cstross

@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?

@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

@pikesley @Soyweiser @fullsquare IIRC the coordination problem afflicts all engineering disciplines: with large tech projects like the LHC and ITER, costs scale as something like the fourth power of the energies they're working with, and a large part of the reason is that managing the project is insanely difficult. I'd love to see some numbers for how the management complexity of large software projects (eg. operating systems, LLMs) compares to this.

@nightsky @techtakes Back when I was in software dev I had the privilege of working with a couple of superprogrammers (not at the same company, many years apart). They probably wrote *less* code: it was just qualitatively far, far more elegant and effective. And they were fast, too.

@gerikson I'd like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn't get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who's scared of robots.

@Mubelotix @techtakes You know what else would solve the Nicole problem? Old-skool USENET style client-side killfiles circa 1990, applied to DMs—your inbox-equivalent.

@HedyL One twist: I imagine google devotes CONSIDERABLE effort to aggressively caching LLM-generated answers (probably parsing queries and merging similar ones before checking the cache for previous replies). That'd reduce their costs substantially compared to just throwing every question at an LLM directly. And it keeps eyeballs on Google's own content and own served ads rather than wandering off into the wildernessd of the non-google public web.

@TinyTimmyTokyo alt.peeves, alt.tasteless, probably most of the comp.* hierarchy, not sure where else.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted It's probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we'd all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.

You can't ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.