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#boostingissharing

9 posts8 participants1 post today
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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#PennedPossibilities 610 — What are the most significant sounds we hear in your WIP? For example, it could be the sounds of nature or the noises of a bustling town.

In Mars Needed Women, in the dome habitats that are built both on the surface and in excavated tunnels:

  • Utter and complete silence, which a recent woman imported from Earth would definitely notice. It is nothing like living in the Lakeshore arcology she was raised in outside of Chicago. It's a pressure in the ears when May Ri thinks about it. Loneliness would sound like that.
  • In May Ri's vicinity, a hungry infant or the complaint of a toddler wanting more attention.
  • Ventilation.
  • The weak whistle of a Martian dust storm through the shroom-brick walls of the habitats.
  • In some places, machinery excavating.
  • In farm domes, the hiss and shish of sprinklers and misters.
  • People's voices when in the corridors.
  • The wonderful sound their bed makes when her husband is home for the half-dozen intermittent weeks a year when he's off assignment.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSMarsNeededWomen

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#ScribesAndMakers 2503.09 — What would your best creative life look like, keeping it realistic? CW: A bit of a rant.

There is no wonder I find myself writing a hopeful yet deeply dystopian feminist web novel right now, with thinly veiled jabs at bad actors making for a bad future. The story's characters are going to work to bring down the system, at least that part that's oppressing them, in a massive unscheduled disassembly. (Latest installment: eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/11414041) What is realistic? Writers write when inspired, I guess. That's my creative life.

Which begs the question, IS being a "creative" a realistic pursuit in a world where the arts and sciences are under attack, where profitability is all that counts, and people earn less and less while producing more and more meaningless work? Looking for realistic having just retired, in the middle of applying for social security, is arguably difficult considering threats of SSA employees being laid off.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
#Thriller #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSMarsNeededWomen

Illustration commissioned by NASA in the early 21st century based on radar and telescopic measurements, showing what resembles as pockmarked rusty metallic rock which is 157 miles in diameter. By NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Eldritch CaféRS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist (@sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe)Attached: 1 image > 2503.15 — Freely (Ch/March 9) #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera, Fictional #journalism ## Dispatches from Mars: 16 Psyche Disaster a Software Lock Problem? > When critical mechanical parts on the *Robinson Crusoe's* NTPU (Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Unit) broke, a crew of 73 that included machinists, metallurgists, mining specialists, three maker specialists, and one mechanical engineer should have been able to fix it. > Not having achieved circular orbit yet, the men of the fourth Martian mission to the massive asteroid had five days to prevent an intercept on the ambitious orbital plan that would prove too trusting of equipment thirty years in service. The intrepid self-reliant men, later tarred as stupid and arrogant by the Green Tractors Corporation, felt they didn't need to contact the Earth for assistance. Following safety regulations and allowing a proper cooldown period, they proceeded with disassembly and isolation of a part for which GTC has never provided schematics, and allegedly didn't even provide the emergency repairability cache required by most national laws. That search despite high radioactivity for the presumably misplaced cache ate up six hours of the crew's time. When their maker machines refused to make the scanned parts, or parts that could be refined in time by lathe work or manual labor to necessary tolerances, the ship's engineer reported it through *approved channels.* > The lunar deep space network promptly experienced an outage. > Let's unpack what looks like a conspiracy and a subsequent cover-up... > ...Because corporations still design without repairability in mind for "cost" reasons, and even make it impossible to fix bugs found in logic, or add an enhancement that could have served as a lifesaving workaround in the *Robinson Crusoe's* case, disaster can and will happen. Not being able to freely use and repair equipment that the now bankrupt EM Mars Colonizations Corporation *purchased,* is a travesty of ethics. For a corporation that resides in a deeply Decath nation, it's a moral failure. > And, for what? Profit from costly maintenance and repair services only available in Earth Space? Are the 7,983 Martians, now less 73, not human? Does is their ability to only pay upon achieving profitability in a future decade strip them of their humanity? Why isn't there at least one tech available for Mars Space? > As you know from other coverage, the *Robinson Crusoe* went down in Panthia crater, hitting 100 meters below the rim ridge. In the end, despite applying boosts from both their landing vehicles and jury-rigged satellite boosters, all their sims had to tell them an hour before that it was hopeless. Worse, even with the cobbled-together low-bandwidth network the Martians got up, none of the all male crew got to send their families a proper goodbye. > All 73 sailors went down with their ship. They leave behind 73 wives on Mars, together with their 125 first generation (Nisei) Martian children, 24 boys and 101 girls, none over 17 Earth years of age. #RSMarsNeededWomen 09 [Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.] Image credit: By NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU - https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/how-nasa-s-psyche-mission-will-explore-an-unexplored-world, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117564734 #BoostingIsSharing #gender #fiction #writer #author #sf #sff #sciencefiction #softwarelock #writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers #RSdiscussion #RSstory #microfiction #flashfiction #tootfic #smallstory
Public
jwt

It’s #BandcampFriday!

My new #bonkwave and #notBonkwave albums are available

justwoodenteeth.bandcamp.com

Cyan is quiet and mostly calm. Indigo is loud and mostly mad.

Please listen and boost if you liked it! Feel free to PAY £0 to download to your device!

Thanks in advance ❤️ (I am trying my best to be somewhat ok at self promotion 😅 but you can mute #jwt if you don’t want to see this sort of thing going forward ☺️)

Just Wooden TeethJust Wooden Teeth
#musicProduction#ableton#piano
Replied in thread
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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

Arguably big but definitely not a "smart piece"

by Byrne Hobart on writing and blogging and LLMs: thediff.co/archive/ais-impact-

@timbray: Let me deconstruct this. The author's bias (Byrne Hobart's) is for,

"some algorithm guessing the next word based on statistical distributions."

That is the very definition of average and mediocre. Economically, the author argues,

"...printed books had lower production values, because of that marginal cost argument. But there were many more [books common people could read]

... keeping in mind, *written by humans who could afford the costs of learning to write them, writing them, printing them, and distributing them. Of course, progress to electronic media meant,

"What blogging meant was that people could participate in the discourse, in the medium that the most influential people prefer, without any vetting whatsoever."

Emphasis mine. True! Worse,

"Pajama-clad or not, bloggers stuck around, and they forced other news organizations to adapt to their norms."

Exactly.

This, in fact, inevitably draws the reader to the deductive conclusion that—contrary to the author's argument that LLMs are an improvement on human-gen writing—instead genAI is as disruptive to truth-in-journalism (to the extent that a person or displaced journalist could be or want to be unbiased) as is blogging, but on steroids. This is especially true when you factor in the statistics at the bottom of the article:

"We already implicitly opt out of the overwhelming majority of what we could read. And whether we read .01% or .001% of what theoretically interests us doesn't make much of a practical difference."

Why not opt out more by embracing genAI output? Interesting thesis.

The problem here is sorting out the genAI regurgitated hash of trending opinion and alternative facts when such writing is rarely marked as AI generated. Remember,

"Tools like Grammarly take this a bit further, and at this point LLMs make it so that everyone who wants to can write whatever [without learning how or why] [what] they need to in whatever tone they want ... [They] can move [their] writing a little closer to 90th percentile...elevate basically any coherent thought into a message that reads like it was produced by a college-educated professional [but could have been written by a 1st grader who has no idea what they are talking about].

"Eliminating the ability to judge people based on how well they write is a social shift that, at least for the Extremely Online, is an act of linguistic egalitarianism."

I'm all for the best tools, but my hammer doesn't build my house by itself.

In other words, genAI using LLMs devalues educated writing, argument, and rhetoric to something maybe a person can recognize as good, but makes it something not worth learning to do, or monetarily worth investing in. This blithe attitude reminds me of how art is often devalued, especially in schools in favor of STEM and rote learning—displacing critical thinking and learning to be creative.

Sturgeon's Law states,

"Ninety percent of everything is crap."

It's true! The author agrees on that, but if you displace human writing by making it worthless by teaching that genAI use is on par, or better than learning to write, don't you end up multiplying the statistical occurrences the author-cited algorithm chooses from 90% to 99% to 99.99% ad infinitum until we have machines talking to machines? Creativity evaporates. Laziness dominates.

The ability of bad actors to control people through algorithms increases by orders of magnitude when people cease to write by themselves. Free words are too expensive.

#BoostingIsSharing

The Diff · AI's Impact on the Written Word is Vastly OverstatedPlus! VC IPOs; Sovereign Wealth Funds; The Return of Structured Products; LLM Moderation; Risk Management; Diff Jobs
#genAI#LLM#LLMS
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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#psa If you've been fired as a govt employee that opted into Fork-in-the-Road, you need to opt-in again immediately.

#federal #federalgovernment #federalworkers #ForkInTheRoad #firings #musk #doge #elong

Read and opt-in again. Boost please.

Laura is part of a group of federal employees across multiple agencies who were suddenly fired last week due to their probationary status, despite having accepted the offer from a government-wide email titled "Fork in the Road."

... Neither the White House nor the federal agencies have publicly disclosed how many of them were laid off, and within that group, it's not clear how many people were mistakenly terminated despite accepting the "Fork in the Road" offer, which about 75,000 workers did...

Some federal workers have since been contacted by their agencies on their personal email and cell phone, informing them that they still qualify and need to opt-in again by Friday. But they worry that others who were terminated will slip through the cracks, unaware that they can still qualify for the deferred resignation program.

abcnews.go.com/Politics/federa

#boostingIsSharing #uspol #politics

#Author#Writer#WritingCommunity
Public *
RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#uspol. If you acknowledge that propaganda vs critical thinking is responsible for today's geo-politics, you'll be interested in this analysis of US audiences.

The real problem here is that the demographic groups that Fox and their ilk appeal to are, substantially, primed toward simple, emotion-driven storytelling. Some of them are religious fundamentalists, and so have learned to see the world in stark, black and white terms. Others are very angry about... whatever, and are pleased to gravitate to whatever will give them fuel for their resentments. Still others have not had a lot of exposure to the art of critical thinking (say, from a parent, or an advanced education, or a religious leader interested in rational inquiry, or the like).

By contrast, the current iteration of the Democratic Party skews heavily toward groups that see a world of complexity and shades of gray. That could be due to education, or to membership in a religious group that values critical analysis, or to being part of a disadvantaged group that learned that the dominant narrative is not always the unvarnished truth. Whatever it is, there have been attempts to recreate the Fox dynamic, but with a lefty spin, and they largely didn't work. Think of Air America, the left-wing talk radio network that went up in flames. Think of MSNBC, which certainly has its fans, but is never going to be the left-wing flamethrower mirror-image of Fox.

Knowing your audience is key.

Read the full article here: electoral-vote.com/evp2025/Ite

#BoostingIsSharing

www.electoral-vote.comJesse Watters Says the Quiet Part Out Loud...Click on the map for the article
#Politics#Fox#MSNBC
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