Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

New Worlds: The Retired Life

Oct. 24th, 2025 05:01 pm
swan_tower: (Default)
[personal profile] swan_tower
How many people have ever been able to afford to retire, and what has "retirement" meant through the ages, anyway? The New Worlds Patreon has some thoughts -- comment over there . . .

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/79omGz)

On "AI"

Oct. 20th, 2025 05:13 pm
rowyn: (artistic)
[personal profile] rowyn

I have many friends who use chatbots or other plagiarism-engine apps, so I try not to be a dick about how much I dislike it. But I don't want to hide how much I dislike it, either. I call the stuff "plagiarism engines", as a shorthand, but if I am honest, it's not just the plagiarism that I hate. It's not just that it's setting fire to the planet, or that it's driving up electricity and electronics costs, or that it produces such bad-to-mediocre pap, or that it's making real artists and real authors have to defend their work as Not AI, either.

I hate the idea itself: the notion that you can strip away all human skill and effort from the act of creation. Just press a button, and voila, the thing you wanted now exists. I hate it. You can tell I've always hated the idea, because when I make a setting that has magic, it's never magic that makes art without effort. In Silver Scales, enchanters can make beautiful, interactive, three-dimensional illusions -- but they need skill and training and artistry to do so. A character with tons of magical power but no training in art can make copies and do simple/crude images, but nothing like what artists can do. It's similar in all my settings, because I do not write about dystopian hellscapes, and a world where artistry is meaningless is a dystopian hellscape to me.

You could train an LLM on only public-domain works, and make it run for years on a single AA battery, and have it generate stories that make the heart leap with joy and wonder, and I would hate it just as much. I do not want machines that make art.

I do not want machines that make human creativity irrelevant. There is no ethical way to do that because that is not an ethical thing to do.



AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

New Worlds: Are You Insured?

Oct. 17th, 2025 05:02 pm
swan_tower: (Default)
[personal profile] swan_tower
Insurance is rather a hot-button topic these days, especially (but not only) in the field of healthcare. How did it even get started? That's the topic this week at the New Worlds Patreon -- hint, it involved ships sinking at sea. Comment over there!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/N18vHc)

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