Allan Dyen-Shapiro

I’ve been attending, put on programming, and enjoying this conference for the last six years. I first went during the pandemic (2021) to their virtual program and have attended in person in Boston every year since. Here is my schedule for this year: Thursday, July 9 from 8-8:30 PM in Empower/Embrace room: Solo Reading. I’ll be reading from my time travel story “The Eliminator,” which came out digitally and in trade paperback from Water Dragon Publications in April of this

I was staying away from this topic, figuring other people had said plenty, until I saw a post about how politicized the “Zionism” Wikipedia article had become, with teams editing and counter-editing it to conform to current political agendas. Within days, I also listened to a public radio show in which a complete misunderstanding of genetics was combined with a misunderstanding of post-colonial theory (with the word Nazi thrown around a lot) and separately treated to a polemi

I had predicted that the first time a large language model would generate a good enough short story to fool an editor into not only thinking it human-written but also buying it, the genre would be one of the formulaic ones where very specific rules generate a standardizable product, Harlequin-style romance or cozy mystery, for example. I figured that speculative fiction would be the toughest nut to crack because there weren’t strict rules. I was wrong. Today, in the email sen

A Wired Magazine article today did something interesting. It started with a tech premise, that the important work in tech in the AI era is deciding how to use code, not in doing the coding itself, and then bridged from that to admiration for humans who act in an “agentic” fashion. Here is how one of the tech bros they quoted described the new worldview: “…you genuinely, unironically believe there are two kinds of people in the world: the NPCs and the main characters, and you