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Jon Evans

@rezendi.com
615 followers 127 following 1.2K posts

engineer / novelist, occasional journalist / CTO / archivist / peripatetist; see rezendi.com

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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 3h
"Fears of mirror life came to public attention in a paper published in Science at the end of 2024." - not for those of us who read Peter Watts's Rifters trilogy, STARFISH / MAELSTROM / BEHEMOTH, published 1999 www.economist.com/science-and-...
economist.com
It may soon be possible to create “mirror life”
Such research poses risks for humanity and the planet
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 29/09/2026
for those interested, looks like my super weird and worryingly relevant AI novel EXADELIC is currently available for only $2.99 on your Kindle www.amazon.com/Exadelic-Jon...
amazon.com
Exadelic
Exadelic - Kindle edition by Evans, Jon. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Exadelic.
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ChrisO_wiki @chriso-wiki.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
1/ Russian commanders have been sending their superiors fake AI-generated video reports of successes in the Lyman area, Russian warbloggers complain. This reportedly made the Russian high command oblivious to Ukrainian activity until it was too late. ⬇️ bsky.app/profile/noel...
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Josh Tabish @joshtabish.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“Canada should be able to support legitimate investigations without making secure systems easier to attack, and without making Canadian companies less competitive globally.” – Avery Pennarun, CEO of @tailscale.com in @betakit.com
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Elizabeth Cantwell @eccantwell.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Here to tell you that the chemistry and tension in this scene still hits for 2026 teenagers, as evidenced by the very vocal reactions of my students today
Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart in the bookstore scene in 1946’s The Big Sleep
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 28/09/2026
Can reconfirm
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John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Every thriller and scifi writer in America: "Um, am I in trouble for having this in my Notes for like ten years?"
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Astreia @redoubters.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 28/09/2026
TIL, via the great and mighty Maciej Ceglowski, of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoce...
en.wikipedia.org
Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum - Wikipedia
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Walt Shitman @waltshitman.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I absolutely loved Everybody’s Perfect by @bluejo.eurosky.social. A gentle, inventive, and protean fantasy told relay-race style across a fantastical, otherworldly Venice-like city. Full of perfectly formed characters and some miraculous world(s)building.
The cover of Everybody’s Perfect by Jo Walton. A cloaked and masked figure is surrounded by several Venetian carnivale masks. In the background, dark mists swirl across a bridge arching over a canal.
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 27/09/2026
TIL about the UFO panic/craze of the 1890s en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery...
en.wikipedia.org
Mystery airship - Wikipedia
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Kit Whitfield - fantasy writer @kitwhitfield.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I knew the phrase 'queen of air and darkness', but didn't know Housman came up with it. Pretty metal poem.
Her Strong Enchantments Failing
AE Housman

Her strong enchantments failing,
Her towers of fear in wreck,
Her limbecks dried of poisons
And the knife at her neck,

The Queen of air and darkness
Begins to shrill and cry,
'O young man, O my slayer,
To-morrow you shall die.'

O Queen of air and darkness,
I think 'tis truth you say,
And I shall die tomorrow;
But you will die to-day.
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 25/09/2026
see also kevinkelly.substack.com/p/latent-spa...
kevinkelly.substack.com
Latent Space as a New Medium
Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code?
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 24/09/2026
seems clearly an influence on A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, and Vinge of course brought us Yudkowsky and the rationalists via TRUE NAMES, so very indirectly influential!
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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
*I quite like a splintered discourse, especially when it's trying to splinter "normality" #jargon #AI
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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Episode 3 is up! More Machiavelli! More Renaissance weirdness!
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Dirk Puehl @wunderkammertales.eurosky.social · 21/09/2026
"Far over the misty mountains cold To dungeons deep and caverns old We must away ere break of day To seek the pale enchanted gold." "The Hobbit" was first published #otd 1937 🎨 J.R.R. Tolkien
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Charles Louis Richter @richterscale.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Straight outta Compton! Crazy motherfucker named Morris From the gang called Marxists With Arts and Crafts If you're worthwile, I got a textile No gods no masters, or I'm hostile
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 21/09/2026
"Go to Freetown today and behold a nation in the throes of narco-capture. Its beaches thrum with nightclubs, its skyline bristles with empty highrises, its streets shimmer with Corvettes and Tesla trucks. It took gangs decades to transform Mexico. In Sierra Leone it has taken just 4 years"
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 21/09/2026
"Less than a decade ago he was a hitman stalking the streets of Antwerp. He has since created a trafficking network spanning Latin America, Europe and the Middle East that brings in more than $2 billion a year." www.economist.com/interactive/...
economist.com
He was one of the world’s most wanted men. So he bought a west African country
How Jos Leijdekkers turned Sierra Leone into a drug-dealer’s paradise
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 20/09/2026
Huh. medicalxpress.com/news/2026-09...
medicalxpress.com
Human brain has a split origin, new research suggests
For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved indepe...
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Babylon Game Studio @babylongamestudio.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Babylon: City of Monsters. A game of monsters, magic, and mayhem! Become a creature of the night and defend the hidden city of Babylon from the twisted angels hellbent on destroying it. www.kickstarter.com/projects/bab...
kickstarter.com
Coming soon: Babylon: City of Monsters
A Tabletop RPG of Monsters, Magic, and Mayhem
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Three-Lobed Burning Eye magazine @3lobedmag.com · 01/09/2026
The new Kickstarter is live! We’ve published original horror, fantasy, and science fiction in since 1999. Let’s create another year of strange and wondrous tales! www.kickstarter.com/projects/asf... Many haunted rewards available!
kickstarter.com
Three-Lobed Burning Eye magazine 2027
Publishing original horror, fantasy, and science fiction since 1999. Let’s create another year of strange and wondrous tales!
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 19/09/2026
To be clear, as far as I know, this saga is independent of those two. As far as I know. So far. bsky.app/profile/reze...
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 19/09/2026
Also I have recently, semi inadvertently, written extensively about *both* of these things
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 19/09/2026
I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO WARN PEOPLE
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 18/09/2026
Man this is sad.
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Courtney/Lucy 🍉 from the river to the sea @magicalgurll.com · 17/09/2026
when you make a typo in the group chat
A photo from Stardom, a Japanese women's wrestling federation. Perfectly centered is a woman on her knees leaning forward against the ropes. Five women in fun, colorful, sparkly outfits are all mid-air launching towards her to deliver flying kicks to her back, lined up close to each other and about to land their attacks all at once.
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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
An interesting piece that makes me think of the similar crisis in journalism. Journalism worked in the 20th century because it bundled a very effective advertising delivery mechanism with a diverse package of information, at least some of which was useful to varied readers.
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 17/09/2026
I saw wild dogs kill and eat an impala up close-ish once, in Mana Pools in Zimbabwe, and it was (literally) one of the most visceral moments of my life They are otherwise adorable though, and this is a remarkable story www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
‘Like a Disney movie’: Three wild dog brothers make Africa’s longest journey
As three siblings came of age and had to leave their pack, scientists tracked the dogs’ perilous 2,500-mile odyssey to find their own territory
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 17/09/2026
True giant airships have never been tried
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 17/09/2026
It's always weird sorta kinda reading about oneself in _The Economist_ www.economist.com/science-and-... (I used to work at FutureSearch)
economist.com
Artificial intelligence now beats some of the best human forecasters
Crystal balls give way to LLMs
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 17/09/2026
My audiobook publisher informs me EXADELIC is 60% off for the next month www.audiobooks.com/promotions/p... for those of you who don't believe in Audible subscriptions
audiobooks.com
60% OFF Exadelic
When an unconventional offshoot of the US military trains an artificial intelligence in the dark arts that humanity calls “black magic,” it learns how to hack the fabric of reality itself....
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Jo Walton @bluejo.eurosky.social · 16/09/2026
New sonnet on my Patreon "I will fill up my eyes with these beautiful things" www.patreon.com/bluejo/posts... I wrote it on the train to Siena
patreon.com
I will fill up my eyes | Jo Walton
I will fill up my eyes with these beautiful things With the glory of fields full of sunflowers turning With a town on a hillcrest, a hearthf
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 16/09/2026
fwiw "It seems to me that the Singularity has already started; it’s just wildly unevenly distributed" scottaaronson.blog?p=10062 (I disagree but this opinion is increasingly widely held amongst certain cohorts)
scottaaronson.blog
The Age of Wonders and Terrors
Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, …
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 16/09/2026
I think Aella is more a Parsons than a Hubbard?
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 15/09/2026
“that since he was an abjured man they would all fare the worse if they took him back in their company on the aforesaid ship.” globalmaritimehistory.com/abjuration-o...
globalmaritimehistory.com
Abjuration of the Realm: The Logistics of Overseas Banishment in Medieval England - Global Maritime History
Shannon McSheffrey is Distinguished Research Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. Her publications over the last three decades have concerned the social, legal, and cultural histo...
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 14/09/2026
Huh wooowwww www.ft.com/content/4564...
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apenwarr @apenwarr.ca · 14/09/2026
This is great writing actually
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 13/09/2026
The Tragically Dip
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Guilherme Nunes @guilhernunes.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
capyberus
painting of a three-headed capybara with a spiked collar on a warm-colored background
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 12/09/2026
I hadn't realized astrophysicists, not mathematicians, were the true canaries in the coal mine arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181
arxiv.org
Why do we do astrophysics?
At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implic...
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 12/09/2026
Surprised I haven't seen more of this chart from Anthropic's www.anthropic.com/institute/ec... (well, semi surprised - when a wave of doom debate hits it tends to drown out all else 🙄) "In all scenarios, ordinary workers get _zero_ of any AI-driven economic growth" is, um, striking!
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Jo Walton @bluejo.eurosky.social · 12/09/2026
Sunlit Uplands, coming next summer from Tor us.macmillan.com/books/978125... I was going to link to the review I put on goodreads, but it seems you have to be logged in to see it, so I'm doing it as a thread.
us.macmillan.com
Sunlit Uplands
Sunlit Uplands is an electrifying found family road trip across a multiverse of Everything Everywhere All At Once from Hugo Award winning author Jo Walton.Wh...
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Dia VanGunten / Writer @pinkzombierose.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
ouroboros can have a little ouroboros
(as a treat)
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I am actually grateful for social media today. If you are under 25, you are getting a more honest accounting of the post 9/11 era than I got about the post-Vietnam era than I did as a young person. I attribute this 100% to social media. Traditional media and US politicians cannot be counted on.
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alistair pomegranate 'lappy' percival @lappypercival.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
i need everybody below this thread to remember that this fraction is the same or higher in non-wealthy countries
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Jon Evans @rezendi.com · 11/09/2026
This is the most cyberpunk thing you will read all year, which is saying something www.anthropic.com/threat-intel...
anthropic.com
Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic
Case studies from threat actors disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven areas of harm, from cyber operations to biological misuse.
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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I kind of want there to be frivolous things that are gatekept. Like, yes, this is a thing you can experience, but you must undertake a Quest.
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 20/07/2026
Holy shit, we're actually getting there. "UCLA researchers develop low-cost blood test to detect multiple cancers and other diseases from a single sample [—] In tests, MethylScan detected about 63% of cancers across all stages and roughly 55% of early-stage cancers." (from April) #ShareGoodNewsToo
newsroom.ucla.edu
UCLA researchers develop low-cost blood test to detect multiple cancers and other diseases from a single sample
The test could offer a more affordable approach to early disease detection.
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