Richard Pearce Moses

@pearcemoses

Retired archivist. Fellow, Society of American Archivists. Author. The Order of Lazarus ( Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology ( More: www.pearcemoses.info/

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Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jul 8

Got a short story in an anthology coming out this fall! A piece I wrote to think through the idea of FTL travel across the universe, documenting the invention of the exodrive. darkforestpress.com/product/not-...

Cover of book: Not-So-Subdued Stories: An Anthology of Bellingham Fiction. Edited by Kenneth Meyer, Leslie Eden, and J.W. Donley. Shows a figure in a spacesuit (or a robot?) reading a tablet, coffee in hand.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jul 8

The *nix tree command is much more robust, and can list file size and dates (-sD switches). Useful to show work over time. For Windows, look for Tree CLI by Etelej. (Installation was a bit funky.) For Mac, you'll need homebrew installed, then brew install tree.

Character output of the tree -sD command, showing file system's directory structure and all files with size and date.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jul 7

Celebrated finishing the first draft! Formatted, 325 pp, 8.5 × 5.5", coil binding, 80K words. Out to a couple of beta readers, and I still have lots of work to do, but a big milestone! #Writing #Editing #Fiction #Sci-Fi

Coil-bound book: Shot of cover (Cosmos Incognita, Richard Pearce-Moses), and one open to show formatting.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jul 1

Timeline cleanse. The clover has faded, but the tall grass flowing in the breeze is amazing. (Lots of bunnies in there, but you can't see them.)

A field of yellow clover blossoms, tall evergreen trees and the sun on the horizon.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jun 19

A fun tool that shows the extent to which you are part of the LLMs corpus (by name, not works stolen). I particularly like the hallucination. This one posted for @lynnemthomas.com, who will envy by role on Doctor Who! intheweights.com

Report of a hallucination in the Mistral 3.2 LLM indicating that Richard Pearce-Moses is a British Actor known for roles in TV series and films, including 'The Crown' and 'Doctor Who'

(He is none of those things.)

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jun 19

More interesting to me was the hallucinations this tool found. Any number of people will be surprised at what GLM thought of me. (Note: I do not write under a pen name, Strunk or White. Nor am I better known as the University of Chicago Press.) #Writing #Editing #Hallucinations

Summary of what GLM 4.7 Flash says about Richard Pearce-Moses: "American author and editor known for 'The Elements of Style' and 'The Chicago Manual of Style'.

N.b.: He is neither.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jun 12

An example of documentation that shows the human effort in writing a novel (by the author and readers). Filename, date, size, and directory structure. Uses the Linux command tree -sD (running on a virtual Linux box on Windows, as the Windows command is limited). Took less than a minute to run.

A page of text showing statistics about the files used to generate a novel: filesize, date, and name, organized using a tree structure based on directory and subdirectory names
.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· May 27

Forgot the picture!

Hand reaching into a drawer of a library card catalog to reveal a handwritten card.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· May 19

Just started Soul's Blood by @stephengrahamking.com, and it's exactly what I needed. A space opera adventure with some great characters. Excellent, playful use of neologisms. stephengrahamking.com/books/soulsb... #BlueskyBooks #Reading #Sci-Fi #SpaceOpera

Book cover: Soul's Blood: The Maverick Heart Cycle [by] Stephen Graham King

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· May 16

Its possible. Don't know. In Dreyer's English, when you touch a footnote number, the note appears at the bottom.

Page of text from a book with a footnote at the bottom.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· May 12

I have dozens. I use M-W online on a daily basis, but for years I used the Compact OED 10, an app on my PC. Used them to help write A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (files.archivists.org/pubs/free/SA...).

Interface for the Compact Oxford English Dictionary - Tenth Ed. List of terms on left, staring with 'A', with definition on right.

Book cover, "A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology" by Richard Pearce-Moses
PDF available at http://files.archivists.org/pubs/free/SAA-Glossary-2005.pdf

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· May 12

Just put @stephengrahamking.com's Soul's Blood at the top of the TBR pile. (Thanks for the intro, @mikebruin.bsky.social!) More proof, Bluesky sells books! #Reading #SciFi

Man with a toque and glasses holding a book, Stephen Graham King's Soul's Blood, with more books and a plant in the background

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· May 11

I knew the term as contemporary tech, but it was coined by Heinlein (h/t McNett), the picked up by Asimov 24 years later. Citation from OED.

waldo, Waldo

A device for handling or manipulating objects by remote control.

1942 'A. MACDONALD' (R. A. Heinlein) in Atounding Sci. Fiction 9 Aug. 16 Even the. .humanoid gadgets known universally as 'waldoes' .. passed through several generations of development. .in Waldo's machine shop before he redesigned them for mass production. The first of them. .had been designed to enable Waldo to operate a metal lathe. 1966 I. ASIMOV Fontostic Voyage vii. 75 A handling device (a gigantic 'waldo'-so named by the earlier nuclear technicians from a character in a science fiction story of the 1940s). 1978 D. A. STANWOOD Memory of Eva Ryker iii. 30 The bathyscaphs are both equipped with remote manipulators-the experts call them 'Waldos' -for working under the extreme pressure.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Mar 28

#NoKimgs Bellingham WA

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Mar 2

Just finished this by @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social and loved it. Captured so many elements of my life. Lyrical writing. Great characters. And a lovely cover!

Cover of a book, Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox. "One of the most enchanting (not to mention hilarious) writers around," Stephen Fry. Tall cliffs at the ocean short, swirls in the sky, a small house, a humanish creature on the beach, a gull in the sky

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Feb 26

Don't have the tassles on yet. It's my first attempt, and I misread the pattern and fought the crown (as I always do when knitting hats). I'd rather have solid red rather than variegated, but that's all the shop had.

Grinning guy wearing a red Melt the Ice hat. Wearing glasses, dark sweater over a plaid shirt.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Feb 25

The First Seal by Daniel Walker: A historical fantasy mixing folklore, magic, religion. A tale of a knight charged by the Pope to stop the source of the plague: the First Horseman of the Apocalypse. A worthwhile read! #Books #HistoricalFiction #Fantasy www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-first-...

Book cover. Author: Daniel Walker. Title: The First Seal. Illustration: Medieval knight on his knee, holding a sword in defense. Facing a dark, monstrous figure on horseback. In a gray, snowy landscape.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Feb 18

Amazing view of the Canadian range east of Vancouver BC. The photo doesn't do justice to the subtle pastels.

Sun gracing the snow-covered peaks of Golden Ears and Mt Robie Reid. Evergreen trees in a field in the foreground.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Feb 16

I was recently criticized for my esoteric vocabulary. But I love the way SF creates uses words a reader has to figure out from context. The article convinced me of the value of less common words. Today I chose pedagogue instead of professor. #Writing #SciFi www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/s...

opinion Just as the community adopted the term "hallucination" to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation.

Semantic ablation is the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. Technically, it is not a "bug" but a structural byproduct of greedy decoding and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).

During "refinement," the model gravitates toward the center of the Gaussian distribution, discarding "tail" data – the rare, precise, and complex tokens – to maximize statistical probability. Developers have exacerbated this through aggressive "safety" and "helpfulness" tuning, which deliberately penalizes unconventional linguistic friction. It is a silent, unauthorized amputation of intent, where the pursuit of low-perplexity output results in the total destruction of unique signal.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Feb 9

I got Mia Farrow's autograph when I was in junior high school. My mother gave me the only bit of paper she had in her pursue, and Farrow—after signing it—wondered what it was she was signing. (Happy to send this to you if you DM me an address to say thanks for Dreyer's English!)

Autograph of Mia Farrow with the word Happiness! and a smiling face

Cover of the pamphlet "Understanding Ourselves: A Discussion of Social Hygiene" by Marion L. Faegre. Blue with white and purple lettering, young woman and young man dancing

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jan 31

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, my husband and I had coffee at Denny's in Phoenix. Look at us now!

Two men, one with his arm over the other's shoulder, in front of a photo of an old Denny's, restaurant booths in the background.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Jan 22

I'm this old.

Telex™ teletypewriter with a punched paper tape encoder/decoder

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Dec 27

Forgot the photo!

Man in a plaid shirt holding a book, "Queer as Folklore"

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Dec 25

A beautiful day, and thanks to the elf who snuck in and got my computer unstuck this morning. Mountains just north of the Canadian border, east of Vancouver BC. Happy holidays to all the nice people here on Bsky.

Panoramic view of snow covered mountains just north of the Canadian border, green field with a small pond in the foreground.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Dec 11

For anyone curious why the Pacific Northwest is getting so much rain, a graphic of the "Pineapple Express" blowing from Hawai'i towards Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. #Weather #Rain #AtmosphericRiver #PacificNorthwest

Swirling green lines showing wind patterns leave a blue line that stretches from the Hawai'i Islands in the lower left to the Pacific Northwest in the upper right.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Nov 25

Got to have dinner with @mdbell79.bsky.social. What a great time!

Two guys in a friendly hug at a restaurant.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Oct 24

Finished The Mourning Fields by friend and local author @thedancerwrites.bsky.social. Stories based on Greek myths set in modern times. Great tales and some really beautiful sentences. Read more at: atmospherepress.com/interview-wi...

Book cover. Author's name (David Beaumier) at the top, title (The Mourning Fields) at the bottom. Anatomical heart in the center.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Oct 20

I don't remember plastic, but do remember ones made from bamboo. Possibly from Pier 1 (or its predecessor). 1960s. And look what I just found on Amazon.

Bamboo backscratcher: a long, thin strip of wood, curved at the end.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Oct 18

Doesn't show the thousands of people that showed up for #NoKings in Bellingham, Wash. Rain didn't discourage the crowd.

Crowd outdoors in rain gear. One sign reads The old world dies, the new on struggles to be born.

Crowd with protest signs listening to speakers at #NoKing rally.

Richard Pearce Moses@pearcemoses· Oct 10

Needed a little inspiration to get started editing the novel and ran across this quote from Jane Smiley that Matt Bell shared in one of his lectures.