What are you reading in 2026?

[gban007]

Finished rereading Elaine Cunninghams Counsellors and Mings trilogy. I enjoyed the books, and nice to be back in the Realms, but found the pacing a bit off at times, making it a slow read. I think mainly due to number of POVs and interweaving plot threads, im more used these days to books having these being longer to allow it to breathe more, or for shorter works to be focused more on limited POVs.
I also really liked following Matteo and Tzigone, but less so the other POV characters.
Was nonetheless an enjoyable read.

Have started Azure Bonds, and as a comparison is so fsr at least all from Alias' point of view, which is making for a tighter/ quicker read thus far.

 

[Retros_x]

I just finished "If anyone builds it, everyone dies," and I need something a little lighter to recover. Maybe I will reread The Road.

If its any comfort to you: we are lightyears away from real superintelligent AI - contrary to what the tech bros and hypefluencer are trying to sell us (or on the other hand doomsayers like the authors of this book). Current AIs are very high-scaled and sophisticated statistical models for pattern matching, glorified curve-fitting calculations. Impressive achievments of engineering, but has nothing to do with real cognition and reasoning.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If its any comfort to you: we are lightyears away from real superintelligent AI - contrary to what the tech bros and hypefluencer are trying to sell us (or on the other hand doomsayers like the authors of this book). Current AIs are very high-scaled and sophisticated statistical models for pattern matching, glorified curve-fitting calculations. Impressive achievments of engineering, but has nothing to do with real cognition and reasoning.

That doesn’t mean they won’t drive you insane faster than the Necronomicon.

All human lies, propaganda and delusions lumped together in one handy little package.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Have started Azure Bonds, and as a comparison is so fsr at least all from Alias' point of view, which is making for a tighter/ quicker read thus far.

I found Curse of the Azure Bonds to hold up fairly well, as far as old D&D fiction goes.

If its any comfort to you: we are lightyears away from real superintelligent AI - contrary to what the tech bros and hypefluencer are trying to sell us (or on the other hand doomsayers like the authors of this book). Current AIs are very high-scaled and sophisticated statistical models for pattern matching, glorified curve-fitting calculations. Impressive achievments of engineering, but has nothing to do with real cognition and reasoning.

Yeah, a lot of the TESCREAL nonsense is based on magical thinking. They have no idea how to make a super-intelligent AI, even conceptually, so they just say "AI will figure out how to do it."

That being said, with AI being used in military operations now, it's important to be skeptical, to think about the worst-case scenarios.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It's not intelligence that poses the existential threat, it's the lack of it.

 

[Retros_x]

That being said, with AI being used in military operations now, it's important to be skeptical, to think about the worst-case scenarios.

Definitely! The dangers of AI are there, but they have rarely anything to do with super intelligence.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Definitely! The dangers of AI are there, but they have rarely anything to do with super intelligence.

Generally, quite the opposite!

 

[jian]

Finished Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faerie by Heather Fawcett, which seems to be the first of a trilogy about our eponymous heroine, an academic researcher of the fae in an alternate turn of the century England* where fairies are real. It’s really quite good and I liked it more than the previous standalone book of hers I read (Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, set in a magical 1920s Montreal), not least because this book is steeped in European fairy lore, and that’s very well done and entertaining. I will find and read the other books in the series**.

*She is an academic at Cambridge, but most of the book takes place in Ljosland, which seems to be based on Iceland rather than the town of the same name in Norway.

**Some of the academic details are quite convincing but not the use of the word meta-analysis, which from context doesn’t mean what she seems to think it might mean.

(As a bonus I see Fawcett lives in BC - Vancouver Island - as do I, that’s another local author for me to know about alongside many others.)

 

[jian]

Also finished When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who died of lung cancer at the age of 37. The book is short but succinct and very expressive, a race against time to record his life and his dying before he actually does so. There’s a desperate rush to record, to matter, to beat the odds when they have already come out so terribly for him (few people his age die of cancer, after all), to have written something (Kalanithi studied English literature first before going into medicine) before the end, on almost every page. It certainly made me think about the nature and meaning of a life.