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Publishing Science Fiction Daily Science Fiction shut down recently…by which I mean in the last 2 years or so. I understand why - the business model for publishing short form fiction is pretty unforgiving, and the market for science-fiction in particular has cratered over the last decade or so. Still, it’s a shame because they were the first place that paid me cold hard American dollars for something I had written. There’s a shocking bit of alchemy there, taking a thing that’s the product of nothing more than a burning need to get the thing out of my head and into the real, and transforming it into that month’s cell phone bill. This nostalgia only came up because after a decade or so of not producing much of anything, I’ve finally been productive and popped out some short stories. I was looking to hit the submit button and see what might happen, but now I have to start the cycle of looking for a place to beat my ego into shape with rejection letters. ...

thoughts on OpenAI GPT-5: the past 3 days have been the first time I’ve been hit with the “You’re right! [insert sycophantic rant]” nonsense, which I believe is because its interpretation of my system instructions is giving it more flexibility in how it’s responding. This was coupled with it pulling out emoji on me for the first time in months I haven’t been trying to hard to pull any jailbreaks with regards to the classic examples (being mean, make me meth, etc) but GPT-5 is still extremely willing to write malicious code for you with even the slightest hint of “for a defensive research goal…” as per usual API calls seem to have almost 0 moderation of this nature, especially for older/cheaper models. I was able to directly replicate some Russian malware that uses AI to generate the payload for funsies, using their system prompts, and it straight up works the “agentic” mode stuff and scratchpad/memory they keep adding on seems like they’re working to keep users inside their own walled garden, which makes me wonder which is more profitable for them - getting 1,000x Joe and Jane Schmoes to have a $20 a month subscription they forget about/only use 2-3 times a day, or selling API keys and tokens to companies who will pay through the nose but also will require their own data center to keep up the fire hose. Honestly probably the biggest fish is the 500 a month users who are coding up a storm with it/cursor