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  Nice chill Friday, a great day to do #ThreeGoodThings 1. Employer recognised our union branch 2. I got all my writing off Google drive and into an alternative storage/online editing solution hosted outside the US. 3. I was feeling like I was down a hole with very slippery sides earlier this week, but now I feel like I have a bit of agency and a plan. Ready for a fun weekend.

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  Of all the big LLM companies, the most ethical one in terms of ripping off copyrighted works is GrokAI, which is only trained on Mein Kampf and Lolita.

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  #ScribesAndMakers Jul 29 From soft to hard, where do your tastes fall on the Science Fiction scale? There's three axes: how much the science is the point of the story idea, how much the science is articulated, and how plausible the science is. So it's kind of a cube rather than a scale. If the science isn't the point, don't go on about it. If the science is the point, get it right (apart from the what-if impossible bit). Either is fine.

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  Ah, AI autumn is upon us again. It's been a while. Now we look forward to AI winter, and AI Christmas, when if we're very good Sam Altman will be visited by 3 ghosts who don't attempt the impossible task of saving his soul, and just kick the shit out of him.

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  The thing about #ClimateChange under unregulated capitalism is: Corporations will implacably and inexorably do the things that are going to kill us all for as long as those things make a profit. If AND ONLY IF we tax and regulate them so the things that are going to kill us aren't profitable any more, we get to live. It is that simple. There is no path to corporations not killing us all and even themselves if the time lag between act and consequence is longer than one financial year.

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  So, I'm told about 37 fash showed up at Glasgow Green today. I didn't bother counting them myself. The counter-demo is at least 500 so far, at a guess, with more coming in.

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  #WordWeavers 21 Jul Do past reviews influence your current writing? Book website reviews are not feedback. Those are for people with plenty of time and opinions to say what they don't like about a book so other people can think "but that sounds good actually" or the other way round. Thoughtful reviews by people who know what they're doing, and maybe even what you're doing, are still for the reader. They're not for the writer. Don't read them as if they're fee...

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  When I get my next phone, I'm going to buy 2 cases for it. Because if you can still get a replacement case for your phone when the first one wears out, you're buying phones too often. Ideally too, this will be after the start of the next AI winter, so my next phone won't be full of features I don't want that keep breaking things because the server owners are bankrupt or in prison.

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  Never break the law for a good reason. If you break the law for gain or just because you felt like it, you might get off lightly. You'll at least only have the usual burden of raising reasonable doubt that what you did was what you're charged with. If you say you had a good reason to break the law, that's an attack on the legitimacy of the law itself. They'll fuckin *get* you for that.

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  @MissingThePt@mastodon.social Can the triathlon guys get far enough through the snow and across the ice cold river before the skiiers with guns come for them?

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  Millions of depoliticised people with no interest in how things work but full of vague grievances are a statistical phenomenon with its own inertia, almost a physical disaster like a tsunami or a pyroclastic flow. Once they get going they are definitely going to wreck everything, and talking a tiny fraction of them back from the edge isn't going to do anything. This is why boring good governance matters. The lesser of two evils always falls to the louder of two evils. Try being actually...

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  Heard on the bus a few days ago: "He's got five sons, wan ae them's twins" This is from a native speaker of Modern Scottish English, so I can't put an asterisk beside it.

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  At some point we need to stop agreeing that someone can own 1000,000 times as much as their equal share of the world and do what they like to everyone else's share by exerting ownership as power. We could just not believe that any more, it's not a law of physics. What's going to happen if we stop? Disastrous climate change, concentration camps, resource wars? Ooo, scary.

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  I've said it before, but #WesStreeting has huge Young Conservative vibes, and if you showed 1990s me a photo of him, even without any intervening political context, I'd absolutely identify him as the oily Thatcherite simp he is. It would not be a kindness to tell 1990s me any of the intervening political context, now that I think about it.

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  @ErikJonker@mastodon.social Anyway, if you're a representative in a democracy, you don't have the authority to give away your country's dignity, because it belongs to the people.

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  Let's not sleep on the fact that the outcome of the #ScottishElection2026 was a *comprehensive rejection* of far-right politics. The SNP and Greens together take a pro-independence majority. The moderately progressive unionist party, the LibDems made gains. Unprincipled centrists, Labour, lost a few seats. Reform gained 17, but the Tories lost 19, for a net *loss* of 2 seats for the brexity bigot bloc. This is not an inevitable rise of the right by any reasonable measure.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub 10 May What wisdom do you wish you could share with your younger self? That'd be private, and different from what I'd share publicly in the hope that it benefits a younger other person, which is the Q I'll actually answer. Work out who you can be authentically that will be happy being you, and don't worry about the nonsensical answers your society provides for what happiness is or how things are supposed to work.

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  Good morning, all. Today in various parts of the UK, you get to punch Nazis just by drawing a small cross on a bit of paper. Why would you not.

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  I've found a use for AI. If you start typing a sentence and it successfully autocompletes what you were about to say, it was obviously something trite and overdone, so delete it and think of something better.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub 1 May Workers' Day: What can we do to support and protect other writers? Show solidarity with everyone that is oppressed or abused, whether or not they are your kind of worker, or your kind of person. Human rights precede and sustain worker's rights.

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  @jdnicoll I feel like fewer observers should have been astounded.

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  Greatness is bad. Stop trying to become great or making things great or just generally licking the boots of greatness. Make things good. Be good. Lick good things – which things, I leave to your preference.

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  @emmatyping Well, it's not a statically-typed language. In Rust you'd have to define some kind of Fruit trait.

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  If you are appointing people to a position that needs security vetting, it is not sufficient to somehow *fail to find out* they didn't pass vetting, it is absolutely your responsibility to *confirm* that they did. It cannot work any other way. Every job you ever get requiring a background check will involve forms and paperwork. There'll be a box on a form that needs filled in and signed off by someone before your contract goes out. It's impossible that Keir Starmer doesn't know...

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  #ScribesAndMakers 3 Apr Do you think there's a creative element to eating? The way I do it it's mostly destructive.

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  I will never rate my booking experience. I will never recommend your product. I don't keep track of where I heard of things. If I am using your product or happened to book on your site rather than another, that is just an accident of the universe, and you will have to embrace the mystery of it.

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  There isn't an echo chamber. There's an anechoic chamber. If I have reason to think you harbour hateful or dehumanising views, I won't trust you. Why should I? And if I don't trust you, I won't talk to you. I won't help you. I won't amplify you. I will make others I do trust aware of my concerns, and you will not be part of that conversation. If you don't like that, don't be that.

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  #ScribesAndMakers 8 Apr Victuals? Not a word in my dialect. Scran, grub, nosh, even, perhaps.

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  I think it's funny how Trump has set us on the path to the Artemis II crew really getting to come back from space and kneel beside a melted statue of liberty and say the bastards finally did it. I mean it's not funny enough to make it bearable, but still.

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  How do we know there isn't just as much antimatter as matter in the universe? There's no way to tell from a distance. Maybe 99.9% of it annihilated at the big bang, but uneven distribution left clumps of different types. The clumps could be the size of everything we can see now. Maybe the big bang sent some matter one way and equal antimatter the other way, and the anti side is just too far to see? We don't know what big bangs do. We don't even know what&#3...