Scottish resident SF/F author (he/him/they/them). Three times Hugo Award winner, 30+ novels in print. Does not play well with Nazis. Abolish the monarchy!
Born in a world with 320ppm atmospheric CO2, 3.3 billion people.
@cstross.bsky.social on Bluesky
blog at: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
FOLLOW REQUESTS: don’t expect a reciprocal follow. And I will reject requests from folks with no profile and/or no tooting history.
@BioMan Falcon 9 launches are reportedly sold for $60-80M (or $160-200M for Falcon Heavy). But an F9 launch in Starlink configuration is billed internally at just $12M, for the same payload as a Saturn 1B. Which is just insane (S1B cost $55M per flight in 1972, or $425M today).
@mech @techtakes Having SpaceX take over X is going to backfire explosively real soon now: France isn’t the only government investigating X for election meddling and peddling child pornography, and it could take down SpaceX’s ability to do business in countries that would otherwise be buying launch capacity:
@V0ldek @techtakes If you want high latency, nothing beats telnet from the UK to a server in California via a comsat in GEO back in the early 90s when the trans-Atlantic cable circuit was down. A three-phase TCP exchange has to crawl up to GEO, 35,000km above the equator, and back down *three times*, never mind the surface level routing.
Gave me a strong appreciation for Berkeley vi’s designed-in ability to cope with slow modems.
@Seaguy05 @techtakes Bear in mind SpaceX’s near monopoly is transient: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is now flying and re-using New Glenn and ramping up launch cadence aggressively. Give it 5 years and unless Starship works 100% to plan, SpaceX will be eroding like Tesla today. (And this ignores the multiple Chinese reusable launcher startups with government backing.)
@Soyweiser Years ago (before Epstein, before the GFC, etc) I used to jokingly talk about my pet conspiracy theory, that the world was ruled by the P7: the Pale Patriarchal Plutocratic Protestant Penis-People of Power.
Turns out I was right.
I didn’t want to be right …
@TrashGoblin @techtakes Au contraire: I am old and grumpy and I want UNIX (or rather, Linux) the way it was in 2003, none of this bullshit new-fangled nonsense that I don’t understand.
Hint: a LOT of computer users—as opposed to lascivious glassy-eyed computer touchers—are like this. We just want to get shit done, not force-learn a new workflow or debugging tool every five seconds (or years).
@CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.
@Soyweiser Bear in mind that the Middle Ages (roughly 500 years!) is a longer span of time than, say, from the founding of the English and French colonies in North America to the present day, close to the Spanish/Portuguese colonization of South America. And similarly huge in extent. Lots of places/times in the Middle Ages *were* peaceful and tolerant (by the standards of the day).
@Soyweiser @techtakes Nope. The Albigensian Crusade rampaged through the Languedoc (southern France, as it is now) and genocided the Cathars. Numerous lesser organized pogroms massacred Jews al fresco and butchered Muslims and Pagans living under Christian rule. The Alhambra Decree outlawed Islam and Judaism in Spain and set up a Holy Inquisition to persecute them: Richard III expelled all the Jews from England (he owed some of them money): and so on.
@Soyweiser You’ve forgotten the Crusades, right? Right? Or the Clifford’s Tower Massacre (to get hyper-specific in English history) and similar events all over Europe? Or the Reconquista and the Alhambra Decree?
@mirrorwitch I note that China is on the verge of producing their own EUV lithography tech (they demo’d it a couple of months back) so TSMC’s near-monopoly is on the edge of disintegrating, which means time’s up for Taiwan (unless they have some strategic nukes stashed in the basement).
If China *already* has EUV lithography machines they could plausibly reveal a front-rank semiconductor fab-line—then demand conditional surrender on terms similar to Hong Kong.
Would Trump follow through then?
@saucerwizard I still drink *socially*, but it’s very much an “I’ll have a pint or two at the pub where I’m going to see friends”, rather than “I’m going to the pub for a drink (with friends)”. And zero inclination to drink at home, even with meals. Not that I did so regularly before, but semaglutide caused a marked loss of interest on my part.
I was *really* worried for the first six months that it had nuked my pleasure in writing, which would have been a disaster—it’s my job—but I recovered.
@saucerwizard Do you drink alcohol, and if so, what has semaglutide done to your desire to drink? (I know my alcohol consumption crashed by about 80% when I went on Rybelsus—the oral formulation of semaglutide, the GLP-1 agonist in Ozempic™—and it’s a common enough side-effect that it’s undergoing clinical trials as an anti-addiction medication.)
@dgerard See also Dilbert Stark’s drone ship names …
@ZILtoid1991 Spoiler: it won’t happen, it’s basically more marketing bullshit from the folks trying to make bank off the AI bubble.
Next they’re going to tout AI-powered diaper-changing robots for nursing homes and maternity wards. Equal likelihood of success, of course.
@dgerard And The Empire of Azad was basically modern western imperialism writ large.
@antifuchs @techtakes The Culture won’t be adapted for TV/film without input from Iain’s heirs and his literary executors. Who are all very definitely Scottish and will have Opinions …
@fullsquare AIUI for optimal nuclear weapons (ie. lightweight pits that maximize fission) you need to be very careful about which phase of metallic plutonium you use (it has dozens). IIRC an alloy with about 2% germanium in delta-phase is densest: make it with as close to 100% Pu-239 as you can get. (This was declassified in the 1970s.) You’re also going to need some tritium gas to fill the hollow core, and other exotica (never mind the carefully timed explosive lenses to drive the implosion).
@o7___o7 @techtakes That’s why I’m fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.