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Tag: ai

same river: 11feb26

Published February 11, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Sorin Neamtu

Still sick. Still raining. Both conditions seem permanent.

TODAY:

Accessions:

Picked up a sample of this last year, it was on sale yesterday.

UNIT X: HOW THE PENTAGON AND SILICON VALLEY ARE TRANSFORMING THE FUTURE OF WAR, Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff (UK) (US+)

STATUS: deth
READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:


MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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20jan26

Published January 20, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I found a weird little object online – a USB reader for floppy discs. I still have a few boxes of floppy discs from way back when that I didn’t throw out. There’s a fair chance they’re all as corrupted and rotted as shit now, but I picked up said weird little object and I’m going to see if any of those disks are recoverable. Chances are they have a lot of old Marvel, DC and Wildstorm stuff on, and while it’s not crucial to have copies of those old scripts, and they would be painful to look at, I feel like it would be kind of nice to possess them again. I’ve had so many hard drive and storage issues over the years, so many lost scripts and documents and emails, that I’ve gotten used to considering it all volatile and ephemeral and have learned not to be upset at losing things and to let go of things. To be able to recover just a handful of old pieces would have its pleasures.

In retrospect, I should have printed off literally everything and gotten filing cabinets and, I dunno, a full library system or a zettelkasten index or something, and stayed analogue. I have this memory of a bit in the old MAX HEADROOM show where Blank Reg tries to sell a cyberpunk kid a book on the grounds that it’s a “non-volatile storage medium.” Oh, bugger me, the clip’s on YouTube-

TODAY:

Accessions:

CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (UK) (US+)

The 9th Rob Marshall book. I have a great fondness for these less than cosy Scottish crime novels. This one seems to be in the nature of a put pilot for a new series, so it’s probably not the one to start with.

OPERATIONS: script, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter
STATUS: what is this outside world you speak of
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks
LAST WATCHED: GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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18jan26

Published January 18, 2026 by Warren Ellis

One thing I love about January is that all the summer clothes are cheap. And, as my family frequently have been heard to observe, when it comes to spending money on myself, I am in fact very cheap. So I just bought a bunch of linen and summer weight denim clothes for very little. This is, of course, the equivalent of Groundhog Day in the US, in that it guarantees that winter will extend into June. But I just got notification of a royalty cheque from Marvel, so fuck it. If I’m very lucky, the clothes will even fit. Online shopping, right?

Newsletter went out this morning. Minimum Viable Newsletter, as all the things I’d planned to do with it blew up on me last week. Having to pivot barely three weeks into the new year is not ideal but what’re you going to do? Not that I’ve fully landed on the pivot yet. I’ve been writing newsletters since the 1990s, and never figured out how to turn them into a “business” or any kind of useful cultural pursuit. It’s weird for me to have so much inbox competition now – every fucker has a newsletter, or an email list as we once called it. People earn millions off newsletters now, and all I ever used them for was to say hello to people, tell them what I was doing and show them stuff I was interested in. I feel faintly stupid and obsolete these days. Let’s face it, I still write on a “blog” (which is actually just a searchable database for things I’ve read, listened to or brought into the house). May as well be knapping flint like Will Lord.

TODAY:

TELEMETRY:

STATUS: Apparently I’m losing the afternoon to helping to hang curtains somewhere and it’s all very confusing. I’m putting an analogue watch on today, which is how I signal to myself that I am offline for a while.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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NINE BELLS asbestos

Published December 8, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Today I glimpsed a headline along the lines of “AI is the asbestos of our time.” Which caught my eye because my daughter works in a lab with asbestos. Old buildings are still being tested for asbestos and decontaminated today, even though its use in the UK was broadly ceased in the 1980s, and asbestos exposure still kills a quarter of a million people a year.

Asbestos is an excellent fire-retardant insulator that just happens to kill people within twenty or thirty years. It’s been used for centuries. It’s not inherently evil. it was just applied to everything before it was properly tested or understood in the context of the human environment.

Asbestos was originally referred to in Greek as amiantos, meaning “undefiled”,[16] because when thrown into a fire it came out unmarked.

That sounds like us. We call the chthonic death fibres “undefiled” and we call the brain-murdering robot gibberish “artificial intelligence.”

It’s interesting to me to now think of the internet as a poisoned building.

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5dec25

Published December 5, 2025 by Warren Ellis

What eggs fresh from the chicken’s bum generally look like.

His method of eating eggs was as unnatural as the thoughts that accompanied it. As soon as the poor feathered creatures began their broody clucking he would seize them one after another and suck the eggs out of their rumps.

CODEX 1962, Sjon (UK) (US+). 

TODAY:

In the back of my head, I’m counting down to the three gigs I’m intending to go to this month. I’m particularly looking forward to Konsztrukting Soundz, which has become a real exploratory portal for me.

But right now I am buying and downloading music and then shifting it all over to an SD card I use for new purchases, to shove it into this cranky cheap mp3 player. I think I’m getting a better mp3 player for Xmas. And then, with a bit of luck, I get to go for a walk. It is bright and cold out there today, and I would like some winter air.

Going to see if this thing does anything more useful today:

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morning computer bearish

Published December 3, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Martin Wittfooth.

OpenAI is seemingly allowing the company behind a teddy bear that engaged in wildly inappropriate conversations to use its AI models again.

In response to researchers at a safety group finding that the toymaker’s AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma” gave dangerous responses for children, OpenAI said in mid-November it had suspended FoloToy’s access to its large language models. The teddy bear was running the ChatGPT maker’s older GPT-4o as its default option when it gave some of its most egregious replies, which included in-depth explanations of sexual fetishes.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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telemetry 27nov25

Published November 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The Sleeping Forecast: Hunker down and drift away

American statisticians released the results of a survey. Buried in the data is a trend with implications for trillions of dollars of spending. Researchers at the Census Bureau ask firms if they have used artificial intelligence “in producing goods and services” in the past two weeks. Recently, we estimate, the employment-weighted share of Americans using AI at work has fallen by a percentage point, and now sits at 11% (see chart 1). Adoption has fallen sharply at the largest businesses, those employing over 250 people. Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy.

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18nov25

Published November 18, 2025 by Warren Ellis

ooh fuck me it’s chilly out there

TODAY:

OPERATIONS: I am a little bit caught up, so today I am planning ahead a little, converting an outline and developing some other stuff.
STATUS: 8hrs 6m sleep, inbox 80 – most of which are work emails I need to keep front and centre, tickets and notes to self. Formatting a cheap SD card with hammers so I can load recently purchased music on to it for the mp3 player.
READING: finished THE FALL, Albert Camus (UK) (US+).
LISTENING: THE SHUTOV ASSEMBLY, Brian Eno
LAST WATCHED: MEN OF THE MANOSPHERE (BBC)

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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NINE BELLS remembering to power up the gear

Published November 17, 2025 by Warren Ellis

As previously noted: I got gifted a Bee Pioneer AI listening device – recently bought out by Amazon and therefore going through all kinds of performance degradation – and I own a Rabbit R1, that has rarely done what it says on the tin but has a few uses.

The problem is that I never ingrained the habit of turning the fucking things on. And when I do turn them on they get paralysed by over-the-air firmware updates.

But I think the broader point is that I just can’t integrate AI tools into my work. And a lot of that comes down to… there’s nothing it can do for me.

I don’t get a huge amount of email, so I don’t need AI to help with it. I like writing words and making things, so I don’t need a bot to generate material for me. I can and have used AI for research questions, but I always have to double-check the answers because AI will randomly make shit up in order to please the querent, so that is often wasted time.

People I know told me to accept the tools into my life and take the help. Thing is… there just ain’t a lot to help with, and I don’t seem to be getting any fancy new abilities out of it.

Instead, I seem to have bought a wired mp3 player and a leather sling bag to put the phone in.

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telemetry 13nov25

Published November 13, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Mark Elder conducts the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra in a sea-themed concert as part of the orchestra’s Harmony with Nature season. Sibelius’s powerful depiction of the ocean waves in his Oceanides is paired with Vaughan Williams’s mighty first symphony, the Sea Symphony with soloists Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha and David Stout.

After testing three different toys powered by AI, researchers from the US Public Interest Research Group found that the playthings can easily verge into risky conversational territory for children, including telling them where to find knives in a kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. One of the AI toys even engaged in explicit discussions, offering extensive advice on sex positions and fetishes.

COPENHAGEN, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Iceland has designated the potential collapse of a major Atlantic Ocean current system a national security concern and an existential threat, enabling its government to strategize for worst-case scenarios, the country’s climate minister told Reuters.

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