Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Y ou can imagine my pride in discovering that my work is among the millions of pirated books and papers used by Meta to train their newest AI model (dubbed Llama 3).  Thus far I’ve found only three short stories out of the dozen or so I’ve written, but hey: It means I’m in good company! A lot of famous authors are justifiably pissed off. The Atlantic reported on this today. Basically, it describes how Meta employees briefly thought about licensing the material, but quickly decided it would be a lot faster and cheaper just to steal it. Especially since most of it had already been pirated and amassed online via Library Genesis, or LibGen.  Atlantic writer Alex Reisner set up an interactive database so authors can enter their names and see how much of their stuff Meta has scooped up free of charge. That’s how I ended up discovering my stories.    I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have my words comprise a synapse or two in the vast Meta h...

It's porn-bot Pac-Man! B luesky update: Still better than X/Twitter, just for the reduction in MAGA bile. But, really, it’s not going to save us. It was naive to hope, during the last few months, that it might.When you think about it, how can the disaster wrought by social media be cured by more social media?  Anyway I’m up to 320 or so followers now. Normally I’d be dancing in the street with those numbers. But the pie chart above tends to dampen my enthusiasm:  Porn bots. I get half a dozen a day, profile photos of sexy women who try to establish bona fides by reposting or liking three random things. Never-Trumpers like myself, who mostly just like and repost anti-MAGA memes. I don’t mind that, but at this point anything that makes me madder or sadder isn’t helpful. Finally, the tiny cohort of smart people who post interesting facts and photos, or who add some original perspective to the political cataclysm that is about to overtake us.  I suppose that last group is th...

I got on Bluesky. Not that I needed another social-media time suck, but it seemed like a good way to add my vote to the 21 million or so who have come to loathe dufus billionaire Leon Musk and his loveable sidekick, Jabba the Trump. I see I now have 300 followers. Forget how many I had on Twitter, which I quit a couple of years ago. Maybe 40? Let’s just say that, as empty gestures go, my Bluesky plunge is about as empty as they get. Still. People on Bluesky like to go on about how much nicer it is, how much more encouraging and less toxic. Maybe, I guess. But it really doesn’t seem much different from pre-Musk Twitter. It’s still another social media site that runs on clicks and likes and shares. All of which push even the most enlightened users toward hot-take sarcasm, painfully-stretched metaphors and snide shit-posting. On the other hand, I am seeing some nice cat pictures, interesting historical oddities, and talented people doing art and needlepoint and wildlife photography. ...

Maybe we have bigger fish to fry.   S hould TikTok be banned? Beats me. I never use the app. I’m only aware of it because occasionally I’ll look out a window and see two moderately attractive people doing synchronized dance steps while a third person records it. I assume that’s intended for TikTok. Although it could just as easily be for Facebook, or YouTube or any of the other exhibitionist apps that harvest data and persuade its users to do things they might otherwise not. Actually, that’s pretty much the whole purpose of anything on internet, isn’t it? To influence you and to continually improve the ways in which you can be influenced. Which is why targeting a single app seems quixotic. Yes, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company (ByteDance) and as such is required to turn over its data any time the Chinese government wants it. That doesn’t sound optimal. We’re talking 170 million American users, who could presumably be incited to vote for JFK Jr. or participate in the fun Russian...

I n a scientific experiment starting the day after the election, I deleted the ubiquitous blue icon from my iPhone 6. That was right after putting out feelers regarding a move to Australia. Still haven’t heard back from Australia, but over the past few days I’ve noticed a sharp decline in Facebook-induced rage, neurosis, confusion and overall angst. It turns out that when I have to sit at my computer to examine the latest fake news and cat videos, I check the site approximately 29,000 fewer times per day than if I were looking at my phone. And by refusing to “like” or comment on anything, the number of notifications I get is now down to zero. That represents a significant time savings! Also, the carpal-tunnel thing in my right hand is showing some improvement. There are other upsides. I no longer have to spend so much valuable time unfriending people. And when I wake up in the middle of the night — kind of common when you’re my age — I no longer reach for the phone and compound the pro...

W ho among us has not spent 15 minutes perusing Facebook without at some point concluding that life could be better? Show of hands. Now we know why. It's not that life sucks, per se; it's just that the geniuses at Facebook were messing with us. They wanted to know if small variations in the number of cat videos and dinner entrees and vacation sunsets could have an effect on one's mood. They fixed it so that instead of yet another hilarious meme or Buzzfeed quiz, one might see one of those pathetic posts from someone complaining about their neighbors or contemplating suicide. Turns out it makes a difference! According to the data, plaintive cries for help are kind of depressing, while getting 10 likes on an Instagram photo induces a euphoria akin to orgasm. If the research can be trusted, we may now conclude that positive things make people happy, and negative things don't!  This has profound implications.  Of course, a number of people immediately got on Facebook to bit...

A fter 15 years of the Internet, I thought I’d heard from pretty much everyone I’d ever crossed paths with since being born. But the other day there was a comment on a video I’d uploaded to YouTube: “did you attend Flathead H.S.?” I recognized the name. We’d been close friends during my freshman year. All the girls back then loved the way he danced. Once he was helping work cows at my folks’ ranch and got kicked in the chin by a calf. He said he still had the scar. During our brief e-mail correspondence that was pretty much the high point of our shared memories. It was good to know what became of him, but I don’t think we’ll be staying in touch. No reason we should. Internet reconnections are like that: you are delighted to hear from somebody and then in the awkward span that follows you realize there’s a reason you lost touch. His dad was in the Air Force and got transferred the following year. My folks moved not long after. Neither of us ever thought to write. That’s OK. When you rec...

N ow that the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen unfriend as its word of the year, I guess it's official: all nouns are now legitimate verbs, and by extension so are their opposites. Like you, I somehow overlooked the intermediate delineation of  friend as a verb, but there's no sense being pedantic about it. Language constantly evolves. You  get on board or you get the hell out of the way. New words arrive because there's a need for them. The concept of unfriending has been with us for centuries, but the explosion of social media has forced us to formalize and streamline the process. Used to be, if you became tired of a relationship, you had to be cagey about it: You'd see the person's number on the caller ID and not pick it up. You'd make up an excuse not to attend their dumb President's Day party. You'd be fortunate enough to spot them first in the frozen-food section of the supermarket, and you'd lurk in housewares until they were safe...

Facebook and its mildly retarded cousin Twitter have unleashed a huge demand for pithy remarks, single sentences so clever and incisive that they are instantly echoed around the globe. If one's worth is measured by the number of followers one has, then the exponent of that worth is the number of one's pithy messages that get re-Tweeted. Alas, the supply of cleverness has not kept pace with the demand. Maybe this accounts for the proliferation of the phrases "Go figure" and "Just sayin'." If a tweeted observation seems particularly banal, just add the ironic eye-roll "go figure" and you've got the sophisticated air of one who's seen everything. "Just sayin'" works much the same way: It implies an amused exasperation with this absurd world, a touch of whimsy that is not immediately apparent in the trite thought that preceeds it. If those don't work, there are always the "LOL!" "OMG" and "S...

R ecently, at the invitation of my oldest daughter, I created a profile on Facebook. It's not much of a profile: the same stupid picture I use here, a brief mention of my interests, the sort of music I listen to, favorite books and movies and so forth. So far, I have gathered together an elite cadre of three friends. That includes the daughter. ( Not sure who that doofus is in the picture; wonder if he'd like to be my friend ). Friends are the currency of Facebook; like dollars, you can never have too many. The first thing you must do, after listing a few zany personal details, is start inviting everybody you can think of to be your friend. Everybody, no exceptions. I haven't gotten around to that yet, but when I do, I expect to have so many friends that Facebook will have to add another server just to accommodate them all. Good friends. Then, when my page displays all the avatars, it will slow the Internet to a crawl. Until then, I'm making do with just the three. We...