I think Balrum or Elin.

I’d like to be on a slightly different route around the sun, these days.

As usual, the headline is pretty overstated. Yes, the AO3-to-Barnes-and-Noble pipeline is pretty well established at this point, but while that might be making FPP a heavy preference on BookTok for romantasy, I don’t think that’s spilling out into other areas of fiction.

Prokop maintains that while those complex themes can be explored in first person, off-loading narrative tension into an internal monologue has a way of flattening a romance narrative, hemming in the scope. “It limits the kind of stories you can tell,” she continued. “It’s a lot harder to keep a secret from a reader.”

I think this is a bit of personal bias on their part; FPP doesn’t have to be any less complex than TPP. The entire trope of the unreliable narrator is the POV of the reader, lying to the reader, as an example.

Prokop is especially weary of the clear-eyed mindfulness possessed by the wayward lovers that tends to populate first-person novels—how their acuities remain crystalline and sharp, as if touched by the divine, across the pages, in a way that requires almost too much suspension of disbelief, even for a genre that traffics in that suspension.

“All of the characters are nice. There’s a trope called the ‘Cinnamon Roll hero,’ and he’s just a good guy who wants the protagonist,” said Prokop.

I think this is a distinct issue that pops up in a lot of the same books, but isn’t intrinsically related. Fanfics are often self-insert fantasy, both by the author and for the readers (and I don’t mean ‘fantasy’ as in the genre, I mean it as in ‘wish-fulfillment’). FPP books are more popular in romantasy right now, and (sometimes overly-) ‘cozy’ stories with Mary Sue FMCs and no conflict are blowing up (or at least, I’m seeing more of them on shelves than I used to). But one doesn’t imply the other, they just happen to be correlated right now because I think they’re coming from the same pipeline, or being pushed by publishers when they might have been turned down before.

“The best first person has a strong narrative voice. The character is super distinctive. But if the books all sound the same—which a lot of them do—then that’s not great for the genre.”

This is just something that happens anytime there is an explosion of genre popularity; a bunch of new mediocre authors pop up in the space. Go read the late-90s to early-2000s Clive Cussler-esque action schlock that all popped up after Tom Clancy got big, and you’ll see the same thing. Or the Dan Brown-wannabe pseudo-religious-thriller books circa 2005.

Considering we’ve been using the already very limited stockpile of $5m patriot missiles to intercept $35k Shahed drones in some cases, I don’t think this is really a question of “who will run out first?” The US and Israel’s “warfighting” experience in the last 30+ years is almost entirely fighting enemies with no ability to retaliate. This isn’t a war that they can win, just a war that they can lose less badly than Iran.

First off, this article is about the growth scaffold, and the entire breakthrough was achieved by not using an animal-based one:

Recent research has yielded a promising advance in cultivated meat production that could materially improve scalability and cost-efficiency. Scientists at University College London have developed a method to convert yeast left over from brewing into edible scaffold material on which animal cells can grow, offering a potential alternative to expensive synthetic or plant-derived scaffolds and helping address one of the biggest bottlenecks in cultivated meat manufacturing.

Secondly, there are a bunch of plant-based, FBS-alternative cell feeds (‘nutrients and growth factors’) on the market, and pretty much every lab-grown meat company out there is either already using them or moving as much of their production to them as possible, for a number of reasons.

The world is never going to stop eating meat, but the sooner we move to cultured meats instead of slaughtered farm animals, the sooner we significantly lower the amount of animal suffering and environmental impact.

True, but in his case he clearly had a complex about not going to college. Not only did he frequently tout that fact on his channel, he targeted college kids in particular to ‘debate’. You have to wonder how much of the anti-college rhetoric from the Right in 2026 at least partially trickles back to his and Ben Shapiro’s “pwning college liberals” videos circa 2014-16.

Something this doesn’t even touch on is the ability to monitor for accounts making bets over a certain amount, in order to discover news prior to the public disclosure. This is not hypothetical, this is commonly done in the OSINT world in various ways (the most well known currently being the Pentagon Pizza Watch account).

The average investor on Polymarket doesn’t have $100k to drop on bets, so when one account suddenly drops that on several different but related bets, it’s at least sensible to consider it might be an insider. Imagine if Iran was watching this, and put their air defense on high alert as a precaution, and it ended up getting pilots killed.

In the stock market world, that is absolutely one of many reasons that insider trading is banned; senators all suddenly placing shorts on oil and gas before the weekend could have telegraphed the same thing.

No, which is why authority is a problem. Authority is literally “might-enforced hierarchy”.

Unfortunately, this author is also attached to authority, under the guise of a hierarchy of morality. “Moral authority”, by the author’s claim, is the counterpart to might-based authority.

This falls apart when you run into different forms of morality (especially ones where there’s not some near-universal social agreement about it, like rights of minors, rights of healthcare, rights of marriage, etc). Moral Authority is just a social and linguistic construct to justify non-consensual imposition of rules.

“Right” is ultimately best judged by Consent: If someone is consenting to something for themself, it likely is Right. If someone is not consenting to something for themself, it likely is Wrong.

Authority in any form is just a justification (through force, or through claimed Moral Superiority upon whose basis force will be applied) to override Consent in order to impose one’s will on another.

I’ve found a lot of non-religious vegans who object to meat consumption on the supposed grounds of animal cruelty, also oppose lab-grown meat.

One of the the arguments I’ve seen used in the past is the high water usage and emissions of early lab-grown meat products. Once development brings those down, like in this case, I’ll be interested to see whether they still remain anti-meat.

Once you strip away sentience, you only really have ‘living entity’ left, which plants also are.

To be fair, they actually used the verb form of martyr, which means “to put to death for adhering to a belief, faith, or profession”, and I am fairly certain that Israel and the US absolutely are killing these people in (large) part for being Muslim.

In other words, the verb basically reverses the role of whose intention applies; whereas the noun means the person dying intends to do so for their beliefs, the verb means the killer is doing it because of the victim’s beliefs.

You can’t be sure, but you can use providers and exit nodes that are based in places hostile to whoever you are trying to protect against.

Also, functional anonymity can exist by different entities having different pieces of data that together would de-anonymize you, but who are unlikely to ever intersect. A good example of this is DMCA requests: if a copyright holder sees a US IP address on a residential Comcast IP range, they’re going to file a court case and get a subpoena for the subscriber info.

If they see a Hong Kong IP from a co-lo datacenter who would need to cooperate to tell them who owned that IP at that time, they’re not going to even bother because they don’t know how to even start filing a court case in China, and if your VPN has too much data it won’t even matter because no one will even have contacted them.

It all depends on your threat model.

There are people who get VPNs because they hear that they prevent your ISP from snooping on you when configured correctly, and just hear “no one can see what I do”, because that’s what snooping is, right?

When I worked at a university IT dept, we’d often get content block hits for adult websites from inside the internal protected network, via the university VPN, because a professor or staff member thought a VPN would route their traffic ‘past’ us.

This absolutely did not kill them. I’ve been dealing with federal procurement, including ATOs for DoD, for years, and 99% of companies never even remotely interact with it. Yes, there’s a large number that do, especially among Fortune 500s and up, but the actual percentage of companies who have military contracts is tiny. This was meant to intimidate them into compliance, but this doesn’t make them any less viable than AIaaS already is or isn’t.

no company wants to become a supply chain risk to potential customers who might have a DoD supplier somewhere down the supply chain

The order is actually much narrow than that; it only applies to companies who directly have contracts with the military.

Anthropic software just can’t be used to process federal data, but if e.g. Lockheed uses ADP to process internal payroll, and ADP uses a third-party developer to build some software, and that developer uses Claude, that doesn’t snake it’s way back up the chain and invalidate Lockheed’s contracts.

Would not be surprised if it happened to be trained on the thousands of policy debate “nuclear war terminal impact” arguments on openev.

I’m not arguing against the automation used in this particular case; that sounds perfectly reasonable.

I’m arguing that the only reason it’s newsworthy is because companies want to put a positive spin on automation right now, right as the majority of companies expanding automation aren’t doing it to benefit workers.

But what’s newsworthy about this in 2026?

It’s about framing the debate of “robots doing work” in terms of being a positive thing (“see? they’re helping us do important SCIENCE!”) so that people will be just a little less combative when they get a BigMac handed to them by a robot arm.

I think the point is, what happens once all the current senior devs are gone?

They’ll likely only target fully assembled 3d printers, which is why just like their firearms laws it will only stop people who aren’t actively attempting to circumvent the law.

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but given that this is an anti-firearms bill, they will probably do the same thing they do when you purchase a firearm magazine cross-state; they’ll open the box and check that it is ‘compliant’ with the 10-round limit (or in this case, has compliant firmware). If it is, they’ll ship it on to you. If it’s not, they’ll ship you the empty box with a notice of seizure. You may also be contacted by CADOJ later, depending how much free time they have.

I’m sure they’re quaking at the thought of floating out on their golden parachutes…