Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)

@futurebird @josh0 @funkula Isopod tongues are somewhat less of a bad thing than hypercastrating crotch parasites or endoparasitoid wasps (except when the endoparasitoid wasps lay their eggs inside *other* wasps)

#WritersCoffeeClub 15th May 2025. “The past is a foreign country.” What facets of your work do you hope remain intelligible to future readers?

I write SF/F, which AS A GENRE is very much an artefact of its time—before 1910 it was part of ordinary literature, and SF as I knew it growing up in the 1970s-80s is turning into something else.

I'm writing for readers who are notionally 20-40 years younger than me. I don't expect anyone but scholars to be reading my books in 50 years, though.

@Phosphenes The center of gravity of the genre has slid away from the cishet white men (and good riddance). Diversity is good! But also, I'm coming up very short of rigorous extrapolative SF that isn't also barkingly reactionary shite (the right wing absorbed hard SF). And then … I burned out on the genre, too: I don't read much of it any more, it's mostly not speaking to my interests (which remain with the field, but not of it).

The future of AI-powered software development is here!

https://github.com/Zorokee/ArtificialCast

(Warning: don't stop until you've read the text below the subheading, "Why This Exists")

@mwl @GyrosGeier @jsonstein @bsdphk @Infoseepage Yup! That's why I'm fleeing back to the comforting certainties of far future space opera instead of writing more alt-present fiction.

This is too little, too late: there's no cargo heading for the USA from China at the moment and it'll take over a month for anything at all to arrive (even if it left tomorrow, which it won't, because the factories have either closed or are now committed to other markets). By the end of a 90 day pause goods *might* begin arriving again … if anyone in China trusts the USA not to hike tariffs again (which they obviously don't). So there are going to be shortages by and by.
https://mastodon.social/@realTuckFrumper/114494259477030857

Argentina's top court finds boxes of Nazi items in basement

Argentina's Supreme Court discovered dozens of boxes filled Nazi material dating from World War II, including photos and postcards, among its archives in its basement.

https://www.dw.com/en/argentinas-top-court-finds-boxes-of-nazi-items-in-basement/a-72511423

Only nine? We've also got the USA, UK, France, China, and North Korea (who are also at war in Ukraine), but a whole bunch of other countries are probably scrambling for nuclear weapons and won't find it hard to make them: South Korea, Japan, Poland, maybe Germany and Italy, possibly Finland, Australia, and who knows who else.

Remember, nuclear weapons are a 1940s technology. SLBMs are 1960s tech. Cruise missiles are 1980s. It's astonishing they're not more widespread.
https://appdot.net/@jgordon/114483601721350338

@MishaVanMollusq @cwebber I couldn't parse that statement. Mayonnaise? Tomorrow Land?

@cwebber

The value proposition for robots and AI is always slavery, with slaves who don't need feeding and can't rebel.

Just as the values behind Mars colonization are a white supremacist ethnostate in space (without having to massacre any indigenes first).

The tech CEOs soaked it up in their childhood from "golden age" science fiction, which predated the civil rights movement.

The LLMentalist effect: Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms used by (fake) psychics to gull their victims: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

We need to go further and regulate to ban touchscreens in cars (except for non-driver entertainment consoles). Screens for status and navigation displays can stay for now (but more research on distraction potential is needed). But you should be able to control your vehicle by tactile feedback, without taking your eyes off the road.
https://mastodon.social/@br00t4c/114454550823262407

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

On language-induced incomprehension of problems:

A lot of European languages, English excepted, use the same word for "safety" and "security".

Unfortunately English uses the same word in "freedom from" and "freedom to".

@rmblaber1956 The intelligence is corporate greed: corporations are the true AIs—very slow ones with human components, we've had them for centuries. But they preferentially select human sociopaths as components for senior managerial roles.

How long until someone figures out what the high value cargos are and hijacks one of these? A rolling roadblock should do just fine, maybe with a cell jammer to stop it calling for help.
https://mastodon.scot/@andrewducker/114444852905263476

My take:

The AI scam is a bubble. It's going to burst, and 99% of the "value" in it will evaporate. (There will be some utility in the 1%.)

There will then be demand for skilled human employees … who will be few, because unused skills atrophy and there's a crimp in the training pipeline.

Wages for those who can do stuff will spiral.

But there'll be a net productivity decline and a recession.

So: the long-term legacy of the AI bubble will be stagflation.
https://toot.cafe/@baldur/114443358373790490

Also, if (as Satya Nadela claims in public) 30% of Microsoft's software is LLM-generated, then we can expect the next couple of generations of Windows and Microsoft Office to be unelievably bad. Not just enshittified for advertising and profit: but full of really idiotic security holes and bugs inserted by LLMs that were trained on their own toxic efflux by "developers" too de-skilled to understand what they were doing.

CONTROVERSIAL OPINION:

I don't care about the environmental cost of AI.

I care that unscrupulous sociopaths have convinced enough gullible fools that LLMs *are intelligent* to create a damaging economic hype bubble that, like all such bubbles, causes environmental damage as a side-effect! Along with mass-deskilling and unemployment and profits for trillionaires.

Get people to realize that it's not intelligence at work, it's just statistical modeling, and tackle the root of the problem!

Oh God and by God I mean Cthulhu, at some point in the past decade they added artificial mango flavouring and sweeteners to Plenvu™, the Laxative from Hell (pre-colonoscopy) and it tastes EVEN WORSE now.

I mean, I *like* mango juice, but this is some eerie eldritch uncanny valley shit. Not so much real Mango as Trump flavouring?

This stuff is so utterly disgusting that I had to pause after every mouthful to rinse out my gob with unsweetened black tea.

Also, I was supposed to drink it over an hour: I couldn't make it last more than 15 minutes, I just had to put it behind me (sorry).

… Aaaand in other news, @Menhit has come out in sympathy and is making the most horrendous stench imaginable in her litter tray, which is just outside the bathroom door.