@V0ldek @techtakes Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd’s/_of/_London

@pikesley @Soyweiser @fullsquare IIRC the coordination problem afflicts all engineering disciplines: with large tech projects like the LHC and ITER, costs scale as something like the fourth power of the energies they’re working with, and a large part of the reason is that managing the project is insanely difficult. I’d love to see some numbers for how the management complexity of large software projects (eg. operating systems, LLMs) compares to this.

@nightsky @techtakes Back when I was in software dev I had the privilege of working with a couple of superprogrammers (not at the same company, many years apart). They probably wrote *less* code: it was just qualitatively far, far more elegant and effective. And they were fast, too.

@gerikson I’d like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn’t get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who’s scared of robots.

@Mubelotix @techtakes You know what else would solve the Nicole problem? Old-skool USENET style client-side killfiles circa 1990, applied to DMs—your inbox-equivalent.

@o7___o7 @sneerclub Yep, but hopefully my next space opera will take it to the next level (once I finish it—I’ve been working on it since 2015) …

@rook @sneerclub No; back in the early 1990s he was an amusing usenet troll with a sideline in ice-cold sarcasm, but the libertarianism hadn’t eaten his brain yet (although it had already gotten to his elder brother, the cypherpunk).

@HedyL One twist: I imagine google devotes CONSIDERABLE effort to aggressively caching LLM-generated answers (probably parsing queries and merging similar ones before checking the cache for previous replies). That’d reduce their costs substantially compared to just throwing every question at an LLM directly. And it keeps eyeballs on Google’s own content and own served ads rather than wandering off into the wildernessd of the non-google public web.

@TinyTimmyTokyo alt.peeves, alt.tasteless, probably most of the comp.* hierarchy, not sure where else.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted It’s probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we’d all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.

You can’t ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.

@blakestacey I believe there was rapid turnover. (PIHKAL was cited as the cookbook being used. This was in 1993, so it was pretty new …)

@gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience …

@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I’ve been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they’re larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren’t entirely clear on the whole concept of “fiction”.

@JohnBierce CyberTruck, ofc.

@dgerard TESCREAL is structurally an evangelical a-theist religion descended from the 19th century Russian Orthodox christianity of Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorov and in my new book I will—

Nah, forget the book, I’ve got the attention of the POTUS’s ketamine-addled fractional-trillionaire shitposter, get in the car, losers! (Thows brake pedal at puzzled pedestrian)

@froztbyte I think @d4rkness is eliding a few steps that look clear to them, but they’re basically right: eugenics is about all transhumanists can do *today*, a lot of transhumanism is warmed-over Technocracy (the Musk family’s ideological wellspring), Technocracy was *def* on board with eugenics (and apartheid), so here we are: they aspire to more but eugenics is what they can do today so they’re doing it.

(I’ve been studying transhumanism since roughly 1990 and that’s my considered opinion.)

@madargon @V0ldek @gerikson @techtakes Obviously you read the wrong cyberpunk. (Go root out Bruce Sterling’s short story “20 Evocations”, collected in Schismatrix Plus, and you’ll see an assassin having his arms and legs repossessed because he can’t kill enough people to keep up with the loan repayment schedule …)

@bitofhope @techtakes Surely you need a PDP-9 for that?

@dgerard Clickbait declined! Your bait is old and stinky.

@Mitchell_Porter Musk was already a billionaire-adjacent dude who got seriously rich off Paypal and was trying to launch rockets. (Also, I used to go drinking with Iain. The subject came up.)