Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)

In my opinion the social media ban for kids in Australia is a good thing. Even imperfect legislation would be better than exposing children to the dangers. I compare it to drivers' licences, tobacco, alcohol, voting, heroin, methamphetamine. These are all things which are denied to children and it's not controversial AFAIK.

In particular the chapters in the book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff (2019) discuss the potential damage to child and adolescent development. A lot of this would also apply to the fediverse too.

Several of the practices of commercial social media should be banned entirely, for example surveillance, not seeking consent (opt-out policies), targeted advertising, engagement algorithms. Under-16s are not the only victims.

#auspol #socialmedia

@landley On a related WTF note, there's the (current-ish) Anime series coming out of Japan, "Suicide Squad Isekai". Which contains EXACTLY what it says on the tin ...

@blades You don't need to point me at the wikipedia article for a book I own a signed first-edition hardcover of (bought at time of publication).

@cerement Sounds like a straight rip-off of Black Friday/The Day After Judgement by James Blish, which date to the 1960s …

@demi I had to research this a decade ago (for a novel with dragons v. Eurofighters): turns out modern IR seekers aren't simple heat seekers, they're actually IR cameras with image recognition firmware and enough brains to know where to detonate the warhead for maximum impact.

@petermilley Gate is mostly the opposite way around though, isn't it

@cpm No NASAMS-3, only Eurofighter

I can't help wanting JUST ONCE to read a novel whereby the dragon riders are sent to invade a kingdom in another universe only there's been a fuck-up and the locals have got NASAMS-3 air defense missile batteries https://c.im/@puf/113515885912141411

@Remittancegirl @spacehobo I think they were more subtle about it pre-2000?

And this goes for the UK too. I used to read the Daily Telegraph in the 1980s. Stodgy and conservative but the news coverage was balanced and didn't editorialize, and the editorials were Burkean in tone rather than frothing-at-the-mouth xenophobia. (The 1980s Telegraph was about where The Guardian is today on most issues. Exception: homophobia, which was everywhere back then.)

@detritus

Conditional disagreement.

Actual mass deportation won't be feasible but they can lock millions of people in private for-profit prisons, convict them of being in the USA illegally, and then the penal labour exemption to the 13th amendment applies: they become a huge pool of (legal) slave labour. Slaves exert a downward pressure on employee wages, provide profits for the "corrections" industry, and give the MAGAts a demographic to look down on while the bosses pick their pockets.

@spacehobo @Remittancegirl US news media today are for entertainment, not information. The anchors are there to provide the audience with a canned laugh track, telegraphing the correct emotional response to the bite-sized propaganda pieces.

#WordWeavers 20 Your MC can only take one thing on a trip. What is it?

(Laundry files):

Bob: his Necronomipod.

Mo: a violin, just not *that* violin (it eats people).

Derek the DM: his dice bag (it glows and has non-euclidean corners).

... And so on.

@davidleeholcomb The one thing I can say for sure, is that if you pitch a novel as "like X meets Y" you had better be absolutely certain that the person you're pitching to is familiar with both X *and* Y. Which is why folks usually pick huge TV or movie franchises (which don't work on me *at all* because I don't watch TV/movies, but I'm weird that way).

@davidleeholcomb Yes, and the sub-genres are entirely fashion driven in publishers' officers where everyone is desperate to discover the Next Big Thing, but they're condemned to search under the one lit street light. Hence "romantasy" which seems to be defined as "just like ACOTAR only not an *actual* knock-off". Their rise and fall is driven by factors that are opaque to editorial (and usually authorial) insight.

@aes DDC is a straightforward directed acyclic graph: it dates to 1876, although it's now on its 23rd edition. It's really just a hashing algorithm for library storage. There's also the Library of Congress Classification System. Both are enumerative systems: other classification system types exist, notably faceted systems (that use multiple semantic categories), like online keyword-tagged systems.

@tiggy

Initial feedback from my agent on "The Atrocity Archive" in 2001: "I can't sell this, it's way too cross-genre and weird! How can anyone sell a Lovecraftian horror spy comedy thriller about IT and office politics? Who'd buy it?"

Current job: editing book 14 in the series it started …

@aes Library cataloging systems, starting with something like the Dewey Decimal System and then getting more modern. You can't inflict them on casual airport boostore browsers but they're undoubtedly more powerful.

#WritersCoffeeClub 20. Are Novel genres helpful or constraining? A bit of both?

Genres were invented for marketing: they segregate shelf space in bookstores so readers can find the general area with stuff they like. (We have vastly more powerful classification tools but they're not simple and easy to use.)

But a book's genre is a diagnosis, it should never be a prescription.

ebook stores use tagging with multiple categories instead, which (if done right: it seldom is) is more effective.

@jgordon @SteveBellovin @thedarktangent O2 in the UK (mobile phone network) is using an LLM to waste the time of phone scammers.

@Tali My cat likes to claw my Eames recliner knock-off too!