Fascinating must-read thread. And yes, donate to support Paulina Borsook, who tried to warn everyone.

I am so excited that the Kjipuktuk/Halifax/Maritime community has our first speculative writing conference coming this May!! Check out the details on @tricon-hfx.bsky.social or tricon-Halifax.com!

remembering this untouchable pair of comments

Public service announcement: ONTARIO SFF WRITERS PLEASE REMEMBER TO APPLY FOR THE OAC RECOMMENDER GRANT AUGUR IS A RECOMMENDER WE WANT TO RECOMMEND SFF WRITERS GET GRANTS /end

A message to Vince Gasparro, who has banned us from Canada, and our many fans there. 👇

god this is such bullshit. this is canada, btw. alberta. keep an eye on this shit my dudes. lot of canadians going “at least we’re not like the usa” while stuff like this creeps in at the edges.

The problem is that "hallucinations" is a bad term. Every answer, correct or incorrect, spouted by LLMs like ChatGPT are produced in the same manner. LLMs don't know anything. They just generate likely patterns of texts. "Hallucinations" is how the whole thing works.

A leafy fern fox 🍃🦊

All I saw was cheesecake boat and ocean for at least 5 minutes

I've had some lovely responses to this one. Shoutout to the Umberto Eco fans in the house.

Here is a link to a practical doxcare resource that is divided into sections based on time urgency (i.e., a section for "I'm fucked already" and a section for "I have time to plan in advance"). You really, really would prefer to be in the second category. drive.proton.me/urls/A9BHSJY...

If you are on the TPUSA list of professors or are an otherwise visible left academic, I strongly recommend reviewing your digital footprint. Is your address public information? What about your family members? crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/d...

If you've been using a 📌 emoji to bookmark posts, @rafael.my and @samuel.bsky.team cooked up a special tool you can use to migrate them to your Saved Posts. Try it here: pin2saved.vercel.app

Fellow authors, important thread. God, I'd forgotten what a mess that Google Books thing was.

SFWA's Contracts Committee will review contracts and this service is not limited to SFWA members. Email [email protected].

This has actually explained a lot.

Important PSA👇

I am inclined to want to think that there is value in hearing insight about how one's political foes think. But there are big logical problems in asking a guy like this to inform you. If your goal is to out-maneuver the people he supports, why do you think he'd really tell you the truth?

One of the problems of short fiction is *finding* it. There's so much out there, it's hard to know how to find what you'll like. Enter InkFoundry. There are so many ways to search! Search by venue (Small Wonders, for example), by author, by tags... or have the site surprise you ! inkfoundry.net

@hillarymonahan.bsky.social, you probably need to know about this, if you don't already.

Canadians, this is a parliamentary petition, not a random online thing. Takes a minute to sign. An easy good deed for the day.

I'm scared I will draw the Wrath of the Fanboys, but... this week on my newsletter I wrote about why I think the "Golden Age of Science Fiction" writers have so little appeal to a huge swathe of today's SF/F writers & readers. undercover-in-the-apocalypse.ghost.io/this-is-why-...

I heard about a Canadian sailboat (piloted by a retired Coast Guard!) getting stopped by a US marine Border Patrol and having their cabin ransacked after (allegedly) "entering US territory." Stay safe, boaters. They are fully run by maniacs down there right now. #yyj #WestCoast #boating

I loved this "Rome but with magic" fantasy novel, and now it is on SALE.

Yo, fellow Canucks! Head's up to sign up!

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Health Canada has approved Moderna’s newly updated Covid vaccine — and for the first time, the vaccines will be manufactured in Canada. globalnews.ca/news/1134908... #medsky

Don't be too fast of a learner, or too slow. Don't have any disabilities! Don't daydream. Don't socialize. Don't get bored. Don't get upset. Don't have questions. Don't think.

I regret going with Audible to produce my ebooks. The $$ was better at the time but the royalties are gamed, my books are never in library catalogues, and they f*** my listeners whenever they enshittify. Get out of Audible as much as you can. Use audiobooks.com or Chirp or some other tool.

Humblebundle to support World Central Kitchen, and get a bunch of my books from @tordotcom.bsky.social including Murderbot and Witch King! #booksky www.humblebundle.com/books/martha...

Opera comes with a built in VPN. This fun fact of the day is brought to you by the state of Mississippi.

A few comments about what I'll call "1 book in x volumes" series as opposed to episodic standalone volume series (like mysteries). No one needs to buy anything they don't want to. That said, it can harm, even kill, a midlist writer's career if people refuse to (say) buy book 1 until book 3 is out.

Smaugust is almost over, so let me post my dragons while I still can. Four book covers I drew!

"Asked if the Sooke-Metchosin herd would migrate into the city eventually, the ministry did not provide an answer." ROFL. Considering the rampant deer and bunny populations in the city, I believe the answer is, "Likely, yes." At least there will be some pedestrians commanding respect on the roads.

This article, by Carleton PhD student Alexander Rudolph, should be on the front page of every Canadian newspaper. It highlights how the US can access all data on the government and military’s Microsoft servers, Canadian laws be damned. www.digitaljournal.com/tech-science...

This is a pretty good bit

This is elegant and incisive as a knife. It's also all true. I sat through it. Thanks for writing it up in this way, @grigorylukin.bsky.social.

This suggests that "AI" is as much a cultural shift as it is a technological one—the hype-shrouded AI boom has given managers encouragement and cover to break previous norms and standards, even if it means a loss in quality. As the boom appears to give way to a bust, that may be all the clearer.

Since 2023, translators and interpreters have seen work dry up, rates plummet and their jobs reduced to editing AI-generated output. Some are leaving the field, others are considering bankruptcy. All despite any major upgrade in translation quality. This is how AI is killing translation work:

In the bookshop this morning: PARENTS: “Okay, we’re leaving now.” CHILD: *pulls another book from the shelf and sits down * CHILD: “Then I guess this is goodbye.”

I'm trying to help my parents pick a new refrigerator and we are having a TIME. Companies have traded reliability for icemakers. IoT/WiFi connectivity is taking us far from the light of paradise. There are high(stratospheric in all senses)-end models that don't seem designed for human use. SMH.

I have a meeting scheduled at the end of the month with my federal member of parliament to discuss the ongoing censorship campaign by American companies and lawmakers, along with Bill S209 here in Canada. If you are a Canadian NSFW artist, please DM me about what kind of impact this has had on you.

Every time I present on AI, I include a slide specifically calling out how important it is that we don't anthropomorphize genAI for exactly the reason OP gives. Once we start thinking of it in human terms, we're playing into tech bros' strategy.

A federal court ruled that ANTHROPIC illegally copied MILLIONS of books to train its AI. All authors and publishers whose books were downloaded by Anthropic from pirate websites are subject to receiving compensation. This could involve your work. For more info: authorsguild.org/news/anthrop...

"This is locavore versus omnivore" is a good line, too. AI companies' insistence they are everything to everyone, and thus need to take everything...versus all the unique individuals on planet Earth that they would like to supersede.

2025 Aurora Award Winners We are pleased to announce (a little late) the winners of the 2025 Aurora Awards for excellence by Canadians in the fields of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. We want to congratulate all of this year’s nominees.

important