Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)

@leebennett @gedeonm No, transporters would *totally* disrupt all present-day personal transportation technologies. Basically point-to-point teleport booths are now a thing. It collapses logistic chains and destroys the automobile and civil aviation industries and 99% of trains and 80% of passenger ships in one fell swoop. (Historic trains and cruise liners might survive as recreational niches.) Disruption to automobiles and shipping axes another 50% of transport (moving fuel around). Etc.

@lauren AIUI the real concern over this incident is where the Cs-137 got into the shrink supply chain in the first place: the recall is an overabudance of caution (and in case it turns out there's a localized "hot spot" in one particular shrimp …)

@quixoticgeek All that's needed to defeat the giant pickups is for local governments to realize that parking tickets are a money tree, and enforce laws about parking within the designated spaces. Which are designed for Fiat 500s, not Ford F150s …

DEVELOPING: FBI Raids John Bolton’s House

In a dawn operation, FBI agents descended on the home of Trump’s former national security advisor.

(Yup, Trump has got the FBI working on his enemies list. We're only 3-12 months away from the show trials starting. (I think they'll be timed for maximum distraction potential—likely around the November 2026 mid-term elections.))
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/developing-the-fbi-is-at-john-boltons?triedRedirect=true

My metaphor for LLMs is, your employer just imposed a full-time back-to-office mandate BUT is paying for 100% of your petrol AS LONG AS you accept their interest-free loan for a monstrously inefficient stetched-cab pickup truck. (Meanwhile they removed the bicycle stand and EV chargers.)

It's just gratuitously wasteful and inefficient.
https://masto.alancfrancis.com/@acf/115068915602625027

In general, when a politician cites the existence of secret evidence against an organization they're hostile to, it means the "evidence" is one of: (a) fabricated, (b) too weak to withstand public scrutiny, or (c) or gathered illegally in a manner that would cause outrage if admitted (eg. by secret police infiltrators in a manner that broke the law).

Remember, DARVO and outright lying aren't *only* used by fascists: all authoritarians do that.

https://mastodon.scot/@Wen/115053826728029949

Remember that this article is shrieking about a 17% decline in European tourists visiting the USA … back in *March*, only two months into the Trump administration and six months ago.

The endless litany of news about abusive ICE behaviour since then means tourism is probably down significantly further by now.

(I know I for one cancelled all US visit plans after last November 7th. Otherwise right now I'd be in Seattle.)
https://mastodonapp.uk/@marqle/115044978561690299

Taken with a Leica.
https://eigenmagic.net/@NewtonMark/115043999942769178

Yay! I just had a 419 scam on Mastodon! (reported and blocked, but: if we're getting the spammers and scammers it means the fediverse has ARRIVED)

Incidentally, if you notice any basic numeracy errors in my toots—eg. out by three orders of magnitude—I blame COVID19.

Caught it in 2022 and the first time round, for two months afterwards I was worse at mental arithmetic than ChatGPT: I couldn't reliably add two single-digit numbers correctly. I've gradually gotten some of it back, but: sub-clinical brain damage sucks, okay?

@oclsc @Infoseepage See previous replies, ad nauseam. (Covid did a number on my faculty for mental arithmetic.) Nevertheless, it's still within O(n) of the target: storage costs for email are negligible compared to LLM compute costs.

This is, to put it mildly, utter bullshit.

You can store a decade of email for a million people—call it 10-20Gb each—in a 10-20Tb NAS box that costs about £2000 and sucks less electricity than a laptop.

The environment agency are gaslighting us. One wonders who put them up to it?
https://social.lol/@robb/115016579150112511

China's Lanyue Lunar Module—their equivalent of the Apollo LM—underwent integrated landing and ascent tests this month (successfully): crew landing on the Moon scheduled for 2030:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/china_lunar_lander_test_success/

This. Just, this.

@gutenberg_new @gutenberg_org Are you aware that this is a notorious anti-semitic tract that was infulential on Nazism pre-WW2? (I specifically mean anti-Jewish here, not any variant contemporary usage of anti-semitic to indicate anti-Israeli Government.)

Why are you promoting pro-Nazi propaganda?

Why is Project Gutenberg endorsing anti-semitic propaganda by hosting it?
https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_new/114955361822480156

ChatGPT users shocked to learn their chats were in Google search results

OpenAI scrambles to remove personal ChatGPT conversations from Google results.

(Me: nothing to add here, it'd be like dynamiting fish in a barrel.)

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/chatgpt-users-shocked-to-learn-their-chats-were-in-google-search-results/

‘Britain’s most tattooed man’ claims he is unable to watch porn as ‘new age check system mistakes his ink for a mask’

https://needtoknow.co.uk/2025/07/30/britains-most-tattooed-man-claims-he-is-unable-to-watch-prn-as-new-age-check-system-mistakes-his-ink-for-a-mask/

@lxo @NanoRaptor I have bad news for you: that pic was 100% human-created!

@rory @pluralistic With age comes perspective and the perspective 60 years has given me—of which 35 years on the internet—says that the average internet user has rolling amnesia on a 6-9 month time scale.

Remember the COVID19 pandemic? Gosh, that sure was a long time ag—IT'S STILL ONGOING!

Remember how vicious Trump's first term was? No? IS THAT WHY YOU VOTED HIM IN AGAIN?

Remember when web search wasn't actively trying to gaslight you?

And so on.