Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop), page 2

Just noting here that I found it much easier to write satirical political fantasy about the UK electing an ancient Lovecraftian horror from beyond spacetime as Prime Minister with a mandate to eat everyone's brain before the real-world USA basically said "hold my beer ..."

@trurl @Remittancegirl @logomancer @jzillw

Here’s a ray of hope: Hitler maxed out the credit cards *but* used it initially to ramp employment up to 100% very rapidly (from Depression-era levels of unemployment) as well as re-arming. He thus gave lots of disgruntled poor folk a stake in Nazism.

Trump's maxing out the credit cards again, but he holds his base in contempt and won't lift a finger if they're drowning. He's not trying to build a loyal base any more. He's walking on quicksand.

@Remittancegirl But will it be the end of him? Seems to me that the Republicans in congress have shackled themselves to him so tightly that they're terrified of assassination if they defect. Without Republican defectors congress can't do anything. And even *with* congress turning on him, who are they going to send to arrest the POTUS (who the USSC last year granted immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while president, remember?)

He has to lose congress, the police, and judiciary too.

@tbortels @Remittancegirl Germany fucked up 1991-21 by not taking redevelopment of East Germany seriously enough. The East never fully de-Nazified—they shot obvious Nazis, but then set up an authoritarian state where rank-and-file authoritarian types simply switched slogans and slotted right in, then they left the East to rot. This created the swamp in which the AfD emerged: a large region in which far-right reactionary politics is mainstream.

(Here in the UK I'm in no place to throw stones …)

@per_sonne @tbortels @Remittancegirl There's one other avenue, as happened in the Levant and Asia: by backing the Ba'ath (initially pan-Arabists, decaying into fascist dictatorships) and the Shah of Iran against the communists, all left-wing opposition was smashed … leaving the only avenue for dissent via the Islamic clergy.

Hence Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, etc etc.

Neofascism is just the west's equivalent of islamism, in this frame.

@jzillw @Remittancegirl @logomancer

I hear you and counter with "Trump assassination ATTEMPT by tescreals; they try to blame it on Roko's Basilisk (Curtis Yarvin gets the electric chair even though it was actually Peter Thiel lurking in the Oval Office with a poisoned Happy Meal)".

@Remittancegirl @logomancer @jzillw

Trump could die of a heart attack tomorrow, J D Vance could fall off a ladder fellating a duck, and Mike Johnson could choke on a cucumber while wearing a bondage harness, and and the USA would still be toast afterwards.

The USA's credibility as a trading/diplomatic partner has been trashed for a generation. Nobody will trust y'all for a VERY long time to come.

The US system of checks and balances failed entirely because Trump ignores lane markings.

@Bookworm33333 @cwdolunt @Remittancegirl @jzillw If you know what's coming you can prepare for it. Observe OPSEC before, after, and during the event! No phones on marches! Cash or pre-paid disposable debit card for expenses! Don't park near the rally! Lawyer's phone number to hand! And be prepared for a lengthy stay in a jail cell even if you did nothing wrong, if things break bad.

This is for "respectable" white people, BTW. Everyone else has it far worse.

@jzillw @Remittancegirl Yes, and I think Trump would LOVE to shoot him some "rioters" and "EU loving traitors" next year to distract the Fox News audience from the onrushing depression.

Pessimist me looks at all the photos/video of the excited and exercised folks attending the anti-Trump demos around the USA and is remembering the inexorable process by which the Biden administration tracked down and arrested the January 6 rioters.

If he isn't stopped FAST the same process will happen to today's demonstrators a year or two down the line, only with far less due process, far harsher sentences from the puppet courts, and no hope of a presidential pardon.

Oh look, what a surprise, etc.

America just did a Brexit, didn't it.

A reminder: last time an idiot POTUS imposed global tariffs (1930) it led to a 67% drop in US exports and crashed the US economy during the Great Depression (which had already begun, but which the tariff war intensified enormously). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act

WHAT—

... "They point to how security researchers hated Visual Basic 6 binaries due to the complexity of reverse engineering the software, the presence of a Lua obfuscation layer in the 2012 Flame malware, and the Grip virus, which contained a Brainfuck interpreter coded in Assembly to generate its keycodes, as examples."

It can only be a matter of time until malware authors stumble across CLC-INTERCAL. And then we'll ALL be sorry!

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/29/malware_obscure_languages/?td=rt-3a

Bear in mind that while the Nazis built concentration camps everywhere they could (including the bits of the UK they'd occupied—the Channel Islands), the death camps were very specifically located *outside* Germany.

This pattern will be repeated. The worst atrocities will be conducted out of sight and out of cellphone coverage.
https://toot.wales/@Greenseer/114250281388903757

Stand too close to the Tangerine Shitgibbon, get sprayed with shit.

An important thought that seems to elude the AI galaxy brains like billg who want to replace professionals with LLMs is: how are new phenomena identified and dealt with, given that LLMs are trained only on PRE-EXISTING data?

For example: how would a hypothetical LLM physician have identified a case of COVID19 back in February 2020? (Hint: it'd have diagnosed it as something else—wrongly—every time! Because not in the training data.)

Toot a photo of a computer that first arrived in the year of your birth!

(Here's mine: the IBM System/360)

Saying the quiet part out loud: billionaires don't want the little people around, they want us to quietly go away and stop existing on their dime (because obviously all the dimes belong to the deserving poor, er, billionaires).

This is eliminationist rhetoric, aimed at you (and me).

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/business/money-report/bill-gates-within-10-years-ai-will-replace-many-doctors-and-teachers-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things/3706507/

BRB, got to throw out my (silent, efficient, but slow) Miele and buy one of these. I can't wait to wash my dishes in my blockchain-integrated AI dishwasher! At least, the surviving ones.
https://mastodon.online/@davidaugust/114236433226999789