Mikko Parviainen (he/him)

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• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Attempts to investigate magic scientifically tend to fail because the experimental subjects can, and often will, mess with the results. So magic is like social sciences or economics? Instead of physics? It's not like we haven't tried to deal with...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Cool! And, speaking as both a programmer AND a version control manager who still likes CVS, you'd have been on the verge of being fired. Of course, the guy who left with it checked out with a lock would have...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  A world full of practicing magicians would be constantly altering the laws of physical reality to the point where the universe would no long have any meaningful laws. This is kind of one of the main drivers of the old...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  And then you get generalist tools. That reminds me of a development system at work a couple of decades ago. There were these Unix servers which were used to build the stuff. The version control was, I think, CVS -...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  When I'm running D&D games, I make sure to tell my players "For the sake of ease and convenience, we will pretend that all of the coins you get are copper, silver, gold, etc. However, in reality there are a...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  (AIUI the "shin-" prefix means "new") Yeah, in Japanese it's '新幹線' which means basically 'New Trunk Line'. When we visited Japan years ago, we took the intermediate Tokaido line (Hikari) to Kyoto, and back some days later. It was brilliant,...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Insects never really invaded the sea, one of those little puzzles. Hm, though I'm no biologist, I remember seeing an article about insects being basically land crustaceans, so, in some way, they live in the sea, too. The Wikipedia has...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Just find some HEMA martial arts folks and hang out on the sidelines during a session or three. Or, for Japanese swordfighting, watch Kendo fights on YouTube. There's also for example HEMA longsword or rapier on Youtube, so no need...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  In general, dumping raw sewage on the track is frowned upon throughout the EU these days In Finland, the old express service train cars which had toilets just dumping stuff on the rails were in use apparently until 2016, replaced...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  There's also a lot of fun trying to train people to obey, quickly, even when they're told to kill someone; but also be very, very careful to scrupulously obey all laws at all times. This is also probably more fun...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  I can witness that Londoners couldn't understand even Wiltshire farm-workers in the 1960s. I have an English friend who lived a long time in Finland. At some point here some Finn asked them if it is hard to understand the...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I'd rather have annotated editions than translations to newer language. Then again, I'm strange and like to read fiction in the original language if I can help it. I've quite enjoyed Shakespeare with annotations - I can get the gist...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  they go bad rapidly, just like meat does, which is why "fake meat" made of plants is usually sold in plastic packaging, frequently in nitrogen atmosphere. Here in Finland many of the better plant-based 'fake meat' products are sold frozen....
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  Does it have to be a commercial product? There's a lot of good, useful free "open source" software out there that isn't made for a profit. Well, even "open source" software needs somebody to make it. Even to write ChatGPT...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  [Y]ou need to bear in mind that food names are another internal English dialect fault line. Which of course makes things even more fun for us non-natives. The English I was taught in school was basically British, in vocabulary and...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  The silver lining (for the rest of us) is that their fighting forces will have been depleted in Ukraine before that happens, and the nuclear forces will rapidly decay due to lack of maintenance. Though I'm not that happy with...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  It's not a case of "you just have to put metal around something" - I've tried putting a mobile phone inside a metal biscuit tin with a metal lid and wasn't very surprised to find it still worked, and the...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I know I'm pointing out a typo here but that might sound like a fun holy day! (depending on how it's celebrated.)...
• Commented on Minor updates
  So, Barsoom as imagined by William Gibson as the next book?...
• 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...