I think Balrum or Elin.

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.

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.

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…

if people can be happy and fulfilled

Except a lot of them aren’t happy and fulfilled, they’re opting out for the same reasons young people in the US are:

they can’t afford homes, can’t find decent jobs, and don’t see a future worth bringing children into.

That’s not “happy and fulfilled outside the rat race”, especially since their solution is closer to hikikomoris. They’re not out there building self-sufficient communes.

just say ‘doggo’ and ‘w00t’ and ‘roflmao’ a couple times and the AI will peg you as an elder millennial and leave you alone

I’d settle for any home, smart or dumb.

I’m so mad they’ve switched from their “protect the children” line for Boomers, to “protect the pets” for us Millennials.

IRC is still alive and well, team speak for voice chats. Hell, Nextcloud even has these, as well as video calls.

Everyone forgets that “Information Technology” was just a rebrand from the more accurate “Information Systems”, which was itself the less accurate rebranding of “Data Processing”, which is what computers actually do. There was also the failed push by IBM for Information Communication Technology (ICT).

It’s been hype cycles since the beginning.

Every derelict I salvage has so much crap I have to compulsively clean up, including my starter ship…