrates me.

He basically exists to funnel run the:

intellectually curious libs -> smug superiority complex with status quo bias -> reactionary

pipeline.

Didn’t know eyeballs could get cancer from reading but here we are.

We are not worthy

On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.

No for real it’s baffling. What happens when your profession doesn’t have a licensing board.

Worse than the cursed “curl -o- | bash” command installations. Or as I like to call it “curl prostrate”