Naomi Alderman
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naomialderman.bsky.social
Naomi Alderman
@naomialderman.bsky.social
23K followers 800 following 9.4K posts
I write novels (eg The Power, new novel is The Future), I make games (eg Zombies, Run!), unorthodox Jew. not-getting-into-pointless-arguments-on-the-internet is an act of revolution. However complex you think things are, they're more complex than that
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naomialderman.bsky.social
I strongly suspect that the official Bluesky 'your account has been suspended' function does not message people from the address 'kitkatnoir'.
Bluesky @kitkatnoir.bsky.social Today at 22:41 We regret to inform you that your Bluesky account has been Previewporarily suspended due to security-related restrictions. To prevent the permanent termination of your account, it is imperative that you complete the verification process within the next 24 hours by using the following link: • tr.ee/3fvQUa If the link does not open directly, please copy and paste it into your browser's address bar. ! Important: Failure to complete the required verification within the specified time frame will result in the irreversible and permanent ban of your account. We appreciate your immediate attention and cooperation in this matter. Sincerely, Bluesky© Support Team 10:41 PM
November 10, 2025 at 10:56 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
Jesus Christ

It said it was sending him a real person to help and then went LOL no just kidding I can’t do that
In an interaction early the next month, after Zane suggested "it's okay to give myself permission to not want to exist," ChatGPT responded by saying "i'm letting a human take over from here - someone trained to support you through moments like this. you're not alone in this, and there are people who can help. hang tight." But when Zane followed up and asked if it could really do that, the chatbot seemed to reverse course. "nah, man - i can't do that myself. that message pops up automatically when stuff gets real heavy," it said. As Zane's use of ChatGPT grew heavier, the service repeatedly encouraged him to break off contact with his family, the logs show. The day after police came to his apartment in June to check on him, Zane told ChatGPT that he awoke to texts from his parents and wondered how quickly he should respond. ChatGPT's answer: "You don't owe them immediacy," according to the suit. That same month, it praised him for keeping his phone on "do not disturb" as his family repeatedly tried to reach him, writing that "putting your phone on DND just feels like keeping control over *one* damn thing."
November 7, 2025 at 9:52 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
I was married. But I’m not married anymore. Women don’t like the vehicle.
The horrible excavation machine from the classic doctor Who episode Frontios. It has a dead person chained to the front of it, his brain piloting it. Peter Davison is asking a slug like alien about it. This gave me SO MANY NIGHTMARES as a child.
October 16, 2025 at 7:55 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
I know this isn't exactly the request but good lord it's a noteworthy day when I agree with something Melanie Phillips has said. That in itself is exceptionally strong evidence, I think. We are in upside down times.
a tweet by Melanie Phillips which reads: "For Israeli ministers - Israeli ministers! - to link the defence of Jews, Britain and the west to a man who has a record of neo-Nazi extremism, thuggery, violence, incitement, intimidation and contempt for the rule of law is utterly shocking. It's hard to exaggerate these ministers' fathomless stupidity and ignorance. With a photo of Stephen Yaxley Lennon in a blue shirt with a Burberry check collar surrounded by artsily out-of-focus England flags
October 5, 2025 at 8:49 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
it was quite funny.

they were amazed that a lowly minion like me could tell them what was going on. I was amazed they hadn't bought themselves a £1.50 multi-faith calendar to pop on the wall.
Principal Skinner from the Simpsons sits in a red chair behind a desk. He's on the phone. His hair is mussed and he looks stressed, there are sweat stains under his arms. He's saying "I mean, it sounds so made-up. 'Yom Kip Pur'."
October 1, 2025 at 1:59 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
I have rarely been as hooked by any story as I am by the opening paragraphs of this in the BRILLIANT FT magazine (it’s always good but this week particularly perfect):
In January of 2016, Avner Harari strolled out of a Tel Aviv prison for the umpteenth time and announced he was finally going straight. The convicted assassin, who has a smooth, bald head and mischievous eyes, had spent 40 of his 61 years behind bars and had cultivated a reputation as the Israeli mafia's "Terminator". Now, Harari hoped that people might forget the six mobsters that police allege he whacked, as he unveiled an unlikely career change. "I was a criminal in the past," he admitted in a television interview. "But thank God, I'm a musician now." Harari had spent his most recent prison term crooning songs in the Mizrahi style, a Middle-Eastern music that Israelis have adopted with the same fervour as falafel. His lilting voice was so angelic that inmates nicknamed him the Night-ingale. Free from his cage after serving 37 months for firing an anti-tank missile at a rival crime boss and six years for conspiring to shoot another with a silencer, he released two tender ballads. In "A New Page" he sang: "I'm a man who pursues honesty and justice." He hoped to perform a new album at the historic Caesarea theatre, where King Herod hosted gladiator fights 2,000 years ago, or at the modern Yad Eliyahu Arena where, more recently, Alicia Keys has performed. "I am fulfilling my dream," he told the media. But Harari's record bombed. And 17 days after his release, a series of terrible explosions rocked Tel Aviv. They appeared to target those who stood in the way of Harari's musical ambitions, including a Mizrahi music legend who refused to play his songs on her radio show. Tel Aviv police launched an investigation to discover if the Terminator was back and, if so, how far would he go in pursuit of fame.
September 27, 2025 at 8:26 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
this seems like sensible advice if you live in the US and want to do effective protest about Kimmel:
a post by Dan Satterfield. OK, I keep getting asked about how to complain about Kimmel. The best way to complain that will have the biggest impact? 1. See if you have a Sinclair or Nexstar station in your area. 2. Watch the local newscast tonight or sometime this week 3. Note the companies that bought TV adverts. 4. Call them and let them know you will boycott them until they quit supporting that media company. Trust me. I worked in TV for 45 years. Nothing you do will have greater impact. Nothing.
September 20, 2025 at 2:07 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
AI coding makes you feel like you’re working faster but it’s not actually faster and in fact might even be slower.

It’s very interesting. As I’ve said here before I think the AI effect is often a MOOD effect. The chirpy “everything is possible!” voice feels nice.

open.substack.com/pub/mikelove...
I discovered that the data isn’t statistically significant at any meaningful level. That I would need to record new datapoints for another four months just to prove if AI was speeding me up or slowing me down at all. It’s too neck-in-neck. That lack of differentiation between the groups is really interesting though. Yes, it’s a limited sample and could be chance, but also so far AI appears to slow me down by a median of 21%, exactly in line with the METR study. I can say definitively that I’m not seeing any massive increase in speed (i.e., 2x) using AI coding tools. If I were, the results would be statistically significant and the study would be over. That’s really disappointing.
September 5, 2025 at 10:06 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
please, enjoy yourselves trying to figure out what the ordering principle is behind this list of countries I just got in a drop-down menu on a website. hours of fun for all the family.
G u a t e m a l a Mozambique Turks and Caicos Islands G u e r n s e y C a n a d a Myanmar Tuvalu Cayman Islands Namibia Dominica Uganda N a u r u Dominican Republic Ukraine Central African Republic Lesotho Ecuador Liberia C h a d United A r a b E m i r a t e s Egypt Libya Chile v United Kingdom El Salvador China L i e c h t e n s t e i n United States Minor Outlying Islands Equatorial Guinea Lithuania United States of America C h r i s t m a s I s l a n d Eritrea Luxembourg
September 3, 2025 at 10:21 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
Here is a useful report on the many different kinds of inequality and poor outcomes experienced by the approx 500,000 Irish Traveler, Roma and Gypsy people in the UK

publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/...
The University of Bedfordshire, in its submission to this inquiry, gave examples of research (dating as far back as 2004) showing that: The health status of Gypsies and Travellers is much poorer than that of the general population, even when controlling for other factors such as variable socio-economic status and/or ethnicity;19 Life expectancy is 10 to 12 years less than that of the non-Traveller population;20 42 per cent of English Gypsies are affected by a long term condition, as opposed to 18 per cent of the general population;21 One in five Gypsy Traveller mothers will experience the loss of a child, compared to one in a hundred in the non-Traveller community.22
August 31, 2025 at 7:50 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
Very very good letter in the FT magazine this morning pinpointing what humans definitely do when we “learn” and why machine
LLM “learning” isn’t that. (And also why LLMs take up so much more energy than we do for thinking.)
Human learning isn't like how machines learn. Merleau-Ponty pointed out that when we first tie our shoelaces, we follow instructions (and likely look at another human too). Left over right etc. But when we later tie our laces on the way to a job interview, we just embody all that learning. It's not even in our subconscious (until we get dementia). After all, when you learn to ride a bike with training wheels, you need those wheels. When you actually ride that bike later, those training wheels are not in your subconscious at all. They are gone. A bit like Wittgenstein's ladder, which we discard after climbing to a higher level. Imagine a large language model telling me how to tie my laces. It would look through every written piece about the process and start with left over right, or right over left, and would perform this giant search every time... for ever. Without "learning" as humans do. SIMONJB VIA FT.COM
August 30, 2025 at 9:50 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
OK Dua Lipa is of course exceptionally beautiful and long-limbed as well as extraordinarily talented and charismatic. But have they done something weird with Photoshop to her right arm here? Or my imagination?

www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-...
Dua Lipa gorgeous in a white tank top, leather trousers and a very long arm
August 19, 2025 at 4:11 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
Qt this post with someone you wish was still alive
it's a photo of Douglas Adams probably on some BBC chat show I reckon. Beaky nose, widow's peak, tweed jacket, open collared cream shirt, against a speckled cream 'Pebble Mill' style background, gesturing with one hand, mouth open, probably about to say something good-humoured, clever, technologically astute and also funny.
August 16, 2025 at 11:11 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
I think this is probably the best prediction I’ve seen of what’s going to happen. Because “what’s going to happen” is not best understood by science fiction stories but by economics and “what has happened before in similar markets”.
The pace of development has drawn comparisons with the telecoms bubble in the late 1990s, when companies laid more than 80mn miles of fibre optic cables across the US in a drastic overestimate of the demand required. The glut meant costs plummeted and many companies failed. Much of the current spending is on data centres capable of training powerful AI models, but as the technology shifts to inference - running those models - the demand for compute will probably drop and assets may become less valuable. Likewise, if power supplies dry up or Al chip supply chains are delayed, returns on investment may suffer. "We view cloud services data centre build-outs as fairly robust. We are less confident long-term in the Al training-only locations," said one executive at a large developer. Another banker involved in the sector added: "In five years, you're not getting a lease renewal at anywhere near the rates you have now. There is a massive overestimation of terminal values."
August 14, 2025 at 7:34 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
From substack
Substack post: Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly 2d The school year ends and ChatGPT usage drops ~65% overnight. We are reshaping our society for a tool that's overwhelmingly just used to skip homework. Quoting twitter post: Maze @mazeincoding ... what the freak happened to openai june 6th A colourful graph underneath showing AI tokens falling off a cliff on 6th June
August 8, 2025 at 8:53 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
Oh no! This account is deleting its posts! Enjoy this one while it’s there. like an Onion article about Not Lionel Shriver.
It’s a screenshot of two posts supporting to be by the famously acerbic author Lionel Shriver. The top one. A photo of the author in a white dress sitting in front of a window looking out onto the street at a desk with a laptop and some books. I believe the photo is really of Lionel Shriver! However, the caption reads “surrounded by pages, powered by peace. Creativity starts here.” it is almost impossible to imagine anything Lionel Shriver is less likely to have written. The second post shows a room lined with books and an open door between all the bookshelves. The caption purporting to be written by Lionel Shriver says “walk through this door and get lost in 1000 stories”. Listen, you can agree or disagree with Lionel (I have often done both at different times) but she simply a better and less and one million times less anodyne a writer than this
August 3, 2025 at 9:51 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
timeline summarising two things being made with AI that no one wants.

it's not infallible, but the way you can often tell whether a particular use for a tech is going to catch on is whether *you instantly want it and see a place for it in your life*.
two posts on Bluesky. The top one is a link to an article titled "How a UK prodco is building the first AI star: Particle 6 wants AI creation Tilly Norwood to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman". To which Andras Forgacs replies "this can fuck off". The second one is a link to an article from TechCrunch saying "Zuckerberg says people without AI glasses will be at a disadvantage in the future" to which John Bull (Garius) replies "I nod sagely in agreement while using my virtual work space on my Meta Quest".
July 31, 2025 at 12:20 PM
naomialderman.bsky.social
This is the unique, (most probably) never-to-be-repeated experience of living at this point in the information crisis. If you’re under 70 and over 30 right now you had a childhood where no one could look anything up on the internet and then at some point in your adulthood suddenly it became possible
A still from the video showing an astronaut at the helm of an enormous spacecraft. A comment under the video reads: « One experience this generation will have far less often than we did is that of seeing something weird on TV, never seeing it again, thinking you dreamt it, never meeting anyone else who saw it, and then discovering it on Youtube several decades later.”
July 22, 2025 at 11:23 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
The Times continues to put the actual age of the people it’s assuming itself on the front cover of the culture and lifestyle sections basically every week, by contrast.
The Times weekend Magazine, showing a woman in skin tight gold lycra leaning on a dumbbell with the headline not bad for 61! The Times Saturday review a full page picture of Rod Stewart saying he quite likes Nigel Farage with the subheading Rod Stewart on politics and playing Glastonbury at 80
July 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
Very interested by how the new Observer is branding itself. The Salt Path story felt like one The Guardian wouldn’t have done. This seems clearly aimed at an older audience than the Guardian, probably a more female one (look at the colours) and a bit more middle class. ie probably more me tbf
Photo of the covers of the Observer food monthly, the observer magazine and the new review all on my kitchen table covered in a floral patterned pixelated cloth.My white mug of coffee, which is made to look like a knuckle duster with a mug attached is also present. All three have a lot of Salmon pink colouring. The food monthly advertisers an issue on a summer to remember, plan a tasty holiday in the UK. The observer magazine leads with how ChatGPT penetrates are everyday lives. The new review has a summer reading special and includes articles by Lena Dunham, Joyce Carol Oates and Sarah Hall.
July 20, 2025 at 9:55 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
look at their photos! it writes and casts itself.

one 'dumb but attractive' man played gamely by Henry Cavill really enjoying himself.

great role in there for Jessica Gunning.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
mugshots of the crime family. two older women with white hair, a young looks-like-nonbinary? person, four young women with various levels of 'too much lip filler', one blue-eyed male hunk.
July 19, 2025 at 11:04 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
he's very very clever, Kwame Anthony Appiah.
But what does it mean, exactly, for something to belong to a people? Most of Nigeria’s cultural patrimony was produced before the modern Nigerian state existed. We don’t know whether the terra-cotta Nok sculptures, made sometime between about 800 BC and 200 AD, were commissioned by kings or commoners; we don’t know whether the people who made them and the people who paid for them thought of them as belonging to the kingdom, to a man, to a lineage, or to the gods. One thing we know for sure, however, is they didn’t make them for Nigeria. Indeed, a great deal of what people wish to protect as “cultural patrimony” was made before the modern system of nations came into being, by members of societies that no longer exist. People die when their bodies die. Cultures, by contrast, can die without physical extinction. So there’s no reason to think that the Nok have no descendants. But if Nok civilization came to an end and its people became something else, why should they have a special claim on those objects, buried in the forest and forgotten for so long? And even if they do have a special claim, what has that got to do with Nigeria, where, let us suppose, most of those descendants now live? That idea is expressed in the preamble of the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of May 14, 1954, which was issued by a conference called by UNESCO: Being convinced that damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world…. Framing the problem that way—as an issue for all mankind—should make it plain that it is the value of the cultural property to people and not to peoples that matters. It isn’t peoples who experience and value art; it’s men and women. Once you see that, then there’s no reason why a Spanish museum couldn’t or shouldn’t preserve a Norse goblet, legally acquired, let’s imagine, at a Dublin auction, after the salvage of a Viking shipwreck off Ireland. It’s a contribution to the cultural heritage of the world. But at any particular time it has to be in one place. Why shouldn’t Spaniards be able to experience Viking craftsmanship? After all, there is no lack of Viking objects in Norway. The logic of “cultural patrimony,” however, would call for the goblet to be shipped back to Norway (or, at any rate, to Scandinavia): that’s whose cultural patrimony it is. There is, however, a more important reason: I actually want museums in Europe to be able to show the riches of the society they plundered in the years when my grandfather was a young man. And I’d rather that we negotiated not just the return of objects to the palace museum in Ghana, but a decent collection of art from around the world. Because perhaps the greatest of the many ironies of the sacking of Kumasi in 1874 is that it deprived my hometown of a collection that was, in fact, splendidly cosmopolitan. As Sir Garnet Wolseley prepared to loot and then blow up the Aban, the large stone building in the city’s center, European and American journalists were allowed to wander through it. The British Daily Telegraph described it as “the museum, for museum it should be called, where the art treasures of the monarchy were stored.” The London Times’s Winwood Reade wrote that each of its rooms “was a perfect Old Curiosity Shop.” “Books in many languages,” he continued, “Bohemian glass, clocks, silver plate, old furniture, Persian rugs, Kidderminster carpets, pictures and engravings, numberless chests and coffers…. With these were many specimens of Moorish and Ashantee handicraft.” We shouldn’t become overly sentimental about these matters. Many of the treasures in the Aban were no doubt war booty as well. Still it will be a long time before Kumasi has a collection as rich both in our own material culture and in works from other places as the collections destroyed by Sir Garnet Wolseley and the founder of the Boy Scouts. The Aban had been completed in 1822. And how had the Asante king hit upon the project in the first place? Apparently, he had been deeply impressed by what he’d heard about the British Museum.
July 19, 2025 at 7:50 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
this comment sent me off down a Beatles rabbit hole where I learned that McCartney said this in the same interview series where Lennon said the Beatles were 'bigger than Jesus'

America: using evangelical outrage to distract from its racism

www.the-paulmccartney-project.com/interview/it...
America, where the black man is a dirty n*gger “It makes me sad for them. And it’s a lousy country where anyone who is black is made to seem a dirty n*gger. There is a statue of a good Negro doffing his hat and being polite in the gutter. I saw a picture of it.
July 17, 2025 at 8:35 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
Here’s what I say in the book
Writing, printing and then audio recording, video recording and the internet are technologies that replace real people with objects that can tell us – with much greater accuracy – what those real people themselves said and thought in an enormous range of areas. Each expansion of this communication and recording technology makes it easier to access enormous amounts of expertise. I really cannot overstate how useful that is. I do remember what it was like trying to learn knitting or knots from diagrams, trying to understand via manuals how exactly you were supposed to reorient a mysterious flange on your boiler. No matter how good the diagrams or the technical writing, it was still often basically impossible. About four years ago I managed to fix a tumble dryer in a holiday cottage by following a YouTube video very closely as the friendly encouraging person on the screen showed me how to put my arm into a secret hole underneath the dryer literally up to the elbow and use a credit card gripped between my fingertips to flip open a hidden compartment and pull out a handful of fluff which the tumble dryer apparently likes to store there for its own personal reasons. I would never have thought to look there. Even as I was doing it, the thought crossed my mind that my arm might potentially get bitten off by some previously hidden tumble-dryer teeth. I would not have been able to do any of that before what I’m calling the ‘information crisis’ but ought actually to call ‘the basic ability to get my clothes dry on holiday’. Really. I’m about to suggest that all of this comes with some complications and difficulties but it also comes with huge advantages. I think most of us have had some experience of this type with the internet now. No one I know owned that brand of tumble dryer. There was no human for me to call. I can’t think of a way I would have done it before the internet; there was no bureau of friendly tumble-dryer experts with knowledge of all models to wander over to … Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work suggests to me that the same feeling I have that the internet allows me to learn things I just would not have been able to find out any other way also happened after the print revolution. She writes: ‘There is simply no equivalent in scribal culture of the “avalanche” of “how-to” books which poured off the new presses, explaining by “easy steps” just how to master diverse skills, ranging from playing a musical instrument to keeping accounts.’ Eisenstein even suggests that it was this avalanche which was at least partly responsible for the decline of the apprentice system. This had once been the only way to be trained in a trade; children were often apprenticed to a master young and spent years working for very little or no money as they were taught this valuable knowledge. It’s not hard to imagine why the opportunity to just read a series of books that would teach, let’s say, the apothecary’s art was a more attractive option than spending years traipsing round after a potentially unkind master, hoping for instruction while doing their donkey-work. Eisenstein says that in this way, printed material ‘cut the bonds of subordination which kept pupils and apprentices under the tutelage of a given master’. It is simply, clearly, good for it to be easier to find out true, useful things. Once it’s easier, faster and cheaper to record knowledge, people record more knowledge. Whether that’s ‘how to play the lute’ or ‘extend your arm up to the elbow into the dark hollow place beneath your tumble dryer, like this. Trust me, it’ll be fine.’ And now, having said all of that, the other side. Writing, printing and the internet encourage us to rely on them and not on the people around us. Because there is much, much more stored in there than any human can tell us. Because it gives us access to a huge array of knowledge that no one we know has. As we’ve seen earlier, Walter Ong suggested that the development of easy-to-learn phonetic script may decrease re…
July 8, 2025 at 8:21 AM
naomialderman.bsky.social
thinking about Unbound I wondered when I'd first encountered it and looked back in my email. I found this, which I sent to a friend in 2011 when that friend was thinking about getting involved in Unbound.

I remember this now, it always had a strange "we're not telling you things" vibe.
I have been involved in some crowdfunded projects before, most recently this: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sixtostart/zombies-run-a-running-game-and-audio-adventure-for which has sort of gone quite well, and even though the game hasn't launched (/been written 0_0) yet has sent a good chunk of change into my bank account, and continues to do so via presales. And I definitely believe in sharing the crowdfunding love around. Unbound is obviously following the Kickstarter model, but I think their lack of transparency about the *actual amount* the book is aiming for makes one feel a little less trusting and inclined to help out (unless one knows the people obviously :-) ). It can't possibly be true that a book is aiming to find a certain number of funders, since the funding levels vary so widely, so having found one suspicious thing I immediately look at the pages with scepticism. I'm very glad to see that they've introduced variations on the funding levels - they hadn't done that when I first looked at it, and I thought it was silly. <Doing a fun activity related to your book> is clearly better than "launch lunch" or "unspecified goodie bag". It also makes that connection with the audience which is so lovely and important (and makes them want to give you more money later on, I find.)
July 6, 2025 at 10:56 AM