Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been playing around with Chat-GPT. It’s remarkable in so many ways — writing fluidly and coherently, putting together sentences and paragraphs, pulling information from the vast swathes of data upon which it was trained. We marvel: It would take humans hours to find Read more…
This tweet inspired me to follow up on the piece about AI art and writing that I published yesterday. I couldn’t agree more. In 2011, a venture capitalist wrote that software was eating the world. More than a decade on, I think it’s fair to say that today, the technology Read more…
Lately, there’s been a lot of discourse about the impact of AI art and writing, and I’ll admit that I feel a bit of trepidation about the abilities of recently-unveiled artificial intelligence projects. There are so many possibilities to fear—its ability to replace creative workers, the hollowness of its art, Read more…
The news lately has felt pretty apocalyptic. I won’t get into the international or even national headlines, because there’s far too much there. Instead, I’m going to stick close to my own home, and close to Platformed’s setting. When I wrote Platformed, I imagined a future embattled by climate change, Read more…
Mount Whitney is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States at 14,508 feet — and in the height of summer (or, tbh, a lot of the year during this latest great California drought) it is a walk up climb! But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, exactly. I researched extensively Read more…
There’s something beautiful about a well-loved keyboard. You know the kind: certain keys’ labels have worn off but the user knows exactly which ones must be pressed harder to work properly now, after so many years. Alas, most of the signs of our work, as authors or software engineers, are Read more…
This post is just a rant, so if you’re looking for something insightful, I suggest you look elsewhere. You know that phenomenon in which you look at a chair on some website and then it haunts you for weeks? Worse yet, when you buy some random item you clearly need Read more…
I lived in Silicon Valley for five years before I realized it was an actual valley. You can see it on any topographical map, or even a roadmap if you note where the roads go windy and understand that means there are hills. I should have noticed sooner. But it Read more…