@gerikson @techtakes It’s classic DARVO gaslighting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO

@Mitchell_Porter And the Musk-equivalent figure buying up bankrupt alien Hells to provide eternal torment as a service, no, that’s not something those guys would ever want to inflict on their perceived enemies or anything …

@fullsquare AIUI for optimal nuclear weapons (ie. lightweight pits that maximize fission) you need to be very careful about which phase of metallic plutonium you use (it has dozens). IIRC an alloy with about 2% germanium in delta-phase is densest: make it with as close to 100% Pu-239 as you can get. (This was declassified in the 1970s.) You’re also going to need some tritium gas to fill the hollow core, and other exotica (never mind the carefully timed explosive lenses to drive the implosion).

@BlueMonday1984 The “weapons grade” almost certainly means 239-Pu, which is used in bombs or fissile in reactors. (There are other isotopes but they’re not really useful for fueling reactors *or* making bombs.)

I’m rather partial to the idea of silly valley oligarchs putting crude A-bombs under the table at one another’s shareholder meetings.

@BlueMonday1984 @techtakes Gnome may be politically non-shitty but it’s still an unusable revolting mess, a bad parody of a good desktop environment.

@Soyweiser @sneerclub Next step in rat ideology will be: we will ask our perfectly aligned sAI to invent a time machine so we can go back and [eugenics handwave] ourselves into transcendental intelligences who will be able to create a perfectly aligned sAI! Sparkly virtual unicorns for all!

(lolsob, this is all so predictable)

@Soyweiser @techtakes You misremembered: Gibson wrote his early stories and Neuromancer on a typewriter, he didn’t own a computer until he bought one with the royalties (an Apple IIc, which then freaked him out by making graunching noises at first—he had no idea it needed a floopy disk inserting).

@scruiser There’s a logical inverse to this argument which I had a go at back in 2016: if you’re running a simulation, how far back SHOULD you go to get to your species’ origin? All the way to the first eukaryotes? (Concept collapses into ludicrous recursive tail-chasing.)

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/cytological-utopia-and-the-rap.html

@Soyweiser @techtakes The correct term for the type of capitalism that enshittifies its product should be “crapitalism”.

@Soyweiser What is “king of the hill”? TV/cinema or some other visual entertainment?

@dgerard Not to worry; the promotion of incel bullshit via social media algorithms will generate increasing demand for sexbots by and by …

@HedyL Generally people who want a mechanical horse don’t fantasize about fucking it … the main techbro use case for humanoid robots is “sexbot”, so they don’t have to learn all the emotional skills you need in order to have a relationship with an actual human being.

@dgerard What fascinates me is *why* coders who use LLMs think they’re more productive. Is the complexity of their prompt interaction misleading them as to how effective the outputs it results in are? Or something else?

@gerikson @sneerclub I knew Iain and he absolutely despised Musk. (Yes, even back before 2011 Musk was on his radar.) Iain was a socialist with zero patience for capitalist exploiters.

@V0ldek That’s an RPG protagonist protagging. Not prose fiction. (This thought brought to you b/c I’ve lately been reading a multivolume LitRPG epic that I had to bail on midway through book 3 because the author dropped into passive voice with extreme clunkiness at random, infrequent intervals, making for a jarring read.)

@V0ldek This is a hill I will die on: the passive voice ABSOLUTELY does not belong in a work of fiction. (Academic papers and reports are another matter entirely, but fiction: no.)

@UltimateNoob @techtakes This is … actually really neat feedstock for us SF authors, amirite?

@YourNetworkIsHaunted Your fairies gnaw on raw pancreas meat? That’s hardcore!

@rook @techtakes The real problem would be persuading Gwynne Shotwell to stay on as COO/President in event of nationalization. (I know nothing about her politics but she’s the one who got SpaceX the NASA contracts and ramped Falcon 9 up to being the global launch superpower. If she’s a personal friend of Elon a takeover that pushes her out could cause chaos.)

@V0ldek @techtakes Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd’s/_of/_London