Charlie Stross

As a rule of thumb, if someone is trying to sell you something they can't explain to you, it's probably a scam.

And if they're trying to sell you something it doesn't/can't do what they claim, that's fraud.

AI, right now, fits both of these rules quite well.

Australia Admits All Those Animals Made Up SYDNEY—Saying the ruse began as a harmless prank about the continent’s mammals having pouches, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese admitted Tuesday that all those animals like wallabies, numbat...

FINALLY THE TRUTH COMES OUT

theonion.com/australia-ad...

Look neighbors, I realize Hiroshima Day is important too but fireworks at 0715 is not the appropriate way to mark the occasion. C'mon.

There's one key difference between AI and guns:

Guns work.

(What they call "AI" right now is a puppet show powered by spicy autocomplete, delivering sentences and paragraphs instead of single words. That's all it is!)

Every time these AI evangelists open their mouths, they reveal how utterly incompetent they are at life. Just completely useless people, unable to function as adults in the most rudimentary ways.

Seems unlikely as I haven't visited the US since worldcon in 2022!

note, this is uBlock Origin *Lite* the one with fewer features that uses Manifest v3 (or as much of it as Apple has actually implemented); it doesn't have the same script blocking, it can't block YouTube ads, it doesn't get to run at the same stage of page load, no dynamic filtering, no filter lists

Who sold you that line of absolute tripe? Because you should definitely ask for your money back!

I'm out of touch with how the US mass market developed post-2016 because I'm now with a trade-only publisher over there (and my informant on mass market stuff died in 2016).

They're a slightly different size/appearance from US mmpbs; I suspect staff dealing with foreign imports assume they're all sold as trade.

You're in Ireland? Because I was describing the US mass market channel. (The mass market channel in the UK finally collapsed when Robert Maxwell took a header off the back of his yacht, circa 1992, and his distribution arm went bust.)

Offer them a one-way ticket to the moon as reactor shielding?

Mass market distribution means books are shipped to bookstores on credit and paid for after 90 days or destroyed—stripped covers returned as proof.

Trade books (hardback/paperback) are paid for after 90 days *or returned intact*.

MMPBs are smaller so shop staff don't rip covers off trade books.

Mass market sales in the USA collapsed between about 2005 and 2015. My midlist MMPBs circa 2005 sold about 60,000 over their lifetime; by 2014 that had dropped to 9000 and they were discontinued. (Ebooks took up the slack almost 1:1). NB: mass market refers to a distribution channel, not book size.

Uncovering the Christian Right’s Anti-Trans Disinformation Network with the Southern Poverty Law Center — Assigned Quinnehtukqut McLamore traced the vast disinformation network poisoning the science on trans youth care.

Disinformation has been a key driver of the anti-trans backlash, and @ghawinriver.bsky.social is an expert on how it is developed, spread, and leveraged.

Dig in with this interview by @rikiwilchins.bsky.social.

No, because they're aiming their grift at the C-suites and PE investors. Televangelists are pitching to the general public (who have far less recourse).

A friend of mine got to interview Musk about his various businesses maybe 15-18 years ago, before the madness really set in. He was cracking jokes about being a Bond villain: "see, I've got a tropical island I launch rockets from, boiler-suited minions, and an electric car! What else could I be?"

What I want to know is, when are the transhumanist grifter-entrepreneurs like Jimmy Swaggart and the other televangelist scumbags going to turn up?

Got to be soon, given how much money the wealthier AI stans are sitting on (at least for now).

THREE things?!?

I grew up in the UK and there were only 3 TV channels total until I was in my 20s and at least two of them were invariably shit at any given time.

Roko's Basilisk is just Calvinist Satan for transhumanists.

(And it totally ignores the Many Basilisks refutation …)

HOW VERY DARE YOU SIR

Please desist from stealing the setting of my current space opera in progress …

Disagree, conditionally: I voted Labour in 1997 (and that was my last time voting Labour) because Tony Blair hadn't revealed his true colours at that point and *anything* seemed better than more Tories.

Not been fooled again.

I really like @cstross.bsky.social on similar issues.

crookedtimber.org/2009/01/27/r...

In the UK, Northern Ireland and Scotland both have their own currency-issuing banks; here in Scotland you will see banknotes from the Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Clydesdale Bank. They're all legal tender interchangeable with Bank of England notes.

A side-effect of this is that British computers will BY LAW be required to rapidly find common prime factors for currency conversion, thereby forcing the British computer industry to develop an UNSTOPPABLE lead in crypto computation.

And Lyons Tea Rooms' computer division will rule the world again!

I'm amazed the US didn't keep the pre-decimalization currency format. If we had, we'd still be using it in 2025 just out of stubborn spite, just like the imperial system of units.

"My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!"

WHEN I AM PRIME MINISTER (so approximately never) I promise to re-de-decimalize the currency again!

Three ha'pennies to the penny
Thirteen pennies to the shilling
Seven shillings to the crown
Twenty-three shillings to the pound
And 1/2/1 to the guinea.

All tax/revenue denominated in guineas, ofc.

It is, alas, entirely true.

Also Brits of a certain age.

I am 60 and I remember learning British pre-decimalization currency (because our current system only came in when I was 7) and IT WAS JUST LIKE THIS AAARGH