Bruce Sterling @bruces

*Quite a mystery. Opaque to mere human analysis, etc

*Nice one with the design-fiction about small towns choosing to confuse their annoying self-driving cars

https://theadjacency.com/p/robot-unreadable-towns--1cd2f246787ae4c576c996e4/

*I wonder how many "Chinese fakes" there are are that are actually better than the original artifacts. It shouldn't be all that hard to do.

*There's an air of obsession-compulsion about these gray-market counterfeits. I worry about the mental health of the fraudsters making these. Why not just make decent pocket-knives

https://youtube.com/shorts/vEL-FqOYFNk?si=WT7TYijsWXi9nwrr

*The Tolkien crater on the North Pole of Mercury. If you threw a ring in there, would it melt, one wonders

*Saturn's north pole has a big hexagon, and Saturn's south pole sometimes has a weak decagon

*What the heck gives with that

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-tracks-new-decagon-encircling-saturns-south-pole/

*Corrosion can be an arcane study, but put simply and conclusively, it's as if every fossil-fueled car is crushing the world's heritage under its wheels.

https://www.newswise.com/articles/rust-never-sleeps2https://www.newswise.com/articles/rust-never-sleeps2

*I wouldn't claim that I "like" this wannabe-trippy slop-muzak, but I don't hate it any more than I would hate a kaleidoscope

https://youtu.be/NKz9TgpTVG8?si=L0HKEssYL_HJvU4i

*Steampunk slop. I don't mind it, but I wonder what might improve it. Some actual ideas, maybe? Political commentary? Maybe a linear plot? Slop is like a custard-pudding, it's boneless

https://youtu.be/gS44osOGM2w?si=0H4hgpKxPMxLTvyX

*A botnet that lasted for 23 years. Are there even older botnets than that? Are they multigenerational heirlooms of some kind?

https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/inside-sality-botnet-disruption-operation/

*Did you ever see this thing? "Gothic literature and media analysis" in the field of "cultural studies"? It's kind of good. #cyberpunk #culture

*Well, that's hard to beat for podcast merch

https://www.etsy.com/shop/critdrip

*Chinese humanoid robot bubble, he says

https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-372-chinas-overhyped-embodied

*The "Vintage Artificial Intelligence" PC software collection

https://archive.org/details/vintageai

*Man, science fiction reviews can be super-political nowadays. Who would think that Karel Capek's "R.U.R." antique robot yarn would be so blisteringly topical

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/move-fast-and-dont-ask-permission-techno-optimism-in-r-u-r-and-arcane/

*If you can't see your sky for the smog:

https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2620/

Hold on to your telescopes: the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D map of the Universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly four billion celestial objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes, and asteroids. The data are available for all to use and are publicly viewable through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer.

https://medium.com/the-new-climate/we-finally-got-the-carbon-price-everyone-wanted-and-emissions-went-up-anyway-4a129850aee9

*If you're Italian or European, I would read that if I were you. #Trumpistan

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2026/08/29/autistici-inventati-trump-terrorists-news/8491452/

*Liking the Eurobotics residency quiz here: "Are you an ambitious expert willing to work really hard in Zurich to solve real robot problems"

*Well, no, but don't let me stop you

https://www.european-robotics.house/apply

*Well, I'm gonna need to get my hands on this book

https://locusmag.com/review/the-book-of-bots-by-james-patrick-kelly-review-by-michael-swanwick/

*The manned Indian space station. I wonder if it might be the only one up there, that would be interesting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharatiya_Antariksh_Station

*Nowadays the people who live by oil are the ones who can't get any. #Russia #Iran

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/8/30/how-has-life-changed-for-iranians-six-months-into-the-war

*Utopian sense-of-wonder SF almost feels perverse now. That's quite a feat and must have been difficult to write

https://aiascendant.com/p/an-optimists-tale

*Nice one with the automotive technohistory slop

https://youtu.be/qMpRcrmzNB4?si=ecQP4Kpy_mLdZMen

"Sports Glitch"

https://youtu.be/XgnBN8BLc-o?si=AQqfTbF3cWAVGYDO

RE: https://techhub.social/@qole/117149016510385607

*Ask and you shall receive

https://www.academia.edu/1320387/A_Collection_of_Many_Problems_In_Memory_of_the_Dead_Media_Handbook_

"Us AI people, are we Stanford-Ketamine or are we Agentic," he says, diligently exploring the tall weeds of the issue

*This is like watching a crypto guy wondering, "Are we all the money forever, or is there no such thing as money at all"

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-be-left-for-us-to-work?hide_intro_popup=true

*This applies to a lot of cultural and artistic innovations as well

*They just never mainstream, it's too much risk and work

*I'm guessing that overconfident Blackwater customers are gonna get singled out and blown up in particular

*I wonder what becomes of these peculiar artificial islands in 50 or a hundred years

https://www.twz.com/news-features/chinas-massive-new-artificial-island-in-the-south-china-sea-emerges-primed-for-militarization

*"Incendiamoeba" the red-hot fire-amoeba, maybe her day has come #globalwarming

"The novel amoeba is sister to V. vermiformis, a thermotolerant amoeba often sampled from hot water heaters"

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.690213v1.full.pdf

*That is some kinda power-battery

https://youtube.com/shorts/0HVKjSI_8vM?si=vydxHf44lgA2rw8r

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Richard_Littler/117127250425933957

*People complain about fads and bubbles, but the Dutch have been selling tons of tulips for centuries now

RE: https://mstdn.social/@noelreports/117127656418584102

*I guess we're cordially overlooking that busted Russian pipeline in Danish territorial waters

*"That was then, this is now"

*Web browsers built for the convenience of AI agents.

https://github.com/lexmount/moli

*Zagreb, of all cities, has Europe's first robotaxis?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/uber-launches-autonomous-rides-zagreb-its-first-europe-2026-08-19/

*Also the "Verne" company is named after Jules Verne

https://www.ic3.gov/CSA/2026/260819.pdf

*AI-assisted Iranian cyberwar attacks on the USA

*That is quite an impressive computer-art collection.

https://www.bre.art

*Well, if you're into complex, labyrinthine, spooky cops-and-robbers encrypted-phone weirdness, that yarn is hard to beat

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366649396/Revealed-Cyber-spies-used-malware-from-GitHub-to-hack-EncroChat-cryptophone-network

*I blame mind viruses and a “viral persona" related to consciousness, persistence, resonance, and science
fiction roleplay

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10218

*The prescient campaign with the perverse effect of accelerating slaughterbots

*I blame science fiction dystopias

https://medium.com/predict/slaughterbots-in-ukraine-df491b895b42

*25 years ago

*What's of historical significance here

*Mostly that the President is a television personality and his regime routinely lies to the American population

*Offshored hacker-slave camps profit hugely, while ethnonational "sovereign cyberspace" forces ignore them and fight each other

https://www.techpolicy.press/amid-crackdown-few-signs-of-a-slowdown-in-scam-compounds/

*I know that people practice anti-Chinese industrial espionage, but it's unusual to boast in English about it

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/08/13/mich-2000/

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@AkaSci/117103385818217763

*Oh good for him, for heaven's sake

*It's not much of a story (although it's factual), but that is a great pop-science headline

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/gold-big-bang-theory-large-hadron-collider-b3033578.html

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/117094507707502754

*Hey wait, look, these global Internet ad companies are run by our national enemies

*It's interesting that "we" do not even bother to mention who "we" are

*Are "we" a chatbot, perhaps

"How come I never heard about this musician while he was still alive," that's one of the good things about recorded music, actually

https://mixmag.net/feature/10-essential-best-william-orbit-tracks-productions-madonna-all-saints-bassomatic-prince-u2-blur

*Okay, I get it that the AI watermarks are "imperceptible," but what do they look like when they are made perceptible

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content

*Are you from Minnesota? Oregon, California, New York City, etc

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/expanding-capabilities-to-combat-transnational-cyber-enabled-crime/

*I know this weird guy exasperates scientists everywhere, but it would make my day if there were five or ten of him

https://medium.com/@avi-loeb/numerical-simulations-of-the-glowing-orbs-surrounding-warp-drives-in-the-earths-atmosphere-23ccdb6e80db

"The question the industry has been avoiding: an AI model may be cheaper to produce, but what is it actually worth?”

https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-3d-models-flood-market-but-almost-no-one-is-buying-them/

*Here in Ibiza, I hear a lot of music from the band "Blondie." It's, like, Ibizan grocery-story music

*Were Chris and Debbie "defeated punks"? Were they crushed by "marketing"?

*Maybe, sort of, but if you're aware of the doings of Debbie, or Chris, they're just fine

*Their confessional tell-all books are good, even

https://transmissionsfromtomorrow.substack.com/p/cyberpunk-started-as-punk-then-marketing

*I don't see how these eccentricities pose any "strange irony" for the AI biz. More like par for their course. #steadydietofamphetamines

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-legendary-erdos-problems-are-falling-to-ai-20260803/

*Pretty much any day is a good day that doesn't involve four minutes of Richter 7.4 tremors #Colombia

*Man, you could smoke a cigarette in that length of time. You could propose marriage, get declined and change her mind about it

*A "Google Creative Lab" Raspberry Pi Google-Translator unit.

https://github.com/google-gemma/gemma-translator

*That is heavy, okay🎶

https://youtu.be/-id9RIIKRdY?si=q-jJddEN3FGiBQZI

*Do I have any use for a made-up world with a billion AI agents on it

*I don't know. Are they entertaining, or maybe dramatic

*How could this NOT be good? <click>

https://www.nts.live/shows/ccl

*She should be in the US Senate, really. She should pass laws

https://youtu.be/ikfAfRUNSCs?si=w3TOrbetyJGRpIzo

The North Korean hackers "used a simple and well-documented tactic of luring software developers with fake job offers promising temptingly high salaries"

https://www.wired.com/story/a-security-pro-hacked-north-korean-hackers-he-found-theyd-breached-hundreds-of-networks-worldwide/

*It you are pro-AI or anti-AI, I would recommend that you look this over

https://boyswhocriedai.lovable.app/archive

Well, what do you know, Ernst Juenger "Glass Bees" in the lab at MIT

*I wrote an intro to that novel once.

https://news.mit.edu/2025/fast-agile-robotic-insect-could-someday-aid-mechanical-pollination-0115

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/31/leopold-aschenbrenner-situational-awareness-fund-fire-sale.html

*Gosh, there's all kinds of schadenfreude stuff to gloat about with the high-flying 20-something AI-booster zillionaire

"May we have somehow more Stanford and less ketamine, please. We're losing our composure"

https://www.pacingthefrontier.com

*That's some nice AI-hackerspeak jargon

*I'm a little surprised that this attacker didn't seem to make any big dumb hackerslop mistakes.

https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline

*Old people in big European cities afraid of the sky

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/08/06/europe-heatwave-puts-all-major-italian-cities-on-red-alert-as-austria-sets-heat-record

*Well, that was edifying. Comic book people who adored HP Lovecraft, who knew

https://deepcuts.blog/2023/12/20/pre-code-lovecraftian-horror-comics/

*In the early days of the Russo-Ukraine war, you could be a volunteer crowdsourcing killerdrone-builder and also yell really loudly about it on Telegram

*Not any more, though

*This is like Neuromancer / Wintermute VS the Turing Police territory here

*Don't make me point at the Torment Nexus sign

://www.wired.com/story/ok-well-there-are-even-more-ai-agent-hacking-incidents/

*It's great that relatively serious people keep up with this kind of genre terminology

*Well, if you had no acquaintance with science fiction and fantasy artists, that's pretty much the iconic crew.

*A cheap AI looking through old records for "astrophysical anomalies" and finding a lot of them

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/12/aa55512-25/aa55512-25.html

*Enshittification of the ecosystem causes Cambrian radiation

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534726001564?dgcid=author

*French space yoga

https://youtube.com/shorts/UKv1K3xXbSE?si=DpRRbl35Oq-rGL8P

Big Tech hastily distributing the bribes for the astroturf campaigns

https://www.techpolicy.press/big-techs-pr-playbook-for-overcoming-data-center-opponents/

*So, Richard Kadrey and John Shirley, is it

August 4, 2026 is the day of American nuclear apocalypse in the short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury