@dgerard See also Dilbert Stark’s drone ship names …

@ZILtoid1991 Spoiler: it won’t happen, it’s basically more marketing bullshit from the folks trying to make bank off the AI bubble.

Next they’re going to tout AI-powered diaper-changing robots for nursing homes and maternity wards. Equal likelihood of success, of course.

@dgerard And The Empire of Azad was basically modern western imperialism writ large.

@antifuchs @techtakes The Culture won’t be adapted for TV/film without input from Iain’s heirs and his literary executors. Who are all very definitely Scottish and will have Opinions …

@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 @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?

@[email protected] Private millionaire railway carriages were absolutely the VIP bizjets of the 19th century.

@[email protected] If you ever get a chance, you might want to try photographing the Torness AGR nuclear power station in Scotland close to sunrise or sunset. It’s right on the coast (for seawater cooling), close by the A1(M) and east coast main line, and looks amazing in the right light (a 1980s-built temple of technology).

@bobhy @wesgeorge @NoLifeKing @leo I want KDE 3.5 back! (Alas, they screwed the pooch with KDE 4—utterly unusable ever since.)

@maol 25 years ago I saw one for sale in the Scottish borders for £250K. An absolute steal—if you could afford the £25K/year for heating and the extra £100K+ to repair the leaky roof. Never mind the £50K to install double glazing and insulation and the £200K or so in renovation it urgently needed. Etc.

@Amoeba_Girl The far right are all about beating up on the Other, and those with acute mental illness are in continuous supply. (Latest twist: if you’re a grifter and antipsychotic meds have crimped your supply of Others to demonize, you can gaslight your followers on social media and convince them that everybody *else* is crazy. See also Q, Trump …)

@MikeStok @lobotomy42 It’s a reference to a scene in “The Matrix”.

@corbin You missed the best bit: one of the current INTERCAL compilers, CLC-INTERCAL (for a superset of the language which adds a bunch more insanity) is implemented IN INTERCAL! It’s self-compiling. Also object-oriented, has quantum-indeterminate operators, and a computed COME FROM statement (also with quantum indeterminacy).

I think we should organize a fundraiser to pay CLC-INTERCAL’s developer @Uilebheist to visit Yud and melt his brain.