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

Fucking ChatGPT book marketing spammers.

"… the Laundry Files represents the kind of established intellectual property that can deliver sustained value when marketing infrastructure is aligned to capture both existing and new readers."

What does that gibberish even *mean*, translated from the LinkedIn?

So I'm currently provisioning my new Macbook Neo (8Gb/512Gb). And I'm shocked by how much Mac this thing is for the price.

It's currently pulling down 200Gb of files from Dropbox and running: Mail (22000 messages in my inbox, lolsob), Chrome (12 tabs), Firefox (160 or so tabs), Scrivener (two novels), 1Password, iTerm2, Ivory, and a few toys. No games, this is a work machine. And it's not breaking a sweat—it feels just like a Macbook Air, only no backlight behind the keys.

RE: https://dice.camp/@FredKiesche/116272837643264038

This is giving me a STRONG Onion "Interim Apple Chief Under Fire After Unveiling Grotesque New MacBook" vibe:

https://theonion.com/interim-apple-chief-under-fire-after-unveiling-grotesqu-1819572211/

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 22: How do you organize your notes? (No notes?)

I'm a pantser, but I increasingly keep my deranged jottings in subdocuments inside SimpleNote, a cross-device syncing markdown note-taking app a lot simpler than Obsidian.

Just text files. Either essays that infodump all the lore on some aspect of the universe, or a stab at a synopsis that I might or might not stick to, with random sentences slapped in at the end to remind me of cool idea.

Meaningless to anybody else!

SF STORY PREMISE:

SETI program decodes an alien signal clearly targeting us.

Hi! We see you're still facing the Great Filter! We want to help! Based on your anatomy per broadcasts we decoded, here is a blueprint for a device that will solve your problem!

Humans: decode blueprint.

It's for an improved guillotine.

@lauren There are big issues with macOS 26 as a UNIX, but it's less terrible than Android or Windows. Meanwhile, a lot of the bad stuff can be fixed—in the terminal, anyway—by installing iTerm2 (terminal replacement) and Homebrew. Just remember to turn off the ghastly Apple Intelligence bullshit in System Settings!

https://iterm2.com

https://brew.sh

RE: https://mstdn.social/@stux/116251902227579771

OMG!

(Radio-controlled planes are one thing, but here's a radio-controlled plane dropping a radio-controlled GI Joe paratroop with steerable chute!)

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@jerry/116242195809861609

I know what—I have an even worse business plan! Why don't we build all our new fission reactors IN SPAAACE? That way we'll be safe from the radiation and any meltdowns!

Also me: I am a teapot, short and stout: this is my handle and this is my spout …

/s

RE: https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/116244381124234374

Marc Andreessen is proof that p-zombies exist:

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

Len Deighton has died (age: 97):

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/len-deighton-obituary-death-32565cvnk

@WellsiteGeo He's defected to SPECTRE.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116232524241982831

Additional note: when foodprices rocket, that is ALMOST ALWAYS the trigger for civil unrest and revolutions. (The other is a fiscal/tax/revenue crisis, caused by government turning into rent-seeking by the rich *and* trying to fund a war simultaneously, as with the French Revolution.)

Does this look familiar to you, too?

Mad idea: given that the US Supreme Court ruled that the President essentially has immunity from criminal prosecutions for acts during his term in office, could J. D. Vance plausibly shoot Donald Trump dead, thereby becoming President, and claim immunity?

(I know this is very silly and Won't Happen for several reasons, but is there a legal fig-leaf he could hide behind here?)

@_tillwe_ @feorag Thus ignoring the only sensible reason for going with maglev—sheer speed over long distance routes, competing with jet airliners—and ignoring that local transport needs to be cheap or free to get people out of their cars.

(Also, they don't seem to remember what happened to Transrapid. Oops.)

Today's eldritch coffee is The Great Race of Yith (from Lovecraft's "The Shadow out of Time"):

@evan As a professional journalist @newsguyusa should know the importance of fact checking and source validation.

@newsguyusa

Politely, alarmist bullshit.

23,000 people died in the great Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami. The reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant *were a sideshow* which didn't directly kill anyone at the time: if the operators hadn't put the diesel fuel for the backup generators somewhere stupid, or had built the sea wall just one metre higher, the meltdowns wouldn't have happened. (The reactors survived the quake intact, the meltdown happened when the coolant pumps stopped.)

@Antiqueight Naah, the ice crystals forming in your synapses would mush them into un-digitizable soup.

@Gargron I'm willing to guess that machine translation of prose may serve two uses: firstly, as an assist for human translators (by preparing a very rough first cut, which they then have to refine), and secondly, as an assist for human editors in figuring out which foreign-language-works to pay a human translator (with or without AI assistance) to work on (translation costs money: knowing where to spend it is important). But those are assistive roles, not human-replacing ones.

The experimenters then went on to hook up their Drosophila connectome to an anatomically detailed Drosophila body model within an open-source physics engine that "uses generalized coordinates and constraint-based contact dynamics to simulate rigid-body systems with high fidelity" including joint and antennae modeling and accurate modeling of surface adhesion—and compound eye simulation.

Lots of *really* interesting insights here.

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