Chrisj

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  the UK no longer mines coal Well, in theory we've stopped. But practice is never the same as theory, is it? So in practice the Ffos-y-fran "Land Reclamation Scheme" is still going despite having lost their licence last year (appeals...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  More interesting, to me at least: how does current society react? Because sociopaths - hedge fund managers, silicon valley "move fast and break things" ceos, etc - are some of the most highly rewarded members of our current social order,...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  a) to quote an astrophysicist of my acquaintance, "'Dark Matter' is not an explanation. It's not meant to be an explanation. It's a shorthand way of referring to a particular problem with our current model that we need to find...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  It occurred to me a while ago that the setting for the Paranoia RPG makes complete sense if you assume that Friend Computer, rather than a malfunctioning genius AGI in charge of a decaying military base, is actually an LLM...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  And the graphics subsystems that come built into most motherboards, although no doubt of quite adequate capability, have been useless for several years because they don't have VGA outputs any more. HDMI-to-VGA and DVI-to-VGA adaptors are widely available* in the...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  In Bujold's World of the Five Gods a magic user figures out how to turn a hand-written sheet of paper into a printing plate: put the sheet face down on the plate, and use magic to engrave the ink into...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  I think that one's pretty archaic, and largely subsumed into Geordie these days. OTOH, I'm not from anywhere near the toon, I just know a couple of people who live there, and it may be that the distinction has greater...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  My partner once (largely unintentionally) annoyed a proselytizing vegetarian aquaintance by absent-mindedly describing the lambs in a field they were passing as "very cute, in a proto-food sort of way"....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I can also imagine some morally challenged group in a state with less-than-rigorous ethics laws/enforcement investigating the removal of just a few of the uniquely human de novo genes from someone's genome, in the hopes of making a population who...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I'm now tickled by the idea of someone running this as a session/demo game at a convention, with a basic scenario that's the same, but each set of players getting whatever hints the previous group managed to leave behind. (None...
• Commented on WTF
  Around half of the world's sunflower oil is produced in Ukraine and Russia. Between drastically reduced output from the former and trade embargos on the latter, Putin's invasion has therefore a huge effect on both available supply and (because supply...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  (military transport planes) have avoided Hungary going out to Rzeszow and, respectively, the NATO airbases elsewhere in Eastern Europe. However, coming back, they have not avoided Hungary. So going out with stuff is sensitive but coming back without stuff is...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Or if you wanted to be really sneaky, how about a billionaire who wants a favour from $politician and agrees to buy up and then close down the main competitor to a company they have some kind of interest in?...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  So, if it seems unreasonable or unpractical to you to ban politicians from having other incomes, what about curbing their total income? Which only works if they don't have a partner, child, distant cousin or even friend for whom they're...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Relatedly, I understand that the Toyota MR2 never sold well in France....
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Given how well he's handling things at Twitter, I think Melon Husk is absolutely perfect to be in charge of migrating billionaires, kleptocrats, and their sycophants to Mars. I wouldn't wish it on anyone I liked, though. In reality, of...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Some kind of software development (I forget what he worked in at the time), and everyone involved was wearing black jeans and t-shirts....
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  My favourite ever job interview question (asked of a friend, not of me) remains: "Would you say goths are punks who lost the plot, or second-generation hippies with no colour sense?"...
• Commented on Omicron
  I offer for the optimists here my definition of the "new normal": Each year will be worse than the previous year, but the rate at which things get worse will continually increase. I'm uncertain whether the increase is linear, geometric,...
• Commented on Omicron
  Jewdas is a left-wing Jewish Diaspora group, based in London. Their work includes parodies of both anti-semitic and pro-zionist [expletive deleted], along with a certain amount of community outreach and cultural stuff. No idea what specific thing of theirs SotMN...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  a backpack full of whatever storage medium is relevant Predictably, Randall Munroe has conducted multiple thought experiments into the bandwidth and/or value of [container] full of [storage medium]. He calculated that 64GB micro-SD cards have a density of roughly 160TB/kilogram;...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Not only did Rita bookmark the blackhole timeline, she explicitly noted while flipping through her bookmarks later that she had two identical engrams. IIRC, she was then interrupted before she could check which two they were - so yes, I...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  I think the electrical isolation issue is actually a red herring in this case. We know you can't jaunt into a timeline where your location is occupied by a solid, and it seems reasonable to assume the same is true...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Those things all help to avoid making things worse than they already are, but I get the impression that timelines 2 and 3 have both already emitted substantially more CO2 (and probably other GHGs) than we have. And we're in...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Is there any "Word of Glod" on what actually became of Mike Fleming (and did he ever turn up in any of the earlier drafts)? Smith says that the DHS/FTO didn't get him, and has been known to tell the...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Dead Lies Dreaming
  But it was an unbearable era for many commoners As was most of the past. But most people imagine that they would be on top of the heap. There's a reason my standard reply to people who ask what...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  The typical cyberpunk world has a curious relationship with legality -- on the one hand corporations are all-powerful, on the other hand they appear to have no recourse to litigation. I don't see any contradiction here. For litigation to be...
• Commented on A Quick Infomercial
  To quote the late, great, Willie Rushton, "A true sportsman fears only two things: fear itself, and the sight of a cricketball whizzing towards their head at ninety miles an hour."...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  That said, martian soil has a fair amount of perchlorate in it, so digging on Mars is about as safe as digging into an old USAF toxic waste dump. If you want to tunnel on Mars, making the walls nontoxic...
• Commented on What happens now?
  In American a billion is a thousand million. In Britain a billion is a million million. In Britain, a billion is a thousand million. This has been the case in all government work for nearly fifty years, and in the...