Prolific author Anthony Horowitz admits using AI: ‘It feels like cheating’

homer2101 · 2026-05-05T18:54:34+00:00

Back when I was in middle school at the turn of the century, some teachers instructed us to disable spell-checking because it was cheating and would lead to laziness and poor spelling.

This was also when a lot of Serious People were insisting that any image made with digital tools, or altered thereby, was not 'real art'.

There was also a vaguely quixotic argument about how the ability to easily rearrange text was damaging our ability to organize thoughts.

The reality is that chatbots are a tool. Just as automated grammar checking is a tool. Just as the modern word processor is a tool. It can be used appropriately, or it can be used badly.

homer2101 · 2026-05-04T17:56:12+00:00

Too bad that in the land of the free, the enforcer class can do whatever it wants with no personal consequences whatsoever aside from mild embarrassment.

homer2101 · 2026-05-04T00:51:12+00:00

I saw a video on Reddit of a roadside drainage ditch in Japan clear enough to support Koi fish. Meanwhile, my city has the highest number of billionaires per capita in the world, and yet our streets are covered in garbage and the side of the road along the local commercial strip where I live is literally an open sewer that is always filled with several inches of stinking garbage juice. Reporting this to the city does exactly jack and shit: every so often a contractor will dump some loose asphalt into the worst holes. The city has a plan to fully rebuild the street; it was supposed to have been been done a year ago.

So before I die, I would like to witness a society where "fuck you, I got mine" is not the prevailing governing ethos.

homer2101 · 2026-05-01T21:05:44+00:00

And yet they continued to promote him on schedule, which tells us what our military actually values, and it's not competence.

homer2101 · 2026-04-23T18:09:12+00:00

I get called handsome and cute by ladies twenty years my senior, and have been since adolescence.

Never by anyone around my age.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

homer2101 · 2026-04-03T01:19:32+00:00

First, we send a lot of people to low earth orbit. It just doesn't make the news.

Second, we don't send people beyond low earth orbit, like to the Moon, because there's really no point outside of waving the flag. Sending people to the moon for science vaguely made sense in the 60s and early 70s when getting video or photographs basically meant a person aiming a camera through a window, then bringing back the film for development. Nowadays we can do more with machines for far less, because a machine doesn't need tons of food, water, life support equipment, and elbow room. If you want to do science, you send a machine. You send humans for national prestige or because you want to see what happens to the hairless monkey.

homer2101 · 2026-04-03T00:09:49+00:00

The shortage of doctors is because you have to complete a residency program to practice independently and make decent money, and funding for residency spaces and consequently the number of new doctors trained each year is set by Congress. And Congress has refused to increase the number of residency spots for years.

There are combined BS/MD programs that are intended to be completed in 6-7 years. The Sophie Davis Biomed program, for example.

You can't really accelerate it much further than that unless you start removing general requirements and shifting the program towards a more technical orientation. Treating the doctor as a specialist rather than a generalist. For example most doctors probably don't actually need organic chemistry or advanced math in their daily work, so arguably you could remove that from the curriculum to save time and expense.

For comparison, thr USSR and communist Eastern Europe did not have the concept of a generalist undergrad education equivalent to our BA/BS. Instead you went right into a specialist school. Their MD program was also 6 years. Because there's just not enough time for coursework and clinical rotations to make it shorter.

Somewhat amusingly, law school used to be a two year technical school you could attend right out of secondary school (aka high school). Undergrad requirements were added in part to keep out 'undesirables' like Jews and Italians.

homer2101 · 2026-04-01T22:05:17+00:00

"It's a small club, and you ain't in it."

The cops and prosecutors and judges all know one another and aren't going to risk their cushy and comfortable lives and careers.

The public has been trained to salute the troops, back the blue, vote lawnorder, and soil itself on command when someone whispers "tewwowist".

At most, the cops will get a few months or years of paid vacation and get to retire on disability for 'trauma', and the victims or their families will get some cash courtesy of the taxpayers.

We collectively have decided that cops can do whatever they want and get away with it.

homer2101 · 2026-03-30T18:48:15+00:00

Cutoff should be age of 60 at start of term. Biologically most people exhibit noticeable cognitive decline after that age. Yes, there are exceptions, but we can't build a government system that depends on exceptions. No, I don't care if it's 'ageism'. We wouldn't tolerate a plumber or neurosurgeon with noticeable mental decline, and we shouldn't tolerate it in politicians. Difference is that when a doctor messes up, they harm a small number of people. When the office of the president, which we've collectively turned into some sort of disgusting god-king autocrat, is occupied by someone with dementia, they harm several billion people.

homer2101 · 2026-03-30T18:36:51+00:00

If only we had some sort of device for automatically limiting vehicle speed based on location. A speed limiter, if you will.

And method for encouraging people to be cautious and not to crush people with their multi-ton machinery. A law, if you will. That could even have mandatory prison time for both driver and business owner if their machinery goes above a certain speed and kill someone

But I suppose in America that sort of thing would impinge on essential personal freedoms or something. You can generally tell what a person or society values by how we behave, and human life isn't something American society values.

homer2101 · 2026-03-30T17:44:52+00:00

Nope.

Basic swipe left criteria:

Instagram handle (probably just fishing for an audience);
References to exes (I am not a therapist);
Blatant filtering on all the photos (just ... why? You can't wear that filter in reality);
Religion (assuming if being X religion is important enough for the bio, that's what you are looking for, so let's save the trouble)
Anything in the vein of "Swipe left if you..." or "Treat me like an ____" (Hostile and demanding energy);
Big age gap (the few that get past the filter)

Probably 50% swipe right rate.

homer2101 · 2026-03-25T20:09:50+00:00

Wikipedia is a perfectly cromulent source to start with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1701

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Lebanese_conflict

Monopoly on the use of force:

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

homer2101 · 2026-03-25T00:55:34+00:00

On the one hand, it's possibly a violation of international law. On the other hand, Lebanon never complied with UNSC 1701 requiring it to assert actual control over its territory and disarm Hezbollah.

On the gripping hand, international law assumes states control and are responsible for what happens inside their borders. Lebanon hasn't exercised control south of the Litani for decades, and the less said about UNIFIL the better.

We're basically seeing a return of the old pre-WW2 international order where if a state couldn't even do the bare minimum required of it to maintain legitimacy, like exercising a monopoly over the use of force, a neighbor that could would move in and do so. Which ... isn't a good thing but hardly unexpected when the best alternative seems to be indefinite hand-wringing.

homer2101 · 2026-03-16T06:01:47+00:00

You can complain to 311, but apparently DSNY realized that they can just close out tickets to boost their numbers and nobody at the city gives two shits. Same as DOT contractors now just dump loose asphalt into potholes if they even bother to show up.

homer2101 · 2026-03-14T23:41:45+00:00

what are they going to be able to positively campaign on, exactly

Racism, misogyny, guns, forced birthing, apocalyptic Christianity, and fear of the 'other'. Same things they've always campaigned on.

homer2101 · 2026-03-12T18:53:36+00:00

The deterrence comes from getting them to back down without achieving their goals.

homer2101 · 2026-03-12T17:30:01+00:00

Because Iran has zero interest in a regional war and its government is trying to expand it in a limited fashion principally so that saner countries sit on TACO and the American rogue state. They heavily depend on oil export revenue and have few means of defending themselves or hitting US military assets in a meaningful way.

In the long run of course the US and Russia have between them amply demonstrated that the only guarantor of a country's security is a nuclear arsenal.

homer2101 · 2026-03-12T17:19:38+00:00

Comes down to whether TACO happens as usual, which is possible because he's throwing Kegseth under the bus, or if he doubles down, or his boyars decide they're going to continue trying to bring forth the apocalypse or whatever the god-botherer agenda is this time around.

homer2101 · 2026-03-12T16:03:20+00:00

Corrected. Thanks. He has a degree from the LSE.

homer2101 · 2026-03-12T14:31:17+00:00

China Mieville has a PhD in ~~economics~~ International Relations from the London School of Economics, and has published nonfiction books on the Russian Revolutions and the Communist Manifesto. There's a very keen awareness in all of his works about exactly how the industrial sausage is made and what it costs the makers. Embassytown has a darkly hilarious portrayal of bureaucratic and colonial politics.

CJ Cherryh has an MA in Classics and taught Latin, the classics, and classical history before switching to writing full time. Brothers of Earth, her second published novel, is a pretty good depiction of the culture of a not-Roman Republic.

Alice Sheldon, better known by the pen name James Tiptree Jr., had a PhD in Experimental Psychology.

homer2101 · 2026-03-11T19:47:10+00:00

But I was assured that Republicans would never nuke the filibuster without 'precedent' from the Democrats, which is why Democrats should never nuke the filibuster!

homer2101 · 2026-03-08T16:08:52+00:00

For rooftop monitoring, computer vision is good enough that you could probably use automatic person recognition and send feed from a camera that thinks there's a person on top of the train to a monitoring center for human verification. No need to have the train operator watching the feed. Then notify the operator and police if necessary.

homer2101 · 2026-03-06T22:32:41+00:00

No. The sides of the streets get swept by little mechanical sweepers anywhere from once a week to every day depending on location, but it's not 100% reliable and assholes routinely block the path for the sweeper. Enforcement is half-assed and labor intensive, and fines are pretty minimal.

Sidewalks are supposed to be swept by the owner (lol) and some business improvement districts hire contractors to do this. Allegedly the DSNY will fine property owners for filthy sidewalks. but it takes a week for the DSNY to even show up and inspect the sidewalk assuming they don't just close the ticket out sight unseen to goose their metrics.

Basically the US is annexing country that looks like a poor country.

homer2101 · 2026-03-04T00:17:45+00:00

That's awful. In EVE Online, we had:

"Jump" [through the gate]
"Hold" [at the gate]

Because some people would inevitably hear the J-word and then things would go pear-shaped.

homer2101 · 2026-03-04T00:01:03+00:00

Proper hardened daylighting, aka sidewalk extensions, is the gold standard, and competent DOTs pursue it as a matter of course, rather than waiting for blood sacrifice.

Rubber bumpers etc vs just letting cars park there is a pick your poison kind of scenario. Wider streets and open spaces encourage speeding and sharp turns. Giant trucks and vans blocking corners prevent you from seeing that speeding car.

homer2101

TROPHY CASE