500 Words from Lee Schneider

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500 Words from Lee Schneider is a blog on the Pika blogging platform

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Last post: Sep 13, 2025
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Books
Sep 13, 2025 · original
Video can be faked. Pictures can be changed. In this slithery world of everything moving underfoot, I'd like to make the case for writing as memory, specifically writing that you get in the form of paper books, as the most stable long-term storage for civilization. Government websites are being erased and online data is vanishing. Amazon can disappear ebooks from your Kindle and prevent you from reading them on any other device. But take a look at your bookshelf. Those books are still there. Maybe getting a little dusty. But otherwise unchanged.
Crime Doesn’t Pay
Sep 5, 2025 · original
Reported via various sources today, Anthropic has to pay authors because it stole their work to train the AI on. Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement, an estimated $3,000 per work. The amount is well below what Anthropic may have had to pay if it had lost the case at trial. Experts said the plaintiffs may have been awarded at least billions of dollars in damages, with some estimates placing the total figure over $1 trillion. This is the first class action legal settlement centered on AI and copyright in the United States, and the outcome may shape how regulators and creative industries approach the legal debate over generative AI and intellectual property. Anthropic doesn’t have to admit any wrongdoing or liability, and says it’s going to keep on developing “safe AI systems” to help solve
Issue 110—Machine Breakers
Sep 5, 2025 · original
TOP OF MIND Welcome to 500 Words. I gave an interview last week to Dave Monk at the Friendly Futurist podcast. Dave was interested in the predictions for the future that I made in the Utopia Engine trilogy, predictions like an AI becoming your therapist, or a unified “Feed” becoming the source of all news. Many of my strangest ideas have come true faster than I can get them down. Dave particularly wanted to talk about the rebels in my books who fight against technology. There is a basis in history for that kind of rebel. They were called the machine breakers. You may know them as Luddites. They would break into factories at night carrying hammers and smash the machines that made their workplace less safe or took away their livelihood. They fought against a powerful tech elite. This was happening in 1799 in England. But it’s all too real today, with the way AI is replacing humans on the j
As many bots as there were humans.
Aug 27, 2025 · original
I was on a Zoom conference the other day and noticed something not-human. No, not zombies. But bots. There were as many bots on the call as there were humans. Turns out, this is a thing. AI Note Takers Are Increasingly Outnumbering Humans in Workplace Video Calls Many people find meetings boring, I suppose. I happen to like seeing the people I work with or for. I suppose that someday I would be so busy as to need to send bots to attend, record, and summarize. I still think, however, that there is something to be learned from being there, even if only on a screen.
Issue 109—When a Whale Looks at You
Aug 22, 2025 · original
Welcome to 500 Words. My next novel, coming out in October, includes whales who can think and communicate with people. Researching that took me down many roads. I’ve learned so much about octopuses and squid that I had to stop eating them. Yes, I will pass on the calamari, even Rhode Island calamari, because I won’t eat anything that is more intelligent than I am. For one strange summer, my father, a Brooklyn-born television executive and lawyer by trade, was briefly put in charge of a marine theme park outside of San Francisco. He learned a lot on the job, and my brother and I, watching the park’s trainers work with orcas, learned about animal intelligence. There was something wrong with training intelligent creatures to be clowns. As a boy, I couldn’t understand it, but an idea took hold that someday, the orcas who were captured for those parks would find their voices and demand restit
Issue 108—Reading Underground
Aug 8, 2025 · original
Hello, and welcome to 500 Words. TOP OF MIND Summer reads are specific reads. The book that is your beach read, with a steamy plot you can interrupt with another iced tea or piña colada, isn’t the same as your airplane read, a book that is fine on the way out, but on the way back starts to feel too heavy to fit in your suitcase. Your cabin-in-the-woods vacation read has a story that you can read in a week, accompanied with whatever animals are howling out there. These books, according to novelist Adam Sternbergh, are short-term pleasures by design. There’s another kind of reading, though, the book that you can read in a hot, fluorescently lit subway car during rush hour. That’s subway read. As he writes, in that situation “I want to be anywhere else, and fast.” The subway read has to capture your attention and hold it through your stops. Sternbergh continues, While I envy the razor-focus
Issue 107—You Can’t Stop the Sun from Rising
Jul 25, 2025 · original
Welcome to 500 Words. TOP OF MIND Bill McKibben is doing some of the most inspiring writing and thinking about the climate crisis, and he’s got a new book coming out called Here Comes the Sun . It’s about the unstoppable rise of solar power. As he wrote in his newsletter: If you think about it, for the first 35 years of the climate fight, our problem was simple: coal and oil and gas were cheap, and hence utterly woven into the fabric of the global economy. But in the past few years we’ve passed some invisible line where sun, wind, and batteries have become cheaper, and that gives us a chance to unweave that dependence on fossil fuel.That comes with many bonuses—a world that runs on a resource that you can’t hoard or fight wars over, and that is available everywhere, could help erode the grotesque inequality that marks our world. Thinking about the inevitability of positive progress is a
Issue 106—Long-Term Memory for Civilization
Jul 10, 2025 · original
Hey there, welcome to 500 Words. TOP OF MIND The sun is having a moment, as Bill McKibben writes in The New Yorker . It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next. That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. McKibben points out that last year, ninety-six percent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewable energy. The clouds move aside and the sun comes through, to force the metaphor, but these bits of good news amid the other kind have me thinking about the old-timey business of reading words in books made of paper. Government websites are being erased, and
Facebook Stepping Up its Memory Grab
Jul 3, 2025 · original
Facebook is stepping up its grab of your personal memories. When you post to its Story feature, there’s a pop up asking if you’d like to opt in to use “cloud processing” of your images, allowing Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis.” Wait, wut? Facebook says this will allow it to make collages, recaps, or theme your images into categories like birthdays or graduations. The real purpose is to get even more material to train their AI. As Tina Nguyen writes in The Verge , “For years, Meta’s trained its AI programs using the billions of public images uploaded by users onto Facebook and Instagram’s servers. But apparently, Meta has decided to try training its AI on the billions of images that users haven’t uploaded to those servers.” Here’s the link to her article: https://www.theverge.com/meta/694685/meta-ai-camera-roll This calls out
What could go wrong?
Jul 2, 2025 · original
A little worried about this, but what could go wrong? US to breed billions of flies and dump them out of aircraft in bid to fight flesh-eating maggot VIA The Guardian
Carbon Footprints
May 27, 2025 · original
For so long I believed that the idea of a carbon footprint was created to help us humans understand the way we imprinted ourselves on our planet. And I was right, but only part of the way. As this post from Nick Heer points out, while quoting a Mashable article from Mark Kaufman, the carbon footprint idea came from marketers doing the bidding of a fossil fuel company. Thinking about the energy “footprint” of artificial intelligence products makes it a good time to re-link to Mark Kaufman’s excellent 2020 Mashable article in which he explores the idea of a carbon footprint: The genius of the “carbon footprint” is that it gives us something to ostensibly do about the climate problem. No ordinary person can slash 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. But we can toss a plastic bottle into a recycling bin, carpool to work, or eat fewer cheeseburgers. “Psychologically we’re not built for
Really enjoying reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways...
May 26, 2025 · original
Really enjoying reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways because of lines like this that vividly render moments in nature: Above me, ravens muttered their hexes. 🐦‍⬛
The Southern California habit of miniature golf...
May 26, 2025 · original
The Southern California habit of miniature golf. Good for long weekends.
Ok, Ok, Ursula...
May 23, 2025 · original
Ok, Ok, Ursula. You’re right. But do you have to be SO right. I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. URSULA LeGUIN VIA Advice to Writers
No AI Button
May 22, 2025 · original
Kojo Osei writes about why there should be no AI button. These are good thoughts to have during the week that Jony Ive and Sam Altman have joined forces for what some believe will be the company to overtake Apple. Kojo’s arguments for no button are: that we don’t know what the button will do when pressed, and having a button introduces unnecessary cognitive load by creating an artificial distinction between AI-assisted and manual workflows. When LLMs were still nascent and we didn't fully trust their output, it made sense for users to switch between their primary task and AI assistance consciously. Today, as models have dramatically improved and we've grown more comfortable with AI integration, this forced context switching unnecessarily fragments the user experience. Makes sense, and it’s certainly coming in a future world. But today I think we still need a choice about AI. We humans ne
Issue 105 - Get in the Zone
May 21, 2025 · original
Welcome to 500 Words. This issue was published 21MAY25. On the first day of my new day camp, I think I was about nine, I got on the basketball court and hit every shot. Layups. Turn-around jump shots. Three-pointers. The coach greeted me enthusiastically, certain he had discovered a new star. Then, for the rest of the summer, I missed nearly every shot that I took. The coach kept me on the team, riding the bench. Another year, another camp, I pitched lefty and had a good sinker. Early in the summer, the softball coach put me in, and I struck out the side for the win. Never did it again. The coach put me at first base for the rest of the summer. When I moved to LA I was thirty-two, and there was a writers' strike. I couldn't write film or TV scripts for money, so I became a professional typist who went 90 words a minute, and a serious amateur tennis player, catching pickup games on public
The information, skills, and the will
May 21, 2025 · original
From Bill McKibben’s newsletter, some clear thinking. Occam’s Razor, I think, would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy. And a bit later, in the same newsletter: All of this is a continued vindication of Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, who has been arguing steadily that wasting money on direct air capture or any other such scheme is a waste when we need to be focused on one project: the rapid buildout of sun, wind, and batteries. McKibben quotes from a British journal called SGR, Scientists for Global Responsibility: The fossil fuel industry promotes all four technologies (ca
Celebrating Notebooks (again)
May 19, 2025 · original
I use notebooks. Still. There is something about writing by hand that stirs things up in a way that I need them stirred. Every few weeks I page through my current daybooks and index everything. On the surface, I’m creating an index that I will later enter into Obsidian, and Obsidian will in turn be indexed by DEVONthink, so I can search for topics. The deeper reason for the index is so I can revisit everything from the past few months. I’m reminded of what I worked on and what I missed. I see my obsessions in plain view. It helps consolidate the past and indicate the future. Chatbots are always offering to write my meeting notes. Calendly offers this also, and Zoom. I’ll probably give that a try someday, if I can tolerate giving bots more exposure to my inner life. The thing about handwritten notes—they put me back into the frame of the conversation. I picture the person I was speaking w
Running from Microsoft Word
May 8, 2025 · original
So far, AI hasn’t gotten close to any of my fiction work. I work on novels and stories in Scrivener, which has no AI hookup. I make daily notes in Obsidian and have connected the Google Translate API so I can translate passages from books and newspapers in my notes. I search for (and find!) research in DEVONthink. When DEVONthink releases its version 4 and invites in AI chatbots, I’ll be able to use natural language queries to search and interrogate my data. I use ChatGPT and Claude to develop and write marketing copy, to search for things in Kagi.com , and to ask dumb questions. Fiction writing is a soul journey. That means I have to do it myself so I can learn about the world. I am wary of the journey becoming contaminated by AI, and if I work in Word, I wonder if Microsoft will ingest my work to train on. (Of course, they’ll say they won’t. I hold stock in Microsoft but still, I don’t
Can’t Write Fiction Fast Enough
May 7, 2025 · original
When I write science fiction, my idea of success is to stay ahead of the real-time curve of events. I’m failing at this — the predictive aspect of it. Because reality is becoming strange faster than I can make stuff up. For a trilogy series that I’m writing, I made up the idea of artificial water generators. I don’t know how they work. I just assumed that we’ll have them soon. We use things today, every day, and don’t know how they work. I don’t really know how my electric car makes its wheels turn and I don’t know how my iPhone makes a picture of a cat turn into digital media. But here is a company , right now, making a water-generating appliance that takes moisture from the air and makes drinking water. The future is already here, but not evenly distributed, etc. Originally posted to 500 Words #writing #predictions

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