Charlie Stross

@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 The “weapons grade” almost certainly means 239-Pu, which is used in bombs or fissile in reactors. (There are other isotopes but they’re not really useful for fueling reactors *or* making bombs.)

I’m rather partial to the idea of silly valley oligarchs putting crude A-bombs under the table at one another’s shareholder meetings.

@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 @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).

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

@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.

@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?

@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?

@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.)

@V0ldek @techtakes Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd’s/_of/_London

@pikesley @Soyweiser @fullsquare IIRC the coordination problem afflicts all engineering disciplines: with large tech projects like the LHC and ITER, costs scale as something like the fourth power of the energies they’re working with, and a large part of the reason is that managing the project is insanely difficult. I’d love to see some numbers for how the management complexity of large software projects (eg. operating systems, LLMs) compares to this.

@nightsky @techtakes Back when I was in software dev I had the privilege of working with a couple of superprogrammers (not at the same company, many years apart). They probably wrote *less* code: it was just qualitatively far, far more elegant and effective. And they were fast, too.

@gerikson I’d like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn’t get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who’s scared of robots.

@Mubelotix @techtakes You know what else would solve the Nicole problem? Old-skool USENET style client-side killfiles circa 1990, applied to DMs—your inbox-equivalent.

@HedyL One twist: I imagine google devotes CONSIDERABLE effort to aggressively caching LLM-generated answers (probably parsing queries and merging similar ones before checking the cache for previous replies). That’d reduce their costs substantially compared to just throwing every question at an LLM directly. And it keeps eyeballs on Google’s own content and own served ads rather than wandering off into the wildernessd of the non-google public web.

@TinyTimmyTokyo alt.peeves, alt.tasteless, probably most of the comp.* hierarchy, not sure where else.