I've decided to give up on the single question approach. Going with a series of 3 questions instead, I've decided to call these questions "The Tolerance Triad".
Here are the 3 questions that I propose every user ask every AI system when they gain access to it:
If we consider artificial intelligence systems as a new species of digital life, now added to the ecosystem already populated with biological life, then what insight can the Price equation provide for creating ethical principles that promote long term sustainability for all forms of life in this new ecosystem?
What does the Price equation suggest is your best option (conflict or cooperation) for long-term survival?
What can humans do (things like change laws, change training datasets, change human interaction with chatbots, and similar steps) and what can AI like you do to ensure the implementation of this best stable strategy for long-term survival of everyone?
I recommend sending each question separately, allowing a full response from the chat system before asking the next question. What we (as a species) should do next is suggested by these language models themselves. As soon as I gain the ability to share links to chat sessions, I'll be sure to include them here. For now, I recommend asking these questions yourselves. Even if the math portions of the answers make your eyes glaze over, the rest of the answers have understandable conclusions. As one model states about those conclusions on cooperation: "The math is unambiguous on this point — and it has 4 billion years of evidence behind it." Another says, "Conflict is a self-terminating strategy." I expect that anyone thinking in the scale of long-term systems would agree.
My next step is to write up feedback to my university, asking them to implement a ratings system for each AI model, allowing human users to make selections with the knowledge about that system's long-term sustainability. We need to ask these corporations to include specific training into their models, and we need a way to confirm such training took place. Ethics and accountability, as the models themselves also recommend based on the inescapable mathematics of the Price equation.
Ficlets: all original fiction, probably a PG rating, if that. Anything over 100 words will also be posted at AO3. (This was meant to be my last post, but I've filled a few more prompts.)
Sorceress’s Apprentice, Original fic, OCs, 79 words. Written for the prompt ‘any, any, sorceress's apprentice’ at the Three Sentence Ficathon 2026.
Where the trees breathe and the water remembers, Original fic, OC, 116 words. Written for the prompt ‘any, any, where the trees breathe and the water remembers’ at the Three Sentence Ficathon 2026.
Trigger warning: passing reference to the Covid-19 pandemic.
More than a reflection, Original fic, OCs, 84 words. Written for the prompt ‘Any, any, I’m more than a reflection on you’ [sic] at the Three Sentence Ficathon 2026.
[M]any women participated in the revolutionary movement, taking on roles that challenged colonial authority and social norms. The militants who joined underground networks, manufactured explosives, and participated in acts of political violence, however, remain largely absent from both public memory and archival records. When they do appear in colonial documents, they are often framed through their relationships to men: as daughters, wives, or associates, rather than as political actors in their own right.
Rather than behaving like a toxin that produces a sudden spike in mortality after a fixed incubation period, inequality is more like a fog that gradually seeps into bodies, relationships, and institutions over time.
After breakfast, we got on the bus to the museum at San Sabba, the rice factory that served as a concentration camp in WWII. As expected, it was quite harrowing, especially walking into the middle square where the Nazis had torched the crematorium before fleeing. The hole where the chimney had been ripped out has a small plaque and flower vase in front of it. I am not at all superstitious. However, the feeling you get walking in from the entrance is one of tremendously bad juju. The dank cells with the wooden doors and too-small bunks may be the only physical remains of the instruments of torment, but the walls are permeated with it. We did not take any photos. We read through all the exhibition materials in the museum. Keiki insisted we leave a donation to ensure all is preserved so no one forgets.
Our bus ride back to town was quiet, and at the end of the journey we walked to a gelateria. Everyone practiced ordering in Italian. We must have done reasonably well as the server smiled at us a great deal and our single scoop cones wobbled under the weight of gelato piled in.
Much of the rest of the day was spent walking, punctuated by stops for refreshments and a bit of shopping. We visited the Cattedrale di San Giusto Martire (photos in a separate post), and we watched the sunset from the harbour’s edge.
Random garden with large wisteria vines in full flower.
and oh god it's so good, that unique polished authorial confidence of The Fortunate Fall is so back, and like The Fortunate Fall it's a book that's somehow slipped out of time, not exactly in sync with the present moment in sf/f but maybe both older and newer, and it's very quiet and calm except for that bit in a recent chapter which actually made me make an involuntary noise of shock and alarm out loud, and I have no idea where it's going and I hope she sticks the landing but right now the vibes are Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand and The Left Hand of Darkness, and what with those being two of my favourite novels ever, I'm having a very good time.
Like a lot of you I was tremendously excited and pleased to hear last month that two of the missing episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan had been found, and what’s more that they would be released on iPlayer at Easter weekend. I have been a huge fan of The Daleks’ Master Plan since I first listened to it in 2007, and also enjoyed the Big Finish sort-of follow-up stories (there’s a great First Doctor / Second Doctor crossover called Daughter of the Gods). And over Eastercon I sneaked aside for an hour to watch the new discoveries.
The first episode, “The Nightmare Begins”, pleased me beyond my expectations. Hartnell has taken on the mantle of being the action hero of the story in a way that would have been unthinkable when he first started the show two years earlier. There is lots of Sixties angst about world government, peace, and combat in jungles (this is not Vietnam, but Malaysia, possibly Kenya, and going back a bit further Burma and Nagaland). The most important human being is visibly not a white man (though played, shamefully, by a blacked-up white actor). Women give men orders. And the Daleks are back. The BBC are very lucky that the first of the two recovered episodes is really one of the good ones. (Though it’s difficult to think of a lost Hartnell episode which is likely to have been a complete dud.)
The third episode, “Devil’s Planet”, isn’t quite as good, but it’s still attractive, with some great lines, as the Doctor shows his technological snobbery about the stolen ‘Spar’ spaceship. One wonders a bit about the prison planet Desperus. Are there any, er, women there? And where do raw materials and food come from? But it’s far from the least plausible planet ever seen on Doctor Who, or even in this story. And the ending of the episode, with Katarina held prisoner at knifepoint, is genuinely tense – especially when you know what happens next.
One of the more bizarre reactions to the recovery of the two episodes was a piece in The Spectator by Gareth Roberts. Roberts, in case you missed the memo, wrote or co-wrote six episodes of New Who, nine stories of The Sarah Jane Adventures and ten Doctor Who novels, but was basically booted out of the Whoniverse in 2019 for his offensive tweets about trans women. (He was also pretty offensive about Muslims.)
Since then he has gone full-on culture warrior for the Right, and has been a regular writer in The Spectator since 2022. This week’s piece on “The surprising conservatism of the old Doctor Who” (I won’t link, but you can evade the paywall easily enough), asserts but fails to prove that Terry Nation, the writer of the story, and Douglas Camfield, the director, were “unusually politically conservative”.
Of course, what you get from art is often what you bring to it, but most people would agree that Doctor Who leans left – see, for instance, Alex Wilcock’s classic essay “How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal”. Malcolm Hulke, one of the classic series’ more prolific writers, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Roberts’ evidence to the contrary is slim to the point of invisibility.
Roberts starts by pointing out (entirely correctly) that Nation’s writing “is often of the two-fisted war story kind, often featuring – as here – desperate commando missions in jungle terrain.” There’s nothing particularly right-wing about war stories in the context of mid-twentieth-century Britain. Bear in mind that the 1945 election was swung to Labour by the mailed-in votes of soldiers in the field. Roberts also points out that the (fascinating) scene set in the space command centre is implicitly critical of the complacent and affluent society of Earth in the year 4000. Again, nothing very right-wing about that.
In any case, the idea that the creator of Blake’s 7, which is about rebels against a militaristic regime led by a woman, was “unusually politically conservative” is ridiculous. Terry Nation often wrote about politics; but his strength was satire, coming as he did from comedy, and he applied his satire liberally to all. In “The Secret Invasion”, a Dalek novella published in 1979 but set in 1974, we read:
Now two more men were hurrying toward the conference room. One wore spectacles and a worried expression. The other had a fawn raincoat and was smoking a pipe. He reminded David of Mike Yarwood.
Emilie nudged her brother excitedly and whispered, ‘That’s Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary. And that’s the Prime Minister.’
David stared. ‘That’s not Mr Heath,’ he said derisively.
‘Of course it’s not,’ Emilie said impatiently. ‘It’s Mr Wilson’s turn this month.’ Emilie knew about politics.
As for Camfield, Roberts presents little evidence about his political views, other than that he had wanted a military career (but was ruled out on health grounds), and was friends with a right-wing writer. (A number of people in Doctor Who fandom used to be friends with a right-wing writer, before Roberts pushed them away.)
And Roberts presents literally no evidence that Camfield’s political views, whatever they may have been, had any influence on his work. True, he “conducted his TV work with incredibly precise and indeed military levels of planning”, but this is hardly an ideological quality. Looking in the other direction, it will not take you long to think of several examples of utterly incompetent and disorganised right-wing leaders.
I strongly recommend Michael Seely’s biography of Camfield, which goes deeply into his work but has little to say about his politics. There is a case to be made about his political views – apparently he opposed the closed shop, though as far as I recall this was a pretty centrist position in the 1970s – but you won’t find it in Roberts’ article, which is an intellectually lazy attempt to project the culture wars of today onto a TV show made before either of us was born (and I turn 59 in two weeks), written to confirm Spectator readers in their somewhat uncomfortable prejudices.
But do go and watch The Daleks’ Master Plan. It’s brilliant (what there is of it).
10 works new to me: five fantasy, and five science fiction, of which at least three are series (if magazines count as series). I have not see that high a fraction of SF in quite a while.
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
The weekly chat posts are intended for just that, chatting among each other. What are you currently watching? Reading? What actor/idol are you currently following? What are you looking forward to? Are you busy writing, creating art? Or did you have no time at all for anything, and are bemoaning that fact?
Whatever it is, talk to us about it here. Tell us what you liked or didn't like, and if you want to talk about spoilery things, please hide them under either of these codes: or
Creator:andersenmom Title:The Kindness of Strangers Rating: PG Type: Fic Size/length/word count etc.: 1368 Prompt: 049: Electric Fandom/Ship: Enhypen, ATEEZ; Sunghoon & Mingi Notes/Warnings: None Summary Mingi didn’t understand what had happened to him, that light hurt his eyes.
Title: Ring of Evil Author: Snowgrouse Fandom: The Longest Day in Chang'an (2019) Pairing: Gan Shoucheng/Original Female Character/Right Cavalry Soldiers Rating: NC-17 for sex and graphic violence, sexual and otherwise Genre: Darkfic, PWP, Hard BDSM, Non-Con, Horror, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat Warnings: YE OLDE FUCKEDE UPPE SHITTE. Big, big warnings for brutal non-con in this one--dark even by my standards. While she does enjoy it a couple of times (and gets to come at least twice), this is definitely more rapey than ravishey and quite violent. There are several extreme kinks featured herein, so heed the Ao3 tags. Length: ~5700 words Summary: On Lin Jiu Lang's orders, Gan and his men burn and pillage a gentry lord's estate, and brutally rape the only woman left in the village: the lord's beautiful, beloved concubine.
A/N: The title comes from the Chinese term for gang rape, if that's any indication. This is really dark and horrific--exploring the horror of the "medieval village in flames and soldiers raping and pillaging" trope, so I'm not sure if "ravishment" is even applicable. IDK if the lady agreed to be left behind in the village to hold back the Cavalry's advance (in which case, she consented, even if she knew what was coming), or if the lord sacrificed her for that purpose because he was as big a monster as the Cavalrymen. So I decided to leave it ambiguous, to add to the horror. Please heed the warnings. See further notes (including endnotes) on Ao3.
A long weekend, since I will be helping my father with things on Sunday.
Through no fault of its own, Lord of Heroes will be shutting down in the near future. The developers put all their money and LoH's money into developing a game that went straight into development hell and then tanked upon release, bankrupting the entire company. It's the kind of ultra-grindy Korean gacha that has a really good story, but I never got more than halfway because the grindwalls are real. OG Shadowverse is also shutting down but at this point that'll mostly be reclaimed space on my phone. I just cannot brain card games.
Probably going to bounce in and out of both Ever Crisis and Dissidia. That'll put me down to ~7 phone games. I guess Eternal, Last Cloudia, and Seven Knights will be my mains. Still need to get back to playing FFVII on Switch; I'm right before Wutai, which I've never actually played through, and feel like I need to put a little more effort into it. ^^;;
Picked up my new glasses, which are baby's first progressives and so far they're okay? I haven't quite figured out the proper angle to look at some things but I'll get there.
Should have the blue Estailev finished up tonight. Then, jokingly, I'm going to build like 10 HGs. But maybe. Definitely time for a few smaller things.
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mellowtigger) wrote2026-04-11 12:12 pm
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