Pretty sure the Olympics would get more viewers if every event involved athletes being chased by wolves. Or wolves being chased by athletes.
Jon
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RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@mms/115905132948071029 Huh, looks like Framework may have started something.
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop hoping Lenovo doesn't go Nazi, as well.
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Meanwhile, the media in the UK—and the USA—are TOTALLY IGNORING the ongoing revolutionary turmoil in Iran, with running street battles, a general strike, dozens of cities in open rebellion against the
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop Al-Jazeera Arabic doesn't have a lot more. They seem mostly interested in Syria right now. Iran and Qatar seem to have been getting along relatively well so that may not be the cause.
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WTF?? https://fosstodon.org/@adafruit/115810815370282865
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@mattblaze@federate.social so a PDP 11/03 is OK, but an IBM 370/195 violates the "large items that could block the view" rule, AFAICT.
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New blog entry: Webtoons revisited: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/webtoons-revisited.html
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@cstross@wandering.shop Unable to login via MovableType (validated the link and still claims no such login?!), but I am fond of Staghorn Academy https://tapas.io/series/Staghorn-Academy/info (roommate
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@oddhack@mstdn.social Try logging in with the username and password you supplied. (It can't send email any more because Google hates the old software my blog runs on.)
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
Old Straight White Dude, Childfree Cat Gentleman. Destroy Fascism Immediately!
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@cstross@wandering.shop I did, no joy. Also tried LiveJournal (?!) but got an OpenID validation error (really should get rid of the accounts as they're FSB spyware now, but I don't use them), and my own OpenID validation setup fell prey to the mists of domain providers and ISPs some time ago. Is OK, here is fine.
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New blog entry: Webtoons revisited: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/webtoons-revisited.html
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
Old Straight White Dude, Childfree Cat Gentleman. Destroy Fascism Immediately!
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@cstross@wandering.shop Unable to login via MovableType (validated the link and still claims no such login?!), but I am fond of Staghorn Academy https://tapas.io/series/Staghorn-Academy/info (roommate drama at a multispecies magical school), Forward https://forwardcomic.com/index.php (post-scarcity, mostly a mediation on someone trying to Fix AI robots not being recognized as people), Quantum Entanglement https://www.webtoons.com/en/romance/quantum-entanglement/list?title_no=5775 (slice of life, interdimensional gateways, vaguely romantic)
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My controversial take: Linux desktops peaked with KDE 3.5.x. (Gnome is a ghastly abomination and KDE's been going downhill ever since.) macOS desktops peaked with Snow Leopard (10.6). Everything since
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@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop I've been using WindowMaker for more than 20 years and it has pretty much stayed in place (other aspects like system audio and video have generally improved).
Wayland is going to present me a miserable dilemma if X.org really gets desupported by Debian at some point, though.
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@otolithe@mastodon.social @ainmosni@social.ainmosni.eu Alas, the AR glasses will be made by large corporations who can afford the R&D to build the horrifyingly complex machines in the first place. And
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@oddhack@mstdn.social
Old Straight White Dude, Childfree Cat Gentleman. Destroy Fascism Immediately!
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@cstross@wandering.shop @otolithe@mastodon.social @ainmosni@social.ainmosni.eu see the classic bit in _First Lensman_ series where Virgil Samms goes to Rigel and the first bond between the species is... ignoring billboard advertising.
Ref chapter 5 in https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/49525/pg49525.txt
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RESEARCH QUESTION (for work): I know what an instar is
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop only because the apartment building I was living in a decade ago suffered an infestation :-(
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@cstross@wandering.shop Tooth calculus is bad enough, especially for math phobics.
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#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 2: What do you dislike as reader and thus avoid in your own work? TOO MANY CLICHEs! I began work on a space opera in 2015 and as prep I wrote up a taxonomy of clichés in space o
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Jon
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@cstross@wandering.shop Poul Anderson was pretty good about astrogeology issues, especially given his timeframe.
Re "You can keep a starship crew healthy and sane indefinitely using a life support system running on blue-green algae, tilapia, and maybe the odd soy bean plant", I wonder if a natural limiter on fascist space programs will be the lack of Manly Beef and Coffee.
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"I put all of Scotlands Sheep into one Mega-Sheep, here is how big it is." https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1pbcygq (Epic quality shitpost!)
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop I believe New Zealand has about 7x the sheep:people of Scotland. Work on it.
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Found on /r/Edinburgh; apparently North Korea is hatching a new cunning plan to infiltrate Scotland: (Spoiler: it's on Teviot and it used to be the Central Chippie. Quite the rebranding!)
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop is Ken MacLeod involved? Remembering _Newton's Wake_ where a NK-centered _juche_ culture is one of the few survivors of the Hard Singularity.
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This is crazycakes idiocy from Debian! Random example (I don't use Debian day to day) but as a working novelist, I'm in the UK but my primary publisher is in the US so I want en_US locale for dictiona
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop I installed Debian 13 a couple of months ago in Lisbon and did not experience this. Sounds like a minor installer bug in the recently released 13.2.0, likely to be fixed in the next update.
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Shot, chaser (fired by Oliver K. Langmead over on Bsky, but it bears circulating here). It's another example of the lousy AI slop scams targeting writers: in this case the AI-assisted review spammer i
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Jon
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@cstross@wandering.shop "These are REAL humans, just as REAL as I am!"
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Shot, chaser (fired by Oliver K. Langmead over on Bsky, but it bears circulating here). It's another example of the lousy AI slop scams targeting writers: in this case the AI-assisted review spammer i
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop reminds of your bit with the matrisohka brain in which the only remaining activity was, IIRC, legal software suing each other.
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#WritersCoffeeClub 11/21. What are some preconceptions about writers you'd like to see challenged? Almost every depiction of a writer in TV or film is grotesquely wrong, starting with: they're all ric
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#WritersCoffeeClub 21/11: A second misconception: everyone seems to think that if they can write a toot or a school essay they can write a book: "it's just more writing". We use the same word for lini
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop DO-178B probably means that most people writing "autonomous" self-driving car software are not in the least qualified to write flight control software.
My recollection from a discussion with the safety-critical folks in our standards group a while back is that there is a certification level where software failure is permitted to kill anyone on board *except* the pilot, though I probably misinterpreted that discussion... probably.
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@sumek@hachyderm.io @dgerard They got turned off and de-fuelled, chunks of the plant no longer exist: can't be re-started. This was deliberate policy.
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop @sumek@hachyderm.io @dgerard sunk cost fallacy. Solar and wind and storage have simply won and the nuclear industry, such as it is, is thrashing around desperately trying to find subsidies and pretending "new tech" will improve matters.
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Yeah, that'd help. In my experience dictation software is 100% useless for writing fiction. Can't handle quoted dialog, has a vocabulary limited to the average business or casual phone user, utterly p
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
Old Straight White Dude, Childfree Cat Gentleman. Destroy Fascism Immediately!
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@cstross@wandering.shop I did get some entertaining hallucinations by trying to transcribe my hand-written RPG run notes via Google voice recognition a few years ago - and that was before LLMs.
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Coming in five hot minutes: first shrieks about the Home Office confiscating wedding rings and reliquaries containing locks of the hair of murdered relatives. (Which in any sane time line would lead t
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Jon
@oddhack@mstdn.social
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@cstross@wandering.shop you mean they are already extracting refugees' gold teeth? Surprised.
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@cstross@wandering.shop It really does seem like the business plan was developed by feeding scripts for horror movies and Twilight Zone episodes into a large language model.
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@mattblaze@federate.social BRB, got to hit the nearest toy store for a talking doll named Chucky
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@cstross@wandering.shop Next idea: Airbnb, but for connecting groups of partying teenagers with large houses that were abandoned years earlier because the owners mysteriously disappeared.
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Jon
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@cstross@wandering.shop Lawn darts. 1 HP/over melee weapons capable of removing eyes, puncturing holes in torsos, etc. when used as directed. The idea was, put down a plastic hoop and throw the darts high into the air with the intent of sticking in the ground inside the hoop. The reality was that when children throw things in the air, they come down randomly.
It was the 1960s. They were banned in an early triumph of the US consumer products safety commission so I expect them back on the market any time now.
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