Chapter 1 of Gardening Leave is now posted to AO3.

The story is still in the process of being outlined, let alone written (it has a beginning and an ending; it just needs some middle), so I can't yet be sure how many chapters there will be. Definitely more than three chapters, though.

The Register: Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Quote:The late great Grace Hopper used to hand out 30 cm (roughly 1 foot) lengths of wire as physical examples of a nanosecond: that's how far light can travel in one billionth of a second. If Google considers a 4 GB model to be "nano" sized, then it puts Hanff's hyperbolic comment about the climate footprint into real perspective. It gives a hint of the size of the real gigantic models in the datacenters metastasizing across the world.

A recent study led by Grace Liu at Carnegie-Mellon found that regular AI use caused measurable cognitive impairment. It's worth thinking carefully about what we trade away when we outsource our thinking and, separately, what the planet pays to power the systems we're outsourcing it to.

This vulture suggests you turn it off now, everywhere you can.

A mere 11 years after the last major release, NetHack 5.0 was released last weekend.

We have fanfic of our fanfic!

Closing the Circle (an unauthorized KanriKyara story), the first story posted to AO3 by ASWCanuck.

I can't speak for the other writers, but as far as I'm concerned, this is canon for KanriKyara.

As for the joke...

Spoiler

it's pretty obvious to long-time fantasy readers who live in Ottawa that the bookseller is Charles de Lint... who wrote the story that Kate's from.

My not so dark World of Darkness fic, all inspired by an Anon on Tumblr last year.
\https://archiveofourown.org/works/746896.../195066946

Please comment, I need the feedback.

Did said absolute mad lad use machine translation probably close to an LLM? Sure. Is the man more of a Tenchi Muyo fan likely just churning through said novels alongside various other LNs alongside the core Tenchi bits? Yup.

Do I give a damn? Look, I own physical copies of all this stuff, and I never thought we'd ever see the day when BGC 2032 Light Novels 1 and 2, the 2012-tastic garbage fire Hard Metal Guardians, and the actual Crisis-Crash bridging audio drama Soldier Blue understandable. I've spamposted a lot of BGC shit here over the years and often worried most of it means next to nothing 'round here, but this is nuuuuuts.

The novels themselves are pretty nuts too: Hard Metal is uniformly trying to rip off Railgun as aggressively as it can without the author having half of Kamachi's creative chutzpah (and boy is a Kamachi Crisis a really amazing image, especially after his high-tech Cute Kunoichis novels rely on playing around with high-tech bullshit in ways that'd suit the series well), LN1 Silent Fanfare works amazingly well as what feels like a standalone episode of Crisis with more of Toshimichi Suzuki's particular fascinations worming their way into the thing, and LN2 Break-Down 48 is more a retelling of the whole story in one novel, a sort of Greatest Hits which can't blend into any main story but does stand on its own somehow. I'm pretty sure the one manga Go Go Sabers will be translated soon, and wouldn't be surprised if we see some effort to translate the B-Clubs to boot.

So cool....

The latest installment of the thrilling Critic series of stories is now available here.

Normally, I use VLC Media Player on all of my devices... but as of yesterday afternoon it's crashing without an error message on my Android cellphone and tablet.

Any suggestions for a replacement? Something that doesn't transmit my usage patterns back to its supplier is essential -- that's private information as far as I'm concerned. Freeware is good.

This themed collection of vignettes is now available on AO3 and on the wiki.

My employer has been going through a couple rounds of staff reductions, and I was one of about twelve that were let go yesterday.

Unlike in the past, though, I am close enough to retirement age that I doubt my prospects for being hired anywhere else are very good, so after consulting with our investment team, I have decided to retire about a year earlier than I had originally planned.

So that makes two of us, now, Rob...