(2025-08-22) Sloan Inevitable Technologies Of Lightness

Robin Sloan: Inevitable technologies of lightness A couple of weekends ago, I attended the Vintage Computer Festival

My favorite was the table of 1990s monitors: goliath CRTs, glass an inch thick. One, I remembered from the showroom at the computer retailer where my dad worked; its orientation was vertical, like a printed page. Pure monochrome, sharp as a tack.

On the writing front, I am in deep on some Moonbound/Mr Penumbra fusion shit. I might not come out the other side of this for a while.

Mathematician and AI researcher Daniel Murfet has recently been tracing the “embryology” of AI language models as they develop during training, and you can see why he calls them “baby serpents”:

Recalling that language models are not programmed but grown, vines on a trellis of code, I think the term “embryology” is apt—less analogy than direct description.
Interesting to glimpse a baby dragon, isn’t it?

The Book-Makers, Adam Smyth
You can learn so much, and there’s still so much to learn.
I’ve read a lot about books and their history

Just for starters, there is the Biblical Harmony, a kind of bespoke book assembled from the raw material of the Gospels. With careful scissors, a harmonizer would liberate verses, often individual words, from the printed original

This is all happening in the year 1634, by the way!

Adam Smyth’s focus in The Book-Makers is materiality and humanity: “a history of the book with people put back in:
"not a techno-determinist account where abstract mechanical forces drive change, not a chronology of inventions, but a narrative teeming with lives

We learn that, for most of print’s history, the central figure was the printer-publisher: a rich fusion, political-economic-artistic. (Benjamin Franklin is archetypal, and Adam’s rollicking profile is, on its own, worth the price of admission.) Gradually, starting in the 19th century and culminating in the 20th, the two activities move apart, in terms of both profession and proximity. So it comes to pass that, in the 20th century, a writer never sees the press upon which their work is reproduced

Software People, Douglas G. Carlston:
A few months ago, I came across a copy of Software People, a memoir of the early computer industry by Douglas G. Carlston, and I’ve continued to think about the book’s central insight:
Carlston describes a nascent industry with an incredible rate of change. The years from 1977 to 1984 were absolutely insane

A lot of people want to tell you that, with the arrival of the AI language models, we have entered a new era of technological change. I don’t dispute that the dollar amounts have mushroomed since the Software People era, or that more people are participating. And yet … I guess I would say: read Software People, and tell me it doesn’t feel the same.

I’m always interested in the argument that some particular period of time was more dynamic than the rest. The turn of the 20th century is a popular candidate. So is: right now.

The message that it’s NEVER been like it is RIGHT NOW, because things have NEVER been changing so FAST, is at best vanity, and more often propaganda.

Where the Axe Is Buried, Ray Nayler
You know I am a raving lunatic for Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, which seems to keep recruiting readers and fans—a book with real momentum

How does the cliché go? Science fiction is really about the present, not the future. Sure, sometimes. This time, yes: Where the Axe Is Buried is, in so many ways, about RIGHT NOW, and the reading experience is charged with real urgency and, honestly, dread.

Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz:
I haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle, but my copy just arrived and I will let Annalee set the stage:
The San Francisco of Automatic Noodle is almost unrecognizable. It’s the year 2064, five years after California has won a war of independence against the United States.

The prospect of a Newitz novella with four robots at its heart is exciting, because Annalee is perhaps the world’s foremost ventriloquist of nonhuman intelligence. I’m thinking of the animals of The Terraformers, and especially of the robots of Autonomous, voices that are rich and full yet legitimately robotic, informed by the real grain of computation: verbose, a bit anxious, invested in protocol.

New M. John Harrison next year!
Plus, Mike’s anti-memoir is coming to the U.S. soon. I imported the U.K. edition, of course; read it earlier this year; and loved it

Robin Rendle’s book recommendations are so lovely, because they are braided into his real life, his thinking. Please: write book recs like this! Tell us about how books have moved with you, in your mind, your body

This year, Anne Trubek has been unspooling an interesting, and in my opinion important, series of posts on the history of copyright in America.
Here’s the first, on the encouragement of Literature and Genius.
Here’s the second, in which everyone is ripping everyone else off.
Here’s the third, on the difference between a copyright and the right to publish.

The AI and AI-adjacent communities of the San Francisco Bay Area have been getting a lot of press lately, and I always want to push back, not because that particular version of the Bay Area doesn’t exist—the land of the overthinkers—but because it is just one among many.

There is, after all, the Bay Area of (just choosing a candidate at random here … ) Sourdough! Or the Bay Area of Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Of the Golden Sardine! Naturally, I love the Bay Area of Richmond’s On-Line Bindery, and of Berkeley’s Trumer Brewery. There are a lot of people doing physical work out here. It’s not all words and it’s not all code.

One vital version is, of course, the Bay Area of Alexis Madrigal, which he has helpfully rendered in rich detail (Pacific Circuit). It’s just so much more interesting than the Bay Area of the overthinkers.

And, in reality news: Alexis and Sarah Rich have secured a storefront in Rockridge, where their new community hub and culture space, called Local Economy, will soon open its doors. If you’re a reader in the East Bay, this is something you’ll want to track closely.

I’ve been ruminating on the tragedy of the U.S. government’s turn away from renewable energy

this calculation is barely about climate anymore. It’s instead about a set of technologies so potent and elegant that they are basically undeniable. Our civilization’s energy will come from the sun; it will be stored in batteries. Humanity will employ a few other generation technologies here and there, particularly in extreme environments. But, in the long run, and to a first approximation, it’s the sun, and it’s batteries

Behold Marcin Wichary, standing athwart the web browser, shouting: HERE IS YOUR HYPERMEDIA

Here is a new app/platform (bindings) for comics creators that looks very nice.

I’m delighted that Derek Thompson is out there just like … Derek-ing! Here is the disaster that is the housing market for young people; here are AI macroeconomics. His writing voice is, as always, peppy but/and precise, and his subjects are exactly the things I want to read about. Lucky me! Lucky us.

I’m excited about this forthcoming book from J. W. Mason:
The title Against Money is trying to do a few different things. Most directly, it highlights the distinction between the network of money payments and values, on the one hand, and the social and material reality that depends on them

We also mean “against” in the same way one might distinguish a figure against a background: by writing about money, we seek to clarify our vision of the social world that exists around, outside and in opposition to money

Here is a post titled Myths and Lessons from a Century of American Automaking and—I say this as a child of Metro Detroit—it is really useful, always, to confront the possibility: what if the cartoon history in my head is wrong?

My note to myself after reading about the concept of entropic gravity:
it’s good to think new thoughts

Could you get to orbit … in a balloon?? Honestly, I love it. A technology of lightness, rather than heaviness; of going with the flow, rather than straining against it.
Nothing here is impossible.
The rocket equation is too gnarly a tyrant; there’s no beating it, only enduring it. Humanity ought to be searching, scrounging, desperate for other ways to rise.

Auden, The Fall of Rome—terrific, via, once again, Adam Roberts.

Sixty thousand images … from an amateur photographer … who was, it seems, mostly a recluse, probably a creep … who wandered the streets of Manhattan with his cameras … that’s A LOT.
And nothing spectacular, perhaps. The curators at the Library of Congress have struggled, over the years, to say much beyond, well, we have these.

We can celebrate two achievements here: the endurance of physical media, the lightness of digital access