@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Bear in mind they're also locked in a long-term cold war with Saudi Arabia (sunni v. shi'ite islam) and Israel (increasingly resembling a religious ethno-supremacist fascist state with regional territorial ambitions). Peace with Iran is a non-starter unless Israel and the Saudis can be forced to back the fuck off at the same time.

@flizzo @techtakes It seems to be—and based on a torment-nexus-grade willful misreading of Accelerando. (Hint: I know what I wrote in those stories! I'm the author.)

@antifuchs @techtakes Oh goodie they enshittified vim IS NOTHING SACRED?!? HAVE WE LIVED AND FOUGHT IN VAIN?!?!?

Today in Seems Legit News: “As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.” why is engineer working before contracted time if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all if “no engineer has written a line of code since December”, when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify why is hypothetical engineer a “he”, Spotify do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify in unrelated news, Anna’s Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/ though I won’t do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is “AI” “music” anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago

@o7___o7 @techtakes That's why I'm fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.

@Seaguy05 @techtakes Bear in mind SpaceX's near monopoly is transient: Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin is now flying and re-using New Glenn and ramping up launch cadence aggressively. Give it 5 years and unless Starship works 100% to plan, SpaceX will be eroding like Tesla today. (And this ignores the multiple Chinese reusable launcher startups with government backing.)

@Soyweiser Years ago (before Epstein, before the GFC, etc) I used to jokingly talk about my pet conspiracy theory, that the world was ruled by the P7: the Pale Patriarchal Plutocratic Protestant Penis-People of Power.Turns out I was right.I didn't want to be right …

@cstross @trottelreiner @Soyweiser @techtakes And I regard Christianity itself as a heresy from Judaism. I suspect it's an inevitability with monotheism

@TrashGoblin @techtakes Au contraire: I am old and grumpy and I want UNIX (or rather, Linux) the way it was in 2003, none of this bullshit new-fangled nonsense that I don't understand.Hint: a LOT of computer users—as opposed to lascivious glassy-eyed computer touchers—are like this. We just want to get shit done, not force-learn a new workflow or debugging tool every five seconds (or years).

@Soyweiser Bear in mind that the Middle Ages (roughly 500 years!) is a longer span of time than, say, from the founding of the English and French colonies in North America to the present day, close to the Spanish/Portuguese colonization of South America. And similarly huge in extent. Lots of places/times in the Middle Ages *were* peaceful and tolerant (by the standards of the day).

@saucerwizard I still drink *socially*, but it's very much an "I'll have a pint or two at the pub where I'm going to see friends", rather than "I'm going to the pub for a drink (with friends)". And zero inclination to drink at home, even with meals. Not that I did so regularly before, but semaglutide caused a marked loss of interest on my part.I was *really* worried for the first six months that it had nuked my pleasure in writing, which would have been a disaster—it's my job—but I recovered.

@sumek @dgerard They got turned off and de-fuelled, chunks of the plant no longer exist: can't be re-started. This was deliberate policy.

@dgerard See also Dilbert Stark's drone ship names ...

@gerikson @techtakes It's classic DARVO gaslighting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO

@fullsquare AIUI for optimal nuclear weapons (ie. lightweight pits that maximize fission) you need to be very careful about which phase of metallic plutonium you use (it has dozens). IIRC an alloy with about 2% germanium in delta-phase is densest: make it with as close to 100% Pu-239 as you can get. (This was declassified in the 1970s.) You're also going to need some tritium gas to fill the hollow core, and other exotica (never mind the carefully timed explosive lenses to drive the implosion).

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

@RelativeArea1 All-out world war is off the table because we're already in a situation where two sides have nuclear weapons deployed to forward bases on launch alert, and the USA isn't either of them, and that's in *two* separate conflicts (India/Pakistan, EU (France)/Russia). If either of those turn red-hot then investor culture is something historians will talk about, if there are any historians left in a century or three.

@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).

OpenAI has stated its scanning users’ conversations (as if they weren’t already) and reporting conversations to the cops in response to the recent teen suicide I mentioned a couple days ago. So, rather than let ChatGPT drive users to kill themselves, its just going to SWAT users and have the cops do the job. (On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)

@saltesc Very useful technology, if what you want is Murderbot.