Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)

What I don't get about this century is WHAT WAS THE SHOWRUNNER THINKING?!?

Who wanted a second season of Trump: White House Havoc?!?

And why the fuck are there SPACE NAZIS ON DRUGS crawling out of the woodwork everywhere?

It seems to me that we're living in a world dominated by AI—only it stands for Angry Idiots.

Welcome to the Shitularity!

Note that the minimum critical mass of U235 is about 8.6Kg (Beryllium tamper, implosion bomb). So this is enough 235U for about 40 A-bombs with one more run through the ultracentrifuge cascade. And you can make an A-bomb with only 20% pure 235U—it just takes a lot more of it and it's heavier/less efficient.

I'd be astonished if Iran doesn't ALREADY have the Bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass

Q: "... What do you tell them you did all day?"

A: "Fourteen words".
https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/114721726449631090

I'm just about okay with emoji in filenames but I draw the line at animated gifs and ringtones!
https://23.social/@leyrer/114648865072884127

It's glaringly obviously so—at least to me: I've been around long enough to remember the first dot-com boom at first hand, plus various property bubbles, the credit default swap bubble, the original bitcoin bubble, and so on.

After a while you learn to recognize a new market bubble on sight. Unfortunately that learning time can be 30 years ... so youngsters ALWAYS think "this time it's going to be different."
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114712748295654159

I want someone to release a gibberish text generator for poisoning LLM crawlers called GANgrene.

That is all.

@jwz @haihappen I wish I was confident I could get it running on my 10 year old dual athlon box with an obsolete debian and 2Gb of RAM, but I am not. (Also, admin skills atrophy if not used and mine are toast at this point.)

#WritersCoffeeClub 18. Share a ‘nonessential’ scene in one of your works that ties the piece together

This is a very bad prompt: if a scene ties the work together then by definition it cannot be nonessential, because by implication the work falls apart without it being present.

British MPs have voted to decriminalise abortion, marking the biggest step forward in reproductive rights in almost 60 years.

(Abortion was previously legal in limited circumstances in the UK, but during COVID police began charging women under a law from 1861: they can no longer be prosecuted.)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/17/decriminalisation-abortion-vote-mps

I think the folks selling lenin pants have identified a powerful emerging market and are definitely in step with current events these days!
https://tacobelllabs.net/@miakizz/114689954470795528

#WritersCoffeeClub 15 Jun
Have you ever challenged yourself to write without editing?

That would be stupid! Even when I was learning to type on a manual typewriter I used Tip-Ex to erase and re-write stuff I'd mistyped or mis-worded.

These days I start each day's writing by editing the previous day's work, and I edit *every sentence* before I go on, often rephrasing and trying out alternates multiple times.

Great to see the ongoing turkey roast in the GitHub comments.

(For avoidance of ambiguity: I am all in favour of DEI and want to poke fun at the bigoted fuckstains who oppose it.)
https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/114665348919666721

@eliterrell @arstechnica I'd have a lot more respect for the space cadets if in the past decade they'd pivoted to orbital solar power satellites.

(If Starship v2/v3 delivers on reusability then it will become more or less economically viable to put gigawatts of thin film PV panels into orbit, which is half the equation: and high orbit PV doesn't suffer from the half-the-day-is-night problem of surface level solar power.)

But no, they're still all in on 3He unicorn fart power.

@foolishowl @bytebro @arstechnica I *hate* SF that uses Lunar 3He mining as a narrative device; it's a red flag that the author(s) haven't done their background research. It's as lazy as taking the divine right of kings as a default for modern governance in a political thriller.

@bytebro @arstechnica Lunar 3He mining was IIRC originally fostered in SF by crank editor John W. Campbell; it provided a commercial/capitalist rationale for colonizing space. Ever since then, space colonization fanatics have been in love with the idea because they don't want to admit there's no viable 100-year-or-shorter term economic case for space colonization.

It's an ideological shibboleth, basically.

Reminder that we don't have ANY viable power-producing fusion reactors yet, let alone aneutronic reactors capable of using 3He as fuel: and if you can overcome the coulomb barrier to use 3He as fuel you're 90% of the way to using Boron-11 as fuel, WHICH IS READILY AVAILABLE (AND CHEAP!) HERE ON EARTH.

There's no need to strip mine the moon for fuel.

Lunar 3HE mining IS A SCAM DESIGNED TO EXTRACT MONEY FROM INVESTORS. Always has been. Always will be.

@arstechnica https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/114653548336608142

Also, products where the only manual is a YouTube video can get in the sea. WILL NOT BUY, WILL NOT USE.
https://mastodon.online/@billyjoebowers/114634755259809058

This unicode fuckery isn't just for domain names: I've had assholes list my books for sale on Amazon and Apple Books under an account that uses a unicode glyph to replace one of the letters in my name—the title shows up in search, but any payments for sales go into the grifter's account.
https://chaos.social/@Emathion/114613267697396447

People seem to think that LLMs are like a magic wish-granting genie with unlimited wishes.

They tend to ignore the "but what if the genie is hallucinating and can't tell truth from falsehood?" side of the bargain.
https://thepit.social/@peter/114601765045842916