Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop), page 4

@foone I have a well-designed Sandisk drive of that ilk—well-designed because it's in a plastic sliding case so you can expose either the USB-A or USB-C plug, but not both at the same time.

Most-followed Mastodon accounts, by rank: holy crap, I'm actually on this list! (Okay, I'm not in the top one hundred: but even so …)

Big take-away is that there are no mega-stars, as on twitter: while news and media are showing up, this isn't where you go to kibbitz on pop stars ripping each other.

https://most-followed-masotodon-accounts.stefanhayden.com/

So, you know that microgenre of cozy fantasy in which a D&D adventurer retires ands opens a coffee shop or library?

I had an idea for one in which a Turkish character from an exotic species decides to open a dumpling shop, and sets out to make it a centre of excellence.

They name it the Manti-core.

PS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manti_(food)

@jappel I totally agree! (I can't help thinking that they were patched together out of random brain-fade ramblings during Heinlein's near-death due to peritonitis, TIAs, and an blocked carotid artery in the 1960s/70s. They're just plain disjointed and "Time Enough For Love" isn't a novel—it's a bunch of novellas flying in very loose formation.)

@jappel They basically don't understand money. (To be fair, not many people do—and most of what passes for economics and business reporting in the media seeds confusion by deliberately pushing an ideologically biased misunderstanding with intent to make profit.)

New blog entry: We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus! (Text of a keynote talk from Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day, Stuttgart):

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html

Public feel politicians invent or exaggerate culture wars as a tactic, poll suggests

Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the policy institute at King's College London says "evidence suggests" using culture wars "may not be a particularly successful approach to an election".

https://news.sky.com/story/public-feel-politicians-invent-or-exaggerate-culture-wars-as-a-tactic-poll-suggests-12998875

Buried in the article:

"The research, by King's College London (KCL) and Ipsos UK, found that - ahead of a general election - the top issues people said would determine their vote include cost of living/inflation and the NHS and social care.

"Third was the issue of Channel crossings.

"But transgender rights and free speech were at the bottom of the list, with just 1% of people saying these issues would determine their vote."

The Tories are boned.

REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)

Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.

OMG. This is both insane, and rings horribly true: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/

@foone The good ones are expensive, but so are plenty of the bad ones (and none of the cheap ones are good).

On the other hand, consider yourself blessed that you're too young to have had to lug around a circa-1985 luggable the size and weight of a sewing machine!

Aaaand now Reply Guy (multiple iterations thereof) has turned up in my mentions.

GO AWAY! I WAS NOT ASKING FOR HELP!

So, the Melon Husk wants to charge $1 for new twitter accounts.

Therefore I just created a new twitter account before his flying monkeys could implement that feature.

Hint: it's called @cstross_exit for now. When I delete @cstross on November 6th, I'll immediately rename the new account to @cstross, thereby hopefully stopping folks seeing all the should-be-deleted-but-probably-aren't tweets from the old account.

Because fuck you, Dilbert Stark.

Chrome is designed to let google spy on you in order to serve behavioural ads. So it should be no wonder third parties are using it to inject malware into your devices. The only reason these are "exploits" is because someone other than Google, the world's largest advertising company, is using them.

https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/chrome-flags-third-zero-day-this-month-tied-to-spying-exploits

Here's ChatGPT masterfully channeling the spirit of the Bastard Operator From Hell:

@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce DDG is a front end for Bing if I recall correctly, and is as contaminated by LLM junk and SEO spam as the other search engines. They're just not trying to sell adverts themselves.

@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce It might be—have you tried using one recently? (The results from Google has taken a steep nose-dive in the past year, and it hasn't been terribly good for a decade: others are no better.)

PSA for American SFF fans wondering what the fuss is about over The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction publishing a story by David A. Riley just because he's a member of an obscure British political group called the National Front:

The NF in the 1970s was the British Nazi Party. This guy was a *parliamentary candidate* for the NF. Your reaction to F&SF's decision should be the same as if they platformed the leaders of Atomwaffen or the Proud Boys.

That is all.

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2023/08/23/the-magazine-of-fsf-in-the-news-again-for-bad-reasons/

15 year old me (circa 1979) had NO IDEA where this was going to end up when he first invented the Githyanki for a D&D campaign then submitted them to Don Turnbull for the Fiend Factory column in White Dwarf (which begat the Fiend Folio, and the rest is history) ...

Well, fuck.

Just been informed by my GP practice's pharmacist that there's now a national shortage of Rybelsus, aka Semaglutide, my most effective diabetes medication, that's likely to last into 2024. Influencers have been boosting it as a weight loss drug (it's the same drug—in tablet form—as Ozembic/Wegovy) and private clinics are buying up all the stock for image-conscious idiots, depriving diabetics of access.

(I have 12 weeks in the cupboard, then I may lose access for months.)