Mikko Parviainen (he/him)

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  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.)...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  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...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Mikko, I may have said this before, but beyond your obviously Finnish name and the "not a native English speaker" statement I wouldn't know that you're not. Yeah, though it's easier to write than to speak - I speak more...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  I'm not a boomer, but solidly Gen X, by age. I'm not a native English speaker, and Finland has a bit different demographics than both the UK and the US, so I don't belong exactly to the demographic Charlie is...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  I assumed the New Management was a metaphor for the right-most kind of Tories. Well, to me it seems the New Management is much more capable of getting things done and food (if 3d printed meats) on the grocery store...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Reducing it to "all anyone needs is a tunic and sandals" is reductionist nonsense. Some years ago I played in this scifi live-action roleplaying game (of about two days). This was very much like 'Battlestar Galactica' with the serial numbers...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Apparently, the universe is only 6,000 years old even if God made it look older. You can of course try to discuss Last Thursdayism which says that the world was created last Thursday at 9:00 in the morning, in a...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Also, what we're seeing isn't "AI" in any meaningful sense, it's just the use of deep neural networks for machine learning on a scale that was hitherto unimaginably vast[.] Yeah. I did a couple of graduate-level neural network courses about...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Also I think there might even be some benefit for near-future sf from the fancy Markov Chain generators: the plausible-sounding complete bullshit generator can be a plot-element, useful for example highlighting the problems inherent in trusting them in any kind...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I can see James Joyce submitting 'Finnegan's Wake' and then some editor returning the manuscript, commented by The Chicago Manual of Style....
• Commented on Place your bets
  They look like fancy, fuzzy Markov Chains to me. We played a bit with those in the Nineties, just for fun. A friend made one program, fed it their mom's medical publications and I think at something like 4-5 chain...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Also, what is this Ryan Air thing that's all over Europe? Something to be avoided when booking flights? I just had to fly the first time in over three years, and, uh, even though the flights were short and 'usual'...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  From stuff I've read on-line it seems like DARPA has funded the development of insect size ornithopter drones - advantage of VISUAL stealth in addition to acoustic or radar deflecting stealth - it looks like an insect instead of a...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Speaking of advanced aircraft designs like the tiltrotor, what would it take to create the ornithopters seen in Dune, the dragonfly-like craft shown in the recent movie? I think (not being an engineer of this type, though, so just guesswork)...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  FWIW, I read it as a joke. (Also, you forgot Finland, we were part of Russia until 1917 and they tried to take us back.)...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  (a) I believe northern Europe is probably better placed to weather the coming storm if Russia is defeated or exhausted in Ukraine (before it becomes a more general conflict or goes nuclear) Though I think we'd have to do something...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Not here, but at this time of year -- mid February -- I'd usually be running my central heating 24x7; this year I'm having to manually turn it on for an hour or so every 3-4 hours. We're not having...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Cold War air doctrine required high-speed interceptors able to get from the ground to 50,000 feet and a long way from base really quickly to shoot down incoming nuclear bombers. It wasn't just flat-out speed but time-to-altitude that counted so...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Please forgive my cluelessness in such matters, but how does one view the href? The 'this comment from XX' part of the 'YY replied to this comment from XX' is a HTTP link. You can click that to see the...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  The problem however is that Premier Xi is as much an autocratic single-point-of-sanity-failure as Putin, and has a vastly more solid economy to back his moves. Although the grotesque mishandling of ending lockdown there suggests that it's very brittle. One...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Now Russia is trying to rampage across Europe and this is the war we were raised expecting to die in. Lots of parental aged people are feeling twitchy. Well, I'm a tad younger than many people here, but I was...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Probably at this point, it's worth coming up with working ways to reduce urban sprawl. Otherwise, it risks becoming a handwave, like "oh, we solved pollution, climate change, and built FTL, now let me get on with my story." This...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  (why move a thousand artillery shells forward if all you need to do is drop one building, which a single PGM can hit?). ... because you're Russia and don't have the capability to produce PGMs nor really the need for...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  This copy-and-reinstate again reminds me that I have this campaign idea for the scifi roleplaying game 'Eclipse Phase'. In that world, mind copies are a common thing, and many people escaped the destruction of the Earth. There are also stargates...
• Commented on WTF
  Anyway. One skilled rifleman with a 1914-era British bolt-action rifle could lay down as much fire as a platoon of 1630s arquebusiers, with greater accuracy, while staying out of their range. (I suspect modern assault rifles or PDWs would be...
• Commented on WTF
  Moz: My point here, aside from teasing Canadians, was that Australia is a clothing-optional country at least as far as climate goes. Traditionally clothing is as much decorative as anything, with paint being common. Housing much the same. Tents were...
• Commented on WTF
  Here we have an app, too. It knows from the phone's location where you are and can be used to connect to the operators, and passes that info directly to them. Somehow, not sure what it really does, but this...
• Commented on WTF
  It can't do terminal i/o so vi and emacs are non-starters, but it can understand cat "hello world" >>filename, and it can even execute python code plausibly if it's fed one-liners on the command line. Even though it has no...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  There is a collection on Twitter, here: https://twitter.com/exclamate_/status/1589426189579747328 Warning: there's a lot of the stuff....
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Well, this is a large and sensitive subject, and I'm very much not the best person to talk about this, but 'trans' and 'cis' in regards to sex don't come from 'transition' - the root is the same, from Latin,...