At times it seems to relish in describing the worst that humanity is capable of. It starts to veer into misanthropy.

I said:

I hope that the next Ray Nayler book I read won’t tip over into wallowing in the worst of our species.

Well, when I cracked open Palaces Of The Crow, my mind was immediately put at ease. And I mean immediately.

Before the story even begins, the book opens with two quotes. One is the closing passage of Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species describing “the war of nature”, but the other quote is from Kropotkin:

Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

That sums up the themes of Palaces Of The Crow. On the one hand, we do indeed get the worst that humans are capable of. But on the other hand, we also get not only the best that humans are capable of, but non-humans too.

As with The Mountain In The Sea, this is a terrestrial first-contact story. We’ve gone from cephalopods to corvids. And we’ve gone from the near future back to Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

I’m always nervous of any piece of popular entertainment that attempts to feature the Holocaust, but I feel that here it’s done with respect. It never comes across as gratuitous.

There are four main human characters; a Polish boy in the Soviet army, a Lithuanian Jewish girl, a young boy who never speaks, and a Roma girl. The narrative is set almost entirely within a forest.

At times this book reminded me of The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. Both stories feature a young woman trying to survive in the wilderness. But whereas The Vaster Wilds is ultimately a tale of the individual, Palaces Of The Crow is very much a story of the group. And whether that group comprises humans, crows, or both, the message is clear:

Social animals are built to survive only among one another.

There is a cautionary subplot involving another denizen of the forest who goes it alone. His fate is very different to that of the group.

A story of four youngsters in a forest during World War II sounds like it should be a brutal survivalist tale. But Palaces Of The Crow has more in common with Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell and Rutger Bregman’s Humankind.

Towards the end, the text sometimes can’t resist saying the subtext out loud, but this is a minor quibble with what is otherwise a beautifully constructed work.

I’m not going to lie, Palaces Of The Crow is absolutely devastating in places. But it’s also life-affirming. I know that sounds trite, but this book is the opposite of trite. It’s visceral and unflinching and beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the idea of The Pirate Queen. Telling the life story of Gráinne Ní Mháille is an excellent premise for some rip-roaring historical fiction. It’s even got an interesting structure alternating between three different parts of her life.

I was pleasantly surprised when I cracked open the book to find a small pronunciation guide to some Irish words in the front matter. It would be nice to have some Gaeilge scattered throughout the narrative. But that’s exactly what made this book so infuriating.

First off all, by dropping in an occassional Irish word into a sentence, it just made me think, “Wait, what language would these people be speaking?” Usually the answer was Irish. In which case, why translate one arbitrary word?

Then there’s the choice of the Irish word that gets dropped into the text most frequently…

The front matter has this to say about the irish word tá:

An affirmative statement similar to yes

Um, not really. Tá is present tense of the verb “be”. The English equivalent is “is”. You can’t just drop it in as a replacement for the word “yes”. But that’s exactly what Ariel Lawhon does.

This continually took me out of the story. One person asks a question like, “Did you see that?” and the other person answers, “Tá.” That just doesn’t make sense.

I know this sounds really nit-picky, but one of the first things you learn about Irish is that there is no single word for “yes” or “no”. It’s most common to respond with the positive or negative form of the verb in the question—“Did you see that?” “I saw!”

So of all the words to pointlessly switch into Irish, “yes” is by far the least suitable.

It happened every couple of pages. I was getting so annoyed, I flipped ahead to the acknowledgements to find out who was consulted on the use of Irish in the book. I found my answer. No one.

That seems somewhat irresponsible to me. It borders on being insulting. Would it have taken so much time and effort to have one single Irish speaker check the text?

Alas, the lack of research wasn’t just evident in the book’s treatment of the Irish language.

At one point, a young Gráinne is out walking with her brother, who is playing the uilleann pipes. I had to stop and check the text a few times. Perhaps I missed a bit where they sat down. But no, this book blithely describes a character walking and playing uilleann pipes at the same time.

Now if you think uilleann pipes are pretty much the same as Scottish highland pipes, this would make sense. But they’re not. A bare minimum amount of research would show that the uilleann pipes are played sitting down (you can try to play them standing up, but you’ll need some kind of extra gadget like Johnny Doran used, but even he couldn’t play them while walking).

I carried on reading even though I was getting more and more annoyed by the shoddiness on display. Then I read this sentence:

No more distant flicker of lanterns in the distance.

I get how you would write that sentence in a first draft. Hopefully you’d catch its redundancy in a subsequent draft. If not, it’s exactly the kind of thing that your editor is there to spot.

But no, this made it all the way to the final printed book, a book that was displayed prominently on tables in major bookstores in multiple countries. Compare and contrast that with When The Boys Came Out To Play by John Mackel, a book which will be likely only ever be read by a much smaller audience but which is crafted with so much more care.

I always feel slightly guilty if I don’t finish a book. I know, I know; life’s too short and all that. But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being a bit disrespectful to the author by not seeing their work through to the end. In this case though, the author displayed enough disrepect to her readers that I don’t think I need to feel bad about slamming this book shut.

The Pirate Queen is a sloppy piece of work. You deserve better.

Here are my top five:

1. Web app installation via <install> and navigator.install(). Prompts the user to install a progressive web app.
2. Speculation Rules API. Hints to the browser to proactively download pages in the background so they appear instantly when the user navigates to them.
3. CSS var() in size container queries. Such as @container (width >= var(--min-width)).
4. CSS flex-wrap: balance. Distributes items in a multi-line flex container so each line has about the same number of items.
5. Interest invokers. The interestfor attribute triggers actions on a target element when the user shows interest, such as via hover, focus, or long-press.

Those are very much in order of priority. Imagine them following a Pareto distribution; the top 20% (in other words, the first one) is 80% of my priority.

But other people have other priorities: Stu, Eric, Ana, Tyler, Paweł, Declan, Sara, and Cyd, for example.

There’s a lot of love for styleable select in there—can’t argue with that.

Get in there and rank your priorities. Then share them.

Once again it deals with inter-species communication. This time it’s de-extincted mammoths. Once again, it’s set in the relatively near future. Many of the same gadgets reappear in this book. It may well be set in the same world.

There’s a tangible atmosphere to this story. But despite it’s high-tech premise, it’s not escapist. The narrative is driven by the all-too-real issues of ivory poaching and big-game hunting.

And this is where I start to get a nagging feeling about Ray Nayler’s work. At times it seems to relish in describing the worst that humanity is capable of. It starts to veer into misanthropy. If you yourself are misanthropic, it will just come across as realism. But it feels a bit too easy, a bit too cheap.

I remember this happening with Paolo Bacigalupi’s books. I enjoyed The Wind-up Girl, but by the time I read The Water Knife, his misanthropy (and misogyny) had become self-parody:

Instead of asking what the future might actually be like, it instead asks “what’s the absolute worst that could happen?” Frankly, it’s a cop-out.

The book takes a similar tack with its characters. It assumes everyone’s terrible and will do terrible things. It’s lazy.

So you’ve got an unrelenting series of people behaving terribly in a horrific setting. It gets boring.

The Tusks Of Extinction isn’t that. It manages to maintain a balance. But I hope that the next Ray Nayler book I read won’t tip over into wallowing in the worst of our species.

I’ll find out soon enough. I’ve already got Palaces Of The Crow on loan from the library.

I really enjoyed this evolutionary tale. It’s equal parts biology and philosophy. I will never look at cephalopods quite the same way again.

Reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea reminded so much of that book that I couldn’t resist flipping ahead to the acknowledgements at the back. Sure enough, Other Minds gets a big shout-out.

But that’s only part of the make-up of The Mountain In The Sea. There’s just as much William Gibson as Peter Godfrey-Smith.

I don’t just mean that the book is an unexpectedly rip-roaring cyberpunk thriller—which it is—but that it’s also got that Gibsonian narrative structure; three disconnected protagonists in three separate stories that you just know are going to connect before the book is done.

The great accomplishment of this book is how well it balances the two genres of philosophy and cyberpunk. There’s plenty of musings on the nature of consciousness, be it human, octopus, or artificial intelligence. But there’s also plenty of high-tech hacking shenanigans.

Above all, it’s an excellent example of one of my favourite subgenres of science fiction: first contact. It’s as linguistically satisfying as Ted Chiang’s Story Of Your Life, the pinnacle of the first-contact subgenre. The fact that there are no extra-terrestrial species just adds to its realism.

I came across a no-brainer recently, thanks to Matt Hobbs:

Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges.

When I was done slapping my forehead at how obvious this proposal is, I signed the petition. If you’re a UK resident, you should do the same. And then spread the word.

This is the kind of proposal that I imagine any politician would be happy to support, regardless of party affiliation, so don’t be shy about contacting your local MP.

I guess in theory this could be opposed on the grounds that it technically violates net neutrality, but I would hope that the obvious societal benefits would outweigh that objection.

Like I said, a no-brainer.

But short stories can work the other way too. If you have a bigger world that’s been established in full-length novels, a short story can be just the right format for exploring another corner of that world.

In Lake Of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie, you get both.

The stories are split into three categories. The first has standalone stories. The second has stories from the universe established in the Imperial Radch series. The third has stories from the world of The Raven Tower.

In my opinion, the standalone stories are really good. The Imperial Radch stories are also great. But the stories from world of The Raven Tower are best of all. Something about the fable-like premise of that world makes it ideal for short stories that are like twisted little fairy tales.

At this point I think I’ve read everything that Ann Leckie has published so I feel safe in saying you can’t go wrong if you pick up any of her books. There’s something deeply humanist about her writing.

Twenty five years! A quarter of a century! That’s a significant portion of the lifetime of the World Wide Web itself.

Actually, this site did exist before September 30th, 2001 but it was very different. You can still look at the very first version of adactio.com if you want to wallow in the glory days of framesets and DHTML. But it was twenty five years ago that I started publishing my thoughts here, making adactio.com my online home.

The funny thing is, I distinctly remember when I started writing that I was getting into this whole blogging thing really late. So many others had been doing it for a while at that point. Now there aren’t many of them left.

It’s not just the journal though. At some point I added the links section. Later still, I added notes. Between those three sections, I usually end up posting something on this website at least once a day.

But I don’t put any pressure on myself. That might be the secret to the longevity of the site. I don’t worry about running out of things to write about. If I go for a while without writing anything, that’s okay. But that rarely happens. There’s almost always something I want to share. Like I said in that first ever post:

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.

I also wrote:

Being a web developer, there’s bound to be lots of geeky, techy stuff but I also want a place where I can rant and rave about life in general.

I think the tech stuff has decreased over the past few years. I’m more likely to write about music or books. I expect that trend will continue.

I certainly have no plans to stop. It feels good to have my own little homestead on the web where I can do whatever I want.

After twenty five years, it feels good to occasionally peruse the archive and revisit the past.

Here’s to the next twenty five.

That’s why it pains me that I’m about to add more fecal matter onto the ever-growing pile of shit by writing yet another hot take related to large language models.

If you stop reading now, I don’t blame you. In fact, I applaud you.

Anyway…

The last time I made the mistake of writing about large language models, I set out my stall thusly:

Software is almost certainly the killer app for large language models.

I think the artists, writers, and musicians will be okay, or at least as okay as they ever were. It turns out that humans like things made by other humans.

And y’know what? If I had to choose which endeavour I’d rather see automated away—programming or art—it’s no competition.

I stand by that. But it doesn’t mean that software development gets a free pass to use exploitative extractive tools with a clear conscience.

You can use these tools in a thoughtless way or you can use them thoughtfully. I really like Robin Sloan’s approach:

The consensus vision seems to involve AI working for you day-to-day, a constant ambient presence, sparkles in everything; even cautious Apple has succumbed. I’m not interested in that.

My alternative: get your wish, then stuff the genie back into the lamp.

He’s got a set of rules:

1. You must actually and consistently use anything you build for two months before posting about it.
2. Ideally, never post about it. (I know I am breaking this rule, but my purpose is pedagogical, and anyway, I’ve got more apps I didn’t tell you about.)
3. Don’t let the AI agent name the app. You pick the name.
4. Don’t distribute the app, not even for free. Don’t post the code on GitHub. This is not software for glory; it is software for you.

For most of my career, I’ve wanted web development to become something that anyone could do. I really like the World Wide Web and I think it would be great if more people had their own websites. But I totally get that most people have no interest in learning HTML.

One of my biggest fears for the web was that it would become the domain of professionals only; a gatekeeping priesthood who get to make stuff while everyone else goes without.

The efficacy of large language models for coding would seem to lessen that possibility. Especially if you apply Robin’s approach.

The Session has an API. There are also weekly data dumps of everything on the site. The idea is that other people can use these to build other useful tools for themselves.

Lately, there’s been a big uptick of these kinds of tools, mostly made by someone with the help of large language models. Often they have no previous experience of making software.

This is good. But I get uneasy when I see people selling these tools to other people. Call me old-fashioned but I feel that if you’re going to ask people to pay for a thing, you should understand that thing. I think that’s why Robin’s list of suggestions resonates with me.

But…

To build software with large language models today, you pretty much have to pay some money to the absolute worst sort of people, the ones pedalling tokens to their “hyperscale” products. You can’t avoid being complicit because there isn’t really an alternative.

I think that might change.

I’m not going to make predictions. That’s a mug’s game. But I might attempt a gentle unspooling of one potential future…

First off, there’s a crash coming. That’s pretty much inevitable at this point. The only question is how much collatoral damage it’s going to do to the world.

Right now, tokens are subsidised. The hyperscalers lose money when people use their products. It’s possible that we are now living through a golden age of making software relatively cheaply with large language models. That will change when the hyperscalers start charging for the true cost of tokens.

Not for everyone though. I believe that enterprise software companies will happily pay the true price for tokens. It’ll be like Google Glass; that was an absolute disaster for the consumer market but went on to have a productive second life in factories.

You know when you’re in an airport and you see advertisements that are not for you, but for faceless corporations? You know the ones. They’re all “cloud” this and “sap” that. Now they’re all about “AI”. It’s not for us. It’s for them.

Does this spell the end of making home-cooked apps with large language models?

I don’t think so.

The hyperscalers might become unaffordable to most people, but keep an eye on open models. And keep your other eye on local models.

Right now, open local models aren’t as good as the large language models that require data centres of computation and energy. But they aren’t massively far behind. And if the recent history of large language models has taught us anything, it’s that “good enough” is fine.

Take Google Search. They decided to fuck it up by forcing generated summaries into your eyeballs above the actual search results. These summaries aren’t 100% accurate. Let’s be generous and say they’re accurate more than 90% of the time. According to Google, that’s good enough.

So, sure, local open models may never reach the levels of data-centre-powered large language models. But they don’t need to. They just need to be good enough.

I’m really looking forward to that.

My issue with large language models has never been the actual technology, which is genuinely fascinating. My issue is with the power dynamics, of being robbed of agency, of the over-inflated hype and criti-hype being used to convince us of an inevitable future where a small group of very rich men are masters over our lives.

I’d love to see the technology decoupled from the current depressing narrative. I’d love to see a thousand homemade software flowers bloom from open local language models.

Summer is officially over.

I saw it out with my now-annual trip to Spain for the Cáceres Irish Fleadh. It was, as always, great fun. Nothing beats playing loads of tunes into the early hours while sitting outdoors in a beautiful old town.

I visited some lovely places this summer. A trip to Greece. A trip to Italy. Even my trip to Cork was blessed with bright sunshine.

But I think the highlight was the three weeks I spent in the north of Ireland. It helped that being there meant I escaped the worst of the heatwave here in England.

All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable summer filled with travel, music, good food, and sunshine. Now it’s time to hunker down at home.