Long live RSS!

Well yes, except google kinda-sorta killed the blogosphere a decade ago by giving us a really good sync-all-the-rss-feeds solution in the shape of Google Reader, waiting until everyone was using it and had stopped following blogs directly or maintaining link sidebars, then killed it. Thereby handing everything to the big vertically-integrated social media silos -- Facebook and Twitter, essentially, but Google thought they were going to play in that pool. (Also, Google hadn't worked out how to monetize RSS feeds. And Google managers get promoted by launching new products, not by fixing up existing ones so they "work better" for whatever value of "work better" appeals to the big G.)

Ahem. Anyway, we've wandered off-topic in just two comments!

So, any questions about Escape from Yokai Land?

Charlie,

You mention US printed versions, but at your suggestion I bought a hardback copy from your local bookstore in Scotland.

For other prospective customers are there any left?

I hope your publisher can get that ebook sale on the Bookbub and Early Bird Books ebook sale newsletters!

Last Saturday they listed one of Tolkien's LOTR books at $2.99, turned out that pretty much his entire canon in English was on sale. I dropped more than a few kopeks that day.

…here's what one Japanese travel blog has to say about The Most Kawaii Place in Japan…

I honestly can't say whether that article is meant seriously or just bathed in the thickest possible sarcasm. Poe's law in action.

I believe the hardcover is still in print? So bookstores can order them in via their usual wholesalers. (Amazon.com shows the hardcover as in stock and available for shipping to the UK, if you can't find a better bookshop.)

I have been there. Honestly, it could be both.

"mastodon" - if I simply hit the address you gave ... will that, indirectly lead me to a way of opening a mastodon account?

Greg, you don't "open a mastodon account".

Mastodon is a piece of software. Different folks run Mastodon servers (called "instances") which you can sign up with.

Mastodon servers talk to you using a browser-based interface (the one that link goes to connects to an instance called "Wandering Shop", where I have an account), or a smartphone app, and to each other, to share messages ("toots") using a protocol called ActivityPub. They're a bit like old-time USENET servers.

There are other servers that can use ActivityPub; for example, the WordPress blogging software has a recently-became-official ActivityPub plugin, Tumblr is acquiring an ActivityPub extension (I think), and so on.

You'll hear the term "federated" bandied about a lot. It's like the old internet, before a handful of huge corporations came to dominate it (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft).

Here's a good starting point -- it's up to you to choose a server that suits you.

(Warning: because it's federated, servers can block one another (refuse to handle each other's traffic) for infractions. This makes the fediverse/mastodon inherently resistant to spam: if you send out offensive crap that violates other folks' acceptable use policies they will yell at your admin, and if your admin shrugs, the entire server will be cut off. So you will really need to re-think your comments about religion if you go to Mastodon. On the other hand: unlike Twitter, you can tag your toots with a Content Warning so that folks are advised you're expressing something controversial or unpopular and have to click through to read it. And there are no big commercial advertisers, and even better, Mastodon isn't designed to generate outrage to drive engagement. It's remarkably laid-back compared to Dilbert Stark's hellsite.)

Yes, create an account is on the right. It's not a requirement, but I find it useful.

There is no requirement to be on the same server.

The amusing thing here is how often animism pops up it's fractalizing heads.

So far as I can tell, yokai are an extension of the Shinto (Shin approximates soul/spirit, to is tao=Way) in the idea that everything has a Shin. So storytellers for the last 500 very odd years have been spinning stories of yokai, the unquiet spirits of things, places, bogies that eat travelers, seafarer's stories, shapeshifting animals...the usual. There are even eras of production, with WW2 marking a big divide between the Meiji-era pre-war story-spinning and the post-war manga, which introduced a bunch more yokai.

It seems that the techie world wants this too, with the Internet of Things, so our stuff can talk to us.

And there's the Laundryverse, into which European bogies have been a'creeping from the animism that refuses to die in the West.

To be my normal, obnoxious self...it looks like in the Thought Police's War on Animism, animism's winning. Maybe it's because cute fairies are more profitable than "Pathetic Fallacy" on merchandise?

Good to see yokai slinking into the Laundryverse. Moar Pleez?

Good to see yokai slinking into the Laundryverse. Moar Pleez?

Probably not (in the short term).

The Laundry Files has a couple of gaps I'm filling in -- Yokai plugged into one of them, the other was Derek the DM's back-story (which is tackled in A Conventional Boy, written and probably forthcoming next year) -- plus one final novel (which could end up in two volumes because there are a lot of loose ends to tie up).

That final novel sets the scene for Dead Lies Dreaming and the New Management stories, which hopefully will be ongoing after the Laundry Files ends.

The Laundry story arc finishes in May/June of 2015, in a universe where the Lovecraftian Singularity has happened.

The New Management start in December 2015, in that universe, and so far run through to mid-2016. Assuming I go back for New Management book 4 eventually that'd start off no earlier than 2017 and more likely 2019 in the Laundryverse. (For shits and giggles, imagine how His Dread Majesty would react to COVID19 ... if it even happens in that universe.)

Hmm. I tried searching on 'stross' and 'stross' and found nothing.

I may have questions on Yokai Land in April!

(For shits and giggles, imagine how His Dread Majesty would react to COVID19 ... if it even happens in that universe.)

Um...I think Covid's a bad idea, mostly because a lot of people are ferociously pretending the pandemic is over and we can get Back To Business As Usual (never mind that Covid's still killing 10-20x more people than influenza).

H1N1 bird flu's a possibility, but you could get really unlucky with that one, either by correctly predicting a pandemic or having the whole thing fizzle and make the story outdated before it's published.

However, there was an Ebola epidemic in 2014-2016...

Given how important blood is in the Laundryverse, I'd suggest imagining His Dread Majesty degrading the NHS to improve the harvest of misery mana. As a result, ebola gets established in the UK, with rather grim follow-on effects for PHANGS and anything else that needs blood to work. Perhaps the alfar experience it as a virgin ground plague?

Given that the Great Old Ones don't seem to be big on collaboration over trivial things like international public health and epidemiology, an ebola pandemic would be entirely believable, and possibly problematic for all levels right up to the top.

Ah, yes.

Toxic Spell Dumps (hattip, Harry Turtledove) are a potentially unlimited source of grand booms and icky spewing monsters if-and-when Laundryverse gets headhunted by one or another of the streaming services. Indeed, that's a secondary spinoff series from the main plot line, a team of shellshocked minor characters deployed each weel (each episode) to tackle yet another site found to contain an annoying (or scary or silly or world ending) Toxic Spell Dump.

Charlie
Many thanks for the advice, warning & way to advise people, in advance.
But ... "like usenet" I could cope with - I'll have a look.

However, there was an Ebola epidemic in 2014-2016...

And Marburg is now spreading in sub-saharan cities. (It was previously a rural disease.)

What the New Management needs is a disease(s) that causes lots of unhappy symptoms, but doesn't kill anyone, which the immune system is powerless over. Or they could just ban any pain-killer stronger than aspirin.

Asorin is now more commonly used as an antiinflamatory and/or anti-thrombotic than as an analgesic these days.

What the New Management needs is a disease(s) that causes lots of unhappy symptoms, but doesn't kill anyone [...]

That'd be antibiotic resistant gonorrhoea, right?

Search in Mastodon doesn't work the way you'd expect it to. You'd be much better off using Google. (There's no global Fediverse-wide discovery system: lots of people are vociferously opposed to the idea.) Meanwhile, I'm @cstross there (as on twitter) -- @cstross@wandering.shop to be precise.

You are aware that NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) as a class are used as pain killers? Inflammatory response being a major cause of pain ...

I quite enjoyed it. Especially pleased I could get it in a traditional paper book.

But I did think the Yokai were a bit wimpy; not up to Bob's level ... Fred from Accounting could have probably handled them with one hand tied behind his back.

Maybe Bob deserved a bit of a break away from the office after The Rhesus Chart. I'm sure others of the problems Angleton left behind were more challenging.

I'm sure others of the problems Angleton left behind were more challenging.

Great title for a monster-of-the-week series: "The Soul-sucking Bureaucracy."

Bob inherits his dead boss's soul-sucking powers after Angleton gets offed by a vampiric sorcerer, and...

Thanks. I have discovered that Mastodon's search isn't very useful, because I was looking for gardening entries - the only one I found was foodin-ga, and it took some finding. My main point was that I am not sure how it would enable new readers to find you (or anyone else), except by word of mouth.

Mastodon search is designed to suck, for privacy reasons.

Yep. There's also no quote-tweet equivalent, for anti-dogpiling reasons.

But we're off-topic again, so back to Yokai Land if you don't mind?

Yokai Land is a nice read, had a good time, and promptly forgot about it. Probably because it's kind of... unsurprising. Very comfortable reading, but par for the course for a middle-of-the-power-leveling Bob novel, where nothing could really have consequences given we knew what happened afterwards. So I'm not surprised there are no real spontaneous questions.

Would it be off-topic to thank you? In one of my novels that's currently looking for beta readers, one of my PoV characters plays a game in VR, and I think it was due to Escape that I had a major character in the game as a yokai.

Charlie @ 22
Yes - as in I try NOT to use any "painkiller" before I've used an NSAID - usually an Ibuprofen variant ...

Just wondering. Is the Laundryverse still some sort of simulation?

I'm also wondering if it's possible to do a strange loop multiverse. Within the loop of the multiverse, every universe is simulated by another universe, but if you go far enough, you find that there's no undelying reality. They're all simulations, and the "purpose" of each universe is to simulate another one...

From the OP: "Hello Kitty—or rather, Princess Kitty—is a mouthless cartoon cat created by Sanrio Corporation"

I have read, from a source I cannot recall but I thought at the time reputable, that Princess Kitty is not a cat, but a young woman (possibly furry-adjacent), and even has a pet cat of her own.

Of course, if your primaray source of information about all things Kitty says that my source got it hopelessly wrong, I shall retire quietly.

JHomes

Well, no one has done a fossil yokai yet to my knowledge, so there is room for a mastodon yokai in the Laundryverse* (/shows himself out).

*That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die

Off-topic, but there are celebrations all over the US just now: indictment #1 for TFG.

well, we are chatting about eldritch horrors and hijacking of national politics as result of amoral monsters from the dungeon dimensions invading an oblivious Earth... so please no further mentioning of IRL born-human-monsters eager to burn the world rather than face justice

(sadly, you are not sure if I'm referencing Johnson, Trump, Putin, Kim, executives from Big Oil, Big Railroad, etc)

so could we get back to eldritch horrors?

Hi Charlie! Love your work (actually just reread the entire LF and NM series in anticipation of the next book), and your posts on Mastodon. Thanks for all of that!

I had a couple of observations after Escape From Yokai Land, and I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Mostly, it's about Bob. He seems to be relying very heavily on his eater-of-souls ability to solve every problem, and while it's gross, it doesn't seem to have actually done him much real harm yet. Especially when dealing with something the size of the horror in Yokai Land, the "don't eat anything bigger than your head" mantra comes to mind. What ARE the actual downsides to munching on all these souls? Is that something you've considered exploring more? Like, having Bob be incapacitated by biting off more than he can chew? Maybe becoming psychically obese from overuse? Outright incapacitated from the psychic equivalent of a ruptured stomach, or constipation, or something?

Just seems like there are so many creative ways you could be horrible to Bob as the eater of souls :)

Thanks again!

I have read, from a source I cannot recall but I thought at the time reputable, that Princess Kitty is not a cat, but a young woman (possibly furry-adjacent), and even has a pet cat of her own.

Possibly here (referenced by Wikipedia)?

What ARE the actual downsides to munching on all these souls?

What actual downsides could be worse for Bob than the severe, repetitive moral injury that using his ability (at least, on humans) results in?

I note that Hello Kitty is under no obligation to be internally consistent or make sense! (In which respect, she is abominably realistic.)

Two parts to that, I think. First, the moral injury doesn't come through all that strongly. He feels physically ill using the power, and may feel sad about it generally, but it doesn't really come through (to me at least) as a big part of his narrative.

The second part is just the stuff I said. It feels like there could be a lot of fun ways to explore what is after all a tremendously powerful ability, and could come with equally tremendous real repercussions. I'd quite like to see him actually suffering some real consequence. Being psychically poisoned and losing a battle as a result, and having to deal with the realisation that the uber-weapon has failed - HE has failed - with much more riding on it than some ephemeral long-term moral injury. He had to rely on other stuff to get out of trouble before he had it - he feels over-reliant on one tool. And why wouldn't he, right? It's always just worked, even against gigantic opposition. Eating something bigger than your head feels like it could be more interesting if it had a fairly extreme immediate consequence. Though I admit having no reference point for the comparative size of an eater-of-souls's head :)

You seem to have missed Bob's repeated guilt trips throughout the series? (Or possibly been diverted because as the adversaries keep leveling up we see less and less of Bob ...)

My problem is that most readers don't want to read about a protagonist grappling with his inner demons, Thomas Covenant style. (And arguably Bob has done much worse things than TC, who is merely a vile and reprehensible rapist. Bob is a multiple murderer by The Delirium Brief ...)

But he's very good at rationalizing it. In a very irrational world at that point though.

Well, I read that into it; you made it clear he is very disturbed about the way he is becoming less human, and accumulating blood on his hands, especially 'collateral' lives. And I agree that reading pages of adult angst is nearly as off-putting as teenage angst; please don't go there.

Since this thought comes up, now I wonder that Bob hasn't had PTSD attacks. (And yes, I have a friend who was in 'Nam, and a bunch of us were in a restaurant, some years ago, when such an attack hit him.)

mention made of manifesting of eldritch horrors into human-originated mythos... there's already humans displaying godlike powers in modes not unlike comic book superheroes... why are there no eldritch horrors taking on the forms of characters from comics?

not just the usual villains but what about someone (something) looking for a socially respectable false front?

Spiderman(tm) but inside there's really a zillion wee flesh eating spiders... how's that for cleaning up crime? saving time 'n money skipping over trial-by-jury right into immediate chomping by eldritch horrors...

I'm wondering what happens when a bullied teenager deliberately lets into his skull an eldritch horror so he can bulk up into Captain America(tm) to gnaw thru drug dealers and Russian thugs and truncheon wielding fascists and amoral politicians

BTW: Captain America(tm) turns 82 this month... https://lite.cnn.com/2023/03/31/opinions/real-captain-america-history-jack-kirby-schwartz-ctrp

Charlie Stross @ 41:

You seem to have missed Bob's repeated guilt trips throughout the series? (Or possibly been diverted because as the adversaries keep leveling up we see less and less of Bob ...)

My problem is that most readers don't want to read about a protagonist grappling with his inner demons, Thomas Covenant style. (And arguably Bob has done much worse things than TC, who is merely a vile and reprehensible rapist. Bob is a multiple murderer by The Delirium Brief ...)

I understand the moral injury that comes from the things Bob has had to do, but what were his alternatives?

Is every killing a murder? What about self defense and defending the lives of others? What about those already possessed by feeders? ... or the tongue eaters in Colorado? Was that murder? ... or justifiable homicide?

Bob seems to believe he's become more of a monster than he has actually become. I'm glad he feels guilt & remorse for the things he's done and that he resists the temptation to abuse the power he's acquired. He's killed many persons & things, but I don't think that makes him a "murderer".

No, I do get that. And his introspection and demon-grappling is great - I've always like how it's evolved throughout his stories. He'd be a much less interesting character without it. I dunno, in Yokai it just felt like he's wielding a massive gun without experiencing any recoil, you know?

typo ==> 36

correction ==>360

And what would His Dread Majesty do to Crapita, who are currently Crapiter than usual.

Run it?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/31/capita-it-systems-fail-cyber-attack-nhs-fears

Feeling yourself to be more of a monster than other people seem to think you are is, in moderation, and if you are an incomplete monster, good.

Spiderman(tm) but inside there's really a zillion wee flesh eating spiders...

Spiders-Man is a canonical character in the Marvel multiverse and is, horribly, exactly what you imagined.

Today, while grocery shopping, I saw a mall ad display to show an ad for some soft drink... named 'Cult'. The Laundry series came immediately to my mind, for some reason.

In addition to that, yesterday I got to know that there is a bar called 'Bob's Laundry' in Helsinki and by chance I was at the movies in the same block today. Their webpages say that they have beer, wine, cocktails, and food, but I have no idea how good a place it is. That might be a fun place to visit in Helsinki if some of you come here some time - though no knowing how long it will be in business.

Also, combining Finnish modern (well, last century) fiction and the topical story here, I now wonder if Finland has a problem of Moomin trolls in the Laundry universe.

what would His Dread Majesty do to Crapita

Have you read the New Management books? What sector do you think HiveCo is a parody of?

As opposed to Raccoon Man, who is basically three stacked raccoons wearing a trench coat.

(If you're really unlucky when you meet Raccoon Man, the one at the top of the pile will be rabid.)

Also, combining Finnish modern (well, last century) fiction and the topical story here, I now wonder if Finland has a problem of Moomin trolls in the Laundry universe.

I suddenly had a crossover idea between this and Christopher Brookmyre's Scottish noir crime novel The Sacred Art of Stealing and had a vision of a bunch of bank robbers in Moomin costumes holding a high street bank's customers and staff hostage. Except they're not actually costumes, and what eldritch horror lurks in Moominmama's bottomless handbag ...?

For those of you better versed in Japanese folklore, exactly what is the difference between a yokai and a kami?

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die"

Is that a reference to Twitter legacy accounts?

Also there is the book Finn Family Moomintroll which has the character the Hobgoblin, whose hat does all kinds of weird things. (In Swedish the Hobgoblin is called 'Trollkarlen' which would be closer to 'The Magician' than to 'The Hobgoblin.)

So eldritch horror is kind of already in the stories!

A youkai is a spirit, usually evil but not always. The usual plot of youkai stories is that you mustn't engage with the youkai which can at first encounter appear human and even alluring. Refuse their attention, run away and you're normally safe. They can take odd physical forms like a folded umbrella with a single foot that hops after you, or a moving wall.

A kami is a god or goddess, usually humanoid but not always. They are usually benevolent and rarely evil. They can be fickle though. "Spirited Away" features several kami-samas such as a River God.

You (and DeMarquis) have given me a truly horrible brainworm - a Discworld/Laundry crossover called With Strange Aeons.

I want to read this now.

A youkai is a spirit, usually evil but not always. The usual plot of youkai stories is that you mustn't engage with the youkai which can at first encounter appear human and even alluring. Refuse their attention, run away and you're normally safe. They can take odd physical forms like a folded umbrella with a single foot that hops after you, or a moving wall.

Hmmm.

The more general point about yokai versus kami is that kami are more often real in the sense that there are shrines set up for them and they are worshipped. Yokai more often are fictional. The umbrella yokai is a classic example of that. There's a whole subgenre of yokai based on the idea that if you keep an old item around long enough, it develops its own personality and comes to life. These are often ephemera (straw sandals, parasols, old banking records turning into paper dragons, broken kitchen ceramics becoming paring knife-wielding miniature samurai, etc.). Mostly they seem to show up in manga (many are post WW2 in origin), and also in people stories people use to poke fun at those who hoard junk as opposed to buying new things and discarding worn-out things.

But the key point is that there's a big overlap between western ghost and fairy stories and Japanese yokai stories. If an entity in a story is supposed to be eerie or scary, it's normally a yokai. Most yokai have no more real-world presence than Rumpelstiltskin or orcs do.

But! Yes, some yokai are "real" in the sense that they purportedly show up outside of stories. Tengu (crow/kite spirits), fox spirits, and kappa water spirits fall into this category, as do some others. Some dai-tengu (great tengu) blur the line between tengu and kami, and the Kami Inari is considered a fox god, except when they're considered a fox goddess, or not relating to foxes at all Inari, among other things, is a commercial deity who in some ways is similar to the way we talk about Mammon on this blog, only more boundary blurring and arguably more fun. And Inari consorts with fox yokai who are beneficent...so long as they're in the service of Inari.

Hopefully that was sufficiently confusing?

Sack of hammers.

That's what comes to mind as I read the last twenty or so entries. Nice to have a non-Western mythos as source material. But it's still a bit elitist. Why not make it something we've had hands on experience? What's missing is eldritch horrors taking over a key aspect of the American identity, that demographic of white male tool user prone towards buying every silly thing sold by the big box stores (Home Depot, etc).

So now I want the next entry in the New Management and/or Laundry Saga to include enchanted hammers. A sack of enchanted hammers bought by ordinary people scattered across the United States.

Oh, sure there's Thor. But that was just the one hammer and he was a god (demi-god?) so that's not so impressively chaotic and by definition he is part the "ruling 1% elite". And while Fred Saberhagen did something with swords in context of magic, he did not allow for any comedic pratfalls nor differently engendered (nor minor religion) characters to express themselves.

So. "Sack of Hammers™". With the possibilities of not just e-books and comicbooks but also for wild 'n crazy game play in a MMOG set amongst maps derived from here-n-now shopping malls and fending off fascist rioters seeking to put their boot on the necks of any of us who are non-white-non-straight-non-Christian.

Or better yet, "Sack o' Hammerz™".

Why not make it something we've had hands on experience?

Well, if the Brit-American yokai--gremlins--make a organized break for Freedom* From Cthulhu in America, should the laundry support them?

We've got plenty of hands-on experience with gremlins, I think. But would you ally with them against an eldritch horror? Would winning be better? Or worse?

*Gremlin Underground Freedom Front, of course.

One of my deepest lasting regrets is that I didn't buy a Hello Kitty Fender guitar when they were available new for about $A200. Bright pink! Single pickup! What could be more metal?

If you can even find one on eBay, they're well north of $A1K now. :(

I just wish to express lots of Kudos to Bob (and, by extension, to Charlie) for having the wits to draw an Eternal Golden Braid when one was appropriate.

Heteromeles 64:

Only if you come up with a snarkier name than "Gremlin Underground Freedom Front". Perhaps something reverse-engineered to fit into "CROWBAR" or "MISDEED".

Why not make it something we've had hands on experience? What's missing is eldritch horrors taking over a key aspect of the American identity

The Laundry Files are not an American series. If you want American tropes, find an American author.

Nice to have a non-Western mythos as source material. But it's still a bit elitist. Why not make it something we've had hands on experience? What's missing is eldritch horrors taking over a key aspect of the American identity

Hang on... things that aren't written specifically for Americans (presumably of a certain demographic, but hey that doesn't really help much in this context, does it?) are elitist?

I'll assume you're aware there are some other people who buy books occasionally...

If you can even find one on eBay, they're well north of $A1K now. :(

The problem with that sort of thing is it doesn't scale. For instance if you bought 100 of them for A$20k back in the day, you would saturate the market and never get A$100k trying to sell them all at once (you'd have to pace it out, maybe 1 a year or something). And that's just in very modest pay-off-your-house-if-you-got-into-a-mortgage-20-plus-years-ago way.

Still fun of course :) I agree, it doesn't really get more metal than that.

So since this thread started I actually re-read Yokai Land to check whether I had questions I'd forgotten about. It was great, I particularly enjoyed the Möbius strip tactic.

The thing I found interesting was the suggestion that the Miyamoto Group is a private sector entity in the strange mix of public-private that Japanese corporate culture generates, and I found it interesting in contrast to the depiction of European and US occult agencies (drawing I guess on the Thunderball one for the Euros... along with the death-by-powerpoint-literally moment).

It led me to wonder about occult defence in the Laundryverse around the world. And Yokai Land itself mentions China and (South) Korea as running some capable services in that space. It leads me to wonder about SE Asia, Africa and (as you might expect I suppose) Oceania and what elder gods are catered to in various local jurisdictions.

But I note that we're coming to the end of the Laundryverse, and it seems unlikely that a two-book series wrapping it up will include space to explore any of these (even if you had inclination to do so).

Not necessarily saying that bunyips, yowies and min min lights are too much fun to be missing out on.

Not terribly germane to the topic, but just for the record, "Dilbert Stark" is the best nickname for Elon Musk I've ever heard and I'm going to be calling him that exclusively from now on.

Charlie Stross 68:

Damian 69:

I'm spitballing 'n snarking. Not just bullshitting, I'm trying on the notion of being "an American author". Just wondering aloud if I can generate a plot sufficiently (uhm) eldritch within a spicy, snarky context to produce an entertaining if occasionally terror-filled read. Such as an operative of the 'Black Chamber' sent off to investigate low value reports of oddities. And he finds himself kinda-sorta cheering on the law breakers given their targeting and how little sympathy anybody not themselves wealthy-powerful-pampered has for those targeted.

"US occult agencies" -- there's gonna end up being a dozen or more given how bureaucracy sprawls in a cash-rich environment like Washington DC -- get distracted by the big picture (or rather the exploding, melting bigger picture) and fail to recognize there's modest modes of infiltration by eldritch horrors.

If not germlins, then brownies or other European demonic immigrants. Plus the lingering traces of Caribbean demons, those not completely faded away. With First Nations' mythos suddenly empowered to turn the tables upon invaders and repay 500 years of abuse. But not big stuff, nor high profile. Not so much evil inflicted upon evil doers as minor miseries and major pranks.

Enhanced electricians. Spellcasts by plumbers. Perfectly poured concrete by wistful contractors. Enchanted hammers in the hands of carpenters. Indeed, a "Sack o' Hammerz™".

Men and women of not-so-high-society yielding to the temptation to spank a brat, one of those all too common overly pampered women (nicknamed "Karen" in social media) who make everyone around 'em just a little less happy. Weddings sadly bring out the worst in some folk. So, why not reverse the usual shit rolling downhill from the rich upon their employees? Such as a rather loathsome Bridezilla by way of reversing the flow on every toilet in a very expensive hotel on a beach paradise island. One of those high profile 'destination weddings' which seem less about celebrating love and romantic commitment, more about flaunting wealth and high society connections. (Any resemblance to Mar-A-Lago merely incidental.)

Or perhaps there's the haunting of that 'white elephant' left behind by a spendthrift descendant of John Rockefeller, a massive assemblage of marble and snootiness which nobody wants to invest the necessary $50 million to bring up to code. The plumbers hired to make critical repairs don't get paid. (A habitual misdeed by seemingly every wealthy inbred family across the US.)

What intrigues me is there had to have been abusive powerful-wealthy-connected families in Japan who find themselves plagued by yokai brought to life by lingering rage of those robbed-abused-shunned as eldritch horrors flow into reality.

Ditto, various European locales. And then there's South America. With Australia another place where dormant indigenous spirits gain renewed potency.

Payback is overdue, hmmm?

Plus the lingering traces of Caribbean demons, those not completely faded away. With First Nations' mythos suddenly empowered to turn the tables upon invaders and repay 500 years of abuse. But not big stuff, nor high profile. Not so much evil inflicted upon evil doers as minor miseries and major pranks.

Missing a continent, did you notice?

Check out Eglash's African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design ( https://www.amazon.com/African-Fractals-Modern-Computing-Indigenous-ebook/dp/B000SEJGHG/ ). West African religions, including voudon, have been incorporating concepts like recursion, infinity, and mathematical chaos for a long time.

One might posit that the mess in the Laundryverse started when indigenous sorcerers, especially in Africa but also in the Americas, taught the imperial nuisances an incomplete and problematic version of the knowledge base they'd been using to keep the Great Old Ones in check. They'd probably hoped that the invaders would destroy themselves and go away.

While that strategy didn't work, modern Euro-magic may be missing some essential components their predecessors learned the hard way, hence the Laundryverse. A simple way to acknowledge this might be to include a throwaway line that the Great Old Ones are staying away from Central America, West Africa, and perhaps the eastern Himalayas (the Taoist heartland).

Another way to deal is with a postscript wherein climate refugees from West Africa and start cleaning up the mess made by the New Management. Given racial biases, I seriously doubt such a story would sell, especially in the US. But it would be apt.

I'll note that HBO's adaptation of *Lovecraft Country already went here. They didn't bother to do anything overtly African with their magic, merely suggested that the magic in the show had been stolen from black and indigenous cultures while wedding it to normal Hollywood CGI and HBO's pointless transgressiveness.

"US occult agencies" -- there's gonna end up being a dozen or more given how bureaucracy sprawls in a cash-rich environment like Washington DC

Tell me you didn't read The Labyrinth Index without telling me you didn't read The Labyrinth Index, why don't you?

Along with Indus Valley and East Asian cultures that are contemporaneous with Egyptian culture or predate it a bit, through to African and Australian cultural traditions that make those all look like newcomers. It's probably too late in the Laundry series for the step-back-tile-pivot perspective shift that takes all those in, at least meaningfully, but I guess it's not off limits for the New Management series.

But I'm really just talking to my fleeting sense of this stuff in the background, not floating ideas or suggestions (at all, don't see it as my place).

The "Wisdom of the Ancients" was done to death in the 19th century; please let's not resuscitate that trope. Yes, some extremely good stories could be written based on those mythologies, but it would need someone familiar with them and their associated cultures to do a good job.

I rather like the idea of a resurgent Benin empire rescuing Europe, but it would very hard to make plausible without moving into the alternative universe trope :-)

Charlie Stross 75:

I'm trying to avoid stepping on your toes, whilst at the same time seeking out a plotline to expand into a story worthy of reading. My limited experienced with the spook agencies is counterbalanced by misery of having contact with multiple regulatory entities with overlapping and contradictory sets of investigations-authority-policies-procedures-regulations

Back in the early months post-2008 financial meltdown I got dragged into a project attempting to untangle the furball of twenty-plus entities laying claim to regulating banking. The team could never quite assemble a full set of applicable source material because bureaucrats were disinclined towards admitting whatever they had in place due to "reasons". So we never was able to laid down what aspects of IT and/or accounting and/or trades were impacted by which specific paragraphs. All necessary if we wanted to assemble a checklist demonstrating compliance by way of 'this' piece of technology rather than 'that'.

I'm trying to wrap my head around how much worst things get in turf struggles amongst spook agencies. And if telling about that will be entertaining if I write it. I might not be a good enough writer to make it anything but tedium mulch and bilge water.

I fully agree about the "wisdom of the ancients" trope. Considering the second sentence, it's the need for familiarity of the mythologies and cultures that I was alluding to when I discussed it being late in the series for that... OGH has well-earned track record for deep-diving into the areas he takes an interest in, but with only a couple of books left it might not be an effective use of effort (unless transferable to the New Management series, I guess). And as also alluded obliquely, it might not be quite the tilt-shift perspective change he has in mind.

Forgot my response to your second paragraph. Yes to Benin (and also Kongo), but I was thinking of older things. Dhar Tichitt connecting prehistoric pastoralism to historical Ghana and Mali Empires (in other words continuity of Mandé peoples) for one example. Like you say, it could be done very well but it's a heck of a deep dive.

I'm trying to wrap my head around how much worst things get in turf struggles amongst spook agencies.

It's bad enough that there is an actual organization currently called the US Intelligence Community that acts as an umbrella and clearing house for roughly 19 primary intelligence-gathering organizations, to keep them from stomping on each others' ties. Per wiki:

The Washington Post reported in 2010 that there were 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the United States that were working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, and that the intelligence community as a whole would include 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances. According to a 2008 study by the ODNI, private contractors make up 29% of the workforce in the U.S. intelligence community and account for 49% of their personnel budgets.

There are probably numerous comedy thrillers in the vein of an updated Richard Condon that could be written in this setting.

Random example: our protagonist is an auditor who pulls on a thread and accidentally starts to unravel the trail of an entire covert national space program set up to rival the National Reconnaissance Office, which is itself is the official covert national space program (they build and operate spy satellites). It exists purely due to bureaucratic/inter-office rivaly, which is eventually traced back to a turf war over ownership of an office coffee machine in 1957. By 2022 has led the world to the brink of a US/China/India space war due to tit-for-tat shooting down spysats ...

Every time I see those figures, I wonder how many people there are left in their government doing useful work.

Just read it, good fun. Not sure why presumable expert Dr. Suzuki decided to carry the idiot ball and get herself possessed (or more possessed, whatever) when the whole story is building up to how eldritch The Kitty is. Anyway, hope she's OK after all that.

Note that Dr. Suzuki isn't entirely human -- she may be a shapeshifting bakaneko, and as such fundamentally more vulnerable to Hello Kitty. (It's deliberately unclear: just an indicator that, like the Black Chamber and -- arguably -- the Laundry, the Miyamoto Group use supernatural entities. NB: the Eater of Souls is clearly supernatural too. That's the direction the Laundry Files is moving in towards the climax: nobody human left alive, the survivors just remember having once been human.)

I know it was a typo, but I’m going to reify “germlins” as “like gremlins but infect instead of damage/destroy“.

I'll point out that possession by yokai is a thing in Japan, especially with foxes. That's how I read Dr. Suzuki. And the Eaters of Souls.

I assume this kind of possession is akin to a corporate takeover that leaves the subsidiary's management structure largely intact?

Earlier Laundry books tended to each invoke a particular type of spy novel. Is there something similarly referential to a particular subgenre in this novella?

I'd like to see a John Le Carre pastische for the last novel - The Honourable Schoolboy comes to mind, given that the operation is at least half a failure - but OGH has made it clear he's agin it! (That said, I think we're far-enough away from the beginning of the Laundry Files that the original reasons for being anti Le Carre are no longer operative (mistaking anything for Declare by Powers stopped being anything to worry about a decade ago.))

stripping the blue ticks from verified but non-paying Twitter accounts

Well you still have it. Are you in the grace period or are you important enough to not have to pay?

Is there something similarly referential to a particular subgenre in this novella?

No.

I stopped doing the spy author pastiches after 4 novels, and switched to urban fantasy genres for the next three novels and a novella (Equoid). Then the Laundry Files acquired so much internal lore that pastiches didn't really work/didn't go where I wanted them to.

The New Management books so far are author homages: not "in the style of" a given author, but "referring to the works of", in order, J. M. Barrie/Peter Pan (Dead Lies Dreaming), P. L. Travers/Mary Poppins and Sweeny Todd (Quantum of Nightmares), and The Prisoner/Patrick McGoohan plus the entire Regency romance genre (Season of Skulls).

A Conventional Boy (which will probably be the next Laundry Novel, but isn't part of the main story arc) is neither a tribute nor a homage, but riffs very heavily on the 1980s Satanic D&D Panic (and a heavy pinch of LitRPG, at least in the second half).

It's likely that the final Laundry Files novel and any future New Management books will be things unto themselves rather than homages/tributes.

I have no idea. But I plan to mock Dilbert Stark mercilessly until my blue tick goes away (or my account is suspended) after Season of Skulls is launched.

👍

Excellent.

If they drop the legacy blue checks, then whether it's brought or legacy will be known at a glance, and somehow they're not convinced yet they want that. I don't see why, really.

@36 - 50.

My impression was that Bob died in The Fuller Memorandum, but the Eater of Souls has been imprinted with his memories and thinks it's Bob.

Oh, I just want one for me. It's not like I have too many guitars …

My impression was that Bob died in The Fuller Memorandum, but the Eater of Souls has been imprinted with his memories and thinks it's Bob.

I think it's okay to spoil the Fuller Memorandum? If not, delete this.

I'll admit I was confused by that sequence. My understanding of it is that Bob cut himself free of his body to animate as many bodies as possible in the cemetery where the rite was taking place. The rite was also designed to expel his soul and install the Eater of Souls, which was in Angleton. So instead, the rite reinstalled Bob in his own body, and he became an Eater of Souls. Rereading it, it looks to me like he became the EoS when the cultists did a binding ritual. Was it that they bound the EoS to him at that point, but since he'd already been reinstalled, he's got two entities in his wetware? I'm not enough of a computer geek to understand what happened, and this looks to me like a computer FUBAR rewritten as magic.

It looks like removing verification is a manual process - how many would they have expected to want to remove? - and removing all the legacy blue ticks will require Twitter to write a new process. Which they're short on knowledgeable people to do.

i think the best-known manga/anime with a big yokai element (apart from the lamentable "yokai watch" pokemon ripoff) is gegege no kitarou: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeGeGe_no_Kitar%C5%8D

nojay probably knows more about it than me

So instead, the rite reinstalled Bob in his own body, and he became an Eater of Souls.

Not quite: in software terms, the rite reinstalled Bob as a dangling pointer to the Eater of Souls (which was already instantiated). So when Angleton died/became inaccessible, Bob was left as the sole reference to the EoS. (Yes, it's a garbage collection error rewritten as magic.)

Can I check; this is a garbage collector and not an exception handler? :-)

Charlie Stross @ 90:

A Conventional Boy (which will probably be the next Laundry Novel, but isn't part of the main story arc) is neither a tribute nor a homage, but riffs very heavily on the 1980s Satanic D&D Panic (and a heavy pinch of LitRPG, at least in the second half).

I had to look up LitRPG and interestingly the Wikipedia entry for LitRPG references:

Charles Stross's 2007 Halting State.

... as an "Early example".

Kool hunh?

Definitely a reference count based garbage collector. It turns out that any interpreter/compiler that implements Old Enochian requires one: it's part of the language spec. This makes perfect sense to me as being part of the natural order of things, and I'm sure it would to any geek of my generation. Even fornicators like P@u1 Gr@h@m would fit in this category (most Lisp implementations implement a similar GC, right?).

I think The Nightmare Stacks confirmed these details for me... making it canon that Old Enochian does variable interpolation in a way that allows "using a variable in a variable name" and all that. There was a well known (and often copied and pasted) quote in comp.misc.lang.perl that went: "I'm not sure what your original problem was, but the answer is to use a hash", but the point always was that is a language facility and where such things are not provided it's necessary to work around them.

Yes. This is a slight digression, but may be interesting. Please delete it if it is too off-topic

A while back (1970s), the garbage collector fanatics were promoting such things (and, especially, reference-counted ones) as being a solution to the dangling pointer problem(s). Well, as any fule kno, all they do is to change it into the disconnected vertex and wrong version problems. The opposing viewpoint said (correctly) that almost all algorithms that need pointers could be implemented better in other ways (e.g. dynamic arrays or a unique owning pointer and bound link pointers). The latter camp lost.

The point is that the proposed alternative ways make 'program proving' much easier and, in particular, can mean that the ownership and validity of an object are always determinable in static time. As you are clearly aware, the Eater of Souls transfer would not have happened without an explicit ritual to transfer ownership from Angleton to Bob. A binding ritual would simply have failed (object already owned), and a linking one would mean that Bob's linkage was invalidated on Angleton's disappearance. Ergo, you are correct, and Enochian necessarily is a reference-count language :-)

Can I choose something else from the ECC (Enochian Compiler Collection?)

103, 104 - I had to check, because a lot of the code is significantly different, although at least some of the variables can have potentially or actually the same or similar names and structures...

Actually, an exception handler might be more elegant if one were valid, so:-

-- In specification,
EX_Angleton_Not_Found : Exception ;
--Other globals
--In body
Raise EX_Angleton_Not_Found ;

EXCEPTION ;
When EX_Angleton_Not_Found =>
Eater_of_Souls ;= Bob ;
When Others => Raise ;

I wonder what the Enochian equivalent of Rust's borrow checker would be...

That brings up the possibility that Angleton "committed" the necessary code to make Bob his successor. Interesting.

In case anyone wants to see a (modified) pink Hello Kitty Stratocaster in action:

https://tonefiend.com/pickups/hello-kitty-strat-not-for-pussies/

Definitely a reference count based garbage collector. It turns out that any interpreter/compiler that implements Old Enochian requires one: it's part of the language spec. This makes perfect sense to me as being part of the natural order of things, and I'm sure it would to any geek of my generation. Even fornicators like P@u1 Gr@h@m would fit in this category (most Lisp implementations implement a similar GC, right?).

No, most Lisp implementations will use a GC that can cope correctly with cycles. I don't know any Lisp implementations that use reference counting. That would be rather like an SQL server using bubble sort for each query. I would expect commercial Common Lisp implementations to use a "Generational GC".

You don't have to use or like Lisp to accept that the Lisp world has been playing this game a long time, and has become very good at it. ;) (Also see the Smalltalk world.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_garbage_collection

IIRC it's python which has a refcounting gc.

pip install cthulhu exists, probably plausible deniability

I politely suggest we postpone any further discussion on this topic until we've passed #300. Otherwise you'll be talking to yourself - I'm done with this subject for now.

Sack of hammers.

Of course something quite similar already exists.

I've been on a Hello Kitty flight (from Taipei to Hong Kong if I recall correctly). Pink plane. Pink seats. Pink gate area; more pink seats.

During boarding: Gate agent: "Sorry, sir, we've run out of Hello Kitty passports." Me: "Thank goodness!"

Yup, there's all sorts of crazy Kitty-branded stuff in Japan! (Feorag even caught a Hello Kitty commuter train into Osaka at one point.)

Yup, there's all sorts of crazy Kitty-branded stuff in Japan! (Feorag even caught a Hello Kitty commuter train into Osaka at one point.)

Ummmm...how many Kitty-formatted katanas and ninjatos are out there? Pepto-bismol time.

I know jack all about programming languages, but in more normal magical terms, are you saying that Bob is channeling the EoS?

Oooh, I had An Idea. It's yokai related.

As noted above, some yokai are animated junk. That inspired me.

It's true in both the Real World and the Laundryverse that we're on the backside of the postwar Baby Boom. It's also true that Boomers are consumers, to the point where the gods of the Laundryverse are gods of consumption, too.

Anyway, Boomers are leaving behind mountains of obsolete stuff. Some of it's just sad, some of it's the object of cult worship by collectors, otaku, and stranger people.

In the Laundryverse, this metastasizing swarm of abandoned, obsessed-over, haunted stuff seems ripe for random outbreaks of yokai and related phenomena. Heck, I would be a garbage worker in the later 2020s in the Laundryverse. Too often, the trash would be fighting to get out of the can and back to its home of decades or centuries. And landfills and rubbish shops? fuggeddaboudem.

are you saying that Bob is channeling the EoS?

I thought it was more the Eater of Souls was channelling Bob?

See #100 above for Word of God: Not quite: in software terms, the rite reinstalled Bob as a dangling pointer to the Eater of Souls (which was already instantiated). So when Angleton died/became inaccessible, Bob was left as the sole reference to the EoS. (Yes, it's a garbage collection error rewritten as magic.)

So if I understand rightly, object SoulofBob was ejected from his body, made available as the only soul the rite could grab, and reinstalled into his own body as a particular instance of a particular EoS object. If this is correct, he's still Bob (hence the moral hazard mentioned above), but also the EoS.

What I don't get is whether object SoulOfBob is a pointer to a particular EoS object, or an instance of that EoS. In the former case, channeling might be an appropriate metaphor.

I think the main thing here is that it's possible to do use the OO paradigm in languages that don't explicitly support it, so long as it is possible to build arbitrarily complex data structures, and pass functions as parameters (the OO paradigm has this in common with the functional paradigm). That such structures are possible in Old Enochian is something Alex makes clear in Nightmare Stacks but only via somewhat indirect means and some of the implications include that there are basically no built-in safety rails. Things like type or class enforcement would be left to the user. That includes class inheritance, and that's a key thing here. OO languages forbid or at least restrict multiple inheritance to some extent, so the class inheritance tree is a DAG. languages that just happen to support OO don't do this, so multiple inheritance is very possible. And in this case maybe it means Bob, who is an object instance of the Human class with various Geek subclass attributes now also inherits attributes from the EaterOfSouls class due to {insert something here} changes in the structure of reality caused by the invocations the cultists made. That includes the CommandTheDead() method employed in Apocalypse Codex (though I'm sure that's clearer in Old Enochian).

Well, I think Old Enochian is more like Ada, and is an object based language rather than having full OO.

Something like the binja fighters in "Un Lun Dun" ( a YA novel by China Mieville ) ?

I'm actually thinking of the config/macro language of a MUD client I used to play with. Because it supported "using a variable in a variable name", it meant if you were careful enough you could build arbitrarily complex data structures and that would include objects and classes. But in terms of implementing things like inheritance you were entirely on your own, it was all in the increasingly complex lexical variable names and whatever semantic structure you imposed on that. The language itself had no concept of it at all, yet you could still implement things that were quite abstract.

And Hello Kitty Shinkansen: https://www.jrailpass.com/blog/hello-kitty-shinkansen

more pictures: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hello+kitty+shinkansen&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images

Re: 'Japanese yokai stories. If an entity in a story is supposed to be eerie or scary, it's normally a yokai ...'

Like Ryuk in 'Death Note'? He's the god/demi-god of death who got bored with his immortality and decided to create what looks like a diary/notebook and leaves it as bait for a human to pick up.* The only reason I know of this character is because it's a musical (based on a manga).

Just looked it up: There are 15 different musicals based on anime/manga - slightly higher than the number of musicals based on the Brothers Grimm. At this point, I'm wondering why Disney hasn't come out with its own artificially sweetened version of a manga/anime musical animated film. As for how this relates to the topic: considering that at least several songs from animated musicals have over a billion views on YT (or Spotify downloads), this could be a very fast, cheap, easy and effective way of spreading a spell or counterspell. These things are [ahem] viral after all.

*This musical keeps being brought back in SKorea with the same male lead (Kwang-Ho Hong - 'Hurricane' is the top song - see below). IMO, the central character's journey is similar to Bob's: tapping into 'evil' to accomplish a 'greater good'. Ahem ... I have some issues/questions about the ethical set-up: does secrecy about bad stuff/potential dangers do more good or harm? I know it's a trope but having this repeatedly presented as normal background in fiction normalizes it in real-life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Tv23T8Hi8

At this point, I'm wondering why Disney hasn't come out with its own artificially sweetened version of a manga/anime musical animated film.

(Not entirely joking) I believe the answer involves:

A. Studio Ghibli

B. Lawyers

C. Market share more recently

The problem the MausHaus has at the moment is that a big chunk of their profits depend(ed) on revenues from mainland China, for things like big, dumb CGI movies. Anime won't play so well there.

IIRC (double check me!), the MausHaus was involved in bringing some of the big Ghibli movies to the US. While the people who saw them loved them, the market share was small compared with Maus animation--and those occasionally flop too.

Now, if Da Maus could figure out a way to do Korean-inflected animation * with K-Pop stars doing the singing and Korean cultural norms (read US conservative), that might sell well around the world. That's why K-Pop does so well in places like the Philippines and Middle East: it's less risque than US and European norms.

Could MausHaus do that and be profitable? Ummmmmmmmmm....

• Korean folklore has yokai-like beings, although they tend to be killers more than tricksters. Still, there are plenty of supernatural K-dramas for the Maus to dangle a pointer onto.

So...what you're saying is that one of the strange loops in the Laundryverse is that its reality can be reprogrammed using languages that can arbitrarily define objects and classes of objects using structures that are cyclic graphs?

Re: 'MausHaus was involved in bringing some of the big Ghibli movies ...'

I'm unfamiliar with anime apart from that particular musical. Anyways, when I looked up that studio I saw the below blurb that MausHaus '... announced an expansion of its 70-year collaboration with the Japanese publishing house, Kodansha ... , to license exclusive anime titles ... which will launch exclusively on Disney+ and Disney+ Hotstar in January 2023.'

So apart from definitely adding anime to their genres, this story tells me that a dedicated MausHaus channel is likely more profitable than the cinema circuit. At the same time though I wonder how this would impact sales/revenues of their movies in a physical form: I think MH made almost as much money selling these animated movies on Beta, VHS, and DVD as they made through the cinemas. In my family, I think we bought every animated MH film in up to three different formats because kids will re-watch the same movie over and over and over again. (Whenever we updated the tech, we had to get the most liked movies in the new format. Two machines conked out with MH movies trapped inside - Beta & VHS formats.)

You do know that for them, you leave out a tin of soldering paste and some liquid flux?

Oh, no, I want one with some Wisdom Of The Ancients (tm). Complete... with misspellings (in the ancient language) and typos and missing fragments (cut the red wire (missing: after you cut the blue).....

Off-topic... but I've seen William Shattner complain "what, you're going to take away my blue tick, after giving you all this free content for bupkiss?"

Or, in *Nix terms, there were two hard links (rather than the much more common soft links) to the EoS....

Think of it this way: there's the EoS, who really isn't part of this universe (supernatural entity, right?). He has a primary link to Angleton, who is his expression in this universe. My take is that the Rite set up a secondary link to Bob. When Angleton is taken out, Bob becomes the primary link, and therefore expresses the EoS.

It's not OOP, it's a spanning tree protocol.

I humbly submit a possibly fun fiction idea. I couldn't possibly write it myself unless the brain fog went thoroughly away. And, if it did go away, I've got a considerable backlog of other concepts to address, so nope. Enjoy it, run with it if you like... I renounce ownership of the concept.

The idea is that a computer researcher and arcanist begins to suspect that Old Enochian is logically identical to a modern programming language, and starts to dig into the languages to prove the supposition.

The modern language is something cool and sound but perhaps not mainstream (e. g. Clojure, which is a Lisp that supports pure functions). Old Enochian is whatever you think it should be.

As the protagonist tries to prove the logical equivalence (and construct a cross-compiler), evidence builds that she or he is being surveilled -- or hunted -- by dreadful intelligences from beyond spacetime. People who know about the research begin inexplicably to go dark. Files are removed from Github. Etc. A fairly straightforward narrative of paranoid terror.

How does it end?

In tragedy, as a test of the cross-compiler leads to death or insanity?

As comedy ("OMFG it was VB all along!")?

As a grand twist founded in computer science?

All yours.

Our simulation runs on Windows ME. This has been known for some time.

An (obviously) unsupported version of Windows Mobile running on an ill-fated novelty phone concept that was a handheld take on a singing fish. Or alternatively, to tilt back to the OP, an early Hello Kitty smart phone.

Our simulation runs on Windows ME. This has been known for some time.

There was a lovely fan-made Matrix short film based on that idea. It ends, of course, in mid-battle when the universe freezes up with a "bonk" and a window appears in mid air complaining about an error.

Ah, it's even on youtube: Matrix XP

?? That sounds to me very much like how the Laundry Files began in the first place? Apart from the deliberate directed research vs. accidentally getting too close for comfort aspect, that is. Maybe your protagonist's name could be Stewart.

Oh, dear. Now I'm imagining that on a Hitachi IEP.

IIRC it's Singapore where they have Hello Kitty police uniforms for cops who have been misbehaving.

Blarf! Are they licensed?

I don't recall the article I saw suggesting otherwise, but I retained so little of it that I've posted all I think I know already :)

Apparently it's Thailand: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6932801.stm

Apparently it is (or was, the article is several years old) Thailand: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6932801.stm

Nahhh... he runs lint on his code (a bug-checker that's been around since The Beginning), and forgets one flag (otherwise, you get more complaints than code)... and it catches the bug that allows the critters from beyond.

OOP? Object Oriented Programming? No, no, hard links are an o/s thing. If you have a "soft/symnbolic" link, and delete the file it points to, the file's gone, and the link's bad. With a hard link, the file is not gone until the last reference to it's gone.

Actually...

The purpose of our universe is to simulate parts of other universes.

And our universe is, in itself, a simulation, produced by multiple other universes.

And these other universes are simulations as well, all run on multiple systems.

And if you could draw a graph of how all these virtual universes simulate each other and are simulated by others, you'd find the graph is both completely cyclic and completely reticulated.

The purpose of our universe is to simulate part of another universe.

That theme shows up in "Stones of Significance" by David Brin…

With all the talk of Hello Kitty, and the comments on another thread about The Hu (a really cool Mongolian metal band) I thought I should share this:

A traditional ger covered in modern canvas, and a motorbike with a traditionally-embroidered saddle blanket on a Hello Kitty fabric. Mongolia is on my list of places to return to… but it's not a terribly good place to be a Canadian, thanks to some rather rapacious mining companies. :-(

I know what links are. The distinction I was drawing was between programming and network configuration.

But it's not programming...

No. "Spanning Tree" is how networks make sure they don't loop - it makes sure there's only one path between two points. So if both Bob and Angleton are linked to Eater of Souls, there can only be one path, lest there be a loop and reality go pear-shaped.

I understand spanning tree - I was a sr. Linux sysadmin before I retired. This is different.

Right. I get that it works under a number of different programming paradigms. However, it also works as networking.

Sure... but I don't agree that the EoS fits into a network paradigm (Oh, Ghu, did I just use the "p" word?). I see it as a singular entity, with originally one link to express into our universe (or rather, OGH's). Then the ritualists came along, and gave it another, secondary link. As long as Angleton was, well, "not dead", that link was primary and active in a sense. When he was removed, the secondary link of Bob became active.

Sure... but I don't agree that the EoS fits into a network paradigm (Oh, Ghu, did I just use the "p" word?). I see it as a singular entity, with originally one link to express into our universe (or rather, OGH's). Then the ritualists came along, and gave it another, secondary link. As long as Angleton was, well, "not dead", that link was primary and active in a sense. When he was removed, the secondary link of Bob became active.

Ummm, after the Fuller Memorandum, Bob was a junior-grade EoS (SoulMuncher?) while Angleton was not dead. Presumably the rite itself made him some sort of EoS, and then he inherited the full preta manger franchise from Angleton when the latter passed the great event horizon and went into eternity?

It's not OOP, it's a spanning tree protocol.

I like this, and I would like to explore how it works. Angelton and the Eater of Souls have a link layer (level 2) connection and share a broadcast domain, while Angleton acts as a router (level 3) to the rest of the network. The events of Fuller Memorandum provide Bob with another link layer connection to the EoS, and therefore Bob is now also in the same broadcast domain (which is why Angleton notices when Bob is connected). But that creates a spanning tree loop, prompting a root node election and an arbitrary cut-off somewhere in the network. Thankfully the cutoff doesn't leave Angleton like a marionette with cut strings, nor Bob isolated from Angleton or the EoS (and demonstrated in Apocalypse Codex, he's connected with EoS just fine).

Angleton's sequestration may prompt another root election, of course, and there may no longer be a loop.

Once sequestered, Angleton would be a slower connection which delivers lower QOS.

The whole networking metaphor is terrible and wrong (and intensely irritating to me). Stop it.

....

So changing the subject, I'm wondering roughly how many magical languages we've seen in the Laundryverse, approximately. I think Enochian is the only one named, but are there others?

It's the only one named, although it's clear that there are dialects -- the Alfar speak one dialect, and there are references to "old Enochian" (as distinct from something else).

Obviously there must be other languages, but it's unspecified so far.

Thanks!

Now I'm wondering if the closest thing to a Creator Divinity in the Laundryverse is the OmniCompiler.

I don't think that OGH has been replaced by an AI, but perhaps I am mistaken :-)

Re: '... motorbike with a traditionally-embroidered saddle blanket on a Hello Kitty fabric.'

Yep - what a modern day Attila & Horde would ride. It'd be interesting to see a cross cultural comparison of what items various cultures have kept unchanged and which they've updated. For example: Although knee length kilts are currently very strongly identified as a piece of Scottish tradition, they only became a symbol of Scottish identity in the 18th century as a form of anti-English protest. Also, I think it's the tartan/plaid that's the real symbol. So this understanding of what is or is not the true cultural symbol might eventually completely fade from Scottish cultural memory. (I've been to a few Scottish festivals where several vendors were selling leather 'kilts' - goth/metalhead Scots, pretty interesting look.)

Greg - I left a longish comment re: your comment about allotments.

It'd be interesting to see a cross cultural comparison of what items various cultures have kept unchanged and which they've updated.

Interestingly, in Mongolia many of the men wear traditional clothing, while the women wear western clothing. This contrasts with other countries where the women (must) wear traditional clothing while the men are free to wear jeans etc.

I don't think that OGH has been replaced by an AI, but perhaps I am mistaken :-)

Good point. I'd say that being the OmniCompiler is one the aspects of his essential nature as the Laundryverse Polyfather.

Sincere apologies. I knew it was terrible but jumped into it out of pure mischievous silliness. Didn't intend to be annoying.

I'm curious about how the relationship or similarity between natural language, programming language and the language of ritual magic works, I guess at least partly because it would occasionally affect plot points. But it's a linguistics point in a way: can you build the features of a programming language in normal speech just by explaining them in sufficient detail?

Although knee length kilts are currently very strongly identified as a piece of Scottish tradition, they only became a symbol of Scottish identity in the 18th century as a form of anti-English protest.

ORLY? It's a bit more complex than that ...

They were popularized by King George IV's state visit to Scotland in 1822, and then sustained by Queen Victoria from the 1840s onwards (she was highland-mad: if she was alive today she'd be a Diana Gabaldon fan). More from the Met Museum.

If I have it right, it was primarily the belted plaid (great kilt) that was banned in the 18th century. That had the great advantage for irregular warfare that it could be used as a blanket as well as clothing. Yes, I have worn one :-)

Agreed. The philamhor was practicable clothing, particularly worn over a shirt, unlike the "Prince Charlie". ;-)

But it's a linguistics point in a way: can you build the features of a programming language in normal speech just by explaining them in sufficient detail?

That's why I joke about the Omnicompiler. In biological terms, what you're describing crudely matches a ribosome. The functional core of a ribosome is three pieces of RNA: two clamp together onto a stretch of DNA to enable other bits of RNA to translate DNA sequences into amino acid sequences, while the third piece folds back on itself to align the first two bits properly, then gets excised.

Obviously speech isn't RNA, although it would be cool if someone took the "magical speech acts like RNA on the protean (protein?) reality" and ran with it. But basically for magical speech, you need a system (the Omnicompiler) that clamps on when it hears the proper start sequence ("Hear me O gods") and parses the next bits as magic until it hears the end sequence ("amen"), then compiles what's between into code or whatever.

In theory, a being with sufficient knowledge of "reality assembler language" could create a new magical language in part by reciting a new compiler in an existing magical language and causing it to install itself on reality. How would you debug and test such an infernal thing? Haven't a clue. You tell me.

Changing the subject slightly...What I'd personally like to see is a system wherein nonhuman spirits make magic happen, and a magical ritual is basically an instructable passed between beings that do not share a common language, body plan, sensorium, or even a consensus reality. In such a world, spells and rituals would exist simply because everyone on both sides of the veil more or less agrees on what is supposed to happen, so if one side does something, the other responds by rote. Magicians would prize perfect performance of rituals for fairly obvious reasons.

Creating new magic in this system could get amusingly interesting.

This is your cue to list all the stories that have used this plot device...

Changing the subject slightly...What I'd personally like to see is a system wherein nonhuman spirits make magic happen, and a magical ritual is basically an instructable passed between beings that do not share a common language, body plan, sensorium, or even a consensus reality. In such a world, spells and rituals would exist simply because everyone on both sides of the veil more or less agrees on what is supposed to happen, so if one side does something, the other responds by rote. Magicians would prize perfect performance of rituals for fairly obvious reasons.

Creating new magic in this system could get amusingly interesting.

This is your cue to list all the stories that have used this plot device...

I haven't read the whole thing (I stopped reading it some time ago), but it sounds amazingly similar to the parts I did read in "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". I stopped reading it because the author "leveled up" the main character too fast, but as an "alternate history" of HP it was fun for a bit.

(It was an ancient Atlantean all powerful computer up to the part I read).

Oh yeah, you can find HPatMoR here:

https://hpmor.com/

Y'know, it strikes me that all the emphasis has been on the Necrnomicon, and addressing the deities in Enochian.

I'd find it interesting if someone found an original, 400 year old mss written by Dee and Digges personally, with parts where all the copies copied a typo. and the effect of someone using the correct words. (I can't imagine anyone here doesn't know where "Enochian" comes from.)

Duh, I didn't check far enough - not Digges, but Kelley.

Keep in mind that the Necronomicon is merely the Latin Translation of Al Azif, which was what the Mad Arab titled his book. The chances of a 'scriveners error' over the course of multiple centuries is very high, of course.

Re: Kilt - history

Thanks for the article link! Especially liked that they mentioned the leather kilts. For a while I was thinking that that was just an NoAm twist on a 'foreign' custom/symbol. Yes, the history is somewhat more complex - those details pile up.

About a Laundryverse universal coding language from a non-techie POV ... there's also Mo's violin. I'm guessing that the continued emphasis on written symbols/words when discussing multi/transdimensional communications (apart from Bob being an IT guy) is a device to keep the reader guessing. Anything could become or be used as a code -- all that's needed is for the sender and receiver to be able to 'shake hands'.

Back to music as a code (because why not - I happen to like music) ... Read an article a few months back that suggested that singing predated speaking. If so, then combining this with Mo's violin we have a sorta back story for why some cultures/religions banned music/singing and emphasized speaking as the default communication mode: because they knew music/singing would summon demons! I'm also imagining the disaster of a tone-deaf high priest. Looking at what differentiates spoken language from music across cultures and comparing that with the types of demons/extradimensional entities those cultures most commonly come across would provide some insight into various demon universe layers and how they're connected.

Or because I'm a non-techie am I missing some inside info that all techies know?

It's pretty easy to set up optical paths to make diffraction and interference effects calculate fourier transforms for you. I see no reason* why a sounding board couldn't be optimised to perform a particular computation and summon cthulhu with the right inputs.

*apart from the obvious.

I doubt, however, that many ppeople here have read the Book of Enoch, or that anyone has in the Ge'ez :-)

You've read "The Music of Eric Zann" by H. P. Lovecraft, I take it? (Not recently, in my case.)

Yes, eerie eldritch atonal music is canon in Lovecraftian horror. I'm guessing ol' HPL the racist got the skin-crawlies over jazz back in the 1920s ...

Lots of interesting jiggery-pokery ought to be possible with the various patterns of nodes and antinodes you can set up on a stretched membrane. And after all cultures whose forms of magic make much use of drums are not unknown...

I thought he was referring to some Indian music, there, but he almost certainly wasn't a jazz fan. I really must reread Lovecraft.

To Pigeon: and several of them use drums with complex cavities, or in very complex ways, too. There don't seem to be drums with anything other than a round membrane, and I would have thought that other shapes would certainly make weird sounds. If anyone has experimented, I haven't heard about it.

Yes, but not for a few years.

"I'm guessing ol' HPL the racist got the skin-crawlies over jazz back in the 1920s ..."

Exactly my thinking as well. I don't recall where I found this discussion of exactly that subject, but it was pretty profound:

"It’s sort of amusing to try and figure out what Lovecraft was being racist about based on his stories. “Evil gatherings of gibbering, subhuman mongrels slavering around demonic totems” are probably black church picnics. “The unholy wailing and shrieking of the denizens of the underworld” is probably jazz. The “Innsmouth Look” might be him describing Chinese people. “Cthulhu” is probably how he heard “hula.” The Old Ones: Catholics, I dunno.

I don’t think there’s a better way to understand how the mind of a racist works than to read Lovecraft and remember all the monsters are just people."

My own specific thought is that the "servitor flautists" of Azathoth, with their maddening musical scales, specifically represented jazz players.

Ummm, HPL is pretty specific about where he got his inspiration.

Some of it is straight-up orientalism, the colonialist/racist idea that Islam started off as this rigidly "moral", Protestant-style religion, then degenerated into "debased" Sufism, where you have Rumi writing a poem comparing proper spiritual training to women having sex with a donkey (I've read the poem and it makes perfect sense in context. Out of context... see also https://aeon.co/essays/sufi-islam-thrives-humorous-eloquent-and-poetic-as-ever ). Problem with this is that Islam, like Taoism, Hinduism, and notoriously Christianity, has always had the anarchic, anti-imperialist streak in it (cf Jesus' Beatitudes). Anyway, that's where the "Demon Sultan Azathoth" comes from: a notion of a debased sultante in Egypt or possibly Turkey. The Ottoman Empire, in other words, which got parted out after WW1.

The Old Ones likely come out of the Egyptology and Assyriology crazes that HPL grew up around: AzaTHOTH, NyarlatHOTEP, Yog-SoTHOTH, or pseudo Babylonian Shub-Niggurath, because they always had dashes in their names. There's a lot of it in the Dreamlands, along with Arabic Ghouls out of the Sufist 1,001 nights haunting the graveyards. Cthulhu is a pseudo-semitic piling on of the consonants.

As for the Cthulhu cult, ethnographers were filling museums with tribal art from all the new colonies, and HPL obviously drew inspiration from those (degenerate eskimos, the obligatory Voudon smear, etc). The Deep Ones aren't Chinese, they're drawn from Polynesian tikis that the New England whalers were bringing back from the Marquesas and New Zealand, although their art might be oriental.

The there's the klezmer music Eric Zahn produced with his violin. That's where his antisemitism shows. That and the time-traveling Yithian Nazis, and their secret hyperborean cult.

And so it goes.

True, but I'm only considering the one case.

Along with "sanity of scrivenor"....

Music - it is a language in and of itself. Please note that 40 years ago, it was common knowledge that IBM liked to hire people with musical degrees (like the co-worker who'd worked there, and got his doctorate in music while we worked together) as programmers.

Along with, as I just saw mentioned, the massive growth of the KKK in the US in the twenties, until the federal government cracked down on them.

THANK YOU! for the link to the article on Sufism! I'm working on a novel, and I need to know more about Islam, and esp. Sufism....

Commentary that ascribes such interpretations to authors generally tells you more about the commentor's mind than the author's. There would almost certainly have been lascars and others in New England ports, which make for a far more plausible target.

eerie eldritch atonal music

Not to downplay HPL's racism, but some of western classical "serious" music also went in for atonality in the early twentieth century -- cf. Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, etc. (Webern's music, especially, you could characterize as "eerie".)

This is actually real.

https://www.wired.com/2007/10/hello-kitty-ak-2/

THANK YOU! for the link to the article on Sufism! I'm working on a novel, and I need to know more about Islam, and esp. Sufism....

Well, I'd strongly suggest getting a decent translation of Rumi's poetry (including the one about the donkey) and a collection of Mulla Nasruddin stories. Have fun!

Let's not forget the near-riot of offended concert-goers at the premier of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

I'm not sure if the correct response is that it's actually sick, or actually psychotic.

Sorry to be that guy, whitroth, but I think you must be thinking of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which apparently did provoke noisy reactions in the audience, but (if wiki is to believed), it's not clear whether it was the music or Nijinsky's choreography that caused the disturbances. Per wiki the noise might have come from opposing claques representing traditionalists vs. modernists in the audience.

Anyway... tastes vary to be sure, but I would not call the Rite "eerie" or "eldritch". Maybe "colorful", "energetic", "dissonant", "barbaric" (if you are a traditionalist). I think it's a great and important piece (though I haven't listened to it in some time).

As for the Prélude, "eerie/eldritch" doesn't fit at all. It's an Impressionist piece, and I would characterize it with words like "colorful" (that word again), "delicate", "sensual", and "languorous".

"The Horror of Red Hook" explicitly mentions Kurds and Yezidis.

I wonder if he knew Yezidis were Christians?

I wonder if he knew Yezidis were Christians?

They aren't. They practice their own religion. That's why ISIS etm. went after them.

Hmm... interesting. I read somewhere that they're Christians. I guess the source was wrong.

Hmm... interesting. I read somewhere that they're Christians. I guess the source was wrong.

There are (were) a bunch of Christians in Syria and Iraq, many of whom have since immigrated, due (in)directly to the US War On Terror and the tender mercies of various nation-states in the area. A bunch of them ended up in San Diego. Sad chapter in the saga of what used to be the biggest Christian denomination (ca 1500 years ago).

Turns out the Kurdish homeland is (was) home to at least three religions, Yazidism being one of them. No wonder they get hated on by the modernists of various religions and ideologies. (note: I am NOT anti-Kurd, and I have a soft spot for minority religions that are unjustly persecuted, even when I don't share their beliefs).

Final note: No, the Yezidis are not devil worshipers. Given that they went through a genocide a decade ago, it's time to toss that meme in the trashcan of outworn SFF tropes next to racism and heroic tobacco smoking.

No, the Yezidis are not devil worshipers

I was a bit puzzled by your vehemence, since nobody here claimed they are. Then I realized you are referring to Lovecraft.

I sit, and type, corrected. You're right, and I misremembered.

It’s sort of amusing to try and figure out what Lovecraft was being racist about based on his stories

No need to guess on the basis of his stories -- here is what Lovecraft wrote in a letter to his publisher, August Derleth:

In the matter of politics -- I don't go much with the younger crowd. I’m more interested in keeping the present 300-year-old culture-germ in America unharmed, than in trying out any experiments in "social justice"... Some people may like the idea of a mongrel America like the late Roman Empire, but I for one prefer to die in the same America that I was born in. Therefore, I’m against any candidate who talks of letting down the bars to stunted brachycephalic South-Italians & rat-faced half-Mongoloid Russian & Polish Jews, & all that cursed scum! You in the Middle West can’t conceive of the extent of the menace. You ought to see a typical Eastern city crowd—swart, aberrant physiognomies, & gestures & jabbering born of alien instincts.

Does not get any clearer than this. (Lovecraft's letters were published in a collection "Essential Solitude")

Yezidis as devil worshipers...

See also the Harry Turtledove's use of devil-worshiping Yezidis as the bad guys in his Videssos cycle.

The bigger problem is that devil-worship is a (the?) common slander against the Yezidis in the Muslim world. You can look up the Wikipedia article on Yazidism in Wikipedia to see why.

This trope has deep roots in SFF literature, going back at least to HPL. IIRC, Robert Howard used it in some of his writing, and the idea of shaitanic cultists up in the haunted mountains seems to be an Orientalist trope that is based on this slander.

Given that the Laundryverse borrows demons and negative tropes from around the world, while also struggling with HPL's racism, I figure it's worth bringing up here. The issue isn't what the Yezidis do or don't believe (and FWIW, their practices seem to be sexist but relatively harmless otherwise). Instead, the problem is that they get targeted for genocide because of how their religion is perceived by outsiders. I think that's something I think most of us are against, if we know it's happening.

Hmm... interesting. I read somewhere that they're Christians. I guess the source was wrong.

Well. It depends. There are a lot of Christians who think others who do not believe exactly as they do aren't real Christians. Or 90%. Or 70%. Or maybe 50% but with a few key principles "we'll let you in".

Many "evangelicals" in the US think the LDS/Mormons and Roman Catholics are the spawn of Satan. Not as much as in the past but still. And there's a lot more.

You mean like the "Christians" who think that the Pope is the Anti-Christ?

I see, I-talians, and Jews... no mention of African-Americans. Surprised he doesn't mention the Irish or the Spanish.

There are a lot of Christians who think others who do not believe exactly as they do aren't real Christians.

This. When I (briefly) attended a Baptist church, it was common for people to use the phrase "before I became a Christian" to refer to a time before they became a baptist, when they were an ungodly catholic or other denomination.

In the New Management I've been adapting some of the bloodier Aztec gods, in order to maintain some element of surprise for the reader (Cthulhu gets old after a while) ... but I've also tried to avoid slander/attribution of evil to Nahua beliefs. The premise is that the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadores saw Aztec priests performing rituals that got magical results, so they copied the rituals in question (as underground cult practices, because the Catholic Church tends to frown on human sacrifice and demon summoning). They corrupted them for their own purposes and what they summon up when performed is nothing to do with either Christian or Nahua beliefs, but merely the thing that answers when you call it in this manner (see also Raymond Schiller's cult in "The Apocalypse Codex"). Which conveniently helps explain why the Spanish Inquisition lasted so long, and pins the blame for the bad magical stuff on a bunch of genocidal slave-taking imperialists rather than the previous culture they stole from.

Until a surprisingly few decades back, that was more or less the official position of the Roman Catholic church w.r.t. even Anglicans. It didn't just go one way.

Jean Lamb @ 194:

This is actually real.

https://www.wired.com/2007/10/hello-kitty-ak-2/

It's NOT, at least according to the link you provided. It's Stupid Photoshop Tricks

And the link IN THE ARTICLE doesn't go to anything "Hello Kitty" on "The Big River".

It goes to a book about The Art of Parody

Troutwaxer @ 202:

Hmm... interesting. I read somewhere that they're Christians. I guess the source was wrong.

Likely it is both an ethnicity and a religion ... someone could be ethnically Yezidi AND a Christian or a Muslim or a practicing Yezidi OR ...

If memory serves, there were large numbers of Christian Kurds in the northwestern part of Iraq that ISIL over-ran and I don't think the news media did much to differentiate the various sects other than they didn't follow whatever subset of Islam ISIL claimed was the one TRUE religion.

They were ALL persecuted by ISIL - even the Muslims, because they were the WRONG Muslims.

I thought observing the Nicene Creed came into it somewhere.

Certainly causes the Mormons problems - the mental gymnastics they go through to "prove" they adhere are entertaining.

That's new to me. How/why do Mormons have a problem with Nicene Creed?

"Don't pray. You never know what might be listening."

Rbt Prior @ 211
Actually, it's ALL christians "think" {emote} that other sects are not "proper" christians - with oceans of spilt blood to prove it.

Hmm... interesting. I read somewhere that they're Christians. I guess the source was wrong.

Well. It depends.

No, it doesn't depend. Yazidism (as a religion) is completely independent from other religions. It is a religion of its own, and the respect we owe each other as human beings should mean that it is recognized as such by both followers of other religions and non-believers.

The fact that Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Yazidism share some commonalities (like each of them referring to a collection of ancient oriental myths) does not mean that any two of them are the same.

And to reinforce Heteromeles' point: the accusation of devil-worship against Yazides is in a similar category as the accusation of blood libel against Jews. If you understand that the latter is evil and should be treated accordingly, then you should be aware that the same goes for the former.

By the way: according to Wikipedia, Germany has become home to the largest Yazid diaspora in the world (200.000 in 2017). There is a Yazid community in my town (which isn't particularly large, but quite welcoming town). I know some of them personally. We meet in inter-religious get-togethers and festivals: Christians, Muslims, Yazids and Jews (sorted by community size).

Going back for a moment to the comments on music, Tom Holt's "Flying Dutch" (a parody of The Flying Dutchman) has a computing system based on music and, therefore, base 7 instead of binary.

My point was all kinds of people are called Christian by all kinds of Christians and non-Christians. But the term is very loosely defined. Except to those who are claiming to be a Christian. Mostly. Sort of.

And no Greg. Again you've incredibly over simplified it to the point of being meaningless.

Quite right.

it's ALL christians "think" {emote} that other sects are not "proper" christians

No, it's not. I was a churchwarden in an Anglican church, and the policy was that anyone who wanted was welcome to take the eucharist as long as they were eligible at their denomination and felt comfortable with it — and we didn't verify eligibility. "My father's mansion's many rooms" and all that.

Ditto for Anglican confirmation in the UK - postulants have to be baptised, but it doesn't matter by what church.

Are Yezidis another type of Christian? Judge for yourself:

"Mirza is a soft-spoken Iraqi man with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache, and because he prays at regular intervals during the day, colleagues and acquaintances often wrongly assume he is Muslim. He is instead a Yazidi, a follower of an esoteric religion that has superficial similarities to Islam but is very different from it. Although his people are often thought of as Kurds and speak the same language (Kurmanji) as their Kurdish neighbors, he insists that they are a separate people. Sometimes called Ezidis, they number hundreds of thousands in northern Iraq and in parts of Syria, Georgia, Armenia, and northwestern Iran. Yazidis believe in reincarnation, sacrifice bulls, and revere an angel who takes the form of a peacock (emphasis added). Their traditions forbid them to eat lettuce or wear blue; men must grow a mustache, though few have beards. They are also victims of an ancient calumny—the accusation that they worship the devil. And even before 2014, they were the victims of the second-deadliest terrorist attack in history."

From Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East, which is well worth the read.

"what they summon up when performed is nothing to do with either Christian or Nahua beliefs, but merely the thing that answers when you call it in this manner"

Aha, so it works like $ in jquery then. No wonder websites are so evil these days...

The three-in-oneness Trinity type stuff I believe is one problem.

I think Jehovah's Witnesses have a similar problem.

It is a religion of its own, and the respect we owe each other as human beings should mean that it is recognized as such by both followers of other religions and non-believers.
Since when is it the business of non-believers to "recognize" religions? Obscurantism has many faces and when it manages to confiscate state powers usually doesn't bother much with "the respect we owe each other as human beings"

Heteromeles @ 226:

Are Yezidis another type of Christian? Judge for yourself:

That's my point. I won't "judge" because it doesn't matter to me what their religion is.

I am not a believer and I don't care if others are or are not ... as long as they will respect NON-belief. My argument with religion and religious believers is strictly (and only) with those who seek to impose their beliefs upon me (or upon others).

ALL THE REST are free to do their own thing just like I insist on being free to do MY own thing.

127: Seeing Red, maybe??

A good book, although uncomfortable reading (like a lot of Indigenous history).

https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/seeing-red

Unless you're thinking of the Pixar movie Turning Red?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_Red

Good film. Shi did a good job of conveying growing up Chinese in Toronto, which a dozen of my nieces did. AFAIK none of them can transform into giant pandas, but fortunately they can be plenty scary without that if they are threatened. :-)

232 (Mr Prior)- you’re quite right of course. I’ve even seen it, enjoyed it, but names.. :( I thought it might connect to the Disney/Yokai question of the earlier thread, but probably not.

(also, it’s at least mostly? a community of Chinese, not Japanese, descent in the movie as you say. Again, I forgot- sorry.

If I remember correctly Mei and her family are Chinese-Canadian (Cantonese I think). Her friends are a mixture: WASP, Jewish, Indian, half-Vietnamese…

I've seen movie 'fans' slagging the film for "political correctness" and "fake diversity", but that mix was standard for my nieces' friend groups*. Toronto (or at least parts of it) really is that mixed.

Leaving aside the shape-shifting pandas, Turning Red is a typical coming-of-age story about ordinary kids — just one that isn't centred about a white male protagonist. It's about bloody time, and I hope Disney does more like it.

* One of the many many things I love about my nieces is that they choose their friends for who they are, not what they look like.

I have reread a few of his stories, and am reminded about his prejudice against gambrel roofs. I don't know enough American writing of that era to know whether he started that, but it assuredly took root (e.g. The Amityville Horror). I should be interested to know if there was anything more than them being common in older New England architecture.

And I am also reminded about how widely he spread his bigotry - I haven't found Irish yet, but I am sure it will be there ....

I think we're one of the few that escape, actually: Detective Malone in the Horror at Red Hook is the only reference to Irishness I can think of and he's a standard issue protagonist with some WB Yeats-y nonsense stirred in.

It's downright odd, since at the time he wrote it the 'herds of evil-looking foreigners' in Red Hook were Irish (though it was at least 50 years too late for hordes of Irish people in New York to be new, which might be related).

New York in general was also heavily Jewish at the time, and he'd ended up living there with his wife, who oddly-enough, was Jewish.

I should be interested to know if there was anything more than them being common in older New England architecture.

It was a style used in older (mostly pre 1900 or pre 1800) buildings as it was an easy way to get upper floor space without making the side of the building extend all the way up. If you've even lived or moved around in such a space you quickly learn to duck and tilt when at the sides.

And New England has way more pre 1900 buildings than most of the US. Especially barns.

I can think of one case where non-believers can decide if it's a religion: the US IRS. And exactly why is Scieterrificology a "church", with tax loopholes?

Yes, but I was asking if there was anything OTHER than that.

Odd. I've seen a lot of gambrel roofs in Milwaukee. And some in Chicago.

Some people get upset leaning to stand or hitting their head on the "wall".

And many (almost everyone?) people have one or two things that most consider trivial that drive their anger button to extremes.

Leaving aside the shape-shifting pandas, Turning Red is a typical coming-of-age story about ordinary kids — just one that isn't centred about a white male protagonist. It's about bloody time

I see what you did there...

It's downright odd, since at the time he wrote it the 'herds of evil-looking foreigners' in Red Hook were Irish (though it was at least 50 years too late for hordes of Irish people in New York to be new, which might be related).

I am certain it was related:

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2022/03/22/neo-nazi-signs-st-patricks-day-parade-national-socialist-club/

Neo-Nazis: Keep Boston Irish!

Could be a rare coincidence, or just the end of learned obliviousness on my part. Either way it seems unusual: the same disastrous weather system that brought tornados to the southern U.S. a couple weeks ago briefly caused intense fog here in central Illinois with 85F air replacing 35F temps overnight. My wife came home from shopping after dark and said it was the thickest she ever saw, so I went out on the porch to look, lost sight of my feet in the haze and overconfidently stumbled down the front steps, rolling onto the sidewalk and letting my right arm harmlessly absorb the impact. Would have been no problem except my left foot twisted straight backwards, ankle swelled up and I walked with a limp for a few days.

Back to normal now, but reading "Escape from Yokai Land" while recuperating, I noticed Bob Howard twisted his left ankle running from Hello Kitty, and then once more saw in Scalzi's "Kaiju Preservation Society" the protagonist fell and twisted his foot while fleeing his shotgun toting former employer. Have I been reading about twisted ankles all my life and just not retaining the information until it happens to me personally, or are Charlie, Scalzi and myself just reaching a "certain age" where the risk impinges on our awareness due to slower reflexes? Weird maybe, maybe not.

Anyway I'm glad I could improve the lighting out front before one of us ended up hospitalized. Live and learn.

GO OUT & BUY a copy of today's FT, for it's SUPPLEMENT.
They have a mjor atricle, warning of the apparent dangers of "AI"
Link here ... but it's paywalled
For such a heavyweight, serious newspaper to publish this is certainly worthy of notice.
- especially since, on R4 this morning, there was a warning (?) about a new artificial "mimic-your-voice" programme/system, that will, with a probabliity of one, be used for scamming politics, everywhere ...

Greg, the current hype over "AI" is exactly that -- hype. All the grifters who were on board with cryptocurrencies until the bubble burst last year jumped ship and now they're flogging junk data science. It's taken in a lot of folks who ought to know better, partly because it panders to their cognitive biases: the utopian strand in Silicon Valley tech ideology, for example, predisposes them to uncritically believe AI will solve all their problems/bring about the End Times

What's actually out there isn't intelligence, it's just huge scale statistical modeling based on bulk input data scraped off the internet (and so of questionable quality). There are areas where it's making astonishing breakthroughs possible, but they're not necessarily the ones garnering headlines (and picking the pockets of the gullible).

Precisely. But there IS a danger that such pattern-based modelling will be used for decision making, thus making the Holy Rule Books into more than just dogma. One example is that medical ones have been proposed to replace doctors for triage and initial diagnosis, because they are more accurate than humans - fine, but from where do the consultants of the future then get their experience?

On this matter, I am also extremely glad that I shan't be around when Ford's hand-free cars hit the road. If there is one thing that humans are bad at it is remaining alert when having nothing to do. The eye checking won't help because many (most?) people can switch off with their eyes open, and then take several seconds to restore awareness of their surroundings when they stop.

But none of that stops the claims of god-like AI from being merely hype.

What's actually out there isn't intelligence, it's just huge scale statistical modeling based on bulk input data scraped off the internet (and so of questionable quality). There are areas where it's making astonishing breakthroughs possible, but they're not necessarily the ones garnering headlines (and picking the pockets of the gullible).
What will almost certainly happen with LLMs is a new wave of automation. Bank/Insurance clerks and low-level managers were screwed by mainframes, factory/warehouse workers by robots, typing pool employees by the PC. Now, paralegals, technical writers and some programmers are going to get shafted.
Some people will say that is just how the system works (and will mention buggy-whip makers, haha). Except the one defining characteristic of 20th century automation was that profit from productivity gains was 100% confiscated. Employees doing the work of a group of 10 employees (before automation) actually saw their wages stagnate (if lucky).
A lot of "middle class" white collar employees will learn the hard way (especially in the US where decent healthcare is linked to having a good job) that they were working-class all along.

https://youtu.be/Xv8FBjo1Y8I

But there IS a danger that such pattern-based modelling will be used for decision making

That is already happening. Cathy O'Neil has been banging that drum for over a decade.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/review-weapons-of-math-destruction/

She's got a blog with infrequent posts:

https://mathbabe.org

Charlie @ 248
Unfortunately, as shown on R4 today, the aforementioned grifters will latch on to the "AI speech" mimics for futher confusion of everyone, plus the more serious concerns, admittedly much more long-term, as noticed by the "FT" - ok?

Just for once, I agree completely with "EC" QUOTE: pattern-based modelling will be used for decision making - oh shit.

What will almost certainly happen with LLMs is a new wave of automation. Bank/Insurance clerks and low-level managers were screwed by mainframes, factory/warehouse workers by robots, typing pool employees by the PC. Now, paralegals, technical writers and some programmers are going to get shafted. Some people will say that is just how the system works (and will mention buggy-whip makers, haha). Except the one defining characteristic of 20th century automation was that profit from productivity gains was 100% confiscated. Employees doing the work of a group of 10 employees (before automation) actually saw their wages stagnate (if lucky).

I happen to agree. A lot of work is highly repetitive, and profits have been increased for the owners by automating them. AI will automate some of that still further, as it has been already (Siri/Alexa....).

There are two interesting problems. One is that tech has huge supply lines (esp for semiconductors right now, but also rare earths, lithium, cobalt, possibly sharp building sand), and anything that disrupts supply lines causes trouble. Random example: most of the cars built in the US right now are Laumer BOLO-scale high end SUVs and trucks. Why? There was a shortage of appropriate computer chips due to the pandemic, so car companies put the chips where they could profit due to legal structures (high end urban bloatmobiles), not where they're needed (small cars and EVs).

The second problem is electrical power, which we're going to be running short of. If training the nextgen chatbot takes more energy than, say, Lagos uses in a year (making that up, but Bitcoin uses more electricity than Thailand does), it's actually enormously costly in a world where we're trying to do everything with electricity. If the choice comes to keeping the ACs running during a killer heat wave and training the next chatbot, I can guess where the power will go.

A third issue, of course, is that the world's getting less predictable. AI systems that are optimized for predictable tasks may not do so well in these.

Bottom line is that we might well get to a point where humans are cheaper to train than robots for many roles. I'm not sure that we'll get there in the next few years, but I suspect that "AI everything" will follow "Blockchain everything" and "IoT everything" into the bin of failed technological diversifications, and we'll be left with whatever was actually useful about it all.

If the choice comes to keeping the ACs running during a killer heat wave and training the next chatbot, I can guess where the power will go.

Training the next chatbot, as long as the rich have their AC? That's the way I'd bet, based on past history…

Training the next chatbot, as long as the rich have their AC? That's the way I'd bet, based on past history…

Maybe. The bigger problem is that Tesla powerwalls don't have the amperage to power a house-sized AC unit. When part of the grid breaks, it doesn't do so by zip code. IF AI-training is what breaks the grid, that's politically fugly, no matter what.

That sort of bureaucratic behaviour predates the use of automation to do it - yes, humans use algorithms, too, and bureaucrats regard them as Holy Writ. I could give you examples. What has not happened SO FAR (as far as I know) is for the 'AI' to be the final court of appeal. All of those abuses are, in theory if with extreme difficulty in practice, challengable or evadable.

What has not happened SO FAR (as far as I know) is for the 'AI' to be the final court of appeal.

IIRC from O'Neil's book, the algorithms used for parole eligibility in many American courts are almost never questioned. And given the financial resources required to keep appealing, for many people the algorithm is the final word. Ditto for mortgage eligibility.

Except the one defining characteristic of 20th century automation was that profit from productivity gains was 100% confiscated.

I believe that claim is false.

The defining characteristic of early and mid 20th century automation was that profit from productivity gains was shared unusually equally. The 20th century overall saw huge reductions in income inequality as automation took off - I'd guess the greatest reduction ever. There are examples everywhere: look at how automation of car manufacturing in early to mid 20th century went with a golden age for US car workers, etc. Look at how much automation improved things around the home (you try doing laundry, or cooking, using technology from 1900 sometime - it sucked!).

Strong union movements, a huge backlash against the moneyed elite after the great depression, labor shortages after WW2, a politically powerful middle class - there were lots of reasons.

Then after about 1980, things changed. A lot. Neoliberalism was in, greed was good. And now a defining characteristic of 21st century automation is that profit from productivity gains is 100% confiscated.

Sigh. As I said, that is no change from how such decisions were made pre-automation by the majority organisations that used a rule book. I had experience of such things. An algorithm can be implemented as well by bureaucrats as by computers.

An algorithm can be implemented as well by bureaucrats as by computers.

Totally. The organisation is the machine. They used to say it was people, processes and tools, but really, from the outside you can't tell which is which. Certainly not from the business end.

The second problem is electrical power, which we're going to be running short of. If training the nextgen chatbot takes more energy than, say, Lagos uses in a year (making that up, but Bitcoin uses more electricity than Thailand does), it's actually enormously costly in a world where we're trying to do everything with electricity. If the choice comes to keeping the ACs running during a killer heat wave and training the next chatbot, I can guess where the power will go.

True, but mitigating factors exist. Notably Moore's Law doesn't have many more iterations to run -- we're already down to 1-3nm node sizes and individual atoms are on the order of 0.1nm: it's not obvious how you can build electrical circuits smaller than atoms -- but Koomey's law is still in effect: the number of computations we can perform per joule of energy doubled every 1.57 years from 1950 to 2000, and is still doubling every 2.6 years -- which yields a 16-fold efficiency improvement every decade. We can probably squeeze another decade or two out of Koomey's Law, which is actually a derivative of Moore's Law. Also, it's a hardware-dictated law rather than telling us anything useful about software efficiency: there may be more OOMs to be extracted by optimizing the low-level logic (from gate-level up to the OS of the VM containers the training apps are running in) underlying the LLMs. Finally, unlike physical manufacturing operations like glass furnaces or steel mills, you can safely idle a supercomputing cluster that's training a LLM during periods of peak electricity demand: the processor blades won't crack or melt or something if you put them to sleep.

So in event of a black flag weather event you can in principle use punitive adaptive pricing to kick non-essential AI tasks off the grid and provide some headroom for the vital services we need to survive ... assuming the political will to prioritize human life over AI convenience exists, of course.

The real problem with trained "AI" systems is that they're trained on historic data, of course. Responding to changing conditions or black swans is not in their design brief.

Then after about 1980, things changed. A lot. Neoliberalism was in, greed was good. And now a defining characteristic of 21st century automation is that profit from productivity gains is 100% confiscated. You're right. I should have written late 20th century automation (my first example was about IBM mainframes).
I actually spent most of the late 70's and 80's doing just that -putting low and mid level bank clerks out of work-

The organisation is the machine. They used to say it was people, processes and tools, but really, from the outside you can't tell which is which.

See also this talk I gave in December 2017, which makes exactly that point.

For the past couple of decades, maintaining Koomey's law has primarily been a matter of increasing parallelism, because raw clock rates have not gone up much, due to power limits. Not all areas can benefit from that, but I am pretty sure that AI training is one that can for some time yet.

And, yes, yes, yes to their fundamental inability to tackle black swan events. You CAN make them adaptable to gradually changing events, with some delay, but I don't know how many are so designed. However, sudden, radical changes will throw them into confusion.

As I said, that is no change from how such decisions were made pre-automation by the majority organisations that used a rule book. I had experience of such things.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Judges have discretion for parole eligibility. To assist them, there is apparently an "expert system" that is followed (by the judges) almost all the time. So rather than a judge relying on their own (flawed) judgement they follow the judgement of an opaque set of rules that didn't exist before automation (because it's too complex).

assuming the political will to prioritize human life over AI convenience exists, of course

If by "AI convenience" you mean "profit", then the political will apparently doesn't exist.

"we're already down to 1-3nm node sizes and individual atoms are on the order of 0.1nm: it's not obvious how you can build electrical circuits smaller than atoms "

I just want to note that the marketing names currently used are not really describing the actual dimension of any relevant feature... see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process The term "3 nanometer" has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a 3 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 48 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 24 nanometers.

So we might have a few more iterations before we are down to single electron devices, but it is not clear whether single electron is actually desirable (for reliability/robustness reasons).

And your main point seems to hold, in the miniaturization "dimension" we do not have all that much water left under the keel.

"And, yes, yes, yes to their fundamental inability to tackle black swan events. You CAN make them adaptable to gradually changing events, with some delay, but I don't know how many are so designed. However, sudden, radical changes will throw them into confusion."

In all fairness, humanity also does not handle "radical changes" all that well and will likely respond with a period of confusion as well, no?

That's what you need people 'on the spectrum' for! As a wild over-generalisation, we handle them a lot better. I am serious, there, because I believe that is why an apparently counter-evolutionary characteristic is so common.

Which includes such questions as "is the subject Black?"

RE: Koomey and Moore's Law...

It might be interesting to explore the geopolitics of Moore's and Komey's Laws. There are two or three political systems involved (liberal democracy, authoritarianism, and plutocratic capitalism), and most of the highest end chips AFAIK are being made in Taiwan.

So, do we continue to assume that Koomey/Moore curves will continue? Will war intervene? Will politics start interfering (for good or ill) in what computer geeks have simplistically thought of as inevitable progress?

Something to think about maybe?

Come to that, so do systems controlled by DNA, which is the most Koomworthy process we currently have.

The real problem with trained "AI" systems is that they're trained on historic data, of course. Responding to changing conditions or black swans is not in their design brief.

Worse. They are trained on slices of historic data. Which may or may not lead to results that even the trainers want.

In all fairness, humanity also does not handle "radical changes" all that well and will likely respond with a period of confusion as well, no?

I'd like to propose that humanity doesn't handle ANY change very well. We, as a whole, seem to be wired to want things to be steady state. And want to plan that the center of every bell curve is where everyone really wants to be.

My wife and I were discussing this last night. A neighbor is having a hard time dealing with her aging mom, sisters who don't want to make hard decisions, grown children who are NOT living the life she thinks they should and so on. (We had some of this fun 10-20 years ago and so my wife is a sympathetic ear to some degree.) And most people would consider her a hard liberal in the US political sense of the word. And we're surrounded by people who want things to not change. Property taxes need to stay static (must be incompetent elected officials), growth needs to stop, people need to go back to church, and a few thousand other things. Over here Trump said it was OK to try and force the world back to the way it WAS. Skipping over all the bad parts of course.

Which includes such questions as "is the subject Black?"

Are you sure about that? One major reason given for the automation was to eliminate physical appearance from influencing the judges.

Not saying the switch didn't bring along an entire new set of issues.

The term "3 nanometer" has no relation to any actual physical feature

I skimmed the article and didn't see what I expected. I had always thought the term referred to the smallest practical size a "line" could be drawn when doing the lithography. Or the "fuzz" in the boundaries of things. But that wasn't mentioned. And I'm years removed from knowing people who know about such things.

If the Beards’ “ Contemporary American History, 1877-1913” is any indication, it took awhile even then…

Re: 'And we're surrounded by people who want things to not change.'

Like sky-high inflation on basics like food, housing, college tuition loans?

We had zero or near zero inflation for years. It was a bubble that had to pop. And it did.

Modern economies just don't work well long term without some inflation. And deflation can be terrible.

sky-high inflation

Well relative to near 0% yes. Those divide by near 0's tend to give big numbers.

You must be younger than me.

Some past rates of my early adulthood. (USA)

1968 4.6% (The next few years brought Nixon crude oil price freezes which led to a host of other issues.)

1972 3.0 (and we didn't get back down that low again until 1994)

1974 8.3%

1975 9.1%

1976 6.5%

with a rise to

1980 12.4% (Iran and this together sank Carter)

then a slow slide down to

1994 2.8%

See https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

Not saying our current 4% to near 7% isn't painful at times but again, people got used to an unrealistic long term economy and when it broke they all want things to go back to the RECENT prior unrealistic.

I think the UK had similar rates at times in the same period. Which many here can talk about better than me. But AIUI it allowed the Iron Lady to do lots of things that still irk people.

Re: 'Modern economies just don't work well long term without some inflation.'

Not sure I buy that the ongoing inflation we've seen is necessary for a healthy economy. One of the core ideas behind supporting tech/sci advances is that it's supposed to improve productivity (let producers produce at a lower cost) which in turn is supposed to stabilize, and in the long term, reduce prices.

COVID is usually named as the key factor in recent inflation because of supply disruptions. Ditto Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the same time however there's also indication of record corp profits over the same time period with some considerable overlap of the supposedly most disrupted goods. This however seldom gets mentioned in the news re: contributing factor in recent price increases.

Inflation seems to be picking favorites.

I'd like to propose that humanity doesn't handle ANY change very well.

We also don't handle steady state well.

Over here Trump said it was OK to try and force the world back to the way it WAS.

Well, back to the way people wished it was (or charitably, back to the way they remember it being).

I observe that none of the people I've heard being 'nostalgic' for the golden age of the pasyt are willing to do without the benefits of modern life: reliable vehicles, cheap flights, varied food, computer technology, modern medicine, etc.

I never argued that most people are rational is such longings. Cognitive dissonance is a very common trait amongst all of us. It just varies by individual/tribe by topic.

Not sure I buy that the ongoing inflation we've seen is necessary for a healthy economy.

A bit of inflation is needed or we continually dip into deflation. Which can be terrible on many people. But you're focused on the last 2 years. Inflation is something that to really see it true effects you need to track running averages over years. My point is we sat at near zero with even negative interest rates in some European countries. That just doesn't work forever. COVID and Ukraine broke us out of that. Hard. Instead of a gradual exit. But gradual exits from such things are what politicians claim they will do and mostly never quite make it work. And with all thing we bounced higher. Look at that link and draw a line that is the 5 year average (now to -4) and you'll see inflation tends to be very steady state.

Inflation seems to be picking favorites.

Of course. But I'd say it is the lobbyists and the Congress critters in the US and equivalents in other countries that are doing the picking. Move along. Nothing to see here.

If you want to see pain, look at what Paul Volcker did to break it in the early 80s. (A question I have is did Europe break out due to PV's policies or did they do something else on their own at the time. Or ???)

Which includes such questions as "is the subject Black?"

That information is incorporated by using information on addresses, schools attended, etc that is strongly correlated to skin pigmentation without actually being a direct question. A direct question like that would be illegal.

O'Neil's argument is that these opaque 'data-driven' systems have bias and prejudice baked in, because they are based on data originating in a system that incorporated bias and prejudice. At their best this is a blind spot; at their worst it is deliberate.

I think maybe the point was that for these sort of machine learning applications we've been talking about, based on statistical associations in the "training" data, we'd essentially be going full circle on that question. The only way to avoid it would be to (IMO misguidedly) try to hide "blackness" from the AI, but I think that's futile given the likelihood that other discoverable variables (such as name, place of residence, occupation, income bracket, employment history, education history, custodial history) also have enough association with "blackness" that the latter becomes a confounding hidden variable, which the AI will find. IOW the AI could be characterised as an almost pure prejudice engine, being driven by reasoning-by-association.

Not sure I buy that the ongoing inflation we've seen is necessary for a healthy economy.

Unlike the last few patches of high inflation we've had, this patch is attributable mostly to increased corporate profits (under the guise of 'supply chain problems').

Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019. Strikingly, over half of this increase (53.9%) can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8% of this increase. This is not normal. From 1979 to 2019, profits only contributed about 11% to price growth and labor costs over 60%

https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond/

In recent months, the Bank of Canada has focused on the labour market as the main culprit behind higher inflation: The unemployment rate is too low, wages are rising too fast and this so-called “overheating” is driving up prices. This echoes conventional fears of a wage-price spiral like the one in the 1970s. But empirical evidence suggests wages have lagged inflation – not caused it – by an average of 2.5 percentage points per year since early 2021.

However, another component of production costs – profits – has grown much faster and further, and hence is more culpable in explaining the inflation surge. Corporate profits have swelled dramatically during the pandemic, to the highest share of GDP in history. And those profits are concentrated in the same industries that lead inflation: petroleum, real estate, building materials, car dealers and, yes, supermarkets.

https://centreforfuturework.ca/2023/01/20/profits-not-wages-have-driven-canadian-inflation/

Inflation is cooling as corporate profit margins fall from record levels.

The red-hot inflation rate has aligned with growing corporate profit margins that soared to record levels in 2022. Executives in many sectors acknowledge that markups are the primary driver behind their earnings, with price hikes more than making up for elevated input costs.

https://thehill.com/business/3945727-inflation-eases-as-corporate-profits-fall-from-record-levels/

Yeah, snap. :)

My knowledge here is several years old, but IIRC there are several systems in use, and of course they all ask for demographics in one form or another...

Re:' "The red-hot inflation rate has aligned with growing corporate profit margins that soared to record levels in 2022. Executives in many sectors acknowledge that markups are the primary driver behind their earnings, with price hikes more than making up for elevated input costs." '

Thanks!

I came back to add that I think this (i.e., we were overdue for much higher inflation rates ... it's perfectly normal!) is related to the Reaganomics 'trickle down theory' of economics which it turns out (i.e., real data shows) benefits the rich first, foremost and forever.

There's probably an economist or several visiting this blog ... so if you can point me at some recent (21st century) evidence to the contrary, please do so. Thanks!

the Reaganomics 'trickle down theory' of economics

I heard a comedy sketch on CBC back in the 90s (Air Farce, maybe?) where they interviewed "Reagan" about his presidency. Details have faded, but they were having fun with the trickle-down idea — "we were under a lot of pressure, you know; when I had the idea, it was such a relief" kind of thing.

There's probably an economist or several visiting this blog ... so if you can point me at some recent (21st century) evidence to the contrary, please do so.

Not an economist, but I recommend a couple of authors.

Ha-Joon Chang writes clearly and isn't afraid to tackle conventional wisdom, using actual data to skewer theories about how things should work in favour of trying to find how how they actually work. I particularly like Bad Samaritans and 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism.

https://www.hajoonchang.net

(Note: I just learned from his web site that Bad Samaritans was banned by the Korean military as subversive literature!)

I also like John Quiggin. His Zombie Economics is a good summary of undead economic ideas. I haven't read Economics in Two Lessons yet; it's on the list, but likely a summer book.

https://johnquiggin.com

In recent months, the Bank of Canada has focused on the labour market as the main culprit behind higher inflation

I heard a talking head today mention there are 2 million fewer people in the US labor force today than 3 years ago. Some early retirements, a few extra deaths, and boomer retirements are really starting to bite. Of course the locals are blaming staffing shortages on a lack of work ethic. They don't want to hear that as the labor pool shrinks they might have to offer higher wages.

And discounts have mostly vanished. Well for 2+ years. They are starting to drift back into the systems. At least here. When people want to buy every single item of a widget no one discounts. And yes that leads to corporate profits. As to which is the driver and which the rider, from where I sit it seems a bit of both.

Supply is just now catching up with demand.

I exist a lot in the Apple tech marketplace. Until 6 months ago Apple laptops with M1/M2 chips were very hard to get in a hurry unless you were willing to go with a minimal system. Build to order could take 1 to 6 months. (My MacBook Air with extra ram took 4 months.) Ditto HP Z workstations which I order about 3 per year. Demand has suddenly slacked off in the entire computer industry. Apparently everyone who wanted a laptop or second system for "work from home" has one or they've been told to come back to the office. All the big boys, Dell, HP, Lenovo, AND Apple have reported demand falling off a cliff. To the extent component suppliers are reporting a 1 to 2 month pause from companies like Apple. My secret source reports that flash memory suppliers are now looking a layoffs due to demand cutbacks. And lead times are suddenly much better for various HP and Apple gear I track and discounts are back in the marketplace. At the extreme end 4 months ago HP was not giving any discounts for their HP Z workstations if you bought direct. Then in January they literally were having a half price sale. I'm glad we waited.

We should circle back to this conversation in 6 months and see how things look.

"Unlike the last few patches of high inflation we've had, this patch is attributable mostly to increased corporate profits (under the guise of 'supply chain problems')."

I'm not sure there is a "mostly".

Inflation is what you get when the economy is running a bit too hot. Lots of demand right now, more than supply right now.

That's kind of what you expect when a economy has been stuck idling because of Covid, and has to burn a bit of rubber to get back up to speed. Add in a little supply shock (more psychological than real - Ukraine war impacted oil prices because of fear it'd impact supply far more than it impacted actual oil supply), and you get inflation. But there's a lot of little things going on - including a bit of convenient price gouging, especially by banks.

The real question is whether it persists or goes away. That depends on whether everyone raises their wages and prices because they think everyone else is, ie whether we get inflation because inflation. Or (on the other hand) whether the central bankers convince everyone that the central bankers have the power to stop inflation. If all the Wall St bros and executives close their eyes very tight, clap their hands, and say "we believe in central banks control of the money supply", then control of the money supply will come back to life and inflation will be defeated. And if they don't believe - well, then the other thing.

most of the highest end chips AFAIK are being made in Taiwan.

This was true, as TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Corporation!) had a global lead ... but TSMC has been building plants overseas lately as an insurance policy, and the US government has also been encouraging construction of leading-edge foundries on US soil.

Also, the EUV lithography machines required for the most advanced semiconductors are all made by one company -- ASML Holding, which is based in the Netherlands.

but TSMC has been building plants overseas lately as an insurance policy, and the US government has also been encouraging construction of leading-edge foundries on US soil.

Yes.

But it gets complicated. TSMC has said that the double taxation they have to pay may stop them from any more plants in the US. To eliminate the double taxing requires a tax treaty between Taiwan and the US and .... oops, this gets complicated.

Also the folks staffing those other new plants in the US don't have the deep pockets of experience that TSMC has. There are expected to be more than a few startup hiccups.

And to make it all more interesting, there are rumblings that TSMC is complaining that the Arizona work force isn't dedicated enough to make these leading edge plants work.

May we live in interesting times indeed.

Article here about why AIs are here to stay:

https://www.technollama.co.uk/artificial-intelligence-is-neither-hype-nor-utopia

Clive F
Back to Kipling, & "The Secret of the Machines" again, then?

One thing about the shrinkage of computer chips: there's another limit that none of you have mentioned. Astronauts going up take generations-old laptops... because for years, the modern ones' circuits are so small they're far more easily/frequently afflicted by cosmic rays.

Giving different answers to the same question.

Re: 'That's kind of what you expect when a economy has been stuck idling because of Covid, and has to burn a bit of rubber to get back up to speed.'

Depends on your definition of 'economy'.

I look at 'economy' as the whole ensemble of products and services. From this perspective, the economy has been consistently active but which specific products/services were in supply/demand changed. Change is a constant. That's one of the reasons JIT became big: no one wants to get stuck with inventory they can't unload when demand shifts. That's also a reason why stats experts became in demand as part of the marketing team: to help predict market shifts.

However, some product/service demand, therefore baked-in need to supply is more predictable. So although electronics are neato, a lot more exciting and have been used as the pet signal for economic growth for almost a century, I think we seriously need to address basic human needs (food, shelter, education, health) first when evaluating any economic theory or strategy. Food went up 20% - wages did not. Rents/housing costs went up 20%-50% depending - wages did not. Loan interest rates went up as did tuition - but wages for first jobs out of college - meh. Oh yeah - illness went up, health coverage/access - not really. Playing catch-up with electronics is feasible, playing catch-up with people's lives - no.

The profits - it'd be interesting to see a report identifying what percent of all the record high profits made during COVID were actually re-invested into these orgs' R&D on future or improved products/services. (I think Moderna is the only F500 corp that did this type of major re-investing. Yes, Moderna is a vaccine developer/manufacturer so it makes sense that they should re-invest in their vax tech. But pretty well every other F500 org claims to be hard at work developing something new and exciting/cutting-edge/ground-breaking, etc. - so let's see what they've been working on. And let's also see how that compares with management bonuses/stocks/perks (free mansions/yachts/jets) and then how that stacks up against salary/wage adjustments for the employees that actually make all of this possible on a day-to-day basis.

About the 'shrinking' labor pool - the stats depend on the jurisdiction: in some places anyone who hasn't worked in a year is tossed out of the 'available labor pool'. It'd be interesting and probably depressing to find out how many people are no longer in the labor pool because of unresolved long term effects related to medical conditions (likely to continue to accrete as long as COVID is around).

The problem with stats is the stats can get used to justify most any position.

Food went up 20% - wages did not. Rents/housing costs went up 20%-50% depending - wages did not. Loan interest rates went up as did tuition - but wages for first jobs out of college - meh

Economies are lumpy. Individual stories never exactly match the averages.

Lots of wages went up. My wife got retired and then found another job at over 10% more. To be honest everyone of the 6 of us in my family circle had their incomes go up. Some by 50%. Well except for me, but I'm winding down my work. At the lower end small businesses either paid more or were short staff or both. Even now a well paying restaurant nearby with fantastic food is closed 2 days a week due to staff shortages.

Some college grads saw no extra pay from a few years earlier. Other are seeing gains of 10% to 30%. Or more.

As to "faux" supply chain issues. I hope you were not in the design and construction industries in the US. Lead times for things like insulation got to 1 year. Ditto all those wood products. 5/8" treated exterior plywood jumped from $25 to $70 per sheet for a while. If you could find it. I had to visit 3 stores just to get 4 pieces in 2021. A year later it had dropped down to $35 and you could expect to find it more often.

Again, when lack of supply takes the slack out of the system prices will go up. Big corp or family farmer selling at the local farmer's market. Both will get more profits for what they sell. Suck but it is the way of the world.

Housing costs where I am have gone up like you indicated. But 1 hour away, not so much. If at all. I live in an area with businesses moving here and 3 top flight universities churning out grads who want to stick around. With a few dozen decent ones doing the same. And all my contemporary old farts not wanting anyone to build houses anywhere near the existing stock. So prices for housing is doing what? Basically we're messing up the stats for the entire country. Well us a a few other places.

There are no simple answers.Except I still maintain that the 0% interest rates and near that inflation were an aberation that had to break. And when such things break they almost never break nicely.

Re: 'About the 'shrinking' labor pool ...'

Here's how the labor pool is defined in the US:

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#:~:text=The%20unemployment%20rate%20represents%20the,%C3%B7%20Labor%20Force)%20x%20100.

'People waiting to start a new job must have actively looked for a job within the last 4 weeks in order to be classified as unemployed. Otherwise, they are classified as not in the labor force.'

My comment was about a different metric. People of my age (boomers) are aging out of the labor force. In vast numbers. Just like our parents (WWII vets and spouses) were passing away for the previous 20 years. (My father would be 98 this summer if alive and he was about the youngest to fight in WWII.)

Anyway, we boomers are packing it in. And the number of folks turning 18 or 20 or whatever you pick in about that range are noticeably smaller in number.

My son in law works with some local factories. They used lightly skilled labor. They are upset that they are having to raise wages as the McDonalds next door bumped their pay up to higher than the factory was paying for staring and similar experience. And we're not talking minimum wages but $14 and up per hour. And these folks do NOT live in my crazy housing market but out in the cheaper rural areas.

Again, we can all pull stories from areas that are doing great or doing poorly. Neither of those is a decent picture of the economy. I lived in the Pittsburgh area from 1980-1987. That was just plain dismal. Except I was doing very well as a programmer. Very well. It is hard to generalize a national economic average to individuals.

Re: 'Neither of those is a decent picture of the economy.'

How about the Gini?

For UK folks - here's a brief your PM & MPs received about the state of your economy:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7484/

'The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasted in March 2023 that real household disposable income per person, a measure of living standards, will fall by a cumulative 5.7% over 2022/23 and 2023/24. This would be the largest two-year fall since records began in 1956/57.

The budgets of low-income households are most affected by the rising cost of living. ONS data shows that households with the lowest incomes experienced a higher than average inflation rate in October 2022, while the richest households experienced lower than average inflation.

The Resolution Foundation expects income inequality to fall during 2022/23 and 2023/24. This is due to benefits being uprated by 10.1% in April 2023 and targeted Government support for low-income households in the form of cost of living payments.

However, people at the top of the income distribution will see their incomes from investment and savings increase because of rising interest rates. This means that the Resolution Foundation predict the Gini coefficient to reach a record high of 40.8% in 2027/28.'

As for getting at people in various regions, different socioeconomic environments, different demos, etc. an AI would be useful here.

You seem to be morphing this into a philosophical discussion.

My point was there were non greed reasons that labor is tight and prices went up. But, yes, greed played a part. Always does. Just not all of it. And to me maybe not most of it.

There are all kinds of definitions about economic situations. The problem with boiling such things down to a number is that they over simplify. That single number tends to work well in indicating a FEW things when things are steady state, but when there are larger swings they tend to get more and more useless. In the US labor pool size, unemployment rates, inflation, etc...

The cost of lumber and brick and such doubling wreaks havoc on those in the market for a new house or renting. Or building such. But is a non event for those who have mortgages or paid off property. So how much do you include such in an inflation rate?

Low pay is a problem. But guess what. The stores and restaurants around here that pay crap can't hire people who can read and do simple math for the crappy wages. And they are complaining. And on nextdoor.com the loudest complainers are the well off upset that the local $Dollar store has reduced hours due to labor shortages. I have no sympathy. At all.

Best one was a month or two ago when someone was utterly pissed that a local non chain high end steak house didn't have prices on the menu. And their bill came in at something like $600 for 4 people instead of the $450 or so they were expected. Cry me a river.

Here's how the labor pool is defined in the US:

As I implied earlier, the BLS has multiple ways of measuring employment, unemployment, and various other related things. But I just read this a minute or so ago in an unrelated NY Times article.

Labor Department statistics show that a larger share of Americans aged 25 to 54 — so-called prime-age workers — were in the labor force in March than in February 2020, on the eve of the pandemic.

So people ARE showing up. But many above those ages have left.

Umair Haque has posted two articles about Britain in the last two days:

https://eand.co/why-brexit-britain-is-imploding-into-a-global-pariah-7f60d6e6a598

https://eand.co/want-to-see-a-country-being-gaslit-into-self-destruction-meet-britain-73a278c75054

Is he exaggerating, or are things really that bad across the pond?

I can't read those essays without logging in, but recently Umair Haque wrote that "When you have to pay 10% more for food, and then another 10% more for shelter, you’re not averaging. Those costs are additive. You are 20% worse off." I trust Stross fans can see the fallacy and list other people who reject official inflation statistics in the same way.

Read him like a biblical prophet (and someone who is eloquent about his own experiences) not as a rational analyst who only says things he has already tried to rebut.

AlanD2
Almost ... UNLESS the tories are thrown out, so hard that they hit the wall on the other side of the street in next year's election, then we are completely fucked.
Even then, it's going to take 2 full terms to rectify the damage.

When you have to pay 10% more for food, and then another 10% more for shelter, you’re not averaging. Those costs are additive. You are 20% worse off
The wage raises one hears about hardly keep up with inflation. I'm not an economist but I volunteer at a local food bank and that's an area where supply is dwarfed by demand. I've noticed many new people lining up and we have to close shop at 11am because we run out of stock.
Also, we're thinking about restarting our anti-eviction group because many people are getting behind on their rent (or mortgage).

Now, that we passed 300, could you elaborate a bit on:

"That's what you need people 'on the spectrum' for! As a wild over-generalisation, we handle them a lot better."

The only close person on the spectrum to me does not (yet?) handle unexpected changes well, and I am looking for ways of helping him deal with those better.

Aspergers. The problem about autism is that it is a catch-all for a large range of issues, some of which are seriously disadvantageous, and most of which are NOT shared by the people to whom I am referring. But the term Aspergers is now politically incorrect :-(

The incidence of Aspergers among leading scientists and engineers is huge, and one characteristic is not denying facts.

Re: 'You seem to be morphing this into a philosophical discussion.'

Nope - just discussing basic stuff like math, bio/nutrition, health. Philosophy doesn't need anything weird like 'data' (facts).

Interesting defamation lawsuit is set to start today - could have implications elsewhere. (Dominion Voting Systems vs. Fox News - trial is in Delaware.)

AlanD2: Is he exaggerating, or are things really that bad across the pond?

He's not exaggerating. In fact, things may actually be worse than the picture he paints. Food inflation ran at around 30% in the 12 months to March, we can't find fresh fruit or vegetables in supermarkets that isn't borderline rotten, doctors, nurses, and teachers are on strike, energy prices are the highest in Europe even though the post-invasion crunch has ended pretty much everywhere else, the government has dropped all COVID restrictions and monitoring even though it's still burning out there, and the press is even further to the right than the far-right politicians they're giving fan service to.

The UK feels like a failed state.

But the term Aspergers is now politically incorrect :-(

That's because Hans Asperger, who identified it, was a Nazi and participated in Aktion T4 (more info here).

The non-Nazi-commemorative term folks prefer these days is ASD, for Autism Spectrum Disorder, reflecting that Autism is a multivariant set of processing anomalies. (Some folks aren't too happy about it being called a "disorder" -- characterising a condition as a disorder is often the first step on the road to dehumanization, is the thinking -- so this is the status quo for now.)

"That's what you need people 'on the spectrum' for! As a wild over-generalisation, we handle them a lot better."

The only close person on the spectrum to me does not (yet?) handle unexpected changes well, and I am looking for ways of helping him deal with those better.

I think the keyword is "unexpected". I am on the spectrum, and I hate unexpected change. Always did, and still do not deal well with it (I am 57). OTOH, I fully expected that my children would grow up with interests/hobbies which I would neither care about nor understand, and when this in fact happened I was not at all bothered. Compare this with my neurotypical mother and stepfather (my real father was autistic), who were very distressed by me choosing D&D over chess or Tae Kwan Do over basketball.

Likewise, I think the idea that 10 years from now beachfront property will be uninsurable and Ford Mustang will be an old man's car, is much easier for us Aspies to process and to prepare for.

Overall, it seems to me that neurotypicals can (more or less) deal with the change when it arrives, but subconsciously assume it never will arrive. "The more things change the more they stay the same" is a very neurotypical sentiment, and is increasingly demonstrably false. Whereas Aspies make no such assumption.

I volunteer at a local food bank and that's an area where supply is dwarfed by demand.

I'm old enough to remember when food banks were a temporary stop-gap measure to keep people alive until the government could establish programs to help its citizens…

The incidence of Aspergers among leading scientists and engineers is huge, and one characteristic is not denying facts.

Another characteristic is not being terribly open to changing their mental model, once they've made one.

Another characteristic is not being terribly open to changing their mental model, once they've made one

Are neurotypicals any better at changing their mental model?

i think one of Umair Haque's better prophecies was "everything the far right touches dies" https://eand.co/the-lesson-of-elon-musks-twitter-everything-the-far-right-touches-dies-5d7d4ddb980e But he mixes that in with the arithmetically illiterate whine about inflation which sounds like a pundit in the 20th century with 12 years or less of education (you can criticize how official economic statistics are calculated, but he does not do that, he rejects basic arithmetic instead).

Are neurotypicals any better at changing their mental model?

I don't think they're any worse.

"Unexpected Change" - this ties in to the discussion on AI's, doesn't it? So-called AI's - AT PRESENT - can only deal with things that are already in their models. A Black Swan will throw them completely. Not that humans do that well, but people do adapt & learn, most of the time, in the end. This one will need careful watching

Actually, we are far MORE ready to change our mental models - but only once we have hard facts showing that the old ones are wrong. I agree that we don't change our minds merely because we are presented with plausible polemic. Why should we? That's mere gullibility.

Something that makes me (and others) despair about many (in my experience, most) 'neurotypicals' is their refusal to change their minds when presented with evidence.

It seems to me that the next step is to simulate (perhaps using a different AI like program) possible future developments (not saying this is easy). Sort of like how Google got AlphaZero (chess playing AI) to the Grand Master level. I'm guessing the simulated Black Swan events don't need to be entirely realistic, just enough to get the AI trained on handling "unexpected" events by expecting them :).

Yes. But, on the other hand, I and others find the term 'autism spectrum disorder' highly offensive and discriminatory. It's not a goddamn disorder, for a start.

It's not a goddamn disorder

Didn't you get the memo? It gets refreshed every few years.

Anything NOT under the middle of a bell curve is must be a disorder.

The debate is how to define the word "middle". We should have that wrapped up in a century or few.

[/snark]

Yes, I think one fair criticism of inflation statistics is that a homeowner may not see an increase in housing costs but a renter (or someone who needs their home repaired) may see a shocking increase. Someone with a kitchen garden may not be so affected by the increase in food prices. Someone who imported lots of goods from the EU may see them increase in price rapidly. "Nobody has exactly 1.7 children."

But to say "if one part of my budget costs 8% more and another part costs 12% more and the rest stays the same than I am 20% behind" is arithmetically illiterate.

Yep. I'm really annoyed that so many people, that I see as "normal", just with different interests than those who were the "popular" kids in school (like reading instead of sports) are now labeled as having a "disorder". When my son was diagnosed by a clinical specialist in the early nineties with ADD, he was, and the medication did help. Most folks who I see self-diagnosing are not disordered, they're being gaslit to think they are.

arithmetically illiterate.

Agreed.

And the current debate around here is throw the bums out as our taxes are going up a bit. They argue about all kinds of incompetence but refuse to deal with wage inflation and the need to keep competent police, fire fighters, utility repair crews, etc... on staff.

My debate with SFReader was about the supply chain issues were and to some degree still are real. And, yes, there is some greed. But things are still hard to get. Visit Reddit's networking sub-thread and see the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. They would pay double if they could just GET THE STUFF. Ditto builders. Especially around here (RDU area of NC) where folks are still moving in with big paychecks.

And there are just fewer workers. Some for COVID illness reasons. But demographics are hard to wave away. And some folks just decided to work less and live a bit downsized. And the employers of low end workers are mostly besides themselves about it. "Must be a work ethic issue." Which absolves them of fixing it.

Somehow that morphed into the Gini measurement which is NOT the same discussion.

Demographics: I'm one of the literal peaks of the US baby boom. I'm 69. My high school class (both the school and area) was the biggest ever. And the following decade plus of students in the system were all smaller and on a trend. And while the population of kids did trend back up without immigration we are headed for a definite nation of old farts. And many in diapers/nappies in a decade or so. And the under 55's are not enough to deal. And I'm not sure I want a machine wiping my butt.

Actually, we are far MORE ready to change our mental models - but only once we have hard facts showing that the old ones are wrong.

I taught at a school with an ASD program, and had many of the kids in my science class. The number of times they would keep repeating a failed procedure* because it should work was if anything more than the non-ASD kids.

*Repeating exactly. I could understand obsessively trying to figure out what was wrong, but this was just repeating the same thing over and over and over and over and over until either I or the TA could get there, or they had a meltdown.

Interesting defamation lawsuit is set to start today - could have implications elsewhere. (Dominion Voting Systems vs. Fox News - trial is in Delaware.)

Nope.

They settled today. I suspect Fox just didn't want their major on air folks testifying that they put known liars on the air telling lies that Fox knew were lies before they were put on the air.

That could have cratered their viewership and thus their money supply.

Now I wonder how many details of this will leak. As it is very likely that at least some of the details will be under NDAs all around.

And that is a good example of why lumping people like me in with genuinely autistic ones is so offensive and discriminatory (against both, actually). The only characteristics that we share with the people you describe are interpreting speech and writing literally and being having to learn to read social cues consciously (i.e. we have no innate ability to do so).

Robert Prior # 283:

I observe that none of the people I've heard being 'nostalgic' for the golden age of the pasyt are willing to do without the benefits of modern life: reliable vehicles, cheap flights, varied food, computer technology, modern medicine, etc.

It's nostalgia for a golden age that only existed in a child's imagination ... and only for SOME children.

For instance, take the comments section here....

And that is a good example of why lumping people like me in with genuinely autistic ones is so offensive and discriminatory

It's a spectrum, or possibly a better description would be a collection of traits that often occur together. Not everyone has every trait.

Young people with Asperger’s Syndrome have a difficult time relating to others socially and their behavior and thinking patterns can be rigid and repetitive.

Generally, children and teens with Asperger’s Syndrome can speak with others and can perform fairly well in their school work. However, they have trouble understanding social situations and subtle forms of communication like body language, humor and sarcasm. They might also think and talk a lot about one topic or interest or only want to do a small range of activities.

https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/conditions/aspergers-syndrome

Also presents differently for men and women — possibly because women are forced into social interactions when children, so they perforce learn to mask. There's some indication that boys aren't more likely to be ASD than girls — they are just allowed enough behavioural freedom for the symptoms to be visible, while girls learn to be 'good' and 'quiet' and so get overlooked. Autism in Heels is a good summary of this:

https://www.sanctuary-magazine.com/autism-in-heels.html

My ASD kids were all over the spectrum. Some were what used to be called autistic, others were aspies*. And I didn't notice any difference in flexibility in terms of opinion. I did notice they were less tolerant of changes in routines.

*Like many of us here, I suspect. Including myself.

For instance, take the comments section here....

Snort! :-)

Pixadoros @ 329
*Someone with a kitchen garden may not be so affected by the increase in food prices. Like me - Charlie was rightly moaning about an increase in supermarket "grocery" prices ... which has psssed me by (almost) ... because, aprt for onions, I do NOT buy vegetables, I grow my own, all of them ..
Right.

David L @ 333
Faux have conceded, but is this actually a victory for "Dominion" or a vicotry for Fox, because they have not been convicted ... (?)

Faux have conceded, but is this actually a victory for "Dominion" or a vicotry for Fox, because they have not been convicted ... (?)

It was a civil case. Convictions are for criminal cases. A fine different I'll admit but still...

Lots of details not yet out. But FOX has already read on the air "We lied to the court" or some such. It will be a day or two before we hear more. Like how many newspaper pages will they have to buy and print "oops"? How often will they have to say something on the air?

And Dominion will get paid 3/4s of a $bil or so in compensation.

Plus the next trial by the other major voting system vendor will get to include all the bits that have come out before this settlement. And there are all kinds of little lawsuits floating around that will get get to use that material now.

This is a loss for FOX.

It is a loss for Fox, but a win for MAGA-sphere. No major Fox figure will publicly admit "we lied", and MAGA-hats will spin it into "political persecution".

Re: 'But to say "if one part of my budget costs 8% more and another part costs 12% more and the rest stays the same than I am 20% behind" is arithmetically illiterate.'

Depends on what the base for each part is, add together then divide over the total. Plus - most people are comparing current 2023 prices vs. pre-COVID days which is supposedly where we've returned to in everyday life.

The inflation rates are usually year-over-year so there's a multiplier effect ... it's similar to which would you prefer $100,000 right now or $1 today, then $2 the next day, then doubled again the following day (i.e., $4) and so on for the next 30 days. This quarter's inflationary increases are on top of prior inflationary increases. If you're in a major city in NAm, some rents have gone up over 50% since COVID started. (Condo fees have gone nuts on a few places too.)

Add in gas prices for folks with long (burbs-to-downtown & back) commutes. Plus all the other 'amenities' like heat, A/C. From my quick look at which prices have gone up or down over the last 3 years, only women's wear has come down in price. Oh yeah, car insurance is going up by 8.4% in 2023.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/car-insurance-rates-rise-84-2023-report/story?id=96340980

https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-automobiles/average-gas-prices-through-history/

So far I haven't seen that wages took the same path. Not talking about the 0.1% Execs, but the 99.9% made up of regular office, service and labor grunts. Not sure but it looks as though total jobs lost still net out higher than new jobs created since 2020.

'During the second quarter of 2020, the difference between job losses and job gains in the private sector yielded a net employment loss of 14.6 million jobs. From March 2020 to June 2020, there were 20.4 million jobs lost at closing and contracting private-sector establishments. Over this period, there were 5.7 million job gains at opening and expanding private-sector establishments. This is the largest quarterly net job loss recorded in these data (which begin in 1992). Job losses in the second quarter of 2020 were more than 5 times the next largest quarterly job loss of 2.7 million jobs in the first quarter of 2009.'

I don't think that all the new jobs combined have made up for that initial hit.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/14-6-million-private-sector-jobs-lost-during-second-quarter-2020.htm

Re: 'This is a loss for FOX.'

Depends on whether they can get the major advertisers back. Their biggest financial loss since the 2020 incident was major advertisers pulling out of the news shows which typically charge the highest ad rates because news shows typically draw the highest viewership. So this is a test of major advertisers as well: Do they want to promote their products/services on a show/network that has admitted it has repeatedly lied?

To me the total question is do their viewers ever find out the details of what happened?

The actual news division of FOX has NOT been reporting on the lead up to the trial. As told by one FOX reporter on the air who was willing to put his foot in the door a few weeks ago.

And for the even more rabid, there is the similar suit pending from the other big voting system company. And both of these have open suits with NewsMax and others.

And all of the public bits of this lead up get to be used by these folks. Along with the very public reveal that FOX wasn't completely truthful during discovery and was going to have to allow someone appointed by the judge to rummage through their internal documents during the trial. This tells those in all the other lawsuits there's more dirt to be mined.

Re: '... do their viewers ever find out the details of what happened?'

Unlikely.

Maybe some twisted version of reality if senior management decides to fire the talking heads most closely associated with this story. If that happens, pretty good chance that those talking heads will then sue Faux/Merde-ock for wrongful dismissal or something. Probably lots of people ready, able (i.e., same ethic standards) and willing to grab the spotlight as anchor and become the face of FN news. My impression is that TV is still the most preferred medium for news among the FN target audience probably followed by their website and YT channel. So basically this means that talking heads are still relevant as a way for viewers to identify with the brand.

Hopefully more info about who knew/thought what will become publicly available when the next lawsuit hits the court.

There is such a lawsuit right now. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/13/media/fox-news-producer-lawsuit/index.html is part of it. And the Murdoch empire would never listen to someone's voice mail and delete it, would they?

Oh, one more thing: Dominion Voting, who just won against Fox, was worth about $80M... and was awarded just under $800M....

The reason that those so-called experts claim we have rigid thinking and repetitive behaviour is because we don't accept "because I say so" as a good reason, and our superiors refuse to give us a proper explanation. "You aren't here to think for yourself - you are here to be told what to think" is close to an actual quote.

Your statements are as offensive as calling homosexuality a disorder, and the treatment I got was similar to sexual conversion therapy. It's slightly better now, but we are still discriminated against.

I should also have said that many of the people to whom I am referring have been responsible for scientific breakthroughs, and a few even have Nobel prizes. You just don't do that by rigid thinking and repetitive behaviour, despite what the pundits claim!

ilya187 @ 341:

It is a loss for Fox, but a win for MAGA-sphere. No major Fox figure will publicly admit "we lied", and MAGA-hats will spin it into "political persecution".

If I were in charge of Dominion, I wouldn't accept any settlement with Fox that did not include every one of Fox's "ON AIR" personalities beginning every episode of their shows with a specific disclaimer that they HAD lied about Dominion. Also Old Rupe himself would be required to make a PSA announcement stating that Fox LIED and the PSA would have to be run at every Station Break.

DO IT OR NO DEAL!

Re: 'You just don't do that by rigid thinking and repetitive behaviour, ...'

Certainly not an expert but ...

I'm guessing that as with other variations of the human condition current stereotyping has many more niches than (let's say) when you were young and first 'typed'.

My only work experience was with someone who I only discovered from his wife was along the continuum after he was re-assigned off my team. When he was first assigned to my team he was somewhat confusing and later, he was just plain recurrent PITA. Confusing because: others kept complaining about the same issue; he and I would have a chat; he'd look and act (i.e., nod appropriately) as though he understood what I was saying; and, when he returned to his cubicle - back to the same old, same old. I didn't then or now think he was trying to be rebellious or a PITA, it's just that our office behavior related conversations never really penetrated into or stuck in his mind. His repetitive uncreative rut was in the office interpersonal/social behavior area. He was able to learn and do the work/tasks he was hired to do. No less and no more. And it was the latter that really ticked off the rest of team - he never offered to help. BTW - he was also an SF fan esp. pterry, so we could and did have a few informal, non-work-related chats. Based on his undergrad and work performance, etc. somewhat higher than average IQ.

Maybe people who are entering the work force now were educated about all the different flavors of human; I wasn't, nor were most of the people in my office. People with physical special needs no longer seem bothered about asking for or being asked whether they need any special assistance or devices. Doubt this is the case with people with interpersonal/social communication needs. I don't even know whether it's legal for me to ask such a question. If not legal, then how am I supposed to manage someone who is unable to communicate with me?

I'm not being snitty or trying to play a blame game - I'd really like to know.

I'm unable to read minds so I use observable behaviors as my yardstick in recurring situations. For one-off situations, I tend to fall back on accepted cultural norms ---- which do eventually evolve.

I'm hoping that many of the MAGA can be persuaded to boycott Dominion voting machines in future, as a protest.

Dominion Voting, who just won against Fox, was worth about $80M... and was awarded just under $800M....

Dominion is owned by a VC. So the lawsuit was funded by a VC. Which, (the funding of lawsuits), is a thing for likely long, expensive, but big payoff if you can see it to the end, lawsuits.

The VC acquired them in 2018 so they took a bet on them before the 2020 elections. Which now looks like a winning bet.

The word "disorder" has a clinical meaning in this case: having a negative effect on the patient. If the condition doesn't have a negative effect on the patient's life, it isn't a disorder. That's why clinically Trump doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder.

Do you have links to any research that indicates that people with Aspergers are more mentally flexible than average? Because my own experience doesn't back that up (and yes, anecdote isn't data, which is why I'm asking for references).

he and I would have a chat; he'd look and act (i.e., nod appropriately) as though he understood what I was saying; and, when he returned to his cubicle - back to the same old, same old

How explicit were you?

It's sometimes taken me years to realize what some of my managers were telling me. I thought I understood them at the time, but a decade (or more) later it suddenly hit me what they were really saying.

Maybe people who are entering the work force now were educated about all the different flavors of human; I wasn't, nor were most of the people in my office. People with physical special needs no longer seem bothered about asking for or being asked whether they need any special assistance or devices. Doubt this is the case with people with interpersonal/social communication needs.

Even asking often doesn't work. I taught at a school with an autism program, so every staff member had training on the autism spectrum and the accommodations that would make life better for our students. This training included Aspergers. Do you think admin was willing to accommodate staff?

I wouldn't accept any settlement with Fox that did not include every one of Fox's "ON AIR" personalities beginning every episode of their shows with a specific disclaimer that they HAD lied about Dominion.

Nah. Should be a scrolling banner along the bottom of the screen for their entire show.

I thought that when Carson got off on the grounds that his program wasn't news but rather entertainment, and no sensible person would take him seriously. Should have insisted that a disclaimer had to appear across the screen.

Here's something even more off-topicer than Fox News paying $800,000,000 to avoid explaining their actions to a judge (and doesn't that sound incriminating, kids?):

The SMBC creators have a new book coming titled A City on Mars which presents a lot of stuff about space travel and colonization; I'm thinking that a well researched analysis of science fictional proposals sounds like something some of us would like to read.

"Space is hard." Anything done in outer space is hard and expensive. It turns out keeping monkeys alive in a can is also hard and expensive. But we're probably going to keep trying to do it, so we'd better know how.

Random topic drift: I saw a Facebook ad today from Ray-Ban about a product developed jointly with Meta... essentially something that looks a lot like Google Glass.

Yes, I mentioned it on the most recent thread. It does look very interesting, however.

Oh FFS don't say that bloody idea is coming back. I was SO GLAD when Google dropped it, thinking that if Google could conclude that something so perfectly up their street wasn't worth the hassle, they would probably have succeeded not only in putting themselves off but in putting everyone else off too.

And now bloody Arsebook are at it? Arsebook who flaunt their horrid face recognition software on their website and get untold millions of gullible fools to train it for them, who are mispersuaded that it's "cute" or "cool" or some bloody thing and seem utterly oblivious to any other possible aspect. It's a great shame there's no way to enforce the reading and assimilation of a list of selected works by such people as Charlie and Cory Doctorow as a compulsory step for people to complete before they can sign up to that fucking site.

It's also a great shame that low-single-figures GHz frequencies need such a bloody big reflector.

"It's a great shame there's no way to enforce the reading and assimilation of a list of selected works by such people as Charlie and Cory Doctorow as a compulsory step for people to complete before they can sign up to that fucking site."

So much this. So much.

Past 300:

Starship didn't quite make it to orbit. It got off the ground though...

Where I work, we call an early or uncommanded termination a "failure".

And a failure that launched debris over a nearby wildlife reserve, one that gives migratory birds a place to nest. https://futurism.com/wildlife-starship-explosion

They were very upfront that this was an R&D flight. Telemetry was the goal. 1000s of bits and pieces on a first time flight.

While they lost the rocket they got a lot of data. And knew and said that it might not get to the end of the flight plan.

And a failure that launched debris over a nearby wildlife reserve,

Actually, if you read the article carefully, they said some particulates were discovered after this launch. The mention of debris was from earlier testing, for which they got dinged by the FAA (and why the launch permit took so long).

The explosion was 33 km high, so probably enough down range to be out over the Gulf.

At 33km altitude you should have been stable enough to make orbit or at least a controlled crash well downrange. The only justification for a kill was if there was a tumble starting after stage one termination.

s/termination/separation. It's 02:30 AM and I am Covid positive.

The only justification for a kill was if there was a tumble starting after stage one termination.

Did you read the flight plan?

There never was a plan to get to orbit. The plan was to go up in a big loop but not quite orbit on a trajectory that would come down in the Pacific.

And stage separation didn't happen on schedule. And 2 engines were not performing correctly at liftoff and up to 6 or 7 were off by the time of stage separation. (There was a neat real time graphics of this.) And tumbling or similar did occur. When I last read about the flight it wasn't yet public if it came apart due to adverse flight issues or a destruct was initiated on purpose.

They were trying a LOT of tings first time all at once. And were upfront saying things might go sideways. They will now rebuild (likely with a few mods) the launch pad and stage up the next iteration (which already has design mods backed in) for another R&D flight in a few months to a year.

Here's a write up about the difference between SpaceX and NASA as it relates to such things.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/so-what-was-that-was-starships-launch-a-failure-or-a-success/

I am Covid positive

Sorry to hear.

My son in law got it and he almost gave it to me and my wife. Just 2 weeks ago. We were apparently not quite around him long enough in his early stages. (In a closed car for an hour or so plus in a small room in our house for another 2 or 3 hours.)

He was telling us today the worst for him was not the physical symptoms but his brain running at a reduced capacity. And how it wore him out to have to think for more than a few minutes at a time. And he was fully vac'd. 4 or 5 shots total.

It's 02:30 AM and I am Covid positive

Here's hoping that your case is as uneventful as mine was a couple of months ago--and half as tedious.

My wife has just tested negative, which suggests to me that I will test negative by the end of the weekend

We reckon that she was one of many who got infected at Eastercon, and then gave it to me, so I'm about three days later than her. I don't think I have passed it on, and so far it's affected me no more that a cold.

It's a hideous virus.

My first time round (Omicron caught me out last June) I had the happy fun minority experience with no nose/throat/lung symptoms at all. So I couldn't get a positive LFT result so it's not "official" COVID. However, I had the full range of non-respiratory symptoms: gut rot of doom, fever, joint and muscle aches, loss of smell/taste, and of course the brain fog. Took a couple of months before I could think clearly enough to write anything at all, and I still have tremors in my right arm and permanent random hiccups (probable vagus nerve damage).

The second time, in early October, was a lot milder at first -- it mostly felt like a bad head-cold that lingered for two weeks. That one was a clear positive test (because of the ENT involvement, I think). The brain fog and fatigue was more pernicious if anything, and I'm pretty sure there's some lingering impairment. Oh, and a subsequent non-COVID respiratory virus (probably RSV but there's no test for that available in the UK outside of a hospital ward) knocked me for six: everything just feels ... off.

If you've avoided a COVID19 family virus so far, congratulations and try to keep up the good work.

I read a lot of ebooks and follow a lot of authors, including some on KU who publish 2-4 books a year like clockwork. Writing machines, in other words. And a number of them have gone dark, or at least dim, in 2021-23: self-pub release dates pushed back 6 or 12 months and rate of releases suddenly dropping from 3 books/year to 1/18 months; and when the book finally emerges, it's not as coherent and consistent as earlier works. COVID19 brain fog is so widespread that if you could data mine the Kindle Unlimited corpus you could probably identify when/where the public slackened off on sheltering and work out which authors came down with it and when to within +/- six months.

If you've avoided a COVID19 family virus so far, congratulations and try to keep up the good work.

I think so - and am nervously uncertain about that because so many people were getting it, and spreading it, while asymptomatic. I'm reasonably good about not spending time very near other people but pass by far too many briefly, or at a few meters range.

All of this nonsense makes me quite happy to keep a mask on. We're all tired of the Covid era, but pretending it's all over only makes things worse.

I am really NOT looking forward to it, especially given that I am already prescribed codeine for persistent abdominal pain, with an offer of something stronger when needed. But I am pretty sure that I can't avoid it indefinitely, even given my near-isolation.

Covid & the upcoming "Arcturus" variant.
I'm fully vaccinated { 4 shots } & have avoided it - so far - though I have a revolting chesty bubbly cough, right now.
Really, definitely don't want it, because of the repeated evidence of persistent brain fog.
See also Charlie's comments.
We are stuck with this disease, for ever, as far as I can see?

Development work on new vaccines continues. In particular, work focussing on a sterilizing nasal vaccine seems to be moving forward on various fronts. (If you can immunize the cells lining the nose and oropharynx you can stop it from getting into your body entirely, which in turn will stop it circulating in the general population if enough folks are vaccinated this way.)

I am not happy with the UK government's decision to limit this summer's third booster shot to immunocompromised/vulnerable people and over-75s.

Better news: we gained a huge amount of experience with mRNA vaccines in record time circa 2020-22. Moderna are already talking about targeted anti-cancer and anti-heart disease vaccines arriving by the end of the decade (implying they're in active development using what is now no longer an experimental process). A broad-spectrum flu vaccine looks to be right around the corner (actual deployment planned within 1-2 years) which is huge. There may be more breakthoughs to come.

Yes, though (based on the epidemiology), I am afraid that Greg is right. We would need a 95% immunising vaccine, and a 90% take-up to actually eliminate it (all figures invented, but the right ball-park). We might JUST be able to provide good protection for vaccinated people, but it would probably need several shots a year.

I agree with your unhappiness about the booster policy - the people who are ruining this country really DON'T understand epidemiology. The original decision not to offer the HPV vaccine to boys was a classic example.

The targetted anti-cancer and influenza vaccines sound most interesting, but I doubt they will be as effective as people seem to expect. Many cancers are poorly differentiated (mine is), so targetting a few cell lines will not kill all of it. And I'll bet on influenza out-evolving vaccines :-(

Have you any idea what they mean by anti-heart disease vaccines? Most heart disease is not caused by infections and, of that which is, there is a large array of causes.

370 to 373 - Thanks guys. My 2 bouts were both mistaken (by me) for heavy colds. It actually took PCR tests to confirm they weren't (administered by Dialysis Ward staff).

376 and 378 - Since Charlie hasn't pointed it out, the "common cold" is usually a Coronavirus, although misnamed as a rhinovirus.

I'll dig out the reference if I must, but I should point out that Moderna's first attempt at an mRNA influenza vaccine failed.

mRNA tech is great stuff, but it's not the panacea everyone hoped it would be.

Changing the subject slightly, one can propose the twee notion that immune systems have their own "intelligence," in that they're really good at finding and identifying certain kinds of chemicals, and doing things with them. In this regard, vaccines are basically humans saying "hi nice immune system, it would be mutually beneficial if you found and destroyed the following structures..." The fact that it takes multiple trials and hundreds of millions of dollars to safely and effectively send that message shows how hard it can be to communicate with a truly alien intelligence, even one as intimate as our own immune systems.

That needs something like a T-Shirt with a picture of a white blood cell and text reading "C.J. Cherryh was right!"

A New Theory for the Great Filter

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/planet-earth-stars-x-ray-exploded-b2324343.html

(Planets out to 150 light years are in danger from X-rays generated by interactions with gas clouds between a supernova and the planet.)

Re: 'How explicit were you?'

Not explicit enough. Most conversations with team go something like this: If X says they need help, would you be okay with helping X? Response: Nod [which I understand as meaning ' Yes'.] With this team member, I should have phrased it as: When X needs help, I want you to help. [Ugh, sounds so controlling/micromanaging ...]

I think part of the problem (from my end) is not being able to find the appropriate turn of phrase or conversational rules. Idioms don't seem to work - they're not as universal as we've been lead to believe, i.e., they vary by locale and generation. So the next step for me is finding analogies.

This would be a useful psy/language research topic: how interpersonal development and cognition interact/intersect with language ability and usage. Not just English but maybe the 20 or so most spoken languages and in both spoken/face-to-face and written interactions. Reason for measuring both oral and written is that some (spoken) languages may rely on body language and facial expressions more than other languages in informal conversation. (Probably why emjois are so popular in informal written communications.)

Weird question - Shakespeare:

My guess is that Shakespeare more than any other author was able via language to depict a wide number of different personalities. My question is: which of his characters (if any) would fall along the ASD?

Play title, character name, sample line from speech in Act/Scene.

Needing help: my first programming job, long, long ago. Managers changed every year - they were each at the top of their salary ranges, so they'd swap who was in charge of the programmers ("New responsibilities! Raise!). One was a former USN officer, and he'd call you in and tear you apart for mistakes. Another, a good old boy from NC, would call you in, "We've got a problem, I need it fixed quick like a bunny, let me know if you need help".

Guess which one I'd bust my butt for.

It was supposed to flip (which I think is nuts) to help booster separation. It flipped, and kept flipping, and no separation. They pushed the self-destruct button.

I think preventing platelets from blocking the arteries (I hope, since that's why I had quad bypass two years ago). And no, I do not eat a lot of fat.

On the other hand, https://www.dailywire.com/news/forever-chemicals-linked-to-weight-gain-making-dieting-harder-study-finds

Still COVID-free so far, and waiting for the next booster to be announced by our med org (we're on KP).

SFR
Probably "The Prince of Denmark" ...

EC
CORRECTION:
"... the people who are ruining this country really DON'T understand epidemiology ANY fucking thing at all ..."

Yes, I was going to comment on that. But really, they do understand a lot... how to con the marks, tossing dead cats on the table, etc.