Charlie Stross

@BlueMonday1984 @techtakes Gnome may be politically non-shitty but it’s still an unusable revolting mess, a bad parody of a good desktop environment.

@Soyweiser @sneerclub Next step in rat ideology will be: we will ask our perfectly aligned sAI to invent a time machine so we can go back and [eugenics handwave] ourselves into transcendental intelligences who will be able to create a perfectly aligned sAI! Sparkly virtual unicorns for all!

(lolsob, this is all so predictable)

@Soyweiser @techtakes You misremembered: Gibson wrote his early stories and Neuromancer on a typewriter, he didn’t own a computer until he bought one with the royalties (an Apple IIc, which then freaked him out by making graunching noises at first—he had no idea it needed a floopy disk inserting).

@scruiser There’s a logical inverse to this argument which I had a go at back in 2016: if you’re running a simulation, how far back SHOULD you go to get to your species’ origin? All the way to the first eukaryotes? (Concept collapses into ludicrous recursive tail-chasing.)

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/cytological-utopia-and-the-rap.html

@Soyweiser @techtakes The correct term for the type of capitalism that enshittifies its product should be “crapitalism”.

@Soyweiser What is “king of the hill”? TV/cinema or some other visual entertainment?

@dgerard Not to worry; the promotion of incel bullshit via social media algorithms will generate increasing demand for sexbots by and by …

@HedyL Generally people who want a mechanical horse don’t fantasize about fucking it … the main techbro use case for humanoid robots is “sexbot”, so they don’t have to learn all the emotional skills you need in order to have a relationship with an actual human being.

@mattblaze@federate.social Private millionaire railway carriages were absolutely the VIP bizjets of the 19th century.

@dgerard What fascinates me is *why* coders who use LLMs think they’re more productive. Is the complexity of their prompt interaction misleading them as to how effective the outputs it results in are? Or something else?

@gerikson @sneerclub I knew Iain and he absolutely despised Musk. (Yes, even back before 2011 Musk was on his radar.) Iain was a socialist with zero patience for capitalist exploiters.

@V0ldek That’s an RPG protagonist protagging. Not prose fiction. (This thought brought to you b/c I’ve lately been reading a multivolume LitRPG epic that I had to bail on midway through book 3 because the author dropped into passive voice with extreme clunkiness at random, infrequent intervals, making for a jarring read.)

@V0ldek This is a hill I will die on: the passive voice ABSOLUTELY does not belong in a work of fiction. (Academic papers and reports are another matter entirely, but fiction: no.)

@UltimateNoob @techtakes This is … actually really neat feedstock for us SF authors, amirite?

@YourNetworkIsHaunted Your fairies gnaw on raw pancreas meat? That’s hardcore!

@rook @techtakes The real problem would be persuading Gwynne Shotwell to stay on as COO/President in event of nationalization. (I know nothing about her politics but she’s the one who got SpaceX the NASA contracts and ramped Falcon 9 up to being the global launch superpower. If she’s a personal friend of Elon a takeover that pushes her out could cause chaos.)

@bitofhope @techtakes Surely you need a PDP-9 for that?