Patrick Nielsen Hayden
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pnh.nielsenhayden.com
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
@pnh.nielsenhayden.com
VP and editor-at-large at the Tor Publishing Group. Series editor, Tor Essentials. Winner of three Hugos and a World Fantasy Award for editorial work. Opinions mine, not Tor’s. Happily working out of Tucson, AZ.

He, his. Anti-trans dingbats, get lost.
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
My take on the general idea of having for-profit companies involved in the field:
Letting Silicon Valley Geoengineer the Atmosphere Will End Badly
We already have plenty of evidence of what happens when things better left to governments — which in this case might decide to never flip the switch at all — are ceded to private industry.
www.gravityisgone.com
November 23, 2025 at 10:36 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
I got to read an early copy of 'Everybody's Perfect,' and it's wonderful. Like nothing I've ever read before.
I have the proofs for Everybody's Perfect, which means I have to stop writing my current novel, Sunlit Uplands, to work on this old thing, last year's book, which couldn't be more different if I tried. (Which I don't. It just happens.) It's good it's a step closer to you being able to read it but...
November 24, 2025 at 10:47 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
the setting is per device in case you switch between phone & laptop or if you upgrade your phone
November 24, 2025 at 10:43 PM
My setting was turned off, too. Jeez, Bluesky.
Idk how long it's been off but my Bsky app stopped reminding me to use alt text, you might have to turn yours back on too
I turned the reminder back on 🤦🏻‍♀️ annoying
November 24, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
this dumb shit is what i mean when i say this is a purely aesthetic “politics.” yeah man, why can’t we have a fusion of cosmopolitan social democracy and revanchist hierarchies of wealth and privilege? tough question.
Matt Stoller: “..Trump & Mamdani defeated establishment in their own way, representing hunger of voters on the right & left who want something different. If those sides cd come together.. that would be a sea change in how we organize our political economy”.

www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-r...
Monopoly Round-Up: Why the Establishment Freaked Out Over a Mamdani-Trump Press Conference
Meta wins its antitrust case, there are now two fire truck antitrust claims, the stock market got wobbly, and Larry Summers was exiled from the establishment, at least for now.
www.thebignewsletter.com
November 24, 2025 at 7:04 PM
Sing of human unsuccess, Charlie Brown
Many Who Die Deserve Life. Can You Give It to Them, Charlie Brown?
Okay. Yes. We’re bored now. We’re all bored. But has it ever occurred to you, Charlie Brown, that the process which creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money?
November 24, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Thread. Good advice.
Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪
November 23, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
It is important for you to realize that you have probably never once in your life sent a private email. That’s just not how email works. Sure, turn off whatever Gmail features you want, but you’re just playing whack-a-mole with the technical realities of email as a concept.
November 22, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
since the "google is now training gemini on your email contents" thing keeps bumping around here: it's _not happening_. I say this not to defend google but because I know a lot of people that have broken their filtering and made their lives much more annoying from sheer misinformation.
The malwarebytes Google opting-your-emails-into-ai-training thing is not true. The post is based on one bad tweet.

I know anti-tech lamenting is a Bluesky core principle, but please use the same judgement you would for any other clickbait.

www.theverge.com/news/826902/...
Google denies ‘misleading’ reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI
Google says “we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model.”
www.theverge.com
November 22, 2025 at 9:30 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
who is following you dorks that you feel the need to repeatedly post that mtg is not on the side of the angels. it feels like spending a lot of time telling people not to eat hams they find on the ground
November 22, 2025 at 2:16 AM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
I'm not against the idea that some sort of silicon intelligence *might* arise at some point--we're not even nearly there as far as I can tell--but humans are SO programmed to regard things that do not have human agency as if they do have human agency, that this seems like a necessary move
my most butlerian jihad coded belief is that we should probably make it illegal – and more importantly, we should work toward a cultural consensus that it is immoral – to design a computer program whose interface uses the first person
November 21, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
my most butlerian jihad coded belief is that we should probably make it illegal – and more importantly, we should work toward a cultural consensus that it is immoral – to design a computer program whose interface uses the first person
November 21, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Absolutely
You ever just sit down and realize that the rise of 21st century fascism is capital's answer to climate change?
November 21, 2025 at 3:04 PM
In other words, traffic deaths are a policy choice
“Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year…Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed from 40 to 30km/hr, city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas & city center in 2021.”
Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death
The capital city is Finnish’ed with car-related fatalities.
www.politico.eu
November 21, 2025 at 5:44 AM
Settling in with @tnh.nielsenhayden.com at the Fox Theatre in downtown Tucson to see Josh Johnson live in about 30 minutes. Life is okay sometimes.
November 21, 2025 at 1:56 AM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
how can the president demand the extrajudicial killing of elected representatives? does he not know about our norms?
November 20, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Moxon’s Shaving Cream: “Never exonerate malice simply because it is also stupid.”
November 20, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Wow, sudden hailstorm in the desert
November 19, 2025 at 8:07 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Seriously, the one idea we need to bend society towards for the back half of the 21st Century is “The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men.”
It's not normal for a professor to start a class discussing how they "regret" being best buddies with a child sex trafficker and asking them for advice on how to abuse their position to coerce sex from former students.

He shouldn't be there at all. This is an institutional failure.
Larry Summers discusses his “statement of regret” for his disturbing messages to Jeffrey Epstein with Harvard students
November 19, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
#SaveSpeech

if you've seen a video going around of Epstein survivors talking about their abuse, you need to be aware that video is promoting World-Without-Exploitation, an organization whose website supports legislation like KOSA, and advocates for the "Nordic model"

they are not your allies.
November 18, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Every time I see an excerpt from this Nuzzi production I think of Mencken's lines re: Harding's writing: "It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."
November 17, 2025 at 3:56 PM
What perfect album came out the year you turned 16?
November 17, 2025 at 2:11 AM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Hard, good reading by Jeet Heer

www.thenation.com/article/soci...
Jeffrey Epstein Was a Warlord. We Have to Talk About It.
www.thenation.com
November 15, 2025 at 2:22 PM
Reposted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Once you've seen the sub-literate gibberish passed along among billionaires, the story of how elites came to exalt Bari Weiss, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and other stylists of 4th-grade book report prose snaps into place.
Another revelation from all of these emails is that many of the richest and most powerful people in the country absolutely cannot write. Helps explain their sweaty embrace of LLMs.
November 14, 2025 at 7:27 PM
As I was saying. These are the conversations the rich have when we’re not around.
Ooh, @bigthink.com this exchange between @joscha.bsky.social and Jeffrey Epstein is so eugenics-smeared. Contemplating using climate change and involuntary euthanasia of infirm and elderly to cull the population… I think I’m going to be ill.
From HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026413
November 14, 2025 at 5:56 PM