Charlie Stross

@CinnasVerses @techtakes

This kind of ROI to me stinks of late-stages Ponzi scheme—the smart money has made its pile, but they need to keep pulling in the rubes to keep the illusion of growth running.

@fullsquare @techtakes If you want a TV show about billionaires getting their just desserts, just intone six words at the start of the intro narrative: “After the year of the revolutions …”

@gerikson You could run a lottery where the prizes were control over one of the FPV killer drones hunting him. Require a direct hit with an injector loaded with about 30% of a lethal dose of something excruciating, so everyone can get their stabby on and no one person is technically guilty of murder. (Subject to common cause doctrine in your jurisdiction, but anyway … )

@fullsquare He’ll absolutely need that capability when the bubble bursts and he needs to make a hurried exit in the direction of the extinct volcano lair he’s bought through a shell company in Polynesia!

@Soyweiser The irony is that if Musk was serious about landing a man on Mars by 2022, he had Falcon Heavy flying in 2017 and Crew Dragon flying with crew in 2020. The amount he’s spent on Starship would have covered several fully-expended FH launches to Mars transfer orbit and development of a long duration crew module. We know how to soft-land ~1-2 tons on Mars.

… What, you wanted him to bring the astronauts *back* afterwards? Are you some kind of Commie?

(But my point stands.)

@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Bear in mind they’re also locked in a long-term cold war with Saudi Arabia (sunni v. shi’ite islam) and Israel (increasingly resembling a religious ethno-supremacist fascist state with regional territorial ambitions). Peace with Iran is a non-starter unless Israel and the Saudis can be forced to back the fuck off at the same time.

@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare This hasn’t happened in Iran, but oppressive theocracies *have* decayed from inside elsewhere—notably Ireland since 1980 (the difference now is as night and day, yet there was no revolution and no shooting, and the country has prospered). Arguably Spain’s clerico-fascist system went the same way in the 1970s. And so on.

Iran is different, though, in that it faces a violent, powerful external superpower, which indirectly props up the priesthood.

@flizzo @techtakes It seems to be—and based on a torment-nexus-grade willful misreading of Accelerando. (Hint: I know what I wrote in those stories! I’m the author.)

@antifuchs @techtakes Oh goodie they enshittified vim IS NOTHING SACRED?!? HAVE WE LIVED AND FOUGHT IN VAIN?!?!?

@o7___o7 @techtakes It was Arduino who emitted the llm generated circuit but I was tired and conflated two companies with similar names (whose products I don’t use) before going to bed. Now they’re trying to throw a flame war. Pay no attention.

@fiat_lux @techtakes Yes, they’re that naive.

Fish don’t notice the water they swim in and don’t realize life exists outside of it. And the whole AI bubble is 100% capitalism-centric. (Research institutions got priced out of the game a few years ago and are tinkering around the margins.)

@o7___o7 @techtakes That’s why I’m fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.

@BioMan Falcon 9 launches are reportedly sold for $60-80M (or $160-200M for Falcon Heavy). But an F9 launch in Starlink configuration is billed internally at just $12M, for the same payload as a Saturn 1B. Which is just insane (S1B cost $55M per flight in 1972, or $425M today).

@mech @techtakes Having SpaceX take over X is going to backfire explosively real soon now: France isn’t the only government investigating X for election meddling and peddling child pornography, and it could take down SpaceX’s ability to do business in countries that would otherwise be buying launch capacity:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo

@V0ldek @techtakes If you want high latency, nothing beats telnet from the UK to a server in California via a comsat in GEO back in the early 90s when the trans-Atlantic cable circuit was down. A three-phase TCP exchange has to crawl up to GEO, 35,000km above the equator, and back down *three times*, never mind the surface level routing.

Gave me a strong appreciation for Berkeley vi’s designed-in ability to cope with slow modems.

@Seaguy05 @techtakes Bear in mind SpaceX’s near monopoly is transient: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is now flying and re-using New Glenn and ramping up launch cadence aggressively. Give it 5 years and unless Starship works 100% to plan, SpaceX will be eroding like Tesla today. (And this ignores the multiple Chinese reusable launcher startups with government backing.)

@Soyweiser Years ago (before Epstein, before the GFC, etc) I used to jokingly talk about my pet conspiracy theory, that the world was ruled by the P7: the Pale Patriarchal Plutocratic Protestant Penis-People of Power.

Turns out I was right.

I didn’t want to be right …

@TrashGoblin @techtakes Au contraire: I am old and grumpy and I want UNIX (or rather, Linux) the way it was in 2003, none of this bullshit new-fangled nonsense that I don’t understand.

Hint: a LOT of computer users—as opposed to lascivious glassy-eyed computer touchers—are like this. We just want to get shit done, not force-learn a new workflow or debugging tool every five seconds (or years).

@CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.

@Soyweiser Bear in mind that the Middle Ages (roughly 500 years!) is a longer span of time than, say, from the founding of the English and French colonies in North America to the present day, close to the Spanish/Portuguese colonization of South America. And similarly huge in extent. Lots of places/times in the Middle Ages *were* peaceful and tolerant (by the standards of the day).