Josh Sutphin

@joshsutphin.com

336 Followers 867 Following

(SUT-fin) Author of horror and hopepunk at https://joshsutphin.com. Co-founder @shirakipress.com. Veteran video game developer. Most active on Mastodon: josh.sutphin@wandering.shop

Screenshot from my LinkedIn employment history showing that we've been running Shiraki Press for 1 year and 5 months already
(chuckles) I'm in danger
Meta and Microsoft are cutting thousands of employees as they bet big on AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting productivity needs. Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut 10% of its personnel – just under 8,000 employees – to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago. The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its US workforce of roughly 125,000. What have they said about AI? Mark Zuckerberg said in January that AI was making some hiring unnecessary. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI chief, said in February that he believed AI would be able to replace most white-collar work within the next 12 to 18 months.
Philosopher Derek Shiller develops this perspective in arguing that ...our resources are finite, and the same resources that might allow human beings to live ... could be more effectively spent on creating and sustaining artificial creatures. When that becomes the case, the beneficent thing to do is to choose that our children be artificial, rather than natural. He concludes that we should then "engineer our extinction so that our planet's resources can be devoted to making artificial creatures with better lives."
But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they're gone - to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.
ECOLOGY is part of TECHNOLOGY. Let's try to understand both!
SOME ARE POSTING ON SOCIAL MEDIA SOME ARE PROTESTING IN THE STREETS SOME ARE DONATING SILENTLY SOME ARE EDUCATING THEMSELVES SOME ARE HAVING TOUGH CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY A REVOLUTION HAS MANY LAYERS BE KIND TO YOURSELVES AND TO OTHERS WHO ARE TRAVELING IN THE SAME DIRECTION JUST KEEP YOUR FOOT ON THE GAS.
Three panels. First: distractions being kicked out of the pub. Second: back to writing. Third: more distractions creeping up behind.
Shrimp chocolate cups with a cocktail sauce center
Palla, dressed as a rabbit, saying she is pleased to greet me dressed as a rabbit. 😂
One of these days my brain is just going to shatter from switching between typesetting, to marketing, to cover art, to printer delays, to contract writing, to royalty payments, to evaluating a submission, to setting up an author event, to Everyone Wants ARCs!, to submitting for trade reviews, to metadata, to comps, to preparing 1099s, to reviewing tracked changes, to NetGalley submissions, to "can you design a bookplate quick?", to cover art again, to file version control, to writing a newsletter, to a Zoom meeting, to ¡drama!, to The Portal Is Down For Maintenance, to a podcast interview, to setting up a line of credit, to picking at my own manuscript. Sometimes all within the same day.
The surge in orbital activity has created a significant collision risk. There have already been crashes, including a 2009 event where a US satellite hit a defunct Russia military satellite. Tens of thousands of tiny fragments of metal are now spinning at high velocities. The big fear is that future collisions will cause a domino effect where Earth's orbit becomes cluttered with tiny, high-speed bits of metal. That could create a near-impenetrable layer of debris that would make space launches so dangerous it would essentially trap humans on Earth.
The cruelest thing the tech industry ever did was to tell you that they cared about you. They built you nice campuses, they called you family, they gave you clothes with their name on it. They fed you, they washed your clothes, they got you to ride in their Pride floats. They made you feel like you had not just a job, but a community. And yes, they paid you well. The stupidest thing we ever did—and I say this with nothing but love for you in my heart—but the stupidest thing we ever did was to believe it. IT was neither true, nor never-ending. The same industry that once called you family is now using the fruits of your labor to commit war crimes. The same industry whose leaders once posted front-page missives to their sites about doing a better job in terms of diversity and inclusion are now selling their technology to fascists who use it to bomb schools. The industry has decided what it wants to be.
Donald Trump has said he expects to have “the honor of taking Cuba” after a US oil blockade caused the electricity grid to collapse, plunging the country’s 10 million people into darkness. He claimed on Monday that he could do “anything I want” with Cuba amid US negotiations with Havana over the country’s future. “You know, all my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba. When will the United States do it?” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I do believe I’ll be … having the honor of taking Cuba.”
Not getting in the way is often a very important way of encouraging and helping someone. I think it's true to say that almost everyone grows up through being left to themselves. "I'll leave you be, but I love you." That's both simple, and hard.
Cover image for ACCELERATED GROWTH ENVIRONMENT depicting two women and a childlike robot looking out over a massive ecological construction toward an explosion in the distance. The blurb on the cover reads: "A sapphic eco-thriller perfect for fans of Becky Chambers and Martha Wells." The blurb is attributed to Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning series Between Earth and Sky. For information and ordering options, visit shirakipress.com/age
Smith and his team produced a two-volume report on the classified documents investigation and a separate probe into Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Joe Biden. Both investigations produced indictments that were abandoned by Smith's team after Trump's November 2024 election win in light of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot face federal prosecution.
It is no coincidence that monstrous crimes against women and children lie at the heart of this deleterious trend, whether Epstein himself succeeded at tilting the global balance of power or not. Far-right ideology begins at home, with the familial unit. However, under this framework family is not treated as a community to be nurtured, but as property to be owned and controlled. The option for a patriarchal man to violently abuse people - including children - is a core appeal of the ideology, which is why far-right politicians and personalities have spent years trying to normalize rolling back laws around abortion, consent marriage age and spousal abuse.
Sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like a person" and sometimes they use "respect" to mean "treating someone like an authority" and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say "if you won't respect me I won't respect you" and they mean "if you won't treat me like an authority I won't treat you like a person" and they think they're being fair but they aren't, and it's not okay.
Bilbo Baggins looking at ChatGPT on his phone that he absolutely canonically has: BILBO: After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? CHATGPT: You're absolutely right - you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.
A still of Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in THE BIRDCAGE
Glass sculptures that look like giant ice crystals in a palette of cool blues.
As for restoring integrity, the only way to do it is to live your values and model that for others. Integrity is the one thing that once you lose, you can't get back. Integrity is a form of power that no oppressor can touch.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also addressed layoffs during the company's most recent earnings call with analysts in late October, saying "culture" was behind the wave. "Really, it's culture," Jassy said in October on a call with Wall Street analysts. "If you grow as fast as we did for several years, ... you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers."
Dialog from a Goddess Statue: Dang it… My first line, and I bit my tongue.
Screenshot of a post on X by Unity for Games: The @Walmart Immersive Commerce SDK is now available! Bring real-world products into gameplay by integrating Walmart items or your own marketplace merchandise directly into your experience without breaking immersion.