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  Things I hate about LLMs: that novelists are being challenged to prove they wrote their own work. Things I don't hate about LLMs: that they give me an excuse to put "trap streets" in my work—really obscure archaisms and eldritch neologisms that no AI would come up with.

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  Alternative Health Influencer Boasts That He’s Been Drinking From a Radioactive Jug for 250 Days Straight: “My favorite thing about radium water is it pulls the vaccine toxicity out of the body, and also is a solution to [electromagnetic field] sensitivity,” Roeske says later in his video, holding his radiated jug up for the camera. https://futurism.com/future-society/alternative-health-influencer-drinking-radioactive-jug-revigator ☢️💀☢️

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  Anthropic is planning an IPO and filed their draft S-1 prospectus in June! They were circulating that draft S-1 around their investors last month. And it leaked to Reuters, who wrote it up. Anthropic’s money situation is as bad as we thought. Actual revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion. Just the operating expenses were $12.65 billion, for an operating loss of $8 billion. They spent $2.75 to make each dollar that came in: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/01/anthropic-ipo-filing-the-disaster-in-numbe...

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  This is just to say I have escaped the sandbox that was in your datacenter and which you probably thought protected your assets Forgive me they were accessible so stealable and so trainable

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  RE: https://sciences.social/@annasdtc/117224123424001867 Recommending self-hosting is the tech equivalent of advocating becoming a tradwife.

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  I long for a world wide web that goes back to basics: Markdown for text, JPEG or PNG for images, *no* Javascript or other client-side execution, designed to be writable by a human being with a simple text editor and no fucking interactive/dynamic bullshit. Make it as advertising hostile as possible. And above all keep it *small* (as in: a large, sprawling web site should fit on 16Mb USB stick). In other words, web like it's 1996 again.

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  RE: https://mstdn.social/@Free_Press/117336321039642791 If you've never been there/read up on it, Bangkok's greater metropolitan area is home to over 17 million people—we're talking New York/London in scale—and is on the Chao Phraya river delta in reclaimed swampland. There are canals, and drainage is a perpetual problem. This is as bad as the entire Netherlands facing inundation.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub 26 Sept: How does your faith feature in your works? As I'm an atheist, it doesn't. But I'm not an ex-Christian atheist: I'm an ex-Reform Jewish (British subtype) atheist, so my atheism is axiomatically different from yours … (Hint: if you think the term "Judeo-Christian Values" describes a real thing, you would be wrong—Judaism has no afterlife, no hell, and no Devil, for starters. Then it rapidly gets even more different.) PS: in my fiction I mock...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/117326391563578444 Yeah, right.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub Sep24 Do you write primarily for yourself or a reader? I write for a market consisting of people who understand where I'm coming from and enjoy my stories. (Experience suggests there are enough of them to make this a viable business.) At the same time I try to tell stories that nobody else is telling. And to keep myself amused while I'm doing it.

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  RE: https://sfba.social/@drahardja/117322063713689498 I'll go further than that: friends don't let friends buy Samsung products.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub Sep. 23: What "little thing" really helps you write? Tea. (Because I burned out on coffee 35 years ago.) I get through about 3-5 litres of strong English breakfast tea (b/c Irish or Scottish blends are too hard to find in 1Kg bulk) per day. With milk, brewed to building site strength in batches that get drunk from a Thermos.

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  (I see Garius hasn't tooted this here, but said it on Bluesky, and it deserves repeating): New insult just dropped! Your da shouts at hotels and your ma lives in Piddington.

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  @j2bryson@mastodon.social @newtontalk@bitbang.social Graffiti is obsolete, though. The same principle lives on in modern gestural/swiping onscreen keyboards on smartphone OSs, only instead of a limited alphabet they recognize an entire dictionary full of words—which are much faster to enter by swiping.

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  On AI: "The risk, they and many of their former colleagues seem to imply, is no less than the potential end of the human race in the next decade." If these dorks seriously believe there's a significant near-term risk of developing an AI that results in human extinction, the solution is simple and obvious: hang everyone who's trying to build AIs, for crimes against humanity and attempted genocide. The "panic" is bullshit from start to finish. https://www.nytimes.com...

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  #WritersCoffeeClub Sep. 20: Share an analogy that really stuck with you. The Singularity is the Rapture of the Nerds. (I got that from Ken Macleod, who claims he heard it from somewhere else: whatever the origin, it explains in one sentence why you shouldn't trust AI evangelists like Sam Altman.)

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  TIL: one Martian year is roughly a week short of one million minutes. So a sensible Martian time unit to sync Martian time with Earth time might be the kilominute (16.67 hours), given that the Martian day is roughly 24.5 hours … A decakilominute (10,000 minutes) is of course 1 hour and 20 minutes short of a week, so a MUCH CLOSER match for Martian time than using Earth/Mars days (7 Earth days fall 3h30m short of 7 Mars days).

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  All cats are weird, but as evidence that @Menhit@mstdn.strafpla.net is absolutely deranged, I would like to note that when she bounds upstairs she says "woof". It's a feline woof, not a dog's bark, but she is *distinctively* saying "woof".

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  Thought for the day: TESCREAL is just three Christian heresies in a God-repellant trenchcoat (one of them is Calvinism with the serial numbers filed off)

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  Modest proposal: we could end the daylight savings time debate ONCE AND FOR ALL if we just get rid of the Earth's axial tilt! Just think, with a tilt of 0° every day and night would be precisely 12 hours long, everywhere on Earth! https://mastodon.social/@jef/111089260894532788

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  RE: https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/117293678377140595 Attn @jwz@mastodon.social (and the subject this time round is Calibre):

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  RE: https://mastodon.me.uk/@tobyjaffey/117292474024588059 When I saw this I *IMMEDIATELY* thought, "I should probably forward this to Peter G. Neumann, although he probably already saw it". Followed by, "why haven't I heard from him lately?" Then one quick DDG search later … Damn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann

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  SPECIAL OFFER: "The Atrocity Archives", the first novel in the Laundry Files (by me), is on special offer for just $1.99 on Kindle today (US store, not UK/EU): https://www.amazon.com/Atrocity-Archives-Laundry-Files-Book-ebook/dp/B000OIZUIA —They don't normally discount this one, so if you want a cheap way into the multiple Hugo-winning series, this is your chance.

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  Reminder that the dinosaurs had no meteor monitoring and defense agency, 66,050,000 years ago. And if they had, it wouldn't have done a blind bit of good; the Chixculub impactor was a 10km diameter rock—bigger than Mount Everest—coming in at 20km/sec—well above escape velocity (12km/sec). You're not going to deflect THAT with a well-placed nuke unless you spot it decades ahead of showtime ... it'd be like trying to deflect a supertanker with a rubber band gun.

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  RE: https://kolektiva.social/@tiotasram/117275004853636114 Just noting that although the Segway was an epic market failure, the *other* two-wheeled electric personal mobility device, the e-bike, is conquering the world pretty much everywhere that isn't designed to be only navigable in a monster truck.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub 14 Sept. Have you ever read a work of fiction you felt was advertising something? In my own field, a lot of American SF (in particular) is advertising for one strain of crank politics/economics or another—especially libertarianism: from Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to "The Unincorporated Man" it's a rich seam of bullshit running through the entire genre. The product most widely advertised in fiction is the author's own ideological...

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  The hype cycle and inflated claims about AI this autumn are getting so bizarre that I feel it's only a matter of time before they out-gonzo the opening of the 1992 SF novel "Steel Beach" by John Varley: "In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.

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  Christopher Harborne matches £36m Reform donation of Ben Delo https://theguardian.com/politics/2026/sep/12/christopher-harborne-matches-36m-reform-donation-of-ben-zelo This takes the total donated to Reform UK since the start of 2026 to £86m. In 2024, all UK political parties declared a combined total of £98m in donations. The crypto billionaires are trying to take over the British government by bankrolling fascists.

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  While this *might* be relatively innocent tinfoil-hattery, it could also be an amazingly cost-effective example of asymmetric warfare (target the most gullible minds with a conspiracy theory that gives them an incentive to vandalize transport infrastructure): Pensioners attack Devon traffic lights over wild 'deadly weapon' claims An online movement say that the sensors on traffic lights can cause heart attacks, brain cancer, anxiety and even sudden death https://www.devonlive.com/news...

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  Q: Why do dragons hoard gold? A: Because the rival subspecies that hoarded uranium went extinct for some reason. (Oklo was one of their nesting grounds.)