I see a bunch of people riffing on how The Art of War is obvious etc etc, but it seems few people keep in mind that this is advice for very powerful people of the time, the kind of guys who would be kicked in the head by a horse every day.
People who understand how power and lack of resources fucks with a person don’t usually get to tell armies to go fight a war, so those who do need to be told by a guy they’d let execute their favorite wife. (Also, probably the whole Seinfeld Is Unfunny trope…)
Yeah, I wish I had skipped it. Dropped the book at the 66% mark, where it was already too late for me ):
I still have to check out Rainbows End, sounds like it’s really great. That one other non-Fire short story/novella of his I read was … very mid (and pretty cringe in places)
When you wrote “he’s such a good writer”, I assumed you hadn’t read Children of the Sky… a book that urgently needed an editor with a spray bottle and the power to yell “No! Bad Vernor!” multiple times a minute.
Re-reading the preceding parts after Children has also fixed my impression of his writing ability, tbh.
I’m sure he is regretting his part in bringing online a major player in this fashtech fashion scene. Bet there’s a bunch of tears-wiping with dollar bills going on.
It’s been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.
oneshotted, a term that means, roughly, to be destroyed and subsequently remade by a single experience.
Strikes me as incorrectly translated. The remaking is extremely optional, in fact that definition feels like defining blackpilling as being healed by vile propaganda.
Yup. If their backups (if they even had any) were this available to a rando with a single ssh key, it’s lucky they got wiped by an insider threat instead of ransomware.
Today in signs of changing times, “we used to call that a botnet”: https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/