gerikson

I should know the answer to this because I re-read all the Culture novels last year, but I do think there's some genetic engineering in the Culture. There's the famous sex glands, of course (but maybe the neural net handles part of that too?) and then there's the asocial dude on the remote asteroid in Excession, who I believe was seen as a genetic throwback from the general population.

But it's beside the point, Banks probably included genetic engineering to make sure no-one got horrible diseases and could live to 500 years, not to breed a separate race of elites. And for that he can never be forgiven by these idiots.

Edit both HN and LW comments mention John C Wright, who I have never read and vaguely remembered being a Sad Puppy. He has some dreck where everything is libertarian. Banks was a socialist, but he was foremost a novelist. Faced with the need to create a future society, he naturally designed one with no disease, no material wants, and lots and lots of sex. Who wouldn't? Conservative yanks, that's who.

"Enjoy" this Rat fundamentally misunderstanding Banks:

https://www.boristhebrave.com/2025/09/14/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia/

JFC the comments on LW are even worse..

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia#comments

While the Culture is, on pretty much any axis, strictly superior to modern civilization, what personally appalls me is their sheer deathism.

If memory serves, the average human lives for around 500 years before opting for euthanasia, mostly citing some kind of ennui. What the hell? 500 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

"Why didn't Iain take my neuroses into account??"

Marvelous! This makes more sense of the culture than the books do.

"please sir may I pleasure you sexually"

LOL ofc I spoke too soon, the "messages" were apparently random arrows

Reports are shell cases with messages have been found. My money is still on it being a false flag.

Artnet: Christie’s Quietly Deletes Digital Art Department

deep down they realize that as soon as the machines become superintelligent they'll realize how fucked up humans are and decide it's a net postive to delete us

JFC if he dies he's the new Horst Wessel

I mean it's still just funny money seeing the creator works for some company that resells tokens from Claude, but very few people are stepping back to note the drastically reduced expectations of LLMs. A year ago, it would have been plausible to claim that a future LLM could design a language from scratch. Now we have a rancid mess of slop, and it's an "art project", and the fact it's ersatz internally coherent is treated as a great success.

Willison should just have let this go, because it's a ludicrous example of GenAI, but he just can't help himself defending this crap.

Yet another example of how acceptance of GenAI is increasingly coded as right wing

MAGA hates AI (well, Big Tech):

https://archive.ph/mBo9I

(Originally The Verge: MAGA populists call for holy war against Big Tech)

https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-natcon

I think it's a very "edgy teenager" thing to say, regardless of what cultural or political tribe this mental teenager pledges allegiance to.

Promptfondlers on lobste.rs are unhappy about the tag "vibecoding", used to denote development using GenAI. I'd not recommend reading the thread, just want to observe that if slop coding had actually taken the coding world by storm, I doubt there would be much pearl clutchign about how slop-slingers are treated on the site. We're talking about people willing to pay Scam Altman money monthly after all.

https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms