@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

flippac

@flippac@mendeddrum.org

Techie weirdo (FP, PL etc in particular), occasional electronic musician, professional dolescum

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cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

So, working on a Laundry novel yesterday I was crawling over the scrivener files from an earlier one and stumbled on a really promising codename for something ghastly that fits perfectly in the new one—a grisly contigency plan called FORLORN AVALON—only to discover that it never made it into the final as-published novel because fuck how was I to know in 2008 that the 2024 climax to the series would absolutely have to involve Gashadokuro King Arthur?

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@cstross Ah well, still usable? You could even have a character mention that they'd skimmed past it back then!

FredKiesche, to random
@FredKiesche@dice.camp avatar

And there it is…the first novel-length installment appearance of the BOMB-PUMPED X-RAY LASER!

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flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@nyrath @sudnadja @FredKiesche The Enterprise is a slightly unfair choice: it's not supposed to land, there's an entire ecosystem of tech for avoiding that! Forwards is a bit more problematic (whatever "impulse" is supposed to mean), and the show's always been fairly transparent about that, but forwards isn't up/down in most Trek vessels.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@nyrath @sudnadja @FredKiesche Oh, I know. Just, the gravity vs thrust thing is a pretty significant difference that plenty of shows do enough work on - "splat on takeoff" and "splat on non-trivial thrust" are worth telling apart and the diagram only works for the former when I think we'd both like to see some work on the latter?

(I think the implication in Farscape was just that Moya never really accelerated that hard - but FTL is weirder than usual for TV SF in it)

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

21st Feb: Is your setting a stratified society or something experimental?

It doesn't get much more stratified than the UK in a nightmarish alt-2015 where the Tory party has been taken over by an Elder God out of Lovecraft!

Although the PM's weekly meetings with the Queen have become slightly fraught of late—it's no longer clear who reports to who!

(Fade to strident ullulations of BREXIT MEANS BREXIT! STRONG AND STABLE! ALL GLORY TO THE BLACK PHARAOH! IÄ! IÄ! ...)

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@aethylred @kemayo @cstross Not the royal family?

Thatcher got to be an ork

Ellen, to random
@Ellen@masto.ai avatar

Please send me strength, I didn’t come see my mum for 8 weeks, which I guess she’s kinda mad about because she keeps mentioning it “as a joke”.

Plus I feel totally judged because she put gluten contaminated butter in the pot, so I moaned and removed it, and she started going on about how i shouldn’t care because I smoke weed and will die of lung cancer. Lovely 👍

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@Ellen @Giliell "Funny" thing about being ND: our parents often are too, only with nastier coping mechanisms...

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

I've been on Mastodon for a year now. So it seems only right to have switched my old twitter account out from underneath my name there (which is now sitting on an empty account with no follows and no tweets) and sent it to the knacker's yard for deactivation.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@cstross They've got inactive account policies these days, so it's probably a good idea to document that you are Not On Twitter prominently somewhere that you very clearly own - I've done it on my web site's about page where other contact info (including my other fedi account) is

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Seen some distinctly odd toots appearing from accounts in the western US (since roughly start of waking hours in California) saying "battery-electric vehicles are a dead end, the future is [OH LOOK A WOOKIE]". Not people I've ever engaged with previously.

I suspect the petrochemical industry astroturf bot farms have finally reached Mastodon ...

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@cstross Any tendencies in which instances they're on?

cstross, (edited ) to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

WELP: Marines Test Fire Robot Dog Armed With Rocket Launcher

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/marines-test-fire-robot-dog-armed-with-rocket-launcher

Buried lede: they used a cheap off-the-shelf Chinese consumer robot. And the Chinese and Russian armies have already tested that model with weapons.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@cstross I'm less worried about the marines' version than the one with "less lethal [honest]" payloads that'll be deployed by police forces in the next decade...

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Life-threatening rain as Met Office escalates Storm Babet to red alert

A red warning is issued only when dangerous weather is forecast and it is 'very likely there will be a risk to life'.

https://news.stv.tv/scotland/life-threatening-rain-as-met-office-escalates-storm-babet-to-rare-red-warning?key=68ViW0HZa4TnWo9qeyNejdW

(Forecast is for a month's worth of rain in 48 hours, starting late tomorrow, plus strong winds. Area affected is the east coast of Scotland, i.e. right here, and parts as far south as Newcastle.)

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@cstross I don't suppose you know where's good for picking up a pair of wellies today?...

RGB_Lights, to random

I really believe that if your infrastructure can’t survive a user clicking a link, you are doomed. I’m the director of cybersecurity at NSA and you can definitely craft an email link I will click…

r.mtdv.me/TrustThis

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@RGB_Lights Rickrolls: the SFW goatse

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

As someone on Bluesky noted, "Mona Lisa but with bigger titties" is the reductio ad absudam of AI "art" generators.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@oldladyplays @cstross It's worth being wary any time someone says "AI version of..." without telling you the prompt

I highly doubt there's no misogyny in the generator, but there's a pretty good chance there was plenty in the prompt too - especially given the boob window and corresponding change of pose...

SecurityWriter, to random

My cat is great at catching spiders. There are however a few caveats:

  1. Spiders must be sufficiently enormous to be fun. Somewhere between “Oh lawd he coming” and Shelob.

  2. Spider catching only happens at night, and only in the bedroom.

  3. Cat will make a few chirping noises to alert us that a spider is being hunted.

  4. All spiders must be delivered as gifts onto the chest or face of one of us.

  5. Note I only said great at ‘catching’. Delivered spiders are very much alive and very fucking irate about the current state of affairs.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@SecurityWriter On the bright side your cat's never found a facehugger?

0xabad1dea, to random

my perpetual advice to new university students: go the fuck to class and go the fuck to bed. almost all student crises stem from not doing those two things

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@0xabad1dea And if you find you can't do this, there's a problem and now you're away from home it's time to start looking at why!

(speaking as someone who still has the problems, still can't go the fuck to bed and actually sleep and it turned out basically can't work: the earlier you know what's up, the less burnt out you are as you figure out how to cope)

hywan, to random
@hywan@fosstodon.org avatar

The case for Nushell, https://www.jntrnr.com/case-for-nushell/.

Relevant article about shells, and how Nushell pushes the boundaries further. I highly recommend reading it.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@samueljohnson @cstross @jonsinger @LauraJMG @Keltounet @hywan We (UK here, but meh) have the legislation, too. Just no enforcement worth a damn.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@samueljohnson @cstross @jonsinger @LauraJMG @Keltounet @hywan Gee, as someone who lives here I had no idea. Especially having had to go about enforcing various things myself.

I just don't get to include myself directly when talking about the EU any more even when that's where the current legislation derived from. Which funnily enough I didn't vote for.

Arsehole.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@samueljohnson @cstross @jonsinger @LauraJMG @Keltounet @hywan "& owned a home".

This certainly explains a lot about why you have no idea what a splainy bastard you're being right now.

Meanwhile I might be autistic but I know what connotation is. Fuck off.

danhon, to random
@danhon@dan.mastohon.com avatar

Happy Tuesday, or as I now call it, "find out you're in Naomi Klein's latest book day"

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/naomi-klein-naomi-wolf-book

h/t @waldoj

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@danhon @waldoj Good news! You're probably not in Naomi Wolf's latest book!

Yora, to scifi
@Yora@dice.camp avatar

Something that I am sure lots of writers and gamemasters have thought about:

How bad is it when you get bullet holes in your space ship?

If you can get to safety before pressure drops to 30 kPa, you will be fine. At that point, you might have a minute or two before you pass out.

I found this equation to calculate how long it takes for pressure to drop that far:

Time(s) = [30 * volume(m³)] / hole (cm²)

For a 9mm bullet hole in a 2x2x10 meter corridor, that gives you about 5 hours.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@cstross @Yora @nyrath Wikipedia itself seems to be low on info about that part: are there sources from that page you'd recommend?

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Apropos of nothing, one observation I’ve heard people who used to be involved in labour negotiations here in Iceland is “people with American brain worms don’t know how to negotiate with unions”

(Paraphrasing, since the original is always in Icelandic.)

This is noticable in that you can guess with reasonable certainty, which company is run by an executive trained in the US just by how badly they are handling union contract negotiations

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@cypnk @baldur @simeon This is a (foul!) form of collective bargaining on their part btw: they're willing to all be tactically clueless in pursuit of collective strategic goals which include minimising unions' actual power

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@simeon @cypnk @baldur Accomplishing your strategic goals may have very little to do with your local aims - or at least your overtly stated ones.

"Look how they made me do this!" is worryingly effective rhetoric for escalation, and not everybody's happy with the same kind of collective power. Some people really do value the ability to hurt others more than not messing their own lives up.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@simeon @cypnk @baldur But the biz part is effectively group precommitment to a scorched earth strategy: "we're all MAD and it definitely helps work here".

If nobody's willing to bring enough capital to keep things going without playing that game, they win because they can trash everything until nobody can afford to see anything more trashed.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@simeon @cypnk @baldur Some just literally don't believe it'll happen until after it has.

Most of the rest just assume they get their way before then, with the same result. Understanding where "unfixable" really is doesn't matter to them, it's somebody else's problem.

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@simeon @cypnk @baldur "fash and other fuckers lie about what they're doing in the moment to manipulate the media and public" might seem sophisticated too, but the playbook is mostly pretty simple when you've seen it in action enough.

Reducing how much trust people have in each other then polarising things so they have their own strong base and an enemy? Totally part of it.

Cryptika, to random
@Cryptika@eldritch.cafe avatar

I love all of the new capitalist innovations like:

  • Submarines that implode
  • Computers that lie
  • Movies no one can watch, for tax reasons
flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@Cryptika The tax write-off IP really ought to be archived and placed in the public domain!

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Reading news headlines on Mastodon I accidentally conflated two things—"Biden should pardon Trump" (that's a hard nope from me) and "wildcat releases in Scotland" and suddenly realized the solution to our problem would be for Biden to release Scottish wildcats in Trump's bathroom. (NB: Scottish wildcats are smaller than bobcats and roughly as friendly and domesticated.)

flippac,
@flippac@mendeddrum.org avatar

@alienghic @chadgeidel @cstross Do they have a leech problem?

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