Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop), page 3

Random marketing announcement: I have a new short (very short!) New Management story coming out in "99 Fleeting Fantasies", ed. Jennifer Brozek, coming out on February 15th: https://books2read.com/99FleetingFantasies

PS: if you were wondering what my story is about, given it's only a thousand words long: Imp has to deal with a hive of fairies at the bottom of the garden. Not Alfär—Laundryverse murder elves—but actual FAIRIES. With insect wings. And stingers ...

@jredlund FACT: bee and wasp stingers are modified OVIPOSITORS. So Tinkerbell could TOTALLY have had a stinger!

My thought on Neuralink implanting tech in human heads for the first time:

Brain implants are one of those technologies where the MTBF for the implant MUST exceed the MTBF of the implantee. And there must be lifetime after-sales support, Or else the execs who made the decision to pull support should go to prison for the rest of *their* lives.

Raspberry Pi is planning a London IPO, but its CEO expects “no change” in focus

— Yeah, right.

I am looking forward to my Raspberry Pi 7 which will arrive with Windows 11 pre-installed, cost a mere £25, and use the bottom 25% of the desktop for streaming ads (while snooping on my every keystroke). Because this is how enshittification proceeds …

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/raspberry-pi-is-preparing-for-an-ipo-in-london-for-likely-more-than-500m/

@foone I'm more partial to the world in which IBM take a year or two longer to make the PC and it surfaces with a 68020, a 20Mb hard disk, and runs Xenix, or a clone like MWC Coherent. Added lulz: VMEBus. A year or two later, the PC030 surfaces, with built-in ethernet and a 68030. A small upstart called Sun Microsystems brings out a frame buffer and graphics accelerator to turn it into an X11 workstation—

Everything is delayed a couple of years but then the year of UNIX on the desktop is 1988.

It turns out cassowaries have been domesticated—as guard-fowl.

I figure some brave soul grabbed one of the GIANT LUMINOUS NEON MARKER GREEN eggs (the colour of "do not fuck with me for I am deadly" in nature) and ran away with it. Then it hatched, and they fed the giant murder chicken that kept following them around.

<supervillain>
When I get my island volcano base the inland jungle will be patrolled by giant murder chickens LOYAL ONLY TO ME! Take that, laser-sharks!
</supervillain>

It's like that embarrassing thing where you go to the supermarket and buy a six-pack of large free-range eggs because you want to make a tortilla and when you get home they start hatching and the baby velociraptors eat all the pancetta you were going to add to it and look at you with googly eyes like, "mooom! hungry!" and now you have a kitchen velociraptor infestation and they love you and refuse to move out

@foone I seem to recall Larry Niven played with this stuff in his teleportation short stories in the 70s (notably "All the bridges rusting"). And I had fun with it in "Glasshouse".

@abursey @foone A portal gun (with the other end of the portal inside the photosphere of a blue-white supergiant) makes a really neat blaster!

@foone Yes, but if everyone built 1g torchships pretty soon there'd be no oceans! Much better to use Jupiter instead: nobody will miss it, right?

"Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft."

They forgot to continue: "… the warmth and humanity of the Emperor Dalek, Donald Trump's humility, Elon Musk's quiet egalitarianism, and ChatGPT's searing truthfulness and insight."

Tech hills I will die on: a NAS server is just a stack of three hard disks wearing a trench coat.

@foone Dual PCMCIA card slots or go home. That way you can have a dual-function card (thinnet, 10mbps) and 56K modem in one slot and Wifi (11mbps) in the other.

What is Star Trek?

Wrong answers only, please!

@whvholst @MichaelPhillips @simonbp @_thegeoff @foone @green_bens @Hcobb @nyrath Gulf War 1 overlapped with Mir (space station prior to the ISS) being in operation, Space Shutle missions, a whole bunch of comsats. EMPing low orbit would have caused international havoc and possibly killed astronauts/cosmonauts.

@MichaelPhillips @Hcobb @nyrath Launching from any altitude below the tropopause is madness—even if your launch planet is uninhabited/able, you run the riskof reflected shockwaves.

@green_bens @MichaelPhillips @Hcobb @nyrath Naah, just stick it on top of a SpaceX Superheavy (scaled up, if necessary). Second test flight left the pad in good shape, the new sound suppression system worked! (And a fueled-up Starship—the booster's payload—currently weighs 1200 tons at staging, although they're stretching the next version …)

Tired: Goblincore
Wired: Goblincottagecore

This has got to be the next big thing in cozy fantasy romance ...?

@foone The world of "Glasshouse" is probably a nice vacation spot as long as you avoid the glasshouse itself …?